Victory and Defeat The Crusades

At the end of the 11th century,

a papal call to arms inspired tens of thousands of Christian warriors

to march across the face of the known world,

to reclaim the Holy City of Jerusalem

from its Islamic overlords.

These were the first Crusaders,

and their seemingly miraculous victory

ignited two centuries of religious war,

as legends, like Richard the Lionheart

and the mighty Muslim Sultan Saladin,

fought for dominion of the Holy Land.

In the 13th century, this titanic conflict

reached a decisive and shocking conclusion.

But for all its drama, this final chapter of the Crusades

has been virtually forgotten.

Today, many would have us believe that the Crusades

were simply a bloody and brutal struggle

between two diametrically opposed

religions, Christianity and Islam,

an unavoidable clash of civilisations,

the echoes of which resound around us to this day.

But the true story of the Crusades is more complex,

and far more compelling.

In the end, the fate of the Holy Land was decided

not on the hallowed ground of Jerusalem,

but in Egypt.

And the ultimate outcome of the Crusades was dictated

not by Christians,

but by the Mongol successors to Genghis Khan,

and by a Muslim slave, a fearsome warrior,

whose story is now all but lost to Western history.

By the 13th century,

after more than a hundred years of Holy War,

and thanks to Richard the Lionheart's Crusade,

Western Christendom retained a fragile foothold in the East.

As yet, Jerusalem remained in the hands of Islam,

but three Crusader states survived,

clinging to the coast of the Holy Land.

These Christian outposts

were ruled by bickering warlords,

with little or no interest

in waging Holy War.

Weak, ineffective leaders

incapable of defending themselves

from any hostile neighbouring powers.

As factualism and disunity crippled the secular

powers of the Crusader states, the defence of the Holy Land

increasingly fell to others. Above all, the military orders.

The members of these orders combined the ideals of knighthood

and monasticism.

They were, essentially, Christian warrior monks,

the perfection of the crusading idea.

And they would come to play an ever more vital role

in the very survival of the Crusader states.

After the success of the First Crusade in the 11th century,

Christian knights banded together to form the legendary Military Orders.

Today, the most famous of these are the Knights Templar,

but there were others,

including the Hospitallers and the Teutonic Knights.

Together, they formed the elite standing army

of the Crusader states,

and they built a series of imposing fortresses across the Holy Land.

There's something absolutely wonderful

about coming to a place like this.

It gives you a really physical, visceral sense of connection

to the Middle Ages, but a castle like this also reminds you

of what strongholds were supposed to do for the Crusaders.

They were all about addressing a critical weakness,

a lack of man power.

Ever since they'd arrived in the Holy Land,

the Christians were short of men,

and structures like this acted as nails

driven into the fabric of this world

to hold the Crusader states together.

Looking at this place,

you also get a sense that this is a massive undertaking.

It would have taken a huge amount of wealth to build it,

let alone to garrison it and maintain it.

Only one group could have built a structure like this,

the Military Orders.

This stunning fortress at Montfort stood guard over northern Palestine,

protecting the port of Acre, the capital city of the Crusader East,

about a hundred miles north of Jerusalem.

It was here that the Holy Orders established their headquarters.

And in the heart of the city,

archaeological excavations have uncovered the remains

of one of their magnificent command centres,

a demonstration of the Holy Orders' extraordinary wealth,

which, until recently, lay almost completely buried underground.

This remarkable complex was built by the Hospitallers,

one of the greatest military orders.

It's extraordinary to think that until just a few decades ago,

much of this compound remained buried beneath rubble,

and it's only been revealed now by tireless archaeological excavation.

The sheer scale and majesty of this place revealed the power

and wealth of the Hospitallers.

This is a monument to rival anything in the Middle Ages.

The Hospitallers began as a charitable order devoted to

caring for the poor and sick.

But soon, like their Templar brethren,

they embraced the Crusading ideal.

Eight hundred years ago,

these chambers would have been a frenetic hive

of military and logistical organization.

But this complex also stood at the heart of an international

financial institution, because these Christian knights were not

just engaged in the business of Holy War.

The Military Orders received lavish donations from Europe's nobility,

and also became heavily involved in trade,

farming, and manufacture.

By the end of the 12th century,

the Templars had developed such an elaborate

and secure financial system that they virtually became

the bankers of Europe and of the Crusading movement.

In what was essentially the first use of a cheque,

it became possible to deposit moneys

in, say, Paris,

receive a credit note, and then cash this in the Holy Land.

Alongside the affluence of the Military Orders,

Acre emerged as a bustling centre of trade between Islam and Europe,

awash with exotic goods drawn from the Orient.

