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01:00And escape to where the past comes alive.
01:04My eyes have seen the glory.
01:06The History Channel.
01:38Three hundred miles north of Jerusalem, the Pilgrim Road runs through Manor al-Numan.
01:46In midwinter of the year 1098, this small town was invaded by cannibals.
01:54Men who had marched 2,000 miles to do good in the name of Christ.
02:08In Marat, our troops boiled pagan adults in cooking pots.
02:12They impaled children on spits and devoured them grilled.
02:28This was the First Crusade.
02:31Men who had run through Manor al-Numan.
02:39Men who had run through Manor al-Numan.
02:57What made the Crusaders into monsters?
03:00The search for an answer begins in Constantinople.
03:04Take me back to Constantinople
03:07No, you can't go back to Constantinople
03:11Now it's Istanbul, Constantinople
03:14Why did it come to Constantinople get the worse?
03:18That's nobody's business but the Turks!
03:21That's exactly the point.
03:23It may be nobody's business but the Turks now,
03:26but 900 years ago,
03:27this was the headquarters of the Roman Empire.
03:34Its Latin name was Byzantium.
03:37Not that they spoke Latin here.
03:38It was a Greek city,
03:40and they called it Constantinople.
03:44Nowadays, of course,
03:45it's just called by the Greek words in the city.
03:48Eis-ten-polin, Istanbul.
03:51And everyone thinks that's Turkish.
03:53No wonder it's called Byzantine.
03:55Anyway, the point is,
03:56if the emperor of Constantinople
03:58or Byzantium or Eis-ten-polin
04:00or whatever it is,
04:01whose name, by the way, was Alexius,
04:03could see these minarets,
04:04he would be turning in his grave.
04:06You see, he spent his whole life
04:09defending this great Christian city
04:11against the Muslims.
04:17The Turks were nomadic warriors from Central Asia,
04:20newly converted to Islam.
04:22They invaded the Middle East
04:24and part of Alexis' empire.
04:30Twenty years later,
04:31Alexius was ready to kick them out.
04:33But he needed more soldiers.
04:43It's 1095.
04:44The Turks have established their capital
04:46only 100 miles from Constantinople.
04:49The emperor, Alexius,
04:50has decided he needs some help
04:52from his brother Christians in the West.
04:54So, he's sending a letter to the Pope
04:56asking for help.
04:57On the face of it,
04:59it's a perfectly reasonable proposition.
05:01Actually, Alexius cannot even begin to imagine
05:04the effect this letter will have.
05:12This letter was going to blow the world apart.
05:16Alexius ruled the Byzantine church
05:19and he assumed the Pope would act
05:20like a Byzantine official,
05:22organising the recruitment
05:23of a few paid professional soldiers.
05:26This was a mistake.
05:38There were plenty of professional soldiers in Europe.
05:42The barbarians who destroyed the Roman Empire
05:45had built a society based entirely on fighting.
05:50They had converted to Christianity
05:52and they recognised the authority of the Bishop of Rome
05:55whom they called Papa, the Pope.
05:59But the Pope was not a Byzantine official.
06:03He was an ambitious politician
06:05building a superpower.
06:12At its centre was the monastery of Cluny in France.
06:24There were once separate churches,
06:26each controlled by the armoured thug
06:28who ruled that particular bit of ground.
06:30But no more.
06:34Cluny spoke of a greater church,
06:37the church that embraced all churches
06:39and supervised and controlled every church
06:42and every churchman and all Christian souls.
06:59Today, the largest enclosed space on earth
07:02is the Pentagon.
07:03In the 11th century, it was Cluny.
07:11In 1073, a churchman involved with Cluny
07:15had become Pope Gregory VII.
07:17And he had begun demanding
07:19that the men in armour
07:20bow before the power of the church
07:23or risk the wrath of God.
07:26No one had been allowed to stand in his way.
07:33For the only time in the history of the papacy,
07:36a group of extreme radical reformers
07:38had seized control of it.
07:40And in a series of breathtaking actions
07:44which included excommunicating
07:47the patriarch of Constantinople,
07:49effectively dismissing the king of Germany
07:52and Western Emperor from his post as their protector,
07:57summoning nobles from all over Europe
07:59to protect the papacy,
08:01demanding of bishops that they should be free
08:04but, of course, subject to Rome.
08:07In a series of these breathtaking moves,
08:09these radicals had completely transformed the papacy.
08:14What was happening in the Western church
08:17was that the Pope was becoming the head of a state.
08:20it was becoming Christendom
08:23which was united under the Pope.
08:28Pope Gregory created a militant revolutionary movement
08:31that was struggling to take control of the whole world
08:34and make it truly Christian.
08:40Pope Gregory's successor, Urban,
08:42was carrying on the good work.
