The Crusades: Part 3 – Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub: Part 1

[Music] So I did something insane a long time ago, and so I thought I'd bring it today, just because I'm hoping to invoke, uh, spirits of the past. Hold on, let me organize these. So, uh, when I did the first Crusader talk, I actually brought this—this coin. This is a coin; it is a 1400-year-old coin. It was minted in Syria, and I—and I talked about it being, uh, Mu'awiya I. He is the first Umayyad ruler of the Umayyad Caliphate. He was the fifth leader of the Arab Empire. And after I showed this coin, I was thinking about it, and it says “Homes” on the side. So the front of the coin is the picture of a Roman Emperor with a cross on the top. So the Arab Empire was Muslim-ruled, and they were just taking the Roman mints and minting their coins. So the Roman—they were basically using counterfeit Roman coins. And after I left the talk, I remembered it said “Homes” on the side, which means it was minted in the city of Homes. And I got my wheels turning, and then I realized I knew who the governor of Homes was during Mu'awiya I: it was Abd al-Rahman. In other words, this coin was actually minted by the son of Khalid. For those of you who don't know, he's possibly the greatest general in human history. Um, he essentially was undefeated, and he essentially did the impossible over and over again.

The reason I'm bringing this coin back—because it has nothing to do with my talk today—is just because when I realized it was Khalid’s son, I just thought, okay, I have to finish the story since I started it. Um, the other coins are based on today's talk, um, and they are… So this is a coin for Emperor Manuel I. He's the Roman Emperor; he's going to be featured a little bit in the talk today, not overly, but uh, he'll come up a few times. Um, this coin is Raymond III. He was the Count of Tripoli; he is a Crusader, and he'll come up probably a little bit. I'm not really sure. Um, Bohemond III, another Crusader, he is the Prince of Antioch. Um, he will also come up a little bit. Hold on, I gotta—have to save that one. Um, this coin here—here, let's—since I'm on a Crusader spin—this coin here was Roger II. So when I explain Roger in a second, you'll see he's not a Crusader per se. Uh, yeah, I don't think you can call him a… He is the Norman ruler of Sicily. When he takes over Sicily, it's 1105 AD. The Normans had just finished conquering Sicily in 1091; they started in 1061. Took them about 30 years to conquer it; they conquered it from the Arabs. So when the Norman—the Normans take over… So for those of you who don't know, Normans are French-speaking Vikings who, after conquering northern France, got bored and decided to conquer southern Italy and Sicily, and then got bored again and decided to conquer uh, England, because they were just—well, they were Vikings, of course; that's what they were going to do.

Um, when Roger II took over, he—the Normans had already owned Sicily—undisputed—owned Sicily for 24 years. On one side of the coin, it's written in Latin; on the other side of the coin, it's written in Arabic, because the rulers of Sicily recognized that, even though they were Christian rulers of Sicily, they couldn't just simply delete the Arabs who were living there. And that's how Roman coins, Norman coins, and then later German coins—because the Germans—the German royal—German royal family takes over Sicily—um, that's how those coins were minted for a couple of centuries; they would have Arabic on one side and Latin on the other side. Um, all right, so then the other three coins that I have here: this is Nur ad-Din’s coin; he's going to be featured heavily in the story. Um, and then this is his son, Saladin’s coin. Uh, and then the probably the star of the story is Saladin, and I actually have a coin from him. It was minted in Cairo, and I'm pretty sure this coin was minted uh, in 1169, 1170, or 1171, because it actually has the—um—fiḍ khalifat—the fiḍ ruler—on the back, and that ends in 1171. Anyway, I just thought it would be strange to have actual historical things in the room while I'm doing this, and also cool, cuz maybe like, I don't know, at some point one of these guys who made these coins might have touched it or something. And so I tried to bring them in—make it real. After the talk, if you want to come look at them, I'll let you do that, but cuz I realize that you probably can't see it, and—and then I'll—I'll have my film editor put a picture for the people watching the video.

All right, so this is part three of at least the four-part series. My goal is to do part four next semester; I might have to do a part five. I admitted that at the end of part two. We'll see; I don't know what my pace is like. Um, I want to apologize in advance because there's a lot of moving parts in this topic; there's a lot of names, a lot of dates, and my goal is to be a storyteller and not blast you with a bunch of names and dates. So one of the things that I'm going to try and do is condense just enough that I'm—keeping it a coherent story, but—but at the same time without losing too much of the detail. And to the extent to which I fail to do that, I'm apologizing now, because uh, it's tough. And then, you know, some of you already know me, and you know that I'm going to dive at some point into a topic too far and eat up too much time, and it'll just derail the rest of the talk. And then that's why I'm going to probably have to do a five-part series. That's—that's punishment for the fact that I didn't stick to the schedule. Anyway, so that's—that's something that I just thought I'd—just bring out to begin with. Uh, so in part two—well, so let me just sort of—sort of summarize, but not really summarize. Part one is the Crusades start, and the Crusades actually capture uh, four states. So the Crusaders leave Central Europe; they're mostly French and German. They work their way through the Roman Empire. People incorrectly call the Roman Empire the Byzantine Empire; there's no such thing; nobody ever called themselves a Byzantine Empire. The thing that you sometimes incorrectly call the Byzantine Empire called itself the Roman Empire. So it was the Roman Empire. Um, they—they worked their way through the Roman Empire; eventually they go through the Kingdom of Hungary on the way to the Roman Empire. It's a mess; some of them are plundering; some of them are not really soldiers; they're really just brigands. Long story short, they fight their way through Anatolia. Um, the Sultanate of Rum was a Turkish kingdom in the middle of what is today Turkey that had been fighting the Roman Empire successfully for the most part, although it had had—it had had—it had had some setbacks. They—there's a little bit of fighting that goes on between them and the Crusaders. The Crusaders get to Syria, and they carve off their first state. The first state is the County of Edessa. Edessa is Northern Syria and then Southern Turkey. Uh, the city itself is Şanlıurfa in Turkey. And then they take over the Principality of Antioch. This is in 1098. So 1096 is when the Pope called for the Crusades; it takes them two years before they get to Syria. They carve off two little states, and then in 1099 they actually conquer Jerusalem and create the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The guy that takes over is Godfrey of Bouillon. He never calls himself a king, even though he establishes the kingdom of Jerusalem. He only rules for a few months; he dies, and he's replaced by Baldwin I, who's the first crowned King of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. And they take off—three years later—they cap—the Crusaders also capture the County of Tripoli. Tripoli is a city in Lebanon. And so there are four—uh—states, four—uh—Crusader states. Those four Crusader states sort of hit a high-water mark in 1124—in 1124 they capture the city of Tyre. Sorry, Tyre. The Arabs call it Sur; it's in southern Lebanon. Um, when they capture Tyre, that sort of cements their control of Syria, and it makes it so that they're the indisputable masters of—of Western Syria—not Central Syria by any means, cuz they didn't capture Damascus, and they didn't capture Aleppo yet. And—and—and that's the high-water mark for the Crusaders; it's only downhill from that moment.