The Crusader states had survived the turmoil of the 12th century,

albeit in a severely weakened state in political,

military and territorial terms,

but they did have one thing going for them,

there was one force that could transcend

the barriers of religious and ethnic difference, and that was trade.

Through the early 13th century, commercial contacts between

East and West blossomed

and the amount of money and goods passing through Acre

increased almost exponentially.

In fact, we now know that the Crusader states were actually

minting their own money, so that even in the midst of holy war,

they could trade with their supposed Muslim enemies.

The whole economy,

basically, of the Crusader Kingdom,

was based on this

imitation gold coin,

and the coins are Arabic coins,

with Arabic script,

and they are basically imitations made of the coins

that were produced in Egypt.

Except for these gold coins, the Crusaders also minted

these Western-looking dinars.

This was the typical coin of the West,

and, besides this one, we also have...

I brought an example of a coin which was minted here in Acre,

and which was probably a fraction of this one again.

So what you see, basically, on this table is, more or less,

the monetary system of the Crusader Kingdom at that period,

and these coins are minted in the millions.

We're taking about a world in which East and West

are supposed to be pitted against each other in a...

in a holy war. Why would a Christian mint a coin that looks like

it's come from a Muslim kingdom?

Well, I think from the beginning,

the moment the Crusaders set foot in the East,

they, of course, understood that they had to fit in economically.

To build a castle, the quantities of money that were involved,

we're talking about two million.

Millions of gold coins,

just in the building of a castle over a two-year period.

So the investments, what you see around you of Crusader Acre,

the buildings, the stone, the masons, the people involved,

it must have cost an enormous amount of money and it shows that societies

were at war with each other, but underneath, trade went on.

And it only became bigger and bigger.

Acre became the most cosmopolitan city in the known world,

packed with sailors, pilgrims and foreign merchants.

In 1217, James of Vitry, a devout French priest,

travelled to Acre to become its new Christian Bishop.

He arrived on this, his first visit to the Holy Land,

expecting to find an earthly paradise.

He was about to be shocked.

Through the eyes of James of Vitry,

Acre was a veritable den of iniquity.

The Bishop likened the city to a second Babylon,

a horrible place, full of disgraceful acts and evil deeds,

where crime and even murder were commonplace.

James was especially scathing about Acre's residents,

condemning them as sinners

utterly given over to the pleasures of the flesh.

In fact, prostitution was supposedly so rife

that even clerics were renting out their rooms to whores.

Of course, we have to remember that James of Vitry was a newly arrived,

prudish bishop, but to him, Acre was nothing less than Sin City.

In the midst of this tide of trade and earthly transgression,

it seemed the Christians had forgotten

their sacred struggle for Jerusalem.

At the same time,

the Islamic East had fragmented after Saladin's death.

His heirs, the Ayyubids,

retained control of Egypt, Palestine and Syria.

Ruled, in theory, by a sultan in Cairo,

this was really little more than a loose coalition of rivals.

Given the vast fortunes to be made through trade,

by Christians and Muslims alike,

both sides now had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

Back in Europe, the crusading fire still burned.

But its force was often directed away from the Holy Land,

as the papacy launched campaigns against Southern French heretics,

Baltic pagans and the Moors of Iberia.

For 50 years, those few crusades that did reach the East

failed to achieve any lasting conquests.

The Crusade movement was now in crisis,

and Jerusalem's recapture seemed like an impossible dream.

What was needed was the leadership of a great European monarch,

another Richard the Lionheart,

who could spearhead a new campaign and galvanise support.

The only likely candidate was King Louis IX of France.

Around 30 years of age, tall, pale skinned and slight of build,

he was not quite the storybook crusade hero.

But Louis was born of a line of kings who had waged a holy war

and his royal blood was infused with the crusading impulse.

Louis was a fanatically devoted Christian,

obsessed with the life of Jesus Christ.

In 1238, he obtained what was thought to be the actual

Crown of Thorns worn by Jesus on the cross.

The young king spent a fortune building this magnificent chapel

in the heart of Paris to house his sacred relic.

This miracle of Gothic technology, infused with light and colour,

was designed to cradle the relics of Christ's passion.

But it also proclaims Louis' intense personal piety,

and this devotion would be at the heart of his Crusade.

Even in his youth, the King was renowned for his intense

spirituality.

But at the age of 30, a grave personal crisis stirred in him

a profound commitment to the Crusading cause.

In 1244, Louis IX contracted a severe fever

that brought him close to death.

In the grip of this dire illness,

Louis declared his unswerving determination to lead a crusade.

Once the King had recovered, Blanche, his formidable mother,

seems to have been infuriated by this pledge,

judging it to be a reckless folly

that endangered both Louis' life and the realm.