08:44And then the Emperor's letter fell, as it were, into his lap.
08:53The Pope decided to use Alexis' letter
08:56as an excuse for creating his own army
08:59and conquering the East.
09:02When the Pope talked about liberating the Holy Land,
09:05what he meant was bringing them under the power of the Pope,
09:10bringing them under the power of the Western church.
09:13Now, you can well say that this is not a very religious exercise.
09:17After all, Jesus told his followers to love their enemies,
09:22not to exterminate them.
09:30Jesus' words were, of course, a problem for all Christian knights in any case.
09:35If a knight was attacked,
09:37he was supposed to kill his attacker and all his relatives.
09:40But the Lord had ordered his followers to turn the other cheek
09:44and not defend themselves at all.
09:50Take a rich young warrior like Tancred de Hauteville.
09:54Even on a bad day, he would end up killing someone.
10:00If you could afford the right kit,
10:03there wasn't much chance of being killed yourself.
10:07And he was trained to destroy the weak.
10:10But Tancred's biographer recorded that this sensitive 17-year-old
10:15was very worried that God disapproved of killing people.
10:21This conflict of moral authorities was a recipe for psychological instability.
10:27We can all surely recognise in Tancred a classic example
10:30of the double-bind theory of schizophrenia.
10:33And knights had no teddy bears.
10:35No wonder they lashed out in a crisis.
10:46The Pope returned to Cluny
10:48and began to organise backing for his plan to create a church army.
10:54Then he summoned a large church council at Claremont Cathedral.
10:59He let it be known that he was going to make
11:00an extremely important announcement at the end of the meeting.
11:06There was tremendous excitement.
11:08Nobody knew exactly what he was going to announce,
11:11but they knew it was going to be something out of the ordinary.
11:15An accursed race,
11:18a race utterly alienated from God,
11:22has invaded the lands of those Christians.
11:26In the event the crowds that turned up to hear him were so vast,
11:30they had to hold the meeting in a field outside the cathedral.
11:34The chap who painted this picture 400 years later didn't get it quite right.
11:38Your own blood brothers are either subjected in their homes to other masters,
11:47or are driven from them,
11:50or are flogged and exiled as slaves for sale in their own land.
12:02Now this was slightly misleading.
12:05The Turkish invasion had been over 20 years ago,
12:08and they treated Christians quite reasonably.
12:11Paintings like this are medieval tabloid journalism.
12:15The Turks had actually only massacred Arabs.
12:18But the Pope was building up war fever.
12:21And to do it,
12:22he offered a spectacular solution to the problem of being a Christian knight.
12:27Christ had been misquoted.
12:29It was only a sin to kill Christians.
12:34You are arrogant with great pride.
12:39You rage against your brothers and cut each other to pieces.
12:45You should shudder, brethren.
12:49You should shudder to raise an angry hand against Christians.
13:07It is less wicked to brandish your swords against Saracens.
13:16That is the only warfare that is righteous.
13:27Tancred's dilemma was solved.
13:31It was his Christian duty to go out and kill from God.
13:36His biographer was thrilled.
13:39At last, as if previously asleep,
13:43his vigour was aroused.
13:45His powers grew.
13:47His eyes opened.
13:49His courage was born.
13:56And, of course, what the Pope was proposing was war as a penance.
14:02A penitential war.
14:04A war which assisted a man towards salvation.
14:10War as a devotion.
14:13And if one thinks of fasting, penance, prayer as devotions, this is war as the equivalent of prayer.
14:21Now, I can think of no precedent in Christian history for that.
14:25It was a way of the imitation of Christ.
14:28Very peculiar in some sense since Christ, as far as we know, seems to have been a pacifist who had
14:33more in common with Gandhi than with this kind of aggressive Christianity.
14:42A pilgrim adventure.
14:46Your priest says, go.
14:50Your bishop says, go.
14:54Your Pope says, go.
14:57Take the cross to Jerusalem as pilgrims in arms.
15:12The Pope's call now went out across Europe.
15:15And to get bums on saddles, the church could boast it had already signed up a cast of stars.
15:21See Raymond, Count of Toulouse.
15:24He hammered the Moors in Spain.
15:26Now watch him smash them in Jerusalem.
15:30Raymond's taking his family with him.
15:32He expects to be put in charge of the whole crusade.
15:36Crusading with Duke Godfrey of Lorraine.
15:40Duke Godfrey is in a rather precarious situation at home.
15:43He'd get his high teeth to be in charge of the crusade.
15:46Thrill to Hugh of France.
15:50That he thinks rather a lot of himself because his brother's the king of France.
15:54Unfortunately, he doesn't have any money.
15:55He's another one on the make.
15:58Join the greatest knights since time began on their journey to save the Holy Sepulchre from the blood-praised infidels.