The problem is, on the other side, is that the Arabs and their Turkish rulers uh, can't get their act together. When the Turkish rulers do manage to pull off some sort of victory, the next thing you know, somebody—that leader is assassinated, or they catch an arrow, or just something goes sideways. They're—you know, they're alcoholics; they just can't keep it together. It's a disaster, and it's one disaster after another. Finally, a Turkish leader, an atabeg named Zengi, takes over Aleppo. He takes over the city of Aleppo. Um, he had Mosul. Mosul is northern Iraq; Aleppo is the largest city in Syria at the time, and today it's the largest city. I think most people assume it's Damascus. Damascus was frequently the political center, and it played an important role, but Aleppo was always the big city. So once he has Aleppo, he has effectively created this little miniature state in Northern Iraq and Northern Syria. He's—he's not, on paper, independent; he's part of the Seljuk Empire, but in reality the Seljuk Empire is falling apart, and Zengi gets it in his mind that he's going to capture Damascus. So I covered all of that in part two, so I'm not going to rehash all that, but I do want to actually start in 1144, because something—so I'm repeating a little bit from part two—something amazing happens in 1144, and it's the theme basically of my talk tonight, and that is that the Arabs get their first real break. Zengi manages to capture Edessa in 1144. Edessa is the first Crusader state to be created; it was a few months—it was created a few months before Antioch was created. It's the first Crusader state to be deleted. When—when Zengi captures the city, at that point then everybody—Crusader, Arab, Turk, European, Kurd—it didn't matter—Armenian—realized that the Crusaders were in trouble and that this could be the beginning of the end for the Crusaders. And so there was hope on the Arab side, fear on the Christian side, and—and that's the stage that I want to set this talk in. Zengi does this; his goal, though, is Damascus. He doesn't own Damascus; Damascus was ruled by uh, another—another family, another Turkish family. He did everything he could to get Damascus; he lay siege to it on occasion. He marries the woman who's the regent for her son; her name is Zumur. Uh, he tries to get her—through marriage—to hand the city over. She—she can't, because her son doesn't want to lose it. Then her—her son is crazy; he goes through and does all these horrible things; he's paranoid; he starts murdering people if he thinks you're even a little bit suspicious; he kills you. He makes a deal with the Crusaders; finally, in the end, he—he's just ready to hand the city over to the Crusaders or the Assassins, cuz, right, there's a band of religious fanatics called Assassins who are running around assassinating people—strangely enough. And the mother finds out; she kills her own son, but her next oldest son is too young to take over, so she basically becomes the regent, and—and—but then what ends up happening is there's this guy named Mu'in ad-Din, and Mu'in decides he's going to—be—take over as regent and run Damascus for her son who's too young. And so Zengi just can't get the city; everything he tries to do to get the city goes sideways. Uh, he tries to put it under siege in 1145; something goes wrong. I—I don't remember the exact detail, but something goes wrong in Northern Syria. He pulls the siege down; he goes—he takes his army north; he's attacking a fort somewhere—Bārbah—Bārbah—I don't remember the name of the fort. While he's outside the fort in his tent, he wakes up in the middle of the night and he sees his—uni—slave servant—by the way, a Crusader who was uniz after being captured and turned into a slave—drinking from his chalice—drinking wine from his chalice. Zengi really liked alcohol, uh, so he was a bad Muslim. And he wakes up; he sees the servant doing this; he tells the servant, “I'm going to go back to sleep, but when I wake up tomorrow, I'm going to punish you for drinking my wine from my chalice.” Then he rolls over and goes back to sleep. The servant waits a little bit, goes grabs a dagger, comes back in the room, and stabs him to death. And you think, dude, what the heck? What is wrong with you? He didn't think that through. So in 1146, Zengi's gone, cuz he didn't think this through. Like, don't threaten the guy; just wake up in the morning and kill him. Like, what the heck? Anyway, the guy runs across and goes to the fort, and he's treated like a hero, cuz he—he basically took a—took out this guy. What happens next is a brief period of chaos; it's not like a full-scale power struggle, but there's definitely a little bit of that going on, because the state has just lost its leader. And at the time, that—right—peaceful transition of government wasn't really necessarily a thing. For everybody's sake—for the Arab, Turkish, Muslim, Kurdish population's sake—anyway, they got lucky because Zengi's two oldest sons were smart and calm, and they—they were the kind of guys who could get this right. The older son takes over Mosul; the younger son takes over Aleppo, and now they set themselves on a course of stabilizing their dad's kingdom. So they've split the kingdom in two, which, on the surface, looks bad, right? You're like, oh, it would have been better ruled by one guy, like their dad had done, but in retrospect, looking at it, it looks like it was actually a brilliant thing to do, because one of the problems that the—they were—that Zengi kept having was there were two problems: one, the Seljuk Empire is coming apart, and Mosul in Northern Iraq is kind of at the center of all of this, and so there's this con—he's constantly struggling to stabilize things cuz he's constantly dealing with that. And then, to make things more complicated, the Abbasid Caliphate had decided to reassert its political and military authority on more than one occasion, and there were actually wars against the guy who's supposed to be the symbolic and religious leader of Islam. Um, right, cuz he—no longer had political rule—political power, but had—in the—the Caliph in the past had had that. So they had been sort of English-Monarchy-IED, right? Where, oh yeah, the king did have power once—clearly not anymore. So by splitting that little kingdom in two, now the older brother will deal with the craziness of civil war and a Caliph that wants to take over and whatever else is happening with the Seljuks, and it left the younger brother, Nur ad-Din, the ability to focus on Syria, to focus on the Crusaders. And because they liked each other, respected each other, and trusted each other, they could then turn their backs to each other and not worry about being—being backstabbed. So that meant that one could focus in one place; the other could focus in another place. Immediately, Joscelin II, the guy who was the ruler of Edessa, decides to use that moment of chaos to try to retake Edessa. He brings an army to Edessa; he asks for other Crusaders to help him; they don't. He does actually retake Edessa, but Nur ad-Din immediately moves against him and captures Edessa back without much effort. He populates the city with a—a few families of Jews, because he realized that the Jews would be loyal to him no matter what. So Edessa was an Armenian city; the Crusaders were Christian, but Catholic; the Armenians were Christian, but Armenian Orthodox, so they didn't see eye to eye. In fact, by this point, the Eastern Christian—Christ—the Orthodox Christians, the native Christians of the Middle East, were beginning to start to really dislike and hate the Crusaders. They—there was already a lot of fear built up before this, to the point where, at one point, the king's daughter—her name was Alice—she was the princess of Antioch—the—the ruler of Antioch—she actually led a rebellion against her father. She herself was half-Armenian and sympathized more with the native Christian population of the Middle East, but also sympathized with the Muslim population, because she, as a second-generation Crusader, began to identify as a local and didn't see herself like these European invaders anymore. And right, that's within the Crusader population. So one of the things that was happening by this point is the Armenians were starting to think, now, we don't know if we want to be ruled by Crusaders, but at the same time Joscelin himself was also half-Armenian, so they had a little bit of sympathy for him. And so uh, Nur ad-Din goes, okay, I know that the Jewish population is just loyal; I don't have to think twice about it; I'm going to put them in the city just to have a group of people that I know I can rely on as I go back to Aleppo and try to figure out how I'm going to complete my dad's dream of taking Damascus. Damascus is what he needs. So something amazing is going to happen. Word gets back to Europe that Edessa fell in 1144. The Pope calls for a Second Crusade. The Second Crusade explicitly is to take Edessa back and then reinforce the Crusader states to make sure that no other Crusader state falls and possibly, at some point down the road, maybe expand it a little bit—take some more territory. So the Second Crusade is like the First Crusade; it's—it's largely populated by—by Germans and French. Some of the French are Normans, right? So there's this Norman contingency too, but it's going to include uh, Conrad III of Germany, Louis VII of France. It's going to include actual royalty this time, and these kings are coming along on the Second Crusade because their goal is to partake in the glory, to—to show themselves, to go to Jerusalem, to be part of this thing that will guarantee them gateway to heaven, where when they die they will spend all eternity hanging out with Jesus Christ himself, right? That's—that's why they're going. It's different from the First Crusade; the First Crusade was nobles, but it wasn't royalty. This is a whole new thing. To make things more interesting, Louis VII is married to his cousin—I don't—I don't remember if they were second cousins or closer or further—but you know, something like that—Eleanor of Aquitaine. So you've probably heard of Eleanor of Aquitaine at some point. She will eventually not be married to Louis VII, and when that happens she marries Henry II, the King of England. So Eleanor of Aquitaine was married to the King of France and then later the King of England, and she went on the Crusade. In reality, she was her own military commander, but because she was a woman they had to sideline her; they had to give her limited authority. So what she had to do basically was put her men—the men under her command—in command, and then she would act as in the role of advisor instead of actual commander, but in reality she did have her own command, right? Like, where's your ear? Um, very inefficient. When they—when the Crusaders get to—to Constantinople, they meet with the Roman Emperor Manuel I, and the Roman Emperor talks to them about strategy and what they're going to do, and they're trying to figure out how to proceed—which path to take. Roger II, the King of Sicily—that guy—the—the Norman King of Sicily—who, by the way, learned Arabic; he was fluent in Arabic; he—he spoke French; he spoke Latin; he was—he was capable of talking to his subjects. Um, he created a bureaucracy that eventually would include Muslims and Jews in his bureaucracy. So he's—he's not acting like a typical Christian leader from the time period, because the typical Christian leader would have nothing to do with Muslims and Jews. Um, so he—he hated Conrad III. The easiest way for them to get to Palestine was to go by ship; the problem is, if they go by ship, they risk running into Roger II's navy, cuz he just might send his navy out to intercept Conrad III with the goal of capturing him or killing him or just ransoming him—ransoming him—shaming him—who knows, right? Cuz at the time, most leaders—like today—were sociopaths, because literally nothing ever changes; we're the same dumbass species from generation to generation doing the same stupid stuff over—over—and over—and over again. But wisdom is recognizing when you're doing a stupid thing again. So um…

They can't go by sea. Well, Louis VIIth can go by sea, so he's debating what to do with the French army. But then he thinks, "I don't really want to be separated from Conrad," so he chooses to go ahead and go the same path that the Germans are going to go, which is to go through Anatolia by land.

Well, when he makes that decision, it really angers Roger II. So Roger II, being the adult, mature guy that he is, decides he's going to punish everybody. Instead of participating in the Crusades and going to Palestine and killing Muslims, he decides to attack the Roman Empire, and he lands an army in the Peloponnesus with the goal of chopping Greece out of the Roman Empire. So now Manuel I Comnenus, the Roman Emperor, who is planning to help this Crusade, is stuck turning around and going to Greece with his army instead of going into Anatolia with his army to fight Roger. Isn't that cool?

So the Crusaders shrug it off; they're like, "That's okay, we don't need the Romans; we've got this. We'll just work our way through." There was a battle of Dorylaeum in the First Crusade, and the Crusaders defeated the Turks. So they're thinking, "We'll just do it again; we'll just repeat that." So the, uh, Garsan was the guy who defeated—was defeated at Dorylaeum in the First Crusade. In the Second Crusade, Conrad is coming up to Dorylaeum, so everybody's like, "All right, we got this; we're going to do a Dorylaeum II, and we'll win again." The Turkish leader, the Sultan of Rum—so the Turks that were living in Anatolia called themselves the Sultan of Rum, as in Rome—and their flag was a two-headed eagle, as in the Roman flag, because their goal, their explicit goal, was to replace the Christian Roman Empire with a Muslim Roman Empire, which is why they had their eye on eventually one day capturing Constantinople. Which is why, when in 1453 the Ottoman Turks finally do capture Constantinople, it's so amazing because that was their goal; they had been working towards that for centuries.

So the guy, the leader this time, is his name is Masud—Masud I—sets up an ambush at Dorylaeum. Conrad and the Germans march right into the ambush, and they are massacred. It is a catastrophe. Conrad barely escapes with a handful of Germans. They dig their way out; they make their way to the French camp. They turn around and head back to the French, because the French were following him, and they get to the French camp, and they're like, "Okay, that was really bad. This Second Dorylaeum was not what we were hoping for." They regroup, but now, as they're marching, their morale is a little shook up, and it's Germans marching with French, and that's awkward, because you know it's not always happy. Little by little, the army sort of starts to disintegrate. They get in a second battle with the Turks, and it's another disaster. Part of the baggage train gets left behind; hundreds of Crusaders are killed; it's a mess. They blame Eleanor of Aquitaine, of course, because it's her fault, because she brought a dress with her, and you know how dresses work in battles; it's a mess.

And then, so eventually they get to Antioch. When they get to Antioch, uh, Renaud de Châtillon—he, he, he gets to Antioch first. They follow him; they regroup; try to figure out what they're going to do. At this point, it's 1148—I'm sorry, 1148—and Nur ad-Din is panicking because what they should do next is attack Aleppo. Aleppo, this city, has held out against the Crusaders for decades now. The principality of Antioch goes, goes right up almost to the city walls, like Aleppo. When I say Aleppo is on the front lines, I don't just mean figuratively; it was literally on the front lines, and they were put under siege time after time after time. And the fact that the Crusaders couldn't capture this city was devastating for the Crusaders because they really—this was the lynchpin. And right now there's this big army—now it's a little demoralized, it's a little shaken—because it should have been about twice the size, and it's missing most of its Germans. And you never want to say that sentence when you're in war, right? You want most of your Germans there. They should just point straight at Aleppo and attack it. And Nur ad-Din is panicking because he doesn't know that he has enough men to stop that. If they do, he's not sure he can prevail. Now he's going to call on his brother, and his brother will come to his aid, but his brother's in Mosul; it's going to take a while for him to get there.