But Louis was not to be swayed.

In fact, he would dedicate his life to the cause of the Crusades.

Keenly aware of his crusading heritage,

and spurred on by his piety,

Louis was determined to bring Jerusalem back

into the Christian fold.

His spiritual fervour echoed that of the First Crusaders,

some two centuries earlier.

And the King's ardent dedication reignited

the fire of crusading enthusiasm in the West.

Not since Richard the Lionheart, 70 years earlier,

had a major monarch launched a crusade on this scale,

with this degree of determination and devotion.

In the months that followed, virtually all the great

nobles of Northern France enlisted in the coming Holy War.

One of the Crusade's most important recruits was a young knight

named John of Joinville,

a gifted writer, who became one of Louis' closest confidantes.

As a participant in the coming crusade,

John of Joinville came to know King Louis well,

and witnessed the Holy War firsthand.

Years later,

he wrote a vivid account of his experiences on campaign,

albeit one that portrayed Louis in a saintly and heroic light.

Even today, it's a fabulous read, packed with human colour

and the kind of visceral detail that allows us

to recreate the hardships and the horrors of a crusade.

Describing the agonies of starvation and disease

later endured by the Christians, Joinville wrote,

"The epidemic in the camp began to grow worse.

"Our men had so much dead flesh

"on their gums

"that the barbers had to remove it

"to enable them

"to chew food and swallow.

"It was most pitiful to hear the moans of men,

"from whom the dead flesh was being cut away,

"for they moaned just like women in the pains of child birth."

John of Joinville's King and hero,

Louis IX,

set out to perfect the art of crusading warfare.

His campaign was driven by the same spiritual zeal that empowered

the first Crusaders 150 years earlier,

yet was underpinned by the most meticulous planning.

This fortified town of Aigues-Mortes in Southern France

became the European base of operations for Louis' crusade,

and it was here that much of the logistical preparation

for the expedition took place.

To finance his campaign,

Louis amassed a huge war chest.

Royal accounts indicate that

in two years, he spent two million livres tournois,

much of it on paying for his knights.

Given that royal income was around

250,000 livres tournois per annum,

this was a vast commitment.

Louis effectively mortgaged France to pay for his crusade.

Louis was an astute military realist,

determined to achieve success where other crusades had failed.

He combined an eye for the gritty detail of war

with a dogged belief that he and his army

must be pure of heart and soul

if they were to win God's support.

Louis spent four years making meticulous preparations

for the coming crusade,

and the King obviously believed

that success would depend on both practical and spiritual readiness.

To ensure that he could start his campaign with a clear conscience,

Louis created a special commission to root out corruption by the Crown

and its officials, across the realm of France.

In terms of determination and pious intent,

Louis IX was the perfect Crusader King.

In late August 1248, hundreds of ships set sail,

carrying Louis' troops to war,

a formidable Christian army, determined to defeat Islam,

and recapture the Holy City of Jerusalem.

John of Joinville vividly described the experience of his own departure.

"With all on board, the ship's captain called forward priests,

"and then shouted 'In God's name, sing!'

"In one voice, they began to chant the Crusader hymn,

"Veni, Creator Spiritus.

"As far as your eye could behold,

"the whole sea seemed to be covered by the canvas of the ships' sails,

"whose number, large and small, was given as 1,800 vessels."

King Louis stood at the head

of the most perfectly prepared Crusader army ever to depart Europe,

25,000 well-equipped, professional troops.

But unlike

the great Crusades of the past,

their destination wasn't Palestine...

..but Egypt.

At first glance, the decision to launch a Crusader invasion of Egypt,

rather than target Palestine and Jerusalem directly,

might seem questionable.

But Louis' actions actually made perfect strategic sense.

Even if some desperate attempt to take the Holy City succeeded,

Jerusalem could never be held, given its isolated position.

But by attacking Egypt,

the heartland of Islam's economic and military strength,

Louis hoped to deliver a telling and deathly blow

to his enemy's power base.

From now on,

the war for the Holy Land would be waged here, in Egypt.

Louis' target was Cairo, capital of the Ayyubids,

the fragmented dynasty

whose grip on the Muslim Middle East was faltering.

The French King reasoned that victory here, in North Africa,

would undermine Islam's hold over the Near East,

ushering in a new age of strength and security

for the Crusader states,

and opening the road to Jerusalem's recapture.

On 5th June 1249,

the Christian army arrived

at the mouth of the River Nile,

where they found

the armies of Islam

waiting for them.

The full array of the Sultan's forces was drawn up along the shore.

It was a sight to enchant the eye,

for the Sultan's standards were all of gold,

and where the sun caught them, they shone resplendent.