16:06Drive with the heroes.
16:08Get your place in heaven by sending infidels to hell.
16:14Of course, the church didn't actually have movies.
16:16But they did have for the first time a means of mass communication.
16:20And the crusade was the first message to go on general release.
16:24The impact was stunning.
16:29There had been holy wars before, but this was new.
16:33A fighting pilgrimage.
16:35Each pilgrim was to wear a cross to show that they had taken the vow to reach Jerusalem.
16:39They would be excommunicated if they turned back.
16:42Those who went would be freed any penalties in this life or the next for sins they had committed.
16:50This is a completely revolutionary and radical idea which seems to have come from the mind of the Pope.
16:57Because one really can see no prehistory in it.
17:02In other words, what happened with the preaching of the first crusade was that the traditions of holy war in
17:08Christianity took a shift onto a much more radical plane.
17:13And what is amazing is the way people responded to it.
17:22The infidel barbarians in their frenzy have engraved and ravished the churches of God in the holy city of Christ.
17:30Depopulated them by the sword, pillage and fire.
17:33They circumcised the Christians and they spread their blood upon the altars.
17:40Nothing like it had ever happened before.
17:43But it wouldn't happen again.
17:45Of course the thing was, it wasn't meant to happen.
17:47These weren't migrants or nomads.
17:49These were settled rural communities who suddenly stopped work, packed their bags, said goodbye to their friends and set off
17:55to put the world to right.
17:57What on earth made them do it?
18:00One thing is obvious.
18:02The church had a power over people that it really didn't understand.
18:06It had succeeded in making heaven as real as anything on earth.
18:11The church taught that judgment day was at hand and that the fires of hell were very real indeed.
18:18All men going there who die untimely deaths, whether it is on the journey or while fighting the pagans, will
18:25have their sins remitted.
18:28God has given the Pope the power to grant this to those about to go.
18:32You. The enemy's possessions will be yours.
18:36You will seize their treasures and return home victorious or you will die gloriously.
18:44Curd your swords every one of you I say.
18:47God wills it. God wills it.
18:56The Pope had expected to raise an army. He got a mass migration.
19:02And no one knows how many people set out.
19:12To do what they must, they were prepared to follow any leader, including in one case, a divinely inspired goose.
19:29Well, I heard on good authority that the goose on the right is a direct descendant of the famous crusade
19:35leader.
19:35So I'm going to see if I can have a word with it.
19:39Excuse me. Excuse me. Yes, I'd like to know. I'd like to know.
19:44Have you any family stories of your great ancestors?
19:50Do you remember him personally yourself?
19:53Do you remember anything? Do you remember? Do you remember anything at all about the goose?
20:12I said it was a silly idea trying to interview a goose.
20:21It was not only poultry that led the way.
20:23An eccentric tramp called Peter the Hermit attracted a huge following.
20:28He assembled tens of thousands of people and inspired them to set off immediately for Jerusalem, leaving everyone else to
20:36catch up.
20:37He had been, tried to go on a pilgrimage and had been sent back so he could speak personal experience
20:44about it.
20:46And it was to renew the pilgrimage that I think was the motive that made so many people, the Humla
20:55people, eager to go on the crusade.
21:02Peter certainly had charisma.
21:04He rode an old donkey that his followers revered almost as much as Peter himself.
21:09After all, his critics said it looked exactly like him.
21:15Peter soon had a following of 15,000.
21:18But other more sinister leaders were emerging from the German forests.
21:23Barbarous warlords who claimed mysterious powers and seemed attracted by the smell of blood.
21:30They were keen to spill it.
21:31And they soon found their first victims.
21:34Not, as you might expect, Muslims, but Jews.
21:41It seemed nonsense to march 3,000 miles to kill Muslims in the Holy Land.
21:48People at that time, about whom they knew virtually nothing.
21:51When the people who had, or so the Crusaders believed, actually killed Christ, were alive and well on their very
21:58doorsteps.
22:02The tombs of the victims can still be seen in the Jewish cemetery at Worms in Germany.
22:12All of a sudden, like a thunderbolt, in 1096 at the beginning of the First Crusade, a horrible pogrom, a
22:22horrible destruction, which destroyed the community.
22:26a horrible hypocrisy.
22:51Bands of marauders attacked the Jewish quarter.
22:58Some tried to find refuge at the bishop's palace, at the bishop's residence.
23:04After all, they were privileged and they were protected by imperial decree, which didn't
23:11help.
23:20It happened throughout the region, but the city of Worms, Speyer and Mainz and Cologne
23:27were hardest hit.
23:48Crusading really institutionalized anti-Semitism in Europe and made it an incurable disease
23:55in Christendom.
23:58Henceforth, every time a crusade to the Holy Land was called, there were pogroms against
24:04Jews back home.