Another reason to go after Aleppo, besides it'll break Syrian resistance, because Damascus without Aleppo, it's done, it's over, especially because Mu'in ad-Din, the guy who's ruling Damascus, has already struck a deal with the Crusaders. One of the reasons why Zengi and now Nur ad-Din haven't been able to take the city yet is because every time they move an army to Damascus, the Crusaders come up to defend the city because they have a deal. This Muslim, Turkish, Arab city is allied with this European Crusader state. And so, um, if you capture Aleppo, that's it; it's over. You already got Damascus—not truly, but partially—and then there's nothing to stop you from going and taking Damascus back, and you complete the Crusade; you fulfill the goal. But Louis VIIth goes, "Uh, I don't really want to take Aleppo. What I want to do is I want to go to Jerusalem, because Jerusalem is—I vow to do a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, so that's what I'm going to do; I'm going to go to Jerusalem." So he takes the army, and they march to Jerusalem. Nur ad-Din, of course, is sighing a giant sigh of relief. They're in Jerusalem, and they're trying to figure out what to do next; what's the plan; who, where do they go? And as they're talking to the king of Jerusalem, they come up with the following plan: "Let's say, attack and capture and conquer Damascus." Now I know what you're thinking, "Didn't you just say they're allied with Damascus?" I did, and that's why this is an amazing plan because there are two cities; you want both of them. You're allied with one, and the other one might not have the forces to resist you. In that scenario, attack your ally. I think that's obvious; what else would you do, right? You know what I'm saying? There's a fight coming; there are two people in the fight; one of them is your friend; the other one is the guy you want to really badly beat up. Well, the friend, you're not so sure about, but he's still your friend, and he really—he hates the guy you really want to beat up. So who should you attack? The friend, of course. It's obvious. You know what I mean? Like this is just an easy one.

So they, they march an army to Damascus, and as they're doing this, of course, Unur, the ruler, knows they're coming, so he starts preparing defenses. He immediately sends word to everybody, including his enemies, like Nur ad-Din, "Hey, I'm in trouble." Nur ad-Din sends word to his brother in Mosul, "Send an army; we're going to see if we can see—stop the Crusaders from capturing Damascus because they've just betrayed Damascus, and they're going to attack it." The Crusader army is right up next to the walls; they're putting the city under siege, and they're just trying to grind it into the dirt when Nur ad-Din and his brother show up with an army, and they attack the Crusader camp right there at the walls. They're driving the Crusaders back; they've created a sort of a status quo; they've postponed the collapse of the city; they've saved their enemy, Unur, and as a result, not let the Crusaders take the city. At that point, Unur is writing frantic letters one after the other to the Crusaders, and in the process of writing these letters, he, he's sending it to both camps: the local Crusader camp, the guys that have been around for a few decades, the descendants of the Crusaders who arrived in 1098, those guys; and he's sending letters, frantic letters, to the new Crusaders, the guys that just got there. To the new Crusaders, he says this: "If you guys insist on doing the siege, I'm going to turn the city over to Nur ad-Din; you're going to really regret that." To the old Crusaders, he goes, "I can't believe you betrayed me—not because I can't believe you would betray anybody; you've pretty much betrayed everybody, including yourselves; you just—you have loyalty to nobody. That's not what I'm freaked out about; I just don't think you've thought this through. If you guys capture my city and hand it over to the new Crusaders, they're going to use it as a power base to unseat you and take your stuff. The new Crusaders don't like you; they think you're natives; they think you're locals; they're just working it so that they can get more land so that they can later turn on you." And it works. Not only—he also threatens he'll turn the city over to the—to the old Crusaders, but it splits the Crusaders into two camps; they get bitter; they pull down their siege, and they head back to Jerusalem.

Conrad is furious; he hates everybody's guts at this point. Eleanor won't talk to anybody; she's furious at Louis VIIth; she keeps saying, "We should get an annulment; I hate you!" And the old Crusaders are furious because they're like, "Oh my God, these guys are going to steal our stuff!" Conrad takes an army; he goes to Ascalon; he puts it under siege, and he waits for the other Crusaders to show up. Nobody shows up. He's like, "Screw all of you," and leaves, and that's it. The Germans are out. He takes Frederick Barbarossa, who had come along for the ride and barely lives, and he goes, "We're going home." And so Frederick Barbarossa will come back in the Third Crusade; that's a different story, though. At that point, Louis is trying to figure out what to do. Finally, he gives up, too. They—he and his wife—go back by sea. She demands an annulment again in 1152. He goes, "Fine, we're too closely related; that'll be the grounds for the annulment." They didn't have a son anyway, so it worked out. So they get the annulment, and he dies the next year. So that's the end of Louis VIIth. I don't remember what got him, but I'm going to go ahead and say dysentery, just to have something. You'll see why later as we go. So that's that.

Having said all this, that's the Second Crusade. It, it fizzled; it was—it didn't go anywhere. But having said all this, I want to also build out the Crusader state a little bit because in Part Two, I really focused on what the Turks were doing, or I—I feel like I neglected the Crusaders, so let me, let me flesh that out a little bit. So I already said there was Godfrey de Bouillon; he doesn't become king; he's replaced by Baldwin I. Baldwin I is replaced by Baldwin II. Baldwin II is replaced by Fulk, and Baldwin II's daughter, Melisende, who they co-rule. Fulk dies; his older son is named Baldwin III. Baldwin III becomes king at age 10, so obviously not, not, not probably great at making good political decisions or military decisions. Baldwin III, then his mother, Melisende, is his regent. When he finally becomes old enough to take over, she refuses to hand him the reins of power. They do a little civil war, and son defeats mother, and Baldwin III finally takes over. Baldwin III will rule for 20 years. Oh, let me rephrase it: he will be king for 20 years; he ruled for about half of that. Um, when he dies, he's replaced by Amalric. Amalric was his younger brother. Amalric—okay, Amalric—I gotta, I gotta hold, hold on; I got to get the dates right. Amalric takes over in 1163. Amalric has a problem, and his problem is when he wanted to marry—he married a woman named Agnes of Courtenay. When he wanted to marry, nobody liked Agnes; they just—they just hated her. She was probably like Eleanor of Aquitaine; she was a person who sat in her own power and was really calm about it, and that probably just made all the men really nervous, so they turned on her. Um, so they, they were okay with him being married to her because he wasn't probably going to be the next king; his brother was probably going to produce children, and then they would be the next, the next monarchs. So that's, that was the thinking. But now that the older brother didn't produce any children, he doesn't have any heirs; the younger brother is going to be king. The court goes to them, and they're like, "No, you got to get rid of Agnes; we will not crown you until, until you do." So, so they—he annuls the marriage with Agnes, and then he turns around and marries Maria Comnena. Maria Comnena is, uh, the great-granddaughter—I think she's the great-granddaughter of Alexius Comnenus. His son is John Comnenus; his son is Manuel I Comnenus. So she's the grand-niece of the Roman Emperor. So this is a good person for them to marry because it'll link them back to the Roman Empire, right? Because the, the emperor will be like, "Well, you know, the queen is my grand-niece; okay, that's cool."

And something interesting happens. So I'm going to invoke a movie: the movie is Kingdom of Heaven. If you haven't seen it, it is definitely worth the watch; I think it's a fantastic movie. Movie. Having said that, they do get things wrong. So when I tell you to watch it, I'm not saying because you're going to end up with an accurate portrayal of what happened, but that's true for every single Hollywood movie ever made. There is no Hollywood movie that has ever been historically accurate. And the reason is the reality of Hollywood. Hollywood has a formula; every movie must fit the formula. If the movie doesn't fit the formula, it won't work, and as a result, they won't make it. Your film will never be shown. You can write as many screenplays as you want to; if you don't follow the formula, you will be a screenwriter with no movies. That's just how it is; just reality. So this—so the saying in Hollywood is, "Don't let the truth get in the way of a good story." Now I happen to personally believe that the truth is the good story, and you don't have to change it. The problem is the lowest common denominator. If I make a movie that's too heady, that's too complicated, I'm going to lose too many ticket sales at the box office. I have to have a movie that can appeal to a broad audience. All right, so at the end of the day, Hollywood is trapped in this. So when I say there are inaccuracies, I'm not attacking the movie in any way, shape, or form. I think that what Ridley Scott and what the screenwriters did to make that movie was brilliant. That meant, though, that they had to build in inaccuracies to tell the story in a way that it fit the formula. So if you watch the movie, I'm going to fix some of the errors. My favorite error is Balian of Ibelin. So Balian of Ibelin is—this is Orlando Bloom; he's the star of the movie; he's the main character. In the movie, he's a blacksmith living in France or Germany, I don't remember, and his father is this guy named Godfrey of Ibelin, and his father comes and finds him because he has no heir, and he wants to bring his son—that he had had—illegitimate son that he had had—that he had left behind—back with him on the Crusades to take over Ibelin. Ibelin is on the coast of Palestine, and that's the, the, the basis for the movie: you know, the hero who didn't really want to do it, but he kind of got pulled into it by circumstances, and he just goes ahead and does the right thing because he's there, but he never set out to do it. That's wrong at every level. First of all, Balian was a real person; his father's name was Barisan, not Godfrey. So why did they change the name? It's just random. Um, that's random. But the better part is he was born in Ibelin; he was the third brother—to Barisan, the third oldest son of Barisan—and um, when Agnes of Courtenay is old and no longer married to Amalric, she turns around and actually marries Balian's older brother. So in other words, the person who should have been queen, the person who is the mother to two princesses in the line of—to a prince and a princess in the line of succession—is married to Balian's older brother. To make things even weirder, when Amalric does die—because he's going to—I know I'm like jumping ahead in the story—Balian will marry his wife. So in other words, Balian was so intertwined into the system, and he was such a local that he'll actually marry the former queen. That's not nothing; that's not some random person showing up on the shore. I'm like, "He literally washes ashore; he's so not interested in going and taking over his dad's fiefdom." That in the movie they have him wash ashore like this guy is marrying royalty; what are you talking about? They did it because they wanted him to have a love affair with Amalric's daughter, Sibylla. So Sibylla is a real person; she is the princess who is in line of succession, but her brother, of course, Baldwin, is ahead of her. So Amalric is—actually, before I go into Amalric, I need to bring in another Crusader. So there is a guy named Raymond de Saint-Gilles. Raymond de Saint-Gilles was from Europe; he's not like these other Crusaders who are like second and third generation; he came in 1147, I think. Yeah, that's the year in my head; double-check that. And he's—so he's there with the Second Crusade; he basically acts as a mercenary fighting for whomever will pay him the highest amount of money. Uh, after six years, he marries the princess who's ruling Antioch. So I told you earlier there was a princess who went rogue against her own dad, the king, and so her daughter—he marries her; her name is Constance. He marries Constance, and now he's basically the prince of Antioch. Oh, by the way, this made Roger II also mad because he wants to take over Antioch; he thinks it's his. So, so Roger II was just always cranky in this, but he doesn't actually go to Palestine; he stays, he stays in southern Greece fighting the Roman Emperor.