All around Joinville,

hundreds of Christian landing craft were bearing down upon the beach,

many of them brightly painted with coats of arms

and streaming with pennants,

their oarsmen straining to drive the army on to battle.

This would be Louis' D-Day,

a daring beach landing here at Damietta.

The King was gambling the fate of his entire expedition

on this one moment.

Failure would end the Holy War

even before it had begun.

As the first Crusaders began to land,

fierce fighting broke out up and down the coastline.

The Muslims unleashed withering volleys of arrows and spears

onto the Christian landing craft,

and a desperate struggle for the beach commenced.

Many boats couldn't get close enough to land

and, facing the real possibility that the whole attack might collapse,

urgent orders went out for the Crusaders to wade ashore.

When Louis, watching from his landing craft,

saw his Royal Standard, the Oriflame,

planted into the sands of Egypt,

he leapt over board into chest-high water.

Once ashore, with his blood up, the King had to be physically restrained

to stop him charging headlong into combat.

In the beach assault, the Muslims

were said to have lost some 500 men,

while the Crusaders suffered minimal casualties.

For the Christians, the entire landing had been a startling,

almost miraculous, success.

A beach head had been established

and many believed that they'd been lifted to victory by the hand of God.

At a single stroke,

Louis IX had achieved the initial goal of his campaign,

establishing a foothold on the Nile

and opening the doorway to Egypt.

It was the most stunning first foray of any crusade,

and overall victory now seemed all but assured.

Louis' army now marched south along the Nile.

Some argued for an attack on the strategically vital

port of Alexandria.

But the King decided to risk

an advance on Cairo itself,

another huge gamble, one that would

strike at the beating heart

of Ayyubid power in the Middle East.

It was said that Louis threw caution to the wind,

on the advice of his brother, Robert of Artois,

who argued that to kill the serpent, you must first cut off its head.

But to reach Cairo,

Louis would first have to defeat a mighty Muslim army

that had now gathered here, on the banks of the Nile, at Mansourah.

You could say he was now on course

for a direct confrontation with the Muslim army,

an encounter that would determine the outcome

of the entire expedition.

The stakes for the Muslims were just as high.

One Islamic chronicler recognised the danger, noting that,

"If the armies at Mansourah were to be driven back,

"the whole of Egypt would be conquered in the shortest time."

On the 21st December 1249,

Louis' expedition reached the River Tanis, a tributary of the Nile.

Thousands of Muslim troops were camped on the opposite shore,

and beyond them stood the fortified town of Mansourah.

The water separating the Christians and Muslims was too deep

and fast flowing to cross.

But just as stalemate seemed inevitable,

Louis made contact with an Egyptian traitor

willing to betray his people,

an informant who led the Christians

to a secret crossing of the Tanis further downstream.

On the 8th of February, King Louis

and a select band of his troops began to ford the deep river.

The vanguard was led by his brother, Robert of Artois,

alongside a party of Templar Knights.

As dawn broke,

the impetuous Robert decided to launch an immediate assault,

directly contradicting Louis' explicit orders.

At first, this ploy seemed to work.

The Muslim camp was taken completely unawares,

and a mass indiscriminate slaughter began.

The Muslim General, Fakhr al-Din, was set upon by Templars

and cut down by two mighty sword blows.

As they rampaged through the Muslim camp,

it seemed the Crusaders would be victorious.

But in the heat of battle,

the King's brother made a catastrophic error of judgement,

urging his troops on to attack Mansourah itself.

Once inside, the town's gates were closed behind the Crusaders,

and trapped within, Robert and his men were butchered almost to a man.

Amidst the chaos,

Louis tried to rally his remaining men back at the Tanis.

The King stubbornly refused to retreat,

and for two dreadful winter months,

his Crusaders endured near-daily Muslim assaults,

sustaining crippling casualties.

The Christians were ravaged by disease and starvation.

Even the King was struck down by illness.

When he finally did try to pull back,

marching north towards Damietta, Louis' bedraggled army was routed.

At nightfall on the 4th of April 1250,

Muslim troops eagerly fell upon the fleeing Christians.

The Crusader King's audacious gamble had failed.

With the expedition in tatters,

many Crusaders scrambled frantically onto boats,

hoping to escape to the relative safety of Damietta.

Among them, John of Joinville.

He now watched in horror

as Muslim troops began pouring into the Crusader camp.

Wounded Christians,

who'd been left in the confusion to fend for themselves,

were crawling to the banks of the Nile,

desperately trying to reach any ship.

There is a tinge of guilt to Joinville's account

of this terrible moment.

"As I was urging the sailors

"to let us get away, I watched by the light of the fires

"as the Saracens were slaughtering the poor fellows on the banks."

