The Battle For Jerusalem
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Hey, how you doing? It's Ramteen here. Before we get started, we want to thank you all for listening to ThruLine. Without you, this show doesn't exist. And we've got a way for you to actually help us out by telling us what you like and how we could improve the show by completing a short anonymous survey at npr.org slash ThruLine survey. It takes less than 10 minutes, I promise. And it's free.

And you'll do all of us here at ThruLine a huge favor by filling it out. That's npr.org slash ThruLine survey. Thank you so much. And now, on to the show. Prologue. The Call to Arms. Oh, race of Franks!

We wish you to know what grievous cause has led us to your country. November 27th, 1095. What peril threatening you and all of the faithful has brought us. Pope Urban II, the leader of the Catholic Church, one of the most powerful men in Europe, is in Clermont, France to give a speech.

A race utterly alienated from God has invaded the land of the Christians. In front of both clergy and laymen, he gives a fiery sermon where he calls for a war to take back Christianity's holiest city, Jerusalem, from its Muslim rulers. They destroy the altars after having defiled them with their uncleanness. No!

He challenges Christians to journey to the Middle East and take back the Holy Land by force.

He asked the Knights of Western Europe to undertake this enormous journey, a form of pilgrimage, in which they would go thousands of miles, largely into unknown territory. Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre. Rest that land from the wicked race and subject it to yourselves. He's asking them to make a great sacrifice and potentially to lose their lives. If they died in battle, they would be, in a way, a martyr for their faith.

- An armed attack is made upon the enemy. Let this one cry be raised by all the soldiers of God. - It is the will of God! - And in a society that's saturated with religiosity, there's images all over churches of the consequences of sin. And what the Pope is saying that you can avoid eternal damnation if you complete this pilgrimage, this act of penance. - Undertake this journey for the remission of your sins.

with the assurance of the imperishable glory of the kingdom of heaven. Going to war to risk your life for the sake of the Holy Land, for the sake of your savior, was the ultimate penitential act. But you can remain violent because in his eyes, you are channeling that violence for a just cause. Word of the crusade soon spreads all over Europe.

Tens of thousands of people respond to this, not just knights. Normal people are drawn towards this goal of Jerusalem. So men, women, old people, young people, churchmen, all head off in these great series of expeditions that we know as the First Crusade. CHEERING

The First Crusade was an unprecedented, massive military campaign to reclaim Jerusalem from what Europeans called Saracens, or Muslims. Some estimates say the Crusader army started out consisting of 50,000 fighters from all over Europe. They traveled thousands of miles to the Middle East, raiding and looting along the way.

They faced fierce opposition from Muslim forces in Turkey, Lebanon, and Palestine. Thousands died from disease and battle. Yet by the summer of 1099, not even four years after his speech at Clermont, the battered and emaciated soldiers of the Pope's crusade arrived on the outskirts of Jerusalem.

Jerusalem is one of the holiest cities in the world.

It's where Jews built their greatest temple. According to Islam, it's where the Prophet Muhammad made his night journey to heaven. And according to Christian tradition, Jerusalem is where Jesus Christ was killed and resurrected.

It had long been a site for pilgrimage for all the Abrahamic faiths. But this was a new kind of pilgrimage. This was armed pilgrimage, sponsored by and authorized by the Pope. The Crusader Army, known by the Muslim defenders as Franks, encircled the city and its high walls, looking for a way in. And they besieged the city in their preparations. They process around it, a sort of religious ritual processing around the city.

The Franks used catapults and siege engines to deal with the stout walls of Jerusalem. On July 15, 1099, the Crusaders finally break through the walls of Jerusalem. At the noon hour on Friday, with trumpets sounding, amid great commotion, the Franks enter the city.

This account of the sacking of Jerusalem comes from a crusader who was there. Some Saracens, Arabs, and Ethiopians took refuge in the Tower of David. Many fled to the roof of the Temple of Solomon. In this temple, almost 10,000 were killed.