Um, Raymond de Saint-Gilles is ruling Antioch; he's an okay ruler; nothing particularly exciting; he does lots of raids. So he's sort of supplementing his tax with stealing stuff from other people, you know, like a good Christian would do. And then he gets it in his mind that he should just plunder, burn, pillage, destroy, rape the island of Cyprus. So that's what he decides to do. Now Cyprus belonged to the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire thinks Antioch belongs to it, so the fact that there's a principality, a Crusader state principality in Antioch that isn't part of the Roman Empire drives the Roman Empire nuts. So here's this guy who—where—who runs a state that the Romans think belongs to them, who decides to attack a Roman island. He lands his Crusaders on the island; the island is Christian, but they're the wrong kind of Christian, right? They're Orthodox Christians instead of Catholic Christians, and he just begins murdering everybody; he's just massacring the island; he's setting fields on fire; he's taking people into slavery; he's murdering people; he's having his army systematically rape; they're burning homes; they're plundering; they tear the island to shreds. I, I've heard it said Cyprus still hasn't recovered. Now I don't know how accurate that is, because it feels like maybe they hadn't recovered 100 years ago, but surely they've recovered in the last 100 years, because the last 100 years have been so dynamic, but maybe not. He just rips the place to pieces; it's a bloodbath, like the First Crusade was. So he comes back to Antioch. Well, this is going to strike everybody as amazing, but the Roman Emperor is mad. He mobilizes his army; he leaves Roger; he's like, "Dude, whatever." He pulls his army down, and he heads to Antioch, and he expects that, uh, Raymond de Saint-Gilles is probably going to be killed, and he's going to take Antioch over. Raymond de Saint-Gilles dresses as a beggar; he takes off all his fine clothing, and he, uh, walks out to where the emperor is, and he just lays face down in the dirt. The emperor is talking to other people; he ignores Raymond de Saint-Gilles; he's just like talking, talking, and talking. Finally, he goes, "All right, what do you have to say to me?" And he says, "I am so sorry; I am so sorry; I don't know why." And Manuel goes, "All right, I forgive you," and that's it. That's it; that's it. It's very, very generous. I, I don't know that I would have been so forgiving. Anyway, um, and Raymond de Saint-Gilles will—

Continue to do his raids; he's constantly attacking the area. He's constantly making a mess of everything until 1160. In 1160, Nur ad-Din defeats him in battle, captures him, and throws him in prison in Aleppo. And he's out of the picture, well, for now. You can never put a good man down, you know what I mean? Like, no, after my description, y'all aren't convinced he was a good guy. I don't know, so all right. Now I got all the shut out the way, so back to Amal.

Amalric starts to get a little obsessed, and the reason he's getting obsessed is he sees something; he sees an opportunity with Manuel's army parked near Antioch and Nur ad-Din solid in his position. Uh, Amalric, I should say Nur ad-Din took Damascus finally. What? I messed up. I should have seen I said there are so many moving parts; I'm going to mess up. Here it is. What happened was, here's what Nur ad-Din did. So Nur ad-Din wasn't wasn't like his dad. His dad, Zengi, was this boisterous, kind of rough guy, ready to fight, looking for an opportunity to fight, alcoholic, drinking all the time. Nur ad-Din was the opposite; he was humble; he did not drink; he looked like he might actually be a believer, like he looked like he actually might be a devout Muslim, and so people kind of look to him for inspiration. And then he did something really amazing; he set up an entire bureaucracy dedicated to propaganda. So what he would do is he would say stuff like, he would make a prayer, so he, he prayed to God and he said, "God, don't give Mahmud victory. Who is this dog, Mahmud, to deserve victory? Give victory to the Muslim people." Well, Nur ad-Din's name was Nur ad-Din Mahmud; he's talking about himself in the prayer. So the propaganda ministry wrote it down, and then they started disseminating it so that it would be a rumor that he puts himself down in his prayers to God, calling himself a dog, saying he's unworthy of victory, that it, that he just wants the Muslim people. And so now people say, "Oh, he's not in it for himself."

And of course, Mahmud, also known as Nur ad-Din, didn't hoard wealth; he didn't live in a big palace; he preferred to live a simple life; he wasn't covered in silk all the time. And so he looked different than the other rulers; he acted different than the other rulers. And then he capitalized on it with his propaganda. Papers are sort of floating around and starting rumors. Is it really a rumor if he did it on purpose? Like it was like the Bush administration; they kept leaking stuff. Is it really a leak if you're leaking it? Isn't it a leak when you didn't mean for it to come out? Anyway, um, I'm, I'm not sure I understand, but anyway, that's what he was doing. And then what he would do is because Unur is this problem; he can't defeat this guy. He's tried; even the Crusaders have tried to defeat him; they can't get him unseated. So what, what Nur ad-Din would do is instead of doing like his dad would do, would put the city under siege or kill. At one point, Zengi attacked Balbec and killed a bunch of people, people to try to send a signal to Damascus, saying, "If you guys don't surrender, this could happen to you." Had the opposite effect; people are like, "Oh my God, if we don't fight this guy, he's going to massacre us," so they fought even harder. Nur ad-Din pulls his army up and he says, "You know, if you, if you, if you come to me, I will take care of you." And then everybody's ready to fight. He goes, "I'm not here to fight," and he pulls his army away. And then he pulls his army back up and he goes, "I'm not here to fight; I just want you to consider joining me. Let's work together." Then when the people are getting ready to fight, he's like, "No, no, no, no, I'm not fighting," and he pulls his army away. And then he, he keeps talking to them, and he starts sending people into the city to sort of, sort of talk the propaganda that he's been doing. He's playing a strange diplomatic war with the people inside the city. At one point, he sends a guy named Ayub into the city to befriend the militia, and the militia basically declares its neutrality and says, "Yeah, if you attack the city, we will not fight you." And little by little, he's getting these successes. Unur is freaking out a little bit; he gets this scent and dies. So, uh, he's out of the picture. The guy that he was the regent for, Akaba, uh, is young; he doesn't really know what he's doing; he's still trying to make things work, keep Damascus separate. But as time goes by, Nur ad-Din is slowly getting the city over to him. Akaba eventually dies. I, not dies, um, loses control; he loses confidence; he doesn't die; he does die by 1165. He loses confidence in the city, and Nur ad-Din realizes it's his chance to strike. He moves his army up, and, uh, what happens is one of, it's 1153, one of Nur ad-Din's men climbs up under the top of the wall and plants Nur ad-Din's flag, and everybody's like, "What, what just happened?" And the city just changes hands; no bloodbath, no bloodshed; it's over. And then he goes to Akaba and goes, "Uh, I'm going to give you land over by Homs," and he's, Akaba is like, "Okay," so he doesn't get executed; there's no murder. Is that amazing? And he finally does it; he's got Damascus and Aleppo merged together in a way that, when you think about it, it was genius. There, and it, he didn't have to overcome Damascus's defenses to do it.