Louis IX's Crusade had collapsed in confusion.

Reluctant to abandon his men, but debilitated by disease,

the King was persuaded to take flight.

Louis, so stricken with dysentery

that he had to have a hole cut in his breeches,

was spirited away by a loyal group of lieutenants.

He was eventually forced

to take refuge in a small village,

and there, cowering, half dead in a squalid hut,

the mighty King of France was taken captive.

His dream of conquering Egypt

had ended in abject failure and personal humiliation.

This cataclysm on the Nile stunned and bewildered Christian Europe.

Never before had a Western King been taken captive during a Crusade.

Louis was eventually freed after payment of a colossal ransom

and returned home in shame.

If anything, his piety deepened.

Indeed, he was later canonized as a Saint.

Yet for all his devotion,

the perfect Crusader King died

without seeing Jerusalem re-conquered.

Louis' defeat in Egypt

marked the end of the Great Crusades in the Near East.

It also spelt disaster for the surviving Crusader states.

For what no-one in the West yet realised

was that it had been no ordinary Muslim army

that shattered the French King's crusading dream.

One of the reasons for Louis' defeat at Mansourah

was that he faced a deadly new adversary.

Spearheading the Muslim assault

against him were elite Mamluks, or slave soldiers.

Taken captive in the Russian Steppes as boys,

these Mamluks were sold to Islamic rulers,

indoctrinated in the Muslim faith,

and trained in the arts of war.

These fiercely loyal and highly professional warriors

would come to play a decisive role

in the final chapter of the Crusades.

Above all, these slave soldiers were consummate horsemen.

Schooled in riding from boyhood, they trained relentlessly,

using an early form of polo to hone their skills.

At first, they had served Saladin's heirs.

But in the aftermath of Louis' defeat,

the Mamluks swept to power in Cairo.

Slaves now became the masters of the Islamic world.

The advent of these mighty Mamluks

transformed the war for the Holy Land.

But in the Crusades' final chapter,

Islam's main enemy was not the Christians,

but another band of empire-building warriors.

Nomadic tribesmen from the vast plains of Asia,

who had united under the leadership of the legendary Genghis Khan,

they were the Mongols.

And it was their titanic clash with the Mamluks

that would dictate the fate

of the remaining Crusader states in the East.

The Mongols were a force unparalleled in the mediaeval world,

perhaps in all human history,

unrelenting, seemingly unstoppable, and utterly uncompromising.

Their rise was mercurial.

In the space of just 50 years,

they exploded across the face of the Earth.

By 1260, the vast Mongol empire stretched from China to Europe,

from the Indian Ocean to the northern wastes of Siberia.

They had crushed all who stood in their way,

and now their eyes were fixed on the Holy Land.

It was Genghis Khan who had put the Mongol Empire on the map.

By the 1250s, rule had passed to his successors,

who led an invasion of Iraq.

There, in 1258, they crushed Baghdad, devastating the city,

putting 30,000 Muslims to the sword.

Only the Mamluks in Egypt could now prevent a Mongol apocalypse,

engulfing the Islamic East.

In the early summer of 1260,

envoys from the Mongol General Hulegu,

grandson to Genghis Khan,

arrived here in Cairo,

demanding the Mamluk surrender.

"Only those who beg our protection will be safe.

"We will shatter your mosques, reveal the weakness of your God,

"and then we will kill your children and your old men together.

"At present, you are the only enemy against whom we have to march."

The Mamluk Sultan Qutuz responded

by ordering the Mongol envoys' immediate execution.

Their bodies were cut in half

and their heads hung from this city gate.

With this defiant statement of intent, the Mamluks went to war.

In midsummer 1260,

Qutuz marched his troops out of Egypt

to fight a desperate battle for survival,

and for control of the Holy Land,

not against their familiar Crusader foe,

but an invincible enemy from another world.

The arrival of the Mongols was almost akin to an alien invasion.

This was an enemy force unlike anything yet seen in the Holy Land.

A foe with whom you couldn't negotiate,

against whom, it seemed, your only choices

were abject surrender or total annihilation.

Sweeping south through Syria,

the Mongols were now just 50 miles from Jerusalem.

For the Mamluks, the fate of the Holy Land

and the future of Islam itself was at stake.

And they decided to confront

the Mongol horde head-on

in Galilee,

here at Ayn Jalut.

So, here we are overlooking the battlefield.

What do you think actually happened here?

I think, even from the beginning, it was a far-fetched venture.

The Mongols had a terrible reputation.

They had already taken most of Syria.

They had behind them, of course, the entire Mongol empire.

They were virtually undefeated.