The accounts from the time of the massacres that took place tend to exaggerate what happened, I think, but they speak of terrible scenes. If you had been there, you would have seen our feet colored to our ankles with the blood of the slain. None of them were left alive. Neither women nor children were spared. All of this death and violence over one city, a city that wasn't rich, it didn't have much strategic value.

But it was and is a symbolic treasure. Even today, Jerusalem is a focal point of war and power struggles, a place so important that people are willing to kill and die to control it. As the years of Christian rule over Jerusalem turned into decades, Islamic scholars intensified their calls to take the city back. Eventually, one ruler would respond to their call.

What happened next was one of the most consequential battles of the Middle Ages. A battle that would forever change the course of relations between the Islamic and Christian worlds, Europe and the Middle East. In this episode, we're going back to the front lines of this war to explore a simple question. What is Jerusalem worth?

Hi, this is Sandy Kaplan from Sacramento, California. You're listening to ThruLine from NPR. Part one, Saracens. In the decades after the establishment of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1099, Christian power expanded in the Middle East. Crusaders soon controlled most of Palestine, Lebanon, and parts of Syria. Meanwhile... The Muslim world was a divided one.

The Muslim Middle East was split between two rival empires. Two rival states. The Fatimid Caliphate, based in Egypt. Which also controlled parts of Palestine. That had been in power for over 100 years. And to the east, the Seljuk Sultanate.

In Iraq and in most of Syria, that region was governed by the Seljuk Turks. This is Paul Cobb. I'm a professor of Islamic history in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of Pennsylvania. He's also the author of a book called The Race for Paradise, An Islamic History of the Crusades.

Paul says that these two powers, the Fatimids and Seljuks, came from opposite ends of the Islamic world and had been fighting for decades, scratching and clawing for each other's territories. And it is no accident that the frontier between those two rivals ran right through Syria and Palestine, exactly where the Franks, the Crusaders, created their states.

It was a complicated web of factions and rivalries, a Machiavellian Game of Thrones, where crusaders, Fatimids, and Seljuks fought each other essentially to a stalemate. But this situation would be completely altered by someone born in a small city in the heart of the Middle East. A child who would grow up to become one of the most legendary figures of the Middle Ages, Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub.

Or as he's come to be known, Salah ad-Din. 1138 AD Saladin was born in Tikrit, which is in modern Iraq. Nearly 40 years after the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem. But he didn't live there for very long. Fairly quickly, with his family, he moved to Damascus, one of the great cities of the Near East. This is Jonathan Phillips.

professor of crusading history at Royal Holloway University of London. And he's the author of the book, The Life and Legend of the Sultan Salahuddin. Salahuddin's father was a commander serving the local ruler of Damascus. His father's called Ayyub. Ayyub. And his father is a very good administrator. He's a religious man.

His uncle Shirkhu, he's a great warrior. And so Saladin, in a sense, from his father and his uncle, has got two great teachers or two great influences. He was trained in the military arts, of course, but also in Islamic law, but also in the finer sides of politics.

What is known in Arabic as adab. Adab. Which refers to courtliness. Kind of like chivalry. He himself was a fan of certain poets whose poetry he read frequently. He was a pious man himself. But above all else, he was raised to be a warrior for his people, for his feudal lord, and for God. He was a member of the military elite.

His father and uncle swore allegiance to the Lord of Damascus, a Turk named Nur al-Din. But Salah al-Din's family was different from many of Nur al-Din's military elite. His family are Kurdish. Kurds are an ethnic group who've lived in the Middle East for centuries. They aren't Arab or Turkish. Kurds had great reputation as soldiers. Which meant rulers always wanted them on their side.

Salah al-Din eventually became a commander in Nur al-Din's army. But he was still a Kurdish outsider. And he wasn't really viewed by anyone as a potential future ruler. But as you'll see, Salah al-Din seemed to always be in the right place at the right time.

