The Real Kingdom of Heaven: The Third Crusade Ep 1- Rise of Saladin

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0:30The year is 1160. The city of Jerusalem is ruled by a crusader king, and it is one of four crusader states that were established by the first crusade. The second crusade has come and gone, accomplishing little except the deaths of many of the men on that expedition. It did nothing to increase the security of the crusader states themselves. These little outposts largely rely on knightly orders like the Templars and the Hospitallers

1:04to man their many fortresses and keep them safe from the ever-present threat of attack. The fact that these four crusader states survive at all, some 60 years after their founding, in a neighborhood surrounded by so many enemies, is largely due to the fact that those enemies are usually busy fighting amongst themselves. After the second crusade, the grand master of the Templars, named Bertrand de Blankfort,

1:38predicted that if a Muslim leader emerged, capable of uniting Egypt and Syria, it would spell the end for the crusader states. The territories immediately bordering the crusader states are Egypt and Syria, and they are both in Muslim hands, but different Muslim hands. The governors of these territories are very busy competing amongst themselves. So it was that after the end of the second crusade, the Templar grand master, Bertrand de Blankfort,

2:10foresaw that if ever a Muslim leader emerged who could unite both Egypt and Syria, it would spell the end for the crusader states. His prophecy came true on June 18, 1173, when just such a Muslim leader rode in to the Syrian city of Aleppo, having already conquered Egypt. His name was al-Malik al-Nasr Salah al-Din Yusuf,

2:41but amongst the Franks in the crusader states, he was known as Salah al-Din. You are listening to Villains and Virgins podcast, and this is the first episode in a series on the Third Crusade. The Third Crusade is such a massive canvas to cover. There are so many incredible stories and amazing figures that it's difficult even to know where to start. But in this episode, we're going to be introducing you to some of the main figures

3:11who are going to have significant roles in this enormous story that unfolds. Chief among them, Salah al-Din himself. But we're also going to be meeting several other characters you might already have heard of, especially if you watched that crusader film, Kingdom of Heaven. We'll be meeting the Leper King, the Noble Knight, Balian of Ibelin, and Sibylla, who was, for a time, Queen of Jerusalem. But before we get into all that, we have a few announcements.

3:42So we've been talking a lot about pilgrimage on Villains and Virgins podcast, both the traditional kind and the armed military kind that's sometimes known as a crusade. But various types of pilgrimage have been a major theme in the past year. And I'm delighted to tell you that next spring, in 2027, I'll be leading a pilgrimage of sorts, or rather retracing the route of one of the most famous pilgrimages. And that is the one that goes from London to Canterbury in England.

4:16And we sort of already talked about why Canterbury is famous. If you listen to the episodes on The Vengeful King and the murder of Thomas Beckett in the Canterbury Cathedral, then you'll be very familiar with why Canterbury became such a major pilgrimage site. And it continued to be significant even centuries later, immortalized in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which is talking about pilgrims who are still making that journey to Canterbury to visit the bones of St. Thomas Beckett.

4:47So if you're interested in that sort of thing, you can check out the link in the description for today's episode, because this tour is going to be organized by a wonderful company called Geek Nation Tours. And I'll provide that link for you there so you can go and get all the details. Now, I need to put a disclaimer in here, because if you follow some of the other things I do on Instagram or my other social media platforms, you'll know that I do a lot of very significant hikes and I really enjoy long distance treks.

5:18This is not one of those. So don't worry. You don't need to be a masochistic, long distance ultra hiker to enjoy this trip. In fact, we're looking at covering distances of something like 12 to 15 kilometers a day. So it's very reasonable. And we're only looking at three or four days of easy walking to go to Canterbury. So if you're interested in that and all of the history around that journey, check out the link in the description for the episode today,

5:50or you can head on over to Geek Nation Tours and look up Tudor Tour Eva Schubert on their website. I also want to pause to acknowledge that this podcast is made possible, especially by the community of people who support it on Patreon. As a member of the Patreon supporter community, you get access to a special bonus monthly episode that I create just for Patreon supporters. It's not available on YouTube or anywhere else, as well as live history chats that I host once a month,

6:21and even ad-free access to regular podcast episodes. So if any of that interests you, head on over to patreon.com slash Eva Schubert. And finally, I want to say a very special word of thanks to those wonderful people who support Villains and Virgins podcast at the very highest level on Patreon. And these people include Agnes Viner, Philip Barker, John McCandless, Robert German, Jim Jeffrey, John Lacasse,

6:51Stephen Skorick, Aaron Silverstein, Gordon Carl, Kenneth Jones, Anthony Farnbach, Tim Williams, Richard Huebner, and Charles Vigneron. Thank you so much. So Saladin is a figure whose name has passed into legend. Even people who don't know much about the Third Crusade have heard his name somewhere, usually right up there beside that of Richard the Lionheart, King of England. And these two names are perhaps the most famous names