Their conquests were accompanied by destruction,

by death, by massacres,

?and they're the scourge

of the civilized world.

The Mamluks were good soldiers too, but they,

since their victories against the Crusaders and...

against Louis in 1249, 1250,

they really hadn't had any great victories.

So it was a bit of gamble, and basically,

Qutuz was putting everything into one pot,

he was betting everything that he had on this venture.

If I was gambling

in Acre, or in Damascus, or in Cairo, or in Baghdad,

or anywhere else in the area,

I would probably put my money on the Mongols.

The Mamluk vanguard was led by a fearsome general named Baybars,

a blue-eyed, Caucasian slave warrior,

who had fought against the Crusaders at Mansourah a decade earlier.

Contemporary accounts describe how the Mongols launched two

devastating charges that shook the Mamluk army to the core.

But teetering on the brink of defeat,

Qutuz managed to rally his troops

and mount a decisive counterattack

that shattered the Mongol lines

and left their commander slain upon the field.

It's not the first time the Mongols had been defeated,

but it was the first time in a long time,

in this area, they'd been defeated.

The Mamluks understood that this was not the last of the Mongols,

but the Mongols were stopped for the time being.

So the Mongols are thrown out of Syria

and the Mamluks take over Syria up to the Euphrates River

with the exception, of course,

on the coast where the Crusaders are still found.

Ayn Jalut was perhaps the most important battle

of the entire Medieval era,

and its outcome had profound and disastrous consequences

for the Crusader states,

now caught in the crossfire of a far greater conflict.

Up to this point, we've been talking about

a contest between Christendom and Islam

for dominion of the Holy places,

for Jerusalem itself, but now, we have new powers on the block.

We have the Mongols to the north, threatening invasion,

the Mumluks based in Syria and Egypt

trying to hold on to their territory,

and the Crusaders, really,

based along the coast as they are, are just onlookers.

In some ways, they're almost a sideshow to these other powers.

And, in truth, the Mongols and the Mumluks are now the big players.

They are the great super powers of the nearer Middle East,

and they are the people

who are going to define and decide the fate of the Holy Land.

Ayn Jalut was an astonishing triumph for Islam.

Although the Mongols continued to pose a terrifying threat,

their advance had been halted.

But there was a twist to the tale of this historic Mamluk victory.

In October 1260, on their victorious march back south to Cairo,

the Mamluk army decided to stop in a remote spot in the desert.

Qutuz wanted to indulge his passion for hare coursing.

He was joined by a small group of elite Mamluk commanders,

amongst them Baybars, the man who had led the vanguard at Ayn Jalut.

The count suggests that Baybars asked the Sultan for a favour,

and when Qutuz agreed, he reached out to kiss the Sultan's hand.

At this moment,

Baybars gripped the Sultan's arms to stop him drawing a sword

and another conspirator stabbed Qutuz in the neck.

The Sultan died beneath a furious torrent of blows.

Before Ayn Jalut, Qutuz and Baybars had been bitter enemies,

rivals who briefly put aside their differences to face the Mongols.

Now, with Qutuz's assassination,

Baybars was free to seize the reins of power.

After more than a century and a half

of war in the Holy Land,

it would be this remarkable man

who would determine the outcome of the Crusades.

Baybars' story is all but forgotten in the West.

No images of him survive.

Few recognize his name today.

And yet this is the true Islamic champion of the Crusading age.

The man who turned back the savage Mongol horde,

who bent the Muslim world to his will,

and who brought an unparalleled ferocity

to the jihad against Christendom.

Once he had seized power,

Baybars' most urgent concern was the legitimisation of his own rule

and the consolidation of Mamluk power in Egypt.

He dedicated the early years of his reign

to reshaping the Muslim East,

forging a potent and authoritarian regime.

One of his most cunning political moves

was to re-establish the Sunni Caliphate here in Cairo

because the Caliph, as a spiritual figurehead,

could offer him the legitimacy he desired.

Once he'd selected a suitable candidate,

Baybars publicly swore allegiance to his new puppet

and then pledged to uphold and defend the faith,

to rule justly, and to wage jihad against the enemies of Islam.

In return, the Caliph appointed him as Sultan

of the entire Muslim East,

giving him free reign to forge an empire and to crush his enemies.

In early summer 1261, Baybars staged a spectacular procession

through the streets of Cairo,

to proclaim his new power and authority.

Dressed in his finery,

Baybars and the new Caliph rode in procession

through the heart of Cairo.

Baybars was to be invested as the Sultan,

the ruler of Egypt and the Muslim East.

His subjects would come to love and fear their new master,

Baybars, the blue-eyed former slave.