Okay, uh, that year, 1153, the Crusaders finally capture Ascalon. Ascalon was not controlled by the Syrians; it was controlled by the Egyptians. So it's on the other side of Palestine from Syria; it's by the sea. And the Egyptians controlling it was necessary for a couple of reasons: one, they had their fleet parked there, and it put them in close proximity to mess with the Crusader states when they needed to. The other thing it did, though, is it kept, it made it difficult for the Crusaders to actually attack Egypt because as long as there was an Egyptian army, an Egyptian fleet in Ascalon, the Egyptians could literally just go behind the Crusaders. So the Crusaders really needed to get Ascalon first, and they do; they get it in 1153. Amalric takes over in 1163. He goes, "Let's go get it." You're like, "Go get what? Egypt, all of it." He decides he's going to make the Crusader state a super state because Egypt back then was the largest in population Arab state; it was filthy rich. Right, today it's the largest Arab state still; it hasn't changed. So if the Crusaders could capture Egypt, like, game over; this is this is it; there's no way you'll unseat them. 1163, he sends an army. The army goes to Bilbeis; it was on the Nile, and the army arrived, like I want to say September, but I'm probably not remembering correctly, but it's the floods, the annual floods are about to happen. So the army sets up a siege around the city. The defenders inside are like, "Okay, bad timing, guys; you should know more about Egypt before you invade it." They just wait until the flood arrives; they go over to the dikes that are supposed to protect the farm fields from flooding and just cut holes in the dikes, and they literally flood the Crusader army; gets flooded out when they break the dikes open. And at that point, uh, the Crusaders are run back to Palestine. The reason that matters is because now everybody is looking at the possibility of the Crusaders capturing Egypt. In other words, if the Crusaders hadn't done that, it wouldn't have necessarily, and just gone ahead and captured Egypt like off the bat; it would have been a really different story I'm telling, but because they have this sort of botched, failed little run, it puts everybody on alert. Um, so Egypt was Fatimid, so the Fatimids were Shia; they had their own caliph. So there's two caliphs for the, for the Arab world; there's one in Baghdad; he's the Abbasid caliph, and then there's one in Cairo, the Fatimid caliph. Well, that guy didn't rule Egypt, just like in Baghdad, the caliph doesn't rule the Arab world; he's more of a symbolic gesture, think King of England, person with a title; they get tax money; we don't know why. Think that, uh, beautiful, lavish palaces, and the tax money goes to support that, and we, we actually have no idea why. Actually, we do; I'll tell you the answer; it's to prevent tyranny. The figurehead king, the figurehead monarch, holds a space in your minds and your hearts and your imagination so that you don't go running over and find a person to fill that space because this is a very Hobbesian idea. Uh, Hobbes believed that all humans were by their nature monarchists. So okay, uh, uh, we had Amalric's failed adventure in 1163 in Egypt. Okay, so I remember I was telling about the Shia system, so the guy who's actually in charge in Egypt is the wazir. So wazir meant minister; you'll sometimes see it spelled with a V because the Turks, uh, did V; the Persians do V instead of W because they don't have a W. The Persians don't have a W, so they all just go vazir, but wazir is Arabic. So the wazir is, so when you used to play chess, let's do chess, the guy next to the king, the tall piece that we now call the queen used to be called the wazir because the wazir was the powerful piece, and the king was the figurehead. So the king could only move one space at a time, but the wazir used to be able to move like a rook. So that was the original way, and then later on it got modified; that's a different story, but it's a fun story, but I don't want to get distracted. So that's, that's the power of the wazir; they're the guy that, that's actually in charge. The wazir was a guy named Shawar; he took over in 1162; he was in charge for nine months; he's overthrown; he heads to Syria to try to get Nur ad-Din to back him so that he can do a coup and get back in charge. He's talking to Nur ad-Din, his day after day, trying to get him on board. Nur ad-Din's top advisor falls head over heels, madly in love with the idea of an Egyptian expedition; his name is Shirkuh. Shirkuh means, sheir is lion, kuh is mountain in Persian; they're Kurds, so it's the same in Kurdish. He, Shirkuh is a Kurd. Within the name, lion mountain, isn't that a cool name? Anyway, he, he's very different from Nur ad-Din; he's a drinker; he likes food; he's a little pudgy. You know, Nur ad-Din is thin, and he's, he's elegant. Shirkuh is kind of rough and cantankerous; he's missing an eye from all the fighting he's been in. They're kind of opposites, and they really like each other. Shirkuh was totally devoted to his father, father to Nur ad-Din's father. Shu's brother actually saved Nur ad-Din's father at one point, so the, the Zengi family was totally reliant on these two men, Ayub and Shirkuh, because, uh, they were there for, and so Shirkuh decides he really wants to do this Egyptian expedition to put Shawar back in power. Shawar tells them, "I will give you one-third of all the revenue from Egypt if you do this," and Nur ad-Din's like, "That's a lot; this is be amazing; one-third every year, one-third, not just one-third once," and Nur ad-Din goes, "I mean, that's enough money; I might be able to just buy Jerusalem from the Crusaders. Let's, let's make this happen." So the problem is Amalric decides he's going to do it again; he's going to again. So in 1164, Amalric is going to go in Egypt for a second attempt at the same time that Shirkuh is working his way to Egypt. Shirkuh, by the way, before he goes, grabs his nephew and he goes, "You're going with." The nephew is like, "No, I, I don't want to go. Who wants to go to Egypt? I don't care," and he actually says, "I, you could make me the king of Egypt, I don't want to go," and his uncle is like, "Uh, you're going." That guy's name is Salah ad-Din; his, his, his, you know, singular name is Yousef. If I say Yousef, I mean Salah ad-Din. If I say Mahmud, I mean Nur ad-Din. It's, it's just a way of, uh, spoiling them because there's something really powerful about saying Yousef and meaning Salah ad-Din. Yeah, you maybe I'll convey that in this, this lecture; I hope I do, but there was something extraordinary about Salah ad-Din. So it's really strange that he doesn't want to go. His uncle drags him off on the Egyptian expedition. Shirkuh has a problem; he has to go through Crusader state territory; he can't just go to Egypt; Palestine's in the way. So he's traveling through Crusader state territory, hoping the Crusaders don't attack him, trying to work his way into Egypt. He gets to Bilbeis; they, uh, march on Cairo. When they get to Cairo, uh, they overthrow the government, uh, that had overthrown Shawar, and they put Shawar back into power. After Shawar is in, he immediately orders Shirkuh out of the country and breaks the deal; he's treacherous, and he backstabs them. Shirkuh is furious; he's like, "What? We, we did this for you; you promised us that you were going to basically tie your state into our state, to be in the common cause, to put down the Crusader states." In the meantime, Shawar is talking to Amalric, the Crusader king, going, "Hey, let's work together to drive Shirkuh out of my country." So Amalric shows up; his army is behind the Syrian army, Shirkuh's army, and the Egyptian army that's going to fight for Shawar is in front of him. He realizes he's in trouble, so he spins his army around and he swings over to Bilbeis and invests it, and at that point, then the Crusader army turns around to attack Bilbeis. It is a mess; the Egyptian combin, Egyptian and Crusader armies outnumber Shirkuh, like 10 to 1, something ridiculous like that. They're hammering the city day after day; there's no, no way that they're going to be able to hold out; it's taking forever; this siege is, but it's inevitable; Shirkuh will have to surrender, he knows this, or escape, but how, especially because right there's an Egyptian fleet there, isn't a Syrian fleet, so there's nowhere to go; he can't even get out by sea. In the meantime, Nur ad-Din decides, "All right, I've got to create a distraction," so he attacks in the north with the intention of drawing Crusader forces away as much as possible so they don't reinforce Egypt. There's no way he's going to get the Crusader forces in Egypt to leave, but at least they won't be sending any reinforcements, and then he defeats a Crusader army; he cuts off a bunch of scalps. Right, so a lot of these Crusaders are Normans; they're Vikings; they're just French-speaking Vikings. So a lot of these guys have their hair braided, like think Viking with, with blonde hair braided. So he takes these blonde braided scalps, and he strings them together, and then he takes the banners that they had captured; he sends them to Bilbeis; they smuggle this in, and then what Shirkuh does is he goes to the wall and he drapes it down and he says, "We just did this to you guys in Palestine," and it shakes Amalric; he loses his resolve; the Crusader army morale falls apart a little bit because they're also trying to figure out how they smuggled it into the castle to begin with, and they get to negotiating. And here's what Shirkuh talks Amalric into doing: "I'll leave if you leave," and Amalric goes, "Okay," and they pack up their armies; one goes to Syria, one goes to Palestine, and that's it. And Shawar is happy; he's hanging out; doesn't send any money to Syria; good days for him, and he thinks he's safe, but Amalric isn't done. Amalric in 1163, so three years later, decides he's going to invade again. And so Shirkuh brings his army, and what he does is he, uh, instead of coming up to Cairo from the front, so for the record, at this point, Cairo is a brand new city, um, he decides he's going to go around it. So in the Middle East, Cairo was founded in 969, so it's like just over a thousand years old. That's a joke in the Middle East, you know, like, "Oh, look, you're only a thousand," Oh, I had a hiccup once that lasted a thousand years. That's, that's how that works, in case you're wondering, uh, especially in Egypt, right? You know, like, there are towns in Egypt that have been continuously populated for over 5,000 years, and you're like, "Oh, look at tiny, young little Cairo, the fifth or sixth largest metropolitan center on the planet." So it's, it's amazing. Um, what happens is when Shawar sees Amalric coming for him, he doesn't know where Shirkuh's army is at this point; Shirkuh is coming too because he's responding to Amalric. When he, when he realizes the army is coming, he goes to Old Cairo. So when the Arabs conquered Egypt, they created, uh, two, they created a city south of what is today Cairo that people often refer to as Old Cairo, and it was, hold on a second, I need to turn this rude alarm off; I need to go get my kid from martial arts; he'll just be there a little extra today. I'm really hoping his mom realized I had a talk tonight, um, so rude. Anyway, that balanced it out; now I don't feel guilty anymore. Um, when, when the Arabs conquered Egypt, they made their own little fort, and they, they, they, they actually called it Fustat, which just means tents; it was the Fortress of Tents. And then when the Fatimids took over Egypt, they didn't want to use that capital anymore, so it was Misr Fustat. Um, Misr means Citadel, so they made a new city; they called Misr al-Qāhira, which literally means the Citadel of the Conqueror. Qāhira becomes Cairo, so that's how Cairo got its name. Well, they treated the old city as Old Cairo, even though it had been actually a different city. Shawar decides, "I'm going to burn it." He sets Old Cairo on fire; the fire burned for 40 days. First, he evacuated the population, then he set it on fire. And the reason he's doing this is he's telling the Crusaders, "I'll burn everything; you will not take Egypt over; I will scorch this place," and the Crusaders are appalled; "What the heck is this?" So they go, and they're like, uh, you know, Shirkuh is here, and, and so Shawar goes, "All right, let's work together." So Shirkuh brings his army on the east side of Cairo and then goes south of Cairo, crosses the Nile, and then heads north, north, and goes to where Giza is, so he's on the other side of the Nile; he's got the pyramids behind him; he's looking at Cairo, and he sends word to Shawar and says, "Let's fight these Crusaders and dig them out of your country together," but Shawar is allied with the Crusaders. And so what Shawar does is he tells the Crusaders everything he knows about Shirkuh's position and then offers to help them dig it, uh, Shirkuh out. Shirkuh takes his army and races south; he pretends, uh, that he's, he's panicking because he's away from his supply lines, which makes sense, cuz he's away from his supply lines, like he had grounds to panic, but he's not actually panicking; he just pretends. He marches about 200 kilometers south of Cairo; he goes to a place called Babayn, which means the two gates or two doors, um, it's near, uh, Samut, which is a tiny little town in the middle of nowhere Egypt, uh, there's a, near there. I love the name of that town; it's like halfway between Asyut and Cairo, maybe a third of the way from Asyut to Cairo. Ayat's another town you've never heard of, so why am I using it for a reference point? Um, anyway, he goes there; he turns around, faces a Crusader army that had been chasing him; Amalric himself is leading a Crusader army chasing him, and the reason he did this was in part to get Amalric away from his supply chain so that they're both out of supply. He attacks them; he tears the Crusaders to pieces; Amalric barely escapes, and then Amalric races back to Cairo to try to, because the rest of his army is still there, and then figure out what to do next, coordinate with Shawar, get the Egyptians into this somehow. All of a sudden, they get news that Alexandria has fallen. Alexandria is on the other side of Egypt, like they were, they were halfway, maybe not quite halfway, a third of the way south, and they, and what happened was in the time it took for Amalric to run to Cairo, not only did Shirkuh run to Cairo, he ran past it about equal distance, got to Alexandria, and captured it. Alexandria was the largest city in Egypt at the time, so it was a devastating blow to the Egyptian morale, to Egyptian economy, and nobody can believe it. That's who Shirkuh was; he was a

Strategic genius. He thought outside of the box. He was constantly coming up with crazy stuff, executing it and pulling it off. He was one of those guys who would just do unexpected, just out of nowhere things. Things like this: like bait the Crusader King South, then once you defeat a race North and capture the largest city before anybody has a chance to figure out what's even happening.