24:08Today, Worms has a synagogue but no congregation.
24:12The process begun in the 11th century was completed in the 20th.
24:16This massacre was just a beginning.
24:27These unofficial crusaders with Peter the Hermit had no organization or formal leaders, but
24:34they knew where they were going.
24:38Every medieval map showed Jerusalem as the center of the world.
24:49And they knew they had to head for Constantinople.
24:52It was a well-trodden route for pilgrims.
24:58Of course, no one had done any planning or thought to provide food or drink for all these
25:03hordes.
25:04So there was constant trouble as they stole from and fought the local people on the way.
25:09When they reached Semlin, for example, an argument over buying a pair of shoes turned into a riot
25:14that left 4,000 people dead.
25:17When imperial troops tried to control them as they crossed the Slava River, they fought
25:22the troops and killed them.
25:23Then they entered Belgrade, which they pillaged and set on fire before they marched on.
25:51Peter the Hermit's army finally arrived outside the fabled walls of Byzantium on the 1st of
25:56August 1096.
25:59They'd been walking for something like four months, covering as much as 25 miles in one
26:04day.
26:05But they were not at all what had been requested.
26:08You see, when the Emperor of Byzantium first appealed to the West for help, what he had
26:12in mind was a few hundred mercenaries or some companies of knights.
26:16And what Peter's turned up with is this vast, volatile, incomprehensible rabble of 60,000
26:22people.
26:22As far as the Empress is concerned, this is more of a headache than a help.
26:26I've always thought the Crusades were basically a barbarian invasion, but barbarian invasions
26:34can be inspired by a belief that one's doing one's religious duty.
26:41But unfortunately, their idea of God's work was rather destructive and not frightfully civilized.
26:51With the warriors came a host of civilians outnumbering the sands of the seashore or the stars of heaven.
26:57They were carrying palms and bearing crosses on their shoulders.
27:04There were women and children, too, who had left their own countries.
27:10Those were the words of the Emperor's daughter, Anna.
27:13What neither she nor her father realized was that these people had come because of his own
27:17letter to the Pope.
27:22Nonetheless, the Emperor was curious to meet this Peter the Hermit, or Peter the Cuckoo as the princess called him.
27:27But he kept the gates of his city firmly closed against Peter's rabble of an army.
27:32They were eventually allowed in, but only in sightseeing parties of six at a time.
27:36So I don't suppose anything like the full 60,000 never got inside of the walls.
27:40Those who did probably had never seen anything like Byzantium.
27:49Byzantium, Constantinople, was larger than all the Christian cities of the West added together.
27:55And Constantinople was still filled with the riches of a Roman imperial capital.
28:15This place, for example, was built by the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century.
28:20I've got to admit, it's pretty impressive.
28:23Of course, it's even more impressive when you realize it wasn't built as a palace.
28:27This was just built as one of the city's underground water systems.
28:31And at the time, it wasn't even the biggest one of those.
28:41The city was dominated by a huge new palace complex, the Blakerni,
28:46whose gardens housed a menagerie of exotic beasts.
29:08It held the greatest church, the Church of Hagia Sophia, already 500 years old.
29:15And the gigantic racetrack and sports arena, the Hippodrome.
29:30The city housed a collection of holy relics that included the Crown of Thorns and a portrait of the Virgin
29:37painted by St. Luke.
29:40But this wasn't what Peter's peasants had come to see.
29:44They were on their way to see Jerusalem.
29:47And that still lay far away across the Bosphorus.
29:54Alexius knew that this rabble would be butchered once they got into Turkish territory.
29:59And he advised Peter to wait for the Pope's real army to arrive.
30:03But Peter insisted that they were going straight on.
30:15The Bosphorus is only 800 yards wide, but it feels like an ocean.
30:22You still have this sense of adventure, leaving one continent and risking another.
30:38For any European, there's a sense that here is where the real journey begins.
30:43That's how it still feels today.
30:59At last, the Crusaders were in the land of the infidel.
31:06Asia was the continent of barbarian hordes, but right now Europe was about to get its own back.
31:13The barbarian hordes of Reims and Brussels, Cologne and Milan landed on the unsuspecting Asian shore.
31:31This was the Pilgrim Road to Jerusalem.
31:34It's a very nice walk.
31:36But the Peasants' Crusade didn't get very far along it.
31:40They made a base camp at Civitos.
31:43And from there, they set about their God-given mission to torture and massacre the locals with a will.
31:53The only snag was that most of the local inhabitants in those days were actually Christians,
31:58although I don't suppose the Crusaders could be expected to tell the difference.
32:03Then a few thousand Frenchmen in the party decided to attack the Turkish capital 40 miles away, Nicaea.
32:18They couldn't get into