Transfixed and terrified by the spectre of another Mongol invasion,

the Muslim Near East willingly accepted Baybars' tyrannical rule.

And with unrivalled and absolute power in his hands,

he set about creating the perfect military state.

The Mamluks dedicated themselves to military training, striving to

achieve perfection as warriors.

They were taught to deliver precise sword strikes

by repeating the same cut up to a thousand times a day.

Baybars encouraged his troops

to experiment with new weapons and techniques.

His army became the most highly trained and disciplined force

of the Crusader era,

more than a match for Mongols and Christians alike.

Baybars' Mamluks were a force more numerous,

disciplined and ferocious than any yet encountered

in the war for the Holy Land.

And one with no interest

in reaching an accommodation with the Crusader states.

These enfeebled Christian enclaves,

now encircled by

the Sultan's mighty

Middle Eastern empire,

were horrendously vulnerable

and exposed.

In the spring of 1265, Baybars marched out of Egypt.

He'd actually mobilised his troops

in order to counter an expected Mongol invasion of Syria,

but this never materialised.

And ever the ruthlessly efficient commander,

with his army already in the field,

he turned his gaze on the Crusader states.

Weak as they were, the Christians could still turn to the elite

knights of the Military Orders,

and to the formidable fortresses that had preserved and protected

their fragile foothold in the Holy Land for nearly two centuries.

Arsuf, like several other

fortresses throughout the Levant,

is a masterpiece.

It is the last word

in military architecture.

The complexity,

the quality of the building here,

the quality of the garrison inside,

it's just a remarkable piece of work.

Capturing the castle at Arsuf

would be a fearsome challenge

for any army.

Yet when Baybars arrived here in March

and deployed the full force of his Mamluk military machine,

he quickly proved his mastery of siege warfare,

down to the finest detail.

Baybars was an incredibly well-organised sultan.

His logistics are a masterpiece.

When we go back to the archaeological finds here,

you can see it, you can see how careful he was about the planning.

So if you look at all the walls around you,

you look at the foundations of the castle, you look at the towers,

it is built out of local stone, it's a very porous type of beach stone.

You look at the catapult stones, this is not from here.

The catapult stones are made out of a very, very dense, hard lime,

that comes from the foot hills

of the Samarian hills.

So when he was planning out the siege, he says,

"I cannot bombard the castle with the same stones

"that the castles are built here,

"because there's not going to be any impact."

So he's got somebody, 15 kilometres away from here,

chipping those stones away.

That is a lot of work. I mean,

it will take at least,

I would say a week, maybe ten days, just to get your ammunition ready.

Baybars knew he had time.

There was no help that was going to come from outside.

And because they did not have help coming from anywhere,

they were fighting a lost battle.

After three days of fierce fighting, Baybars took control of Arsuf.

Those Christians who survived were taken into slavery,

and then forced to demolish their own castle.

In an act of deliberate humiliation,

they were then marched to Egypt,

each wearing a wooden cross around their necks,

and paraded through the streets of Cairo.

The Mamluk army was the ultimate military machine,

created not in response to the Christian Crusades,

but to counter the Mongols, who had been turned back at Ayn Jalut,

yet continued to pose a terrifying threat to Islam.

At the head of this unrivalled force,

Baybars had the power to dispatch

the remaining pockets of Christian settlement in the East,

almost at will.

Baybars razed Arsuf to the ground.

Its fate was emblematic of his revolutionary new strategy.

Other Muslim leaders might have tried to take possession

of a fortress like this.

He simply wiped it from the face of the Earth,

ensuring that it would never again be used by Christians.

Baybars' policy of devastation meant that the Crusader states

now faced total annihilation.

But the Sultan was not just a brutal military genius,

he was also a frighteningly efficient bureaucrat,

who imposed his will across the Islamic world.

So this is a town called Lod.

In the Middle Ages, this place lay on a key route through Palestine,

and it still holds one of the great hidden treasures

of the Crusading era.

The trouble is, it's a little bit hard to find.

I'm looking for a forgotten monument to Baybars' mastery of statecraft.

Hi. Do you know where Baybars' bridge is? Baybars' bridge?

Far from the usual trail of awesome Crusader castles and mighty cities,

it's nevertheless a potent reminder of his unique achievements.

For me, it's an unloved medieval treasure.

So this is Baybars' bridge.

I think it's amazing that it's still standing

more than 700 years after it was constructed,

and what's even more extraordinary, it's still got

traffic running over the top of it.

We know it was constructed under Baybars' rule

because it bears his famous lion emblem.

And symbols like this appeared on scores of bridges

constructed across the Near East under his reign.

If we look really closely,

we can pick out a beautiful little detail

that's supposed to have great symbolism.