But the Crusader Army and the Egyptian Army rally; they marched on Alexandria and they put it under siege. The Siege is going on and on and on, and it becomes increasingly clear they're running out of food; they're running out of supplies. At some point, Shiru is facing surrender, and since he doesn't have a Navy, there's no escaping, because Alexandria is a port city; the Egyptians have the Navy. He's stuck. There's no escape.

So that's what he does: he escapes. He grabs a Cavalry unit and, in the night, they open the gate, and he takes this Cavalry unit and he charges out of the city, and he rampages right through the Crusader Army and gets on the other side. He left his nephew, Saladin, in charge of the city, and he said, "Hold the city, no matter what happens."

Now that he's on the other side of the Crusader Army, he just goes on a rampage, attacking Crusader and Egyptian positions, tying up their supply lines. It's a mess. He'll capture something; he can't keep it, because if somebody comes to take it, they can. But the fact that he's out there doing this makes it so that he's slowly making it so the Siege is no longer tenable. They get together to talk, and they come up with a solution: they'll both leave. Amalric goes home; Shiru goes home. They pull out, and everybody's disappointed, because, right, everybody was hoping they were going to end up with Egypt, but Shaar got it again, to everybody's shock and dismay.

Amalric decides he's going to do a fourth invasion of Egypt the next year, 1168. He wants this thing; we are, we are an obsessed stalker land at this point. You know what I mean? Like, this is not cool anymore. Shiru shows up again, um, and this time he defeats the Crusaders; he defeats the Crusader Army, and he secures Cairo for Shaar. When Shiru marches his army into Cairo, Shaar comes out and he's like, "Oh, thank you, you saved me. I'm so happy you saved me." And Shiru is like, "Yeah, of course," and they act like everything's okay and everything's normal.

And then what Shiru does is he has Shaar lured out of the palace to, to some isolated location where Saladin is waiting for Shaar. He goes into the isolated location, and Saladin guts him like a pig. And that's the end of Shaar. At that point, the Fatimid Khalifa has to make a decision what to do next, and his, the decision he makes is to make Shiru his new Vizier. Like that's it; it's over. Nur ad-Din has won Egypt, because once Shiru is the Vizier, right, what? He's done; he's finished; everybody's finished. The Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt is finished, because, right, these, these guys are suddenly, they, they're not going to hold this thing up any more; uh, it's just a matter of when.

At that point, Shiru is a, is a solid Vizier. He starts to figure out who the opponents are in, in the court; he starts to neutralize them, both politically and in more violent ways when necessary. Usually it's just politically. And this is how the court goes for a few months, and then Shiru dies. He's finished; he's over; it's over. And there's this moment of, "Okay, what do we do now?" His advisors go, "You need to make another one of these Syrians—they're Kurds, right—but you need to make another one of these Syrians the new Vizier, so that we can keep the link back to Nur ad-Din; so we keep Nur ad-Din happy; we keep the Crusaders out of Egypt." And they pick the guy they think is the weakest of the lot, the youngest, the least experienced, the guy who has the least chance of, of ruling on his own, the guy who will be the most easy to manipulate: Saladin. They picked him, the guy who didn't even want to go on the Expedition.

All of a sudden, this 20—I think it was 27, something like that—this, hold on, I can do the math. Ah, it's not, wait, wait, 93, uh, it's 68, eight, so that's 25 years later. I think I screwed up the math. 35, so he's, he's in his early 20s actually. He, so he's a 20-something year old who's had very little military command, had not much to do with capturing Egypt. He had a little bit of a role, but it's not worth mentioning. If it wasn't for what he does next, I would have never brought him up. Even him killing Shaar, who cares who the assassin was? They pick him. He began systematically to neutralize even more of the enemies in the court.

The next year, 1169, um, you're not going to believe this: Amalric invades Egypt for a fifth time. This guy really wanted it. He goes to Damietta; he tries to capture it. Saladin is there with the Army; he's defeated; he turns around, heads back to Palestine; he gives up. That was it; he doesn't invade again. He just, he only invaded five times over the course of six years. It's not that crazy, um, with a little bit of a break in the middle. Saladin now is the undisputed ruler of Egypt. The Crusaders are done, so he doesn't have to deal with that anymore, so he can just focus on the political intrigue. But he has another problem: Nur ad-Din.

So Nur ad-Din wants to make sure Saladin knows that Nur ad-Din is in charge, and Saladin is his subordinate. So he starts doing things like inviting him to come meet, to have a conversation. Saladin is nervous about meeting Nur ad-Din now, because he's worried, not that Nur ad-Din is going to backstab him or something like that; he doesn't think that's going to happen. He's just worried he'll crumble in the face of his master, to put it in the terms that he would have put it in, because Saladin is a strange guy. So let me give you a couple of anecdotes, because they're just, they're precious, actually.

So one of the anecdotes that it's kind of famous for is: he's in his tent, because Saladin didn't want to stay in the palace; he thought it was too decadent; uh, it was, it was crazy. There was a zoo, with, with tame lions and tame deer, and the lions weren't eating the deer. Like, what, what the hell is that? That's just wrong. Um, so Saladin's like, "I don't, I don't need the palace; I'm just going to stay in my tent." So he's in his tent, and a Mamluk walks up to him. So Mamluk means owned, so a slave walks up to him, but he's a special type of slave. The Mamluks were soldiers; they were slave soldiers. So what would happen after a battle is you had an option, as a, as a Crusader or anybody else that the Muslim Army would fight, and one of your, your options was you could end your POW status, you could end being a prisoner of war by converting to Islam and then becoming a warrior slave. So that's, they actually had a slave Army called the Mamluks. So the Mamluk walks up. So here's this slave walking up to—he's basically the king of Egypt at this point—walks up to him; he, Saladin is tired; he's been working all day; he's kind of a small guy; he wasn't especially big, but he's, he's a little exhausted; he's, he's laying in front of his tent; he's not even in his tent; and the Mamluk goes, "Uh, you need to sign this; it's a document, a government bureaucratic document," right? He just needs, you know how it is; you've seen it in the movies; the guy walks up and goes, "Sign this," and the, the superior doesn't even know what he's signing; he signs it and hands it back. "Sign this," and Saladin goes, "I'll sign it tomorrow; I am so tired." The Mamluk sticks this document in his Master's face and goes, "The Master will sign this." Saladin goes, "I don't even have an inkwell." The Mamluk goes, "It's in the back of your tent; I'm looking at it." Saladin turns around, sees the inkwell—the, the guy is a slave, right? He should go to the back of the tent and get the inkwell. He just stands there and waits for Saladin to do it. Saladin finally gets up, gets the inkwell, brings it back; he goes, "Okay," and he signs the document. Isn't that crazy? He's so humble; it doesn't even occur to him that that was wrong. This is not, he's not a power-thirsty, power-crazed maniac; he's, he's strange, because he weeps; he cries.

So at one point—this is later on, but still it's, it's a good story, so I want to tell you just to give you a little bit of who this guy was—at one point a Crusader woman comes up to him; they, they, they've actually been fighting; there's a battle between them and the Crusaders, and this Crusader woman crosses the combat lines in the middle of the battle, and she comes up to Saladin, tears streaming out of her eyes, and he's like, "Uh, what's going on? Why are you crying?" And she goes, "Last night when, uh, one of your army units raided the camp and captured my daughter and took her into slavery, and I went to tell the, the, the Crusader leadership about what happened, and they told me all I had to do is come talk to you and you'd sort it out." And he goes, "Okay." He turns to one of his men and he goes, he asks her for a description of the girl; he goes, "Go to the slave market and see if you can find the daughter." The guy goes, two hours later, comes back carrying the daughter on his shoulders; the woman falls on the ground weeping; he, Saladin takes the daughter, hands it to the woman; Saladin is weeping; everybody around is weeping; and the woman goes back, crosses the combat lines, and rejoins the Crusaders. That crazy. In other words, Nur ad-Din might have been a good Muslim; Saladin went one step further into a realm that I don't even like.

And then, and so Saladin knows to do the propaganda, because he's seen what Nur ad-Din is doing, so he's doing his own little propaganda thing. He's a little worried that when he's in front of Nur ad-Din he'll just break; he doesn't know that he can stand up to Nur ad-Din. And now that he's the leader of Egypt, technically he's more powerful than his master. His master has Damascus and Aleppo; that's not the equal to Egypt; and so there's a power imbalance, and Nur ad-Din's a little panicked because he doesn't know what Saladin is going to do next. In the meantime, Amalric starts sending messages to Saladin; he goes, "Ally with me; you and me against Nur ad-Din." And the crazy thing is is that was never going to happen; there was no way Saladin would do that, but Nur ad-Din's imagination is starting to get away from him, and he's starting to wonder if Saladin is thinking about it.

So in 1171, uh, Saladin sees an opportunity to attack a Crusader fortress in Jordan. That's a heck of a, a roundabout to get to Jordan, but he decides to do it. So he, he goes, and he's attacking the Crusader Palace, while he's attacking the Crusader Palace he discovers that Nur ad-Din's Army is coming to meet him, and he says, "Okay, guys, we got to go." They pack up the Army and they race as fast as they can back to Cairo. And Nur ad-Din goes, "What was that about? We, you could have captured the castle if you had just stayed; why did you escape? You didn't want to see me." So the distrust is starting to happen. Saladin says, "No, no, no, there was an uprising; I had to put it down back in Cairo." It's true, but there was no way he could have known about it in time. Well, maybe so. The Crusaders had the hardest time communicating with each other, even though they ruled a small territory, because it just took forever for a guy on horse to deliver a message from one spot to the other, especially if there was a Siege, because then you had to sneak through the other side's Army, and they were especially looking for just such a thing. The Arabs didn't have any problem with Arabs, Turks, and Kurds who were doing, running the show, because they had homing pigeons; they had trained pigeons to return home. And then every Army, as it would travel, would have a dozen homing pigeons for every city you might want to communicate with, and then you just tie a note to the homing pigeon; you do more than one, just in case, right, like a hawk in the area eating them; and you launch the two, three homing pigeons with the message, and they just fly, and within hours you get the message to the next city, and then that's how they were communicating, and they were having basically instant communication. So it is possible that Saladin found out about an uprising; it's just, it's unlikely. In any case, he puts the uprising down.

