Why the Most Powerful Muslim Rulers in the Middle East Considered the Crusaders a Minor Annoyance

Scott Rank (0:05)

Scott here with another episode of the History Unplugged Podcast. German Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm traveled to Damascus in 1898 in order to push his imperial ambitions in the Middle East. He wanted to show Germany as a champion of the Islamic world against British and French power and project power in the entire Arabian Peninsula. He thought he could do this by going to the tomb of Saladin, who conquered Jerusalem in 1187 and defeated the Crusaders, and honor him, showing that there was a connection between the German and Islamic people. He figured the final resting place would be very well built and known by everybody because the memory of the Crusades were extremely important in Europe and thought it would be similarly important in the Middle East, and the Muslim hero of the Crusades would be honored by the residents of Damascus. He was shocked to find that few people in the city knew where the tomb was, and the tomb itself was severely neglected. Wilhelm funded a lavish restoration, and he left a grand marble sarcophagus behind, and acted like a modern crusader, paying tribute to history's most famous Muslim warrior to court the Islamic world.

What this all shows is that it's really only in the last hundred years that the Crusades were all that important in the Muslim world. If you look at Muslim chroniclers from the Middle Ages up to the early modern period, they don't write about it all that much. That's because of the grand scheme of things it wasn't that important for other things they had going on. The Crusades really only involved a few city-states, and compared to the conquest of the Mongol Empire that happened a century later, they were microscopic. The Crusades to the great Muslim powers of the time, like the Fatimids in Egypt or the Seljuks in Turkey, were really a sideshow. In today's episode, I'm speaking to Nicholas Morton, author of The Crusader Storm, A Global History of the Wars for the Middle East. We'll discuss how the Seljuk-Turkish invasions reshaped the Middle East far more profoundly than the Crusaders ever did, why the Egyptian Fatimid Empire initially treated the Crusaders as allies against the Seljuks, and then made a catastrophic diplomatic blunder at Jerusalem, that turned into a potential partnership into an existential war, and how the Italian merchant cities were the true kingmakers of the Crusader states, because the Franks had no ships. We'll look at how Saladin spent far more of his career fighting fellow Muslims and fighting Christians, why the war for control of Egypt between 1163 and 1169 was a strategic hinge that made the fall of Jerusalem inevitable, and the Crusades weren't a clash of civilizations, as much as they were a free-for-all where everybody was fighting everybody. Hope you enjoyed this discussion with Nicholas Morton.

And one more thing before we get started with this episode, a quick break for word from our sponsors.

Nick, it's great to have you on again. We've had many conversations about the Crusades, but are you basically recanting all of your other works and all of your previous books by saying the Crusades really weren't that important? Is that what's going on here?

Nicholas Morton (2:54)

It's great to be on the show, Scott. And in the past, I've studied the Crusades in various aspects. But in this one, I particularly want to look at the Crusades in the round, how they fit into the broader regional picture. Because if you go to, I don't know, if you meet someone for the first time and they say, what do you do? And he says, I'm a historian. And they say, what history? And you say, all the Crusades. The one thing everyone thinks they know is that basically, you could take a map of the Middle East, draw a line down the middle, and then just color one side in Christian territory and the other side in Muslim territory, and then they fight.

And that's something I really want to challenge with this book, because there's a lot of other things going on, things that actually weren't going on in isolation, but changed the nature of the Crusades and shaped the way that they evolved. So that's a big tent view of the Crusades of making the controversial argument that in fact, the Crusades weren't the biggest show in town.

Scott Rank (3:56)

Yeah, I did a class years ago in Istanbul about the history of Christian-Muslim relations, and one lecture was about the Crusades themselves, but then the entire second half was about how the Crusades were remembered. And I mean the point that on the European side of things, since the Crusades, it was one of the most important defining events of Europe, of Christendom, historical epics from the Middle Ages, the Renaissance or Romantic period, the modern era, onward and onward, and it was an incredibly important moment of self-defining.