There's a tiny rodent, or rat, being trampled under his raised paw,

and this is supposed to symbolize the Mamluk state

crushing the enemies of Islam.

It may not look that impressive, but this unassuming bridge was

just as important to Baybars' military strength and power

as any of the magnificent weapons he could bring to bear in war.

Before Baybars,

no-one had been able to rule the Near East from Egypt

because they were unable to communicate

with the far reaches of their realm.

Baybars understood this truth

and that's why he threw huge amounts of money at infra-structure,

building bridges like this and roads,

and with that communication system in place,

he was able to create what's known as his Barid.

This was effectively a postal service,

a system of elite riders and messengers,

who would go in relay from point to point,

bringing messages to the Sultan himself.

Forlorn and forgotten as it might look,

this bridge was actually a key element

in the success of Baybars' Mamluk state.

When the age of the Crusades began, 200 years earlier,

the Islamic world was in disarray, divided and disunited.

The First Crusade, and most of the Holy Wars that followed,

had been waged against an enemy paralyzed by infighting.

But Baybars' tyrannical rule

united the Muslim world as never before,

finally bringing Islam the power to prevail

in the war for the Holy Land,

spelling disaster for the few remaining Crusader states.

In May 1268, three years after defeating the Christians at Arsuf,

the Mamluk army arrived at Antioch,

a city of special significance to the Crusades.

Two centuries earlier,

this mighty metropolis had been the Christians' first major conquest

in the Holy Land.

Now, it would mark the beginning of the end.

The first Crusaders had taken eight months to break into Antioch,

but when the Sultan Baybars turned

the full force of his Mamluk military machine

against this city, it fell within a single day.

As his troops poured through a breach in the defences

near this very spot,

Baybars ordered that the city's gates be barred

so that no-one would escape.

He then had tens of thousands of men, women and children butchered.

The last days of the Crusader states had begun.

The inexorable obliteration of the Crusader states

continued after Baybars' death in 1277.

The Sultan's successors conquered Tripoli in 1289,

and finally seized Acre itself in 1291.

After almost 200 years,

the war for the Holy Land ended in a definitive victory for Islam.

Dark, brutal, and savage as they often were,

the Crusades, nonetheless,

left no permanent mark upon Islam or the West.

In truth,

the war for the Holy Land had been all but forgotten

by the end of the Middle Ages.

So why do these distant wars still seem to exert

a profound influence upon our modern world?

In the 19th century,

Europe's fascination with the Crusades was reawakened.

These medieval wars were now recast as glorious triumphs

that seemed to affirm the capacity of great powers,

like England and France to forge empires,

to colonise the supposedly barbaric Near East.

The desire to reconnect with the mediaeval past

found its ultimate expression here at Versailles.

King Louis Philippe of France dedicated five rooms -

the Salles Des Croisades - to these monumental,

highly romanticised, paintings of the Crusades.

Here is crusading history reshaped in art.

The first Crusaders capturing sacred Jerusalem.

Richard the Lionheart crushing the Muslims at Arsuf,

and even King Louis of France,

the saintly monarch brought to his knees in Egypt,

now portrayed as an all-conquering hero.

This triumphalist propaganda eventually found its echo in Islam,

not least in the promotion of Saladin

as a Muslim hero, second only to Muhammad himself.

And the misappropriation of the past continues to this day.

This crusade,

this war on terrorism,

is going to take a while.

When George W Bush spoke these words,

five days after the terrorist attacks of 9/11,

many commentators were horrified,

while Islamist extremists, including Osama Bin Laden,

seized upon the President's statement

as proof that the West was still waging a holy war

in the Middle East.

But I don't believe that these centuries-old conflicts

ignited a fire of inimitable and unending hatred

between Islam and the West.

The idea of a direct

and unbroken line of conflict linking the mediaeval

and the modern eras

has helped to give rise

to an almost fatalistic belief

that a clash between Islam and the West is inevitable.

Yet careful study of the complex encounter

between Muslims and Christians, in the age of the Crusades,

reveals that the uneasy mix

of peaceful contact and simmering conflict was not so dissimilar

to relations between rival powers anywhere in the Middle Ages.

I do believe that the Crusades have things to tell us

about our own world,

but most of these lessons are common to all eras of human history.

How hatred of an alien enemy can be harnessed,

how trade can transcend the barriers of conflict,

and how faith can inspire extraordinary deeds

and horrific violence.

The notion that the struggle for the Holy Land

has a direct bearing upon the modern world is misguided.

I think we must examine and seek to understand these medieval wars,

so that we can counter the distortion

of our collective history.

And, above all, we must place the Crusades where they belong -

in the past.

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