If it wasn't for an event that happened in the late 1160s that opened up for him a great opportunity to become a politician, I don't think he would have remained a general and we would not have heard of him much. This is Sulaiman Murad. I'm a professor at Smith College. I teach religion and Middle Eastern studies. And he's published several books on the Crusades, including Muslim Sources of the Crusader Period, an anthology.

Suleiman says that in the late 1160s, the Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt, one of the two great Muslim powers of the Middle East, was declining and in a state of civil war. Egypt at this time was one of the richest places on earth with vast agricultural wealth. So when the Fatimid Caliphate appeared to be falling apart, everyone in the region, including Nur ad-Din, the Seljuk ruler of Damascus, saw an opportunity.

So he sent two of his most trusted soldiers, Salah ad-Din and his uncle Shirku, to Egypt to take advantage of the situation. Saladin was working for his uncle. So Shirku goes there with a simple mission. To assume power over the failing Egyptian regime. But Shirku died. It's said to be of overeating. So who's next in line? None other than Salah ad-Din.

Despite being an outsider, Salah ad-Din went right to work consolidating power. Saladin set about replacing the Fatimid administrators in the palace with his own men. His father comes in and becomes the treasurer of the country. Other family members come to Egypt. He's building himself a power base.

He won everybody over by his shrewdness, by his generosity. He's good, he's diplomatic. Saladin was extremely generous to the extent that in order to assure solidarity and the loyalty of his generals, he would spend on them a lot of money that he himself was poor. Salah ad-Din understood that if he wanted to rule Egypt, he couldn't do it with an iron fist.

He would need to win allies. And he did this by giving out wealth and power to those who would partner with him. He used generosity as a weapon. And that really is one of the defining characteristics of Saladin, and I think why he's so successful. He rewards people. And his enemies knew it. There's a writer in the Kingdom of Jerusalem called William of Tyre.

who says there's three things you've got to know about Saladin. He's wise in counsel, he's valiant in war, and he's generous beyond all measure. And for that reason, you need to be worried by him. His generosity is very, very dangerous. As Salah al-Din was consolidating his power in Egypt, he was still technically working for Nour al-Din. And this was a problem.

Salah ad-Din now held lands that were wealthier and more powerful than his feudal lord. And he knew it. He must have begun to feel like his boss back in Damascus was beneath him. What that means is that he's setting himself against Nur al-Din. But just when it seemed like tensions between the two men were coming to a head… Nur al-Din did Saladin the biggest favor he ever did, which is he died. Salah ad-Din got lucky again.

that presented a vacuum for Saladin. And even though he was sworn to assure that Nur ad-Din's children will take over Nur ad-Din's empire, Saladin moved in and took everything. He marries Nur al-Din's widow, which is a way of integrating himself, I suppose, into the Damascene hierarchy.

Salah ad-Din was a master of manipulating political theater. He knows the value of vivid public statements of legitimacy to bolster his own power. And from there, he has a springboard to spend the next 10 or 11 years trying to assert his power over Syria itself.

And that was a very delicate process for Saladin because he was a ruler that everyone knew was an upstart. A Kurdish kid from Tikrit seized power effectively and was now fighting other Muslims at a time when Jerusalem itself was occupied by Franks. By the 1180s, Salah ad-Din was ruler of Syria and Egypt, controlling a vast and wealthy empire. But he faced resistance.

Many people considered him a usurper and didn't recognize his rule. So he found himself constantly taking his army out to fight against fellow Muslims. And his critics and allies alike started putting pressure on him. Muslim religious scholars start to push Saladin. It's your duty to liberate Jerusalem. Why wasn't he directing his efforts there? And he's criticized by some people. Look, you're fighting your fellow Muslims. And not the crusaders.

So he needed to present his actions against his Muslim rivals as somehow legitimate. By reclaiming Jerusalem itself, that would be a PR move that would make it as if all his campaigning against his Muslim rivals had never even happened. And he, of course, asserts that he is the best man to draw the Near East together and recover Jerusalem for Islam.