Two years later, same thing happens: Saladin is putting a castle under siege; Nur ad-Din moves an army last minute; Saladin pulls out so that he won't make contact with Nur ad-Din; he goes home. Nur ad-Din goes, "You did it again; now I really don't trust you; what is this about?" He goes, "My dad's died." Turns out his dad really was dying. Ayyub dies in Cairo. Before Ayyub died, in the middle between 71 and 73, there was this problem, and the problem was that Nur ad-Din had become so worried that Saladin was going to betray him, he actually sent him an envoy saying, "You need to come, and you need to submit to me, or I'm coming with an army." Saladin said, "Should we fight?" In the meeting, his dad says, "No, we're going to submit, and if Nur ad-Din told me to kill you myself, I would do it." After the meeting, Ayyub goes to his son and goes, "For the record, I'll fight to the death to defend you and help you keep Egypt. Let's just not advertise, then we're going to pretend, no matter what, that we're with Nur ad-Din, and we will never do anything against him, anyway. So it's okay; just go along for the ride; submit to this guy; what's the big deal?" So that's, that's what Saladin does; he writes a letter saying, "I submit." His father dies the next year, and then, amazingly enough, in 1174, Nur ad-Din dies, uh, uh, I don't know what it's called, the, he got an abscess in his tonsil, and, and I think the abscess burst and it killed him. Just such a random, stupid death for a glorious warrior, you know. Anyway, you kind of want to dive with a sword through your gut or something, not an abscess burst in the back of your mouth; it's terrible. That year, Amalric also dies. Disinter—remember I told you, if you just don't know, throw in Disinter; there's a reason; there's just, throw it in there; it's probably right. Doesn't matter. Anyway, so all of a sudden Saladin has just had two potential rivals cleared out in one year.

Saladin realizes he can't just sit in Egypt now; he's got to go to Syria, because he's got to secure everything; he's gonna have to secure Damascus; he's gonna have to secure Aleppo, and he knows it's going to be a mess. So he takes off on what I want to call the Shiru Freeway. So I'm just going to out my dream—my dream in life is to build a freeway that starts in Aleppo, goes through Damascus, goes through Palestine, goes to Cairo, and call it the Shiru Freeway, just because by that point Shiru had gone back and forth so many times through the Crusader State, I just feel like it needs to be an official freeway that people can drive on. Saladin takes it; he's marching right through Crusader territory; he shows up in Syria and he finds out really fast, like the, the, the Zengid dynasty, the, the guy that's going to replace Nur ad-Din is named Asad, uh, Saladin and his advisors don't even think Saladin even knows what's happened yet. So as he's marching, he writes them a letter, because he, he knows that they're, they're plotting to make sure he doesn't end up with Syria, and he writes him a letter saying, "Look, if Nur ad-Din was alive right now, he would have designated me to be his son's educator. You guys are trying to keep him from me and turn him against me; I'm going to come, and I'm going to punish you." He literally declares war on them, causes them to panic; they abandoned Damascus. So by the time Saladin gets there, he now owns Damascus. He just has to figure out how he's going to get Aleppo, and so he starts working on it, because Aleppo is the key to controlling Syria. He keeps talking to Asad, trying to work it out, trying to come up with a compromise, talking to their advisors.

In 1177, uh, Saladin ends up in a battle called Montgisard, uh, on the coast, pretty close to Jaffa; uh, I think if I remember correctly, it's just north of Jaffa. It's a catastrophe. So here's what happened: the new King is a guy named Baldwin IV. When Amalric dies, his son takes over from his first marriage, from Agnes, the one that everybody hated; uh, he, he gets a daughter from, uh, his second wife, um, it's a, so he's got Baldwin, Sibylla, and then Isabella. Baldwin has leprosy, and he takes over the throne, dying; he's melting; he's in, he's not really in pain, because one of the things that happens with leprosy is your nerve endings in your skin basically go away, but he's, he's just melting, and it's an unattractive death, slow death; takes him; he was King for 11 years; he's just dying as he goes. Um, so Baldwin IV is King in Aleppo when Saladin takes over the city after his dad had died two years later, in 1176. He let Raynald of Châtillon go. So Raynald had been in prison for 16 years; remember the Butcher of Cyprus? That guy? He's loose. He doesn't go to Antioch, because his wife has died, so, and he's been replaced by, uh, Bohemond III, so he decides to instead go the other direction, and he marries a woman, Melisende, in my head, but who knows if that's accurate, anyway. She's the heir to Jordan; the Crusaders had captured what is today basically the western part of Jordan, and he goes to Kerak, the fortress, and invests himself into Kerak.

So in 1177, the next year after he's been freed, a, after taking over Kerak, he joins the Army, the Crusader Army; they're, they're going to fight Saladin at Montgisard. When they go to Montgisard, Baldwin, it appears, handed command over to Raynald of Châtillon, and Raynald comes up with a plan and defeats Saladin. Saladin lost battles, but it was really rare; this wasn't that, this was a whole level worse. We don't have good numbers, right, because chroniclers weren't really good at—it wasn't like they went afterwards in the battlefield, one, two, right, and counting the dead bodies—but it, the Saladin Army might have been five times bigger; it might have been less; there are some chroniclers who said it was even bigger, like eight times bigger, and the Crusaders massacre it. Saladin escapes with some of his top advisors, but it's a catastrophe. But so Raynald is back; he's on the scene; he goes into raider mode. Saladin does manage to take Aleppo, finally; it takes him a while, but he does finally get it, um, and then he makes a deal with Baldwin IV; he goes to Baldwin; they negotiate. Here's the deal: he will not try to take Jerusalem; he will leave the Kingdom of Jerusalem intact; he's not even going to mess with the other two Crusader States, and then in return Baldwin will stop messing with his territories. Saladin has merged Egypt into Syria; it's one state now; they've completely surrounded the Crusader States on all sides; and Manuel, the Roman Emperor, he's still dealing with Roger II, but he's also still dealing with his other issues, so he's sort of out of the picture at some level; and so Baldwin goes, "You know what? Let's do it," and they, they make a treaty; they make a formal treaty ending the struggle between Muslim and Christian, and they set up these, these plans for how Muslims can now visit Jerusalem and how when Christians are traveling through Muslim lands they will be protected, and it's over; peace has been struck.

Well, except for Raynald of Châtillon. That guy can't stop raiding; he attacks Muslim caravans every chance he gets; he massacres them; it's a mess; and every time he does, Saladin goes back to Baldwin the Fourth and goes, "We have a deal," and Baldwin's like, "I don't know how to rein this guy in." In the meantime, Baldwin's sister, Sibylla, marries a guy named Guy de Lusignan. Guy de Lusignan was a bully, but a dummy; he's just not smart, like Raynald was maybe evil, but he was at least smart; like he could, he could design victories and lead them against Saladin; he had brains. Guy doesn't have brains. Saladin starts to…

Get really annoyed at Reynald. So, at one point—the year, I think, is 1183—Saladin shows up at Krak. The fortress, by the way, for the record, there’s a Chevaliers its ancient name was Krak. So if you get the two confused, you’re justified in doing it, but they’re in two different places. Krak des Chevaliers is in Syria; Krak is in Jordan. So Saladin shows up with a whole army; he’s going to just take Reynald the Chatillon out. What? When he shows up, he’s launching—using mangonels—and they’re launching rocks against the fortress, smashing the place up. Uh, Reynald sends a messenger, and the messenger says, “Uh, we’re actually having a wedding, Salah. Uh, if you wouldn’t mind, can you take it easy on this sector? Like, don’t drop any rocks on it. The wedding is Bayan of Ibelin’s stepdaughter, Isabella, because Bayan of Ibelin marries Maria Comnena when Amalric dies, and they’re getting married at Krak while a siege is taking place.” Saladin goes, “Okay, show me the exact spot.” So they work it out, and they stop firing rocks in that area, not only so that they can complete the wedding, but so they can also do their little honeymoon afterwards.

Anyway, Baldwin shows up with his army. Saladin realizes he can’t fight on two fronts, and so he pulls away. Uh, Baldwin promises to punish Reynald. I don’t know that he does, but he promises to do so. That appeases Saladin, and they’re done. Reynald continues the raiding. So finally, Saladin goes, “Okay, I’m done. We’re—this is—we—this Crusader State thing can’t work. Baldwin can’t rain in its people.” Um, Baldwin then dies. He—by the way, Amalric dies in, uh, 1174. When he dies, the Romans dissolve into chaos. So Rome’s out of the picture completely at this point. And so, at this point, Saladin’s like, “I don’t have to worry about Rome.” So that’s that’s gone. I own Egypt and Syria; this is working out really well. So Baldwin the Fourth—finally, the leprosy gets to him—he dies in 1185. His—um, son—sorry, Sibylla’s son—his nephew becomes Baldwin V at age five. This is not going to work. Sibylla, now with Guy, are the regents running the kingdom.