7:24of all the Crusades together. And there's a reason for that. Saladin himself was both feared and admired by both Muslims and Crusaders alike. And his name has passed down and become symbolic centuries later. His legacy was invoked, for example, as a symbol of Arab unity by none other than Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt in the 20th century. It's an incredibly resonant name

7:55and not just in English language versions of the Crusades. Saladin was known not only for his military effectiveness, but also for his courage, generosity, and even courtesy. And I'm not going to be portraying Saladin as some kind of saint. Fear not. He wasn't. But what I am going to do is complicate the one-sided picture that you might be familiar with of Crusaders all in white

8:25and Muslims under dark banners and one side is always good and the other side is always bad. If you pay attention to history, you know that it's usually a lot more mixed up than that. And Saladin is just such a character. And so is Richard the Lionheart, who we'll get to in a later episode. If the Third Crusade was a great medieval adventure story or joust, then Richard the Lionheart and Saladin are the two preeminent adversaries. But today,

8:56we're going to start with Saladin. In order to talk about Saladin, we need to talk about the world he lived in, which is the Near East between the Second Crusade, which was 1147 to 1149, and the Third Crusade, which is 1189 to 1192. So it's that interim period between 1149 and 1189 that we're going to be focusing on today. So first, we have the city of Jerusalem itself, which is the center of this story

9:26and many stories. It has been the center of Christian pilgrimage for centuries because believers have long been drawn to the idea of visiting streets where Jesus himself walked. So Christian pilgrims had been coming into Jerusalem since as long as anybody could remember well before the First Crusade and continuously after. So that is still going on during this interim period between the Second and Third Crusades.

9:57Jerusalem is now part of the four Crusader states, as I mentioned earlier. And while there are these major military expeditions, these waves of armies that come in during the formal Crusades, the First, Second, Third, and so on, in the interim, there are these long gaps of decades or even generations during which the Crusader states need to sustain themselves. And they are vastly outnumbered by the neighbors and other governors and geopolitical powers

10:27around them, of which more in a moment. And so they have to sustain themselves in what is essentially a hostile neighborhood. And they do that because there is a continuous stream of economic and military aid coming from Western Europe. So there are donations that are funneled into the Near East for the support of the Crusader states and their operations, particularly through major knightly orders like the Templars and the Knights Hospitaller.

10:58And then there are a stream of people that are coming in all the time. Some of them are pilgrims who are coming and going through the Near East on relatively short sojourns. But then there are others, men who come to the Near East to serve in the armed forces there for a few years, or perhaps even to take orders and join one of the knightly orders. Or perhaps as adventurers coming to work for money, to fight for pay for a certain amount of time, and see what prospects

11:30might be available to them, what new lives they might be able to carve out for themselves in the Near East. But these four Crusader states, which are Edessa, Tripoli, Antioch, and Jerusalem, are surrounded on all sides by neighboring states, who are often not friendly, and many of which are Muslim. But in order to understand something about Muslim powers in the region, we need to zoom out a little bit and talk about the rise of Islam.

12:01So the religion of Islam begins centuries earlier, in the 630s, amongst Arab tribes in the part of the world now known as Saudi Arabia. And it begins under the leadership of their prophet Muhammad. Very quickly, Islam spreads rapidly, and not just as a religion, but as a military force as well. So the Muslims very quickly expand and build themselves an empire of incredible size.

12:32At its height, it reaches all the way into Iran, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, all the way over in the Eurasian Steppe. It comes across into Anatolia, which is modern Turkey. It reaches into Egypt, Syria, and large parts of North Africa. And it even goes all the way west to the Iberian Peninsula in what is now Portugal and Spain. So it's an incredible expanse of territory. And what this means

13:02is that Islam is no longer the religion of Arabs. It is a geopolitical power that involves people who speak many different languages and who have many different ethnicities. And this is really important to understand the geopolitics of the Near East and the mid-1100s, which we're about to get to. But as this massive expansion is happening, there is evolution within the community of Muslims themselves. What we have is a crisis of leadership.

13:32So very early on, after the death of Muhammad, the Muslim community is split into the question of who should be the next leader of the community. And many of the Muslims answer this question one way, basically saying that the leader of the community should be chosen by them. And the people who choose this answer are the majority. They're known as Sunni Muslims. But there are other people in the Muslim community who say that the right leader of the community can only be someone who descends from the bloodline

14:03of the family of Prophet Muhammad himself. and these people and these people are known as the Shia, Shia Muslims. So they are the minority. But there is this very important split in terms of who has the legitimacy to lead the Muslim community. To draw a very crude analogy, you can think of this as a little bit similar to the Protestant-Catholic divide in the Christian world, which of course happens quite a bit later. But the question of who has the authority to lead? Who should be in charge?

14:33And some Christians would say the Pope and others would say not the Pope. And so this is a similar kind of situation, although there are significant differences. But the Muslims are now not just a religion but an empire. And so we also have a division of offices. And so the person in charge of leading the community, which is the question we've just been talking about, becomes known as the Caliph. And so Sunni Muslims recognize one Caliph, and that's the majority of Muslims, and Shia Muslims recognize a different Caliph,

15:05someone who they regard as descended from Muhammad himself. So we have these two different Caliphs. But because you now have an empire, you need military men, generals and governors who can expand, who can take territory, who can govern and defend that territory. And with an expansive territory this large, there's going to be a lot of those guys. And so what you have now are local governors or rulers of little kingdoms or territories. And they're all Muslim,

15:36but they now have their own geopolitical sort of kingdoms. So they will all pay lip service to their Caliph, who is sort of the moral and spiritual leader of the Muslim community. But in terms of actual kingship, in terms of running armies and collecting taxes, you have essentially what look like regional governors or kings building their own little dynasties across this vast empire. And so there's a fragmentation going on and there's a differentiation

16:07of offices. You have Caliphs, who are, there are two of them, the Sunni and the Shiawan, and they're the moral and spiritual leaders of their section of the Muslim community. And then you have regional governors and essentially kings who are running actual territory on the ground. So the relationship between these regional Muslim rulers and their Caliph is, again, not that different from the relationship of medieval kings to the Pope in Western Europe, right? The kings of France

16:37and England in the 1100s are both paying lip service to the Pope and they derive some of their legitimacy to rule as kings from the Pope. Although in practice, they're often engaged in fighting each other and doing what they want to do. And the same dynamic is going on in the Muslim world at this time. You have regional Muslim kings, essentially, although they're often called emirs or other terms, and they might be fighting each other, but they will all pay lip service

17:07to their Caliph and they derive some of their legitimacy as regional rulers from their relationship with that Caliph. So by the 1100s, as we're now going back into the time period where Saladin is going to emerge onto our stage, there are these two Caliphs. The Sunni Caliph is sitting in Baghdad and he's represented by a black flag or banner. So he invests regional Muslim rulers who are loyal to him with this black banner of his dynasty.

17:39And then there's the Shia Caliph who's based in Egypt, in Cairo, and he is the Fatimid dynasty and he is represented by white banners. So two Caliphs who are kind of moral, spiritual, pope-like figures for the Muslim world in their respective capitals. And now we have the geopolitical actual kings of the Muslim world. So the Seljuk Turks are the most recent arrivals on the scene.

18:09Remember I said this Muslim empire was so vast it stretched from Central Asia all the way over to the Iberian Peninsula. So the Seljuk Turks come from Central Asia. They're basically nomadic archers. They're horse tribes. They're very much like the Mongols and Huns and other nomadic steppe peoples who've emerged from that region and rolled west. So the Seljuks are like this. We can call them Seljuk Turks but they're different than modern day Turks in significant ways. And they roll

18:40out of Central Asia and they connect with the Caliph in Baghdad and they say we can take care of some of the territorial problems so we're going to give you our allegiance and we'd like legitimacy from you. And having obtained that the Seljuks then go on to basically put themselves in charge of large parts of the Muslim empire which as I say is now fragmented. So the Seljuks are carving out their own kingdom inside of that which they're going to rule directly while paying lip service

19:10to the Sunni Caliph in Baghdad of course. And the Seljuks are Sunni Muslims because they're involved with the Caliph in Baghdad but they're busy taking as much territory as they can get from other Muslims as well as from Christians or basically anyone that they can take territory from. So there's this rapid expansion of Seljuk controlled territory in the Near East and they're a threat to the Crusader states but they're also a threat to other powers in the region and the next significant power in the region

19:41we need to introduce is the Eastern Roman Empire. So as its name suggests it is the Eastern half of what was once the Roman Empire itself but the Western half of that Roman Empire has long since collapsed centuries earlier the Eastern half continues and some historians call this the Byzantine Empire I think it's more accurate to call it the Eastern Roman Empire because that's how they saw themselves so I'm going to be using the terminology Eastern Roman Empire

20:11because that's how they saw themselves but if you've been reading about the Byzantines or you've heard about the Byzantine Emperor same guys so the Byzantines have lost territory to these Seljuk Sunni Muslim tribes and the Seljuks are a constant menace to everybody else they're very expansive but the Seljuks have also begun fighting amongst themselves so they've sort of rapidly taken a bunch of this territory they've got members of their own family sort of running different chunks of it

20:41like a dynasty and these guys are very warlike they're very competitive and they even start fighting with each other over who gets more of their own territory which is a kind of a good thing for everyone else that the Seljuks are internally divided amongst themselves at this point so this is the world that Saladin is born into probably in the year 1137 and Saladin is Kurdish so he's not a Seljuk Turk he's a Kurd and he's born

21:12into sort of a noble family he's not a peasant he's not a middle class artisan guy he comes from what are essentially the fighting classes and he spends his boyhood growing up in the city of Damascus in Syria which is really interesting because that means that Saladin was probably a nine year old boy in 1149 when the crusading army of the second crusade rolls up around the city of Damascus

21:43to besiege it and we've covered that story in our earlier series on the second crusade but Saladin is a boy in the city at that pivotal moment and you can imagine him maybe looking through an arrow slit in the wall or peeping over the battlements to get a glimpse at this foreign army the people of the region would have called them just the Franks which was their general term for anybody who came from western Europe whether they were originally from England or Flanders

22:13or Spain or France to people in the near east they were just the Frange or the Franks and so you can imagine this nine year old boy looking over the wall at these foreigners who have a fearsome reputation and trying to get a closer look at these people as it turns out the armies of the second crusade end up leaving Damascus they don't take the city but that is the city that Saladin grows up in and the region that he's familiar with one that is marked by these

22:44periodic waves of the Franks rolling in he would have been given an education that wasn't that different from the education given to young knights in western Europe I mean he would have been expected to do things like learn how to ride a horse extremely well learn how to fight he was expected to be literate so he would have learned to read he would have memorized poetry we know he was a fan of poetry he was able to write and he spoke a number of languages

23:14he spoke Arabic he spoke Kurdish and he spoke at least some Persian so he's connected culturally to a number of these other different groups of people that are in the Near East at the time and as he becomes a young man he takes up the family business which is sort of the fighting business it's working for pay in the army and the armies at the time that were hiring and that were good work were Seljuk armies and so Saladin takes up a position

23:44serving under his uncle who's basically an officer in the Seljuk army and this is where Saladin emerges where he enters the scene on his first military campaign he's serving under his uncle who's leading one particular Seljuk army and their mission is to go into Cairo and take it now you might remember Cairo is run by the Shia Fatimids the Seljuks are Sunni okay so

24:14just like Catholics and Protestants hate each other and have been fighting in Europe for a long time the Sunni and the Shia in the Muslim world have a very similar dynamic and that was the case at this point as well so you have to think of the Seljuk army rolling into Cairo as a hostile takeover they're not friends just because they all happen to be Muslims they're bitterly divided Muslims and the Sunnis in the Seljuk army would have viewed the Shia as heretics essentially as people

24:46whose beliefs were all wrong but the Seljuk army run by Saladin's uncle is very effective it's very large and they managed to take over Cairo now only two months after this conquest Saladin's uncle dies and so Saladin himself steps into his uncle's position so he's now in charge of this Seljuk army and this is in March of 1169 so if you've

25:16been keeping track that means Saladin is now about 31 years old at this point this is definitely not his first battle or his first military campaign but it's the one where his name sort of pops up into the records because he's now taken on an extremely important post so politically speaking Cairo still has its Fatimid Shia Caliph its own moral spiritual leader of the Muslim community of Shia Muslims but militarily speaking

25:47the power lies with Saladin and his Seljuk army but it's a very unstable situation right because the people of Cairo and of Egypt are loyal to their Caliph who's a Shia and this army is a bunch of Sunnis so it's a tense and uncomfortable situation and the Caliph the Shia Caliph is under some pressure to offer some legitimacy to Saladin because Saladin wants to kind of stabilize his position he doesn't

26:18want to be dealing with constant uprisings and rebellions and plots against his life as people in the region regard him as this terrible threat so he needs the local Caliph who's not his Caliph because he's a Sunni but the local Shia Caliph to give him some legitimacy to stabilize the situation and really the Caliph doesn't have much of an option because if he doesn't cooperate what's he going to do he's being occupied by this enemy army so the Shia Caliph gives him this title of Al-Malik Al-Nasr which roughly

26:49translates as the king who gives his aid he's basically saying this Seljuk general this Saladin guy is sort of going to be acting like a ruler but he's going to be helpful it's a way of trying to stabilize the situation so now we've got Saladin who's essentially the top man in Cairo and even though he's gotten this kind of legitimacy from the Shia Caliph in Cairo that guy is not his boss Saladin

27:19is still under the authority of the Seljuk generals the Seljuk kings essentially or emirs who are busy occupying their territory all over the Near East and he's basically in charge of one of their armies so Saladin's boss is still a Seljuk ruler and the Seljuk rulers are still under their own Sunni caliph who's in