And from then on, his energies were almost solely directed at the Frankish problem. Salah ad-Din needed to take back Jerusalem, and the crusaders weren't going to be pushed out easily. Coming up, the leper king rises.

Hi, this is Lily from Columbia, South Carolina. I am currently on my morning walk. I absolutely adore your show and you are listening to ThruLine on NPR.

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Comfy Viore activewear, hocus, and rumple blankets for the perfect sideline setup. Don't miss capturing those game-winning moments with a GoPro. This sports season, Sun & Ski Sports has everything you need to keep it together, sort of. Part 2. The Leper King. In a palace in Jerusalem in 1161, a boy is born.

He was named Baldwin IV and he would soon be heir to the throne, the future of the Christian Empire in the Middle East. After the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem in 1099, most of them returned to Europe having fulfilled their vows. But some veterans of that campaign stayed behind to rule the Holy Land in the name of Christianity.

And by the time Baldwin was born, Crusaders were in control of Jerusalem and most of the Mediterranean coast from present-day Gaza all the way up to Lebanon and Syria. Eventually, Baldwin would be the Crusader king. But when he was just a boy, Baldwin's life would change. His tutor, William of Tyre,

Very tragically, this young man has leprosy. Leprosy is a bacterial infection that causes nerve damage to the skin.

It was a widely feared illness that disabled and disfigured its victims. It is impossible to refrain from tears while speaking of this great misfortune. But for young Baldwin, there was no time for self-pity. In 1174, the king of Jerusalem, Baldwin's father, a man called Amalric, died suddenly. At the age of 13, Baldwin ascended to the throne. He did it with passion.

When his right hand and arm went numb, he learned to handle a sword with his left. He quickly became a respected king. But still, Baldwin knew he didn't have a lot of time.

As his illness gets worse, he can't ride a horse. He has to be carried around in a litter. And his public appearances just diminish. He loses his fingers, parts of his face fall off. He really is appallingly debilitated by this illness. So you have a situation where there's going to be people jockeying for position. The kingdom needed an heir. Because of his leprosy, Baldwin would probably never have children.

So all eyes turned to his sister, Sibylla. She's the bloodline, and that's the crucial thing that's so important in medieval society. With Baldwin IV going to die without children, it's through her. And right around that time, someone arrived in Jerusalem from Europe who caught Sibylla's eye. A young man called Guy of Lusignan. Guy of Lusignan, or in French, Guy de Lusignan.

It's hard to get really to his personality because the sources that we have really don't like him very much. Guy de Lusignan was a Frenchman of minor nobility. By all accounts, he was very attractive. He was a very kind of swashbuckling sort, but still intelligent. Perfect for Sibylla. She was absolutely in love with him right from the beginning. There's something about his personality that she loved and everyone else hated.

Soon, Guy and Sybilla were married. And there's a lot of tension about this choice because he is an outsider. He's not a member of the nobility of Jerusalem. And so there's some suspicion of him. But Sybilla and Guy are together. So as Baldwin's health worsened, Guy, by virtue of being Sybilla's husband, became regent, effectively taking over control of the kingdom of Jerusalem.

And while all this drama was playing out, Salah ad-Din began sending raids into crusader lands. And Guy's decision is not to fight him in battle. And it's an interesting, it's like a boxer staying out of range, just avoiding, just pulling back from the punches. But what it avoids is a battle. Guy understood that most of Saladin's forces were militia.

But many crusaders in Jerusalem saw that move as an act of cowardice.

It is a tension because your lands are being ravaged and it makes you look weak. How long can you put up with that? How long can your people put up with that? Baldwin removed Guy as regent. But not long after, Baldwin himself would finally succumb to leprosy and die in 1185. In the end, it was left to Sibylla to rule.

The nobility of Jerusalem would crown her queen on one condition: that she annul her marriage to Guy de Lusignan. The people who made her queen hated Guy. Sybilla said, "Okay, deal. As long as when I become queen, I can choose my own husband." They agreed to this, and immediately after she's crowned, she announces that she's using her free choice to marry Guy.