Uh, Baldwin the Fourth—Baldwin the Fifth dies at like age eight, which is the next year. He was technically co-king with Baldwin IV for a few years. So they were like co-kings for, I think, two years, and then—and now he’s dead. So they’re—so they lost two kings in two years. And so Sibylla and Guy take over directly at that point. Saladin has decided he’s finishing off the Crusader state. There’s a guy named Raymond III; he’s the Count of Tripoli. His wife owns Tiberias. If you watch the movie *Kingdom of Heaven*, there’s a character named Tiberias. There was no Crusader named Tiberias. I feel like that was supposed to be Raymond III, and they maybe they didn’t like the name Raymond, so they named it Tiberias because his wife owned the city of Tiberias. So Saladin pulls up to Tiberias, and he besieges it, and he’s going to take the city. So the Crusaders decide they have to lift the siege. It’s 1187. In front of Tiberias, on one side is the Sea of Galilee, which is a freshwater lake, which is really amazing to have there. On the other side is this open desert plane. There’s a volcano with two horns; it had two volcanic peaks right there at the start of the plane. And that spot’s called Hattin, and the plane in front of it is the Plain of Hattin. So that’s Saladin’s idea. He doesn’t want to take Tiberias; they actually could have taken it at any moment. So—but—so he tells his men, “No, no, no. We’re going to keep it under siege; we’re going to keep the pressure on it, but don’t take it. I know it’s ready to collapse; just leave it there. We’ll even send them supplies if we have to, to keep them from falling,” because he wants to lure the Crusader army into a trap. The Crusaders, under the leadership of Guy Lusignan, decide to cut through the desert across the plane. They don’t have water; they’re thinking when they get to the Sea of Galilee they’ll drink. Saladin lifts the siege on Tiberias, parks his army in the plane in between them and the Sea of Galilee. They now have to fight exhausted and thirsty. And all that the Arabs have to do is just hold their position, and that’s what they do, and it’s a massacre. The Battle of Hattin ends in Saladin’s victory on July 4, 1187. Is that crazy?

Afterwards, Saladin has Guy brought to his tent, and Reynald of Chatillon. He has ice brought to the tent. What the arrows would do is they go into the mountains where, even in the summer, there’s still some ice, and they chop out blocks of ice, and then they used it to keep food fresh, and they used it for desserts. The Persians—the ancient Persians—liked to take crushed ice and put fruit in it, and they would eat the crushed ice and the fruit. The Arabs thought, “What if we made syrup from the fruit?” The word “syrup” comes from the Arabic word *sharbat*. “What if we made syrup from the fruit and then poured it onto the ice?” And they invented sorbet, which comes from the Arabic word *sharbat*. Isn’t that cool? And then later the Italians, who had fallen madly in love with sorbet and made all these different types of gelato, went, “Oh, what would happen if you mix this with cream?” And that’s how ice cream was invented by three different civilizations over the centuries. Anyway, Saladin has ice brought, and then he takes a chalice of ice and he hands it to Guy. Guy takes a sip and hands it to Reynald. Saladin goes, “I didn’t give you the ice.” And Reynald goes, “That’s correct, your highness; you didn’t give it to me.” And Saladin goes, “In my culture, you have to treat your guest well, but you’re not my guest, cuz I didn’t give you the ice.” He did. And Reynald goes, “That’s true, your majesty.” So Saladin takes his sword, guts him right there, cuts his head off, drags him across the ground, and parks him in front of Guy Lusignan and goes, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to harm you.” And that’s how Reynald of Chatillon finally went down.

Now the only thing left to do is go take Jerusalem itself. So the army leaves Hattin and heads to Jerusalem. They get to Jerusalem. Who does Saladin see? Bayan of Ibelin. Bayan of Ibelin is heading to Jerusalem, but the problem is the Arab army is in between him and Jerusalem. So Bayan approaches Saladin. They know each other. And Bayan goes, “So my wife, the grandniece of the former Emperor, who’s now dead, is—is in Jerusalem. I’m here to get her.” By the way, she made four babies with Balian of Ibelin. Like, that’s how wrong the movie is. Like this guy is married to a former queen and making children with her; like he’s totally interconnected. He goes, “I’m here to get my wife. Will you let me into the city?” And Saladin goes, “Okay, fine. I’ll let you into the city, but you have to promise you will not fight us and you won’t do anything but go in there, get your wife, and come out. And if your children are there, you can get them too.” And so—so Bayan goes, “Okay, thank you so much.” He goes into the city. When people see him, they go, “We don’t have any leaders; there’s nobody running the city. Everybody was at Hattin.” So they come back to—they go—they go to Bayan and go, “You need to take command of the city to defend us.” So Bayan goes, “Okay, I’ll be right back.” He leaves the city; he goes back to Saladin. He goes, “Look, they’re begging me to take command of the city. I swore I wouldn’t do anything, but would you do it anyway? Would you let me do this anyway? And this is my alarm to tell me to be quiet now.” Um, and so—uh, Saladin goes, “Okay, so you have your oath to me, but your duty to your people.” And Bayan goes, “Yeah.” And so you’re asking me to release you from your oath. And Bayan goes, “I take my oath very seriously. So if you tell me no, I go get my wife and I leave.” And Saladin goes, “Okay, fine. I release you from your oath. Go take over the city and prepare its defenses. I’m going to attack tomorrow.” And then Bayan goes, “Okay, but one more thing first.” And so goes, “What?” “Can you get my wife for me? Like, I’m going to let her out of the city, but like, can you escort her to a safe place so she’s not combat zone?” And Saladin goes, “Wait, so now I’m taking care of your wife?” And then Bayan’s like, “Well, actually, could you just send her to Tyre to Sibylla? Then that way she’s just out of harm’s way completely.” And Saladin goes, “Fine.” So Bayan goes in, takes over the defenses, he puts up a fight.

Like most of the Crusaders were defeated at Hattin. Arab armies were democratic. So, in other words, yes, Saladin is the general. Once combat is invested, he makes all the decisions; nobody can second-guess him. But in between combat, the soldiers can vote on things and make demands. Is that interesting? Well, the soldiers wanted to massacre all the Crusaders at Hattin, so they had voted for that. Saladin got up in front of them; he’s like, “No, we’re not those people. We don’t massacre everybody when they’re defeated. A bunch of them are going to be wounded and surrender. We’re going to heal the wounded, and we’re going to let them go.” And they’re like, “No, we don’t want to fight them ever again. If we let them go, we’re just going to have to fight them later.” And Saladin goes, “I don’t care. We are not massacres. They are—they do this; we don’t.” They vote, and they vote to modify the mass execution that’s supposed to take place at the end of Hattin. They vote only to massacre the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaller. So the Knights Templar and Hospitaller were monastic orders that went into combat and had vows of chastity and poverty, and they were like the richest rapists the world has ever seen. They just plundered, raped, murdered everywhere they went. They had a big cross on their chest just to make sure you knew they were Christian as they were killing you, raping you, and stealing your stuff. And so—so they voted, “Okay, we’re going to get rid of those guys; we’ll let the whole rest of the army go.” So Saladin goes, “Fine.” He had men who spoke Latin walk up and down the line of Hospitaller and Templar and say to them, “We can’t execute Muslims. We can’t execute Muslims. We can’t execute Muslims.” They have to do it in Latin, right? Because some of them speak French, some of them speak German, some of them speak Hungarian. So they just need a language that everybody can at least figure this out. About maybe a quarter or a third of those Templars and Hospitallers—these fanatic Christians—walk up to the executioner and then—and then become Muslim. They say the two phrases you need to just become Muslims, and they’re all right, fine, get out of line. But then here’s the weird twist: There were a group of guys who weren’t Templars and Hospitallers; they were just clearly normal Crusaders. They walked up and they said they were, and the executioner is like, “That means we have to kill you.” “No, you don’t want to be—it’s obvious you’re not—you’re not dressed like one.” They go, “No, no, we are.” And the executioners go, “I don’t get it. You want us to execute you?” And they’re like, “Yes, because if you kill us here now, we go straight to heaven; we get to hang out with Jesus for all eternity.” And the executioner is like, “Dude, no. Get out of the line; you’re not a—you’re not a Templar.” Because, right, in the meantime, a bunch of Templars are like, “Yeah, I’m a Muslim. You can’t kill me.” All right, go out of line. And then they went and became—they actually joined the Mamluks; they’ve actually switched sides. Anyway, so this—that’s what happened there. So—so here we are. It’s Jerusalem. This brutal siege is happening. Finally, the Muslims managed to break a hole in the wall. There’s fighting in the breach that lasts for days. Bayan comes out; he goes, “We’re done. We’re out of—we’re out of food; we’re exhausted; we don’t have many people left. Honestly, the fight can’t go—go on.” Saladin goes, “Okay, let’s talk terms.” Because Saladin actually, at one point, had decided he was going to take the city by force no matter what. So Bayan says, “Look, if you don’t let us surrender, we’re going to destroy Jerusalem. We’re going to burn everything—everything you find sacred. We’re going to wreck it; we’re going to tear down Al-Aqsa Mosque; we’re going to destroy everything—the Dome of the Rock. We will leave none of your mosques, none of your holy places.” Saladin goes, “Those are your holy places too.” And Bayan’s like, “I will destroy our holy places. I will destroy the Jewish holy places, the Christian holy places, the Muslim holy places. I’m going to tear it all down if you don’t let us surrender.” So Saladin goes, “Fine.” Actually, he turns to an advisor and he goes, “Is it okay to break my oath—capturing the city by violence—to preserve all our holy sights?” And this—the guy’s like, “Yes, yes. That’s totally okay. You’re released from your oath.” And so Saladin goes, “Okay, here are my terms. My army has already voted to enslave some of you, so I’ll talk them into a price for their freedom. If you can come up with X amount of money, we’ll let—we’ll let you guys go. That way nobody gets enslaved.” So the army comes out, and then Saladin goes, “You know what? The elderly don’t have to pay.” And like he keeps exempting groups. Okay, children—children don’t have to pay. And so, by the time they’re done, they’re—they’re down to like this core group of guys, and a bunch of them didn’t have any money. So Saladin goes into his tent, he pulls what was left of his coffers out, and he dumps it on the ground and buys a bunch of the Crusaders and then frees them. And then some of his ad—some of his generals are standing there; they feel really embarrassed. They go get their coffers and free a few more. And so, in this way, Bayan got to lead the entire Crusader population out of Jerusalem. Saladin said, “Anytime you guys want to come visit, you’re always welcome. This city’s gates will always be open to you, just like they were before you did the Crusades. We’re going to put it right back to where it was.” And Bayan was like, “Yeah, thanks. That’s really cool.” And they head towards Tyre, and I’m going to end it there. So we’ve captured Jerusalem. I’m actually not done with the story of—so I’m thinking it might be a five-parter, um, but I’m out of time. So—but I—the Muslims have Jerusalem. The Crusades are in terrible shape, by the way. They’re going to call for another Crusade—the Third Crusade. So part four will be the Third Crusade. All right, thanks so much. [Applause]