She really kind of suckered them into it. This is Tom Madden. I'm a professor of history at St. Louis University. I'm also the director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Tom has written several books, including The Concise History of the Crusades, The

He says Sibylla was able to outwit all of the noblemen of Jerusalem. She completely double-crossed them and there wasn't much they could do. And so with her own hands, she crowned him king of Jerusalem. When Guy and Sibylla took power, they were fortunate that Salah ad-Din's attention was elsewhere. He had been busy fighting other Muslim leaders for territory. So he was forced to agree to a truce with the kingdom of Jerusalem in 1185.

a truce newly crowned King Guy was eager to keep. They didn't want war with Saladin because he could bring together pretty massive force. But there was a growing faction of crusaders who were pushing to confront Salah ad-Din. And one of them, a nobleman named Reynald de Chatillon, would make a move that would throw everything into chaos. Reynald de Chatillon

Raynaud de Chatillon is somebody Saladin absolutely loathed. Raynaud de Chatillon was known for being impulsive and extremely violent. There's a caravan moving through his lands in Transjordan, and he attacks it. And he takes some of the Muslims prisoner and refuses to hand them back. This is the inflammatory act that Saladin is able to exploit and say, right, you've broken the truce.

You've broken it, not me. I'm now going to invade. Coming up, Salahuddin's jihad for the Holy Land begins. Hello, this is Sienna Greenwell in Baltimore, Maryland, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. I always finish each episode looking at the world in a slightly new way.

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Part 3: A King to a King By late spring of 1187, Salah ad-Din had left Damascus and gathered a force of about 30,000 troops. Which maybe doesn't sound much in modern terms, but in medieval terms is a very formidable force. Definitely the biggest army he's got. And it's also brilliantly well organized, very well armed, hundreds of wagons of arrows,

a lot of water available, camels. He's really set this up. Meanwhile... The crusaders amassed an army of around 20,000 soldiers. This is Suleiman Murad again. The one factor there is that all this army was of local Franks because it was sudden. It wasn't planned. And that actually meant that all crusader cities had to compromise on their own safety to send essentially all the fighting men

The Crusader army is set up north of Jerusalem, in a small town with water and other resources. Remember, it will have been hot. Now add a layer of padding and of armor. That played a role in what would happen next. Salah ad-Din did not want to attack the Franks head-on, even though he had a larger force. Instead, he chose to be patient.

Saladin must have realized that he could just let the heat do most of the work. But his challenge then was to encourage the Franks to leave their camp and the security of fresh water. And Saladin has to crack that. And he does it in a very clever way. Salah ad-Din ordered some of his forces to attack another crusader-controlled town called Tiberias.

It's defended by a woman called Eshiva, who is the wife of one of the most important barons in the Holy Land. And so Saladin used this effect to great advantage to draw the Franks out. And playing on that relationship then... The cry goes out, we must rescue Eshiva in Tiberias. Exactly what Saladin wanted them to do. Attack!

They're marching across this arid landscape and on the 3rd of July... They've made it about halfway to Tiberias. 20,000 men and their horses trek under the beating sun wearing heavy armor. They were exhausted and dehydrated. And to make matters worse, they weren't the only ones out on the trail.

Salah ad-Din. Sent his troops not to directly confront the army, but to harass them from the sides, to make them stand and fight and exhaust themselves. He's got these light horsemen on small horses that are archers that just ride up to the crusader ranks, fire their arrows, wheel away. And there's thousands and thousands of them. And if you're trying to march along and you're not a professional army and you're foot soldiers...

and you haven't got enough water, obviously you're going to go slower and slower and you're going to take casualties. And on that first day, the 3rd of July, Saladin manages to corral the Franks. They're moving forwards, but they're surrounded on all sides. And they also have another problem approaching: the setting sun. Night was coming. The crusaders were forced to break their march. They camp overnight.

But there would be no rest. In the course of that night, Saladin set some of the dry brush alight so that Christians can't sleep properly. He also keeps up noise all night. Drums, trumpets, all meant to disconcert and unsettle the Christians.

Saladin's troops have got so much water they can pour it out on the ground in front of the Christians just to show them what they haven't got. And it works brilliantly. It must have been a night of absolute terror. When dawn broke on the 4th of July, 1187, you would have had a spectacle of an exhausted and depleted Frankish army, horses, some of them dead from the heat or from injuries received.

Thirsty, sleep-deprived, and filled with anxiety, the Crusader army, commanded by Guy de Lusignan, had their backs against the wall. They had to make a choice. Either proceed ahead, try and punch through the harassing encirclement of the troops of Saladin, or they could find a base, a strong point from which to make a last stand. And they had one nearby, near a village called Hattin, which was well known for its springs.

Near the village was an old extinct volcanic crater. The rim of the crater was broken. Which makes it look like a set of horns. Horns of a bull. Often referred to as the horns of Hattin. And that kind of fort that the Franks could use as their final defense. The crusaders fight their way to the horns of Hattin.

So they're there in this crater. There's quite a sort of steep slope down it. If you go there today, you can stand on the edge of the rim and look downhill. Below them was Salah al-Din in the middle of his army directing soldiers. They charged down the side of the crater. Oh, God.

They're trying to kill Saladin, because if you kill him, morale may crumble. Some of the Frankish knights dismounted and drew their swords and faced the enemy. It's the last roll of the dice, and it's a sensible one. But doesn't work. Memento mori.

And so by the late afternoon, the Franks have absolutely run out of steam and Saladin's army break into the crater. This is an account of what happened next, according to Saladin's son. We have beaten them, but my father rounded on me and said, Be quiet! Then Saladin pointed at the tent of Guy de Lusignan. We have not beaten them until that tent falls. And even as he was speaking to me, the tent fell.

The battle was over. The Sultan dismounted, prostrated himself in thanks to God Almighty, and he wept for joy.

After the battle, the remaining crusader forces were rounded up and made prisoners, including... King Guy of Jerusalem and Reynold of Châtillon, Saladin's archenemy. And they were led into Saladin's private tent. Saladin comes and offers Guy a glass of water with ice, and Guy drinks from it. Ice from a mountaintop carried an insulated chest...

After Guy drinks, he takes the cup and... Hands it to Reynold. And Saladin is said to have dashed it from his hands and said no. I gave it to the king to drink. Saladin had made the vow that if he were to catch Reynold, he will kill him. Salah ad-Din draws his sword. Slashes him across his shoulder and his warriors then kill the writhing figure of Reynold in front of them. Guy de Lusignan was spared but taken prisoner.

After vanquishing the crusader army, Salah ad-Din continued his march towards Jerusalem. Eventually, his forces reached the walls of the city. Unlike the crusaders in 1099, he would take the city without massacring civilians. On October 2nd, 1187, Salah ad-Din entered Jerusalem victorious, reclaiming the city for Islam.

The news was cause for celebration among the region's Muslim clerics. But in Europe, it was a different story. Is this the doom of Christianity? The Pope is said to have died of a heart attack when he heard. News of the loss of Jerusalem at this time, it affected everyone from the peasant to kings. In the subsequent decades, there would be calls for new crusades to take back Jerusalem. But none were as successful as the first.

Christian Europe's greatest warriors were unable to retake the city. Jerusalem would remain in Muslim hands for hundreds of years, all the way up to the 20th century. What excites us about history, what attracts us to history, is our own reality and how much we want the past to speak to that reality. The fact that we think the Crusades can be relevant to our moment is because our moment is a period of clash.

That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. I'm Ramteen Arablui. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me. And...

Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. This episode was mixed by Gilly Moon. Thank you to Johannes Dergi and Colin Campbell. And special thank you to the brilliant actor Omar Waqar for his incredible voiceover work.

Music for this episode was composed and performed by our very own Ramtin Adablui. And as always, if you have an idea or like something you heard on this show, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org. Thanks for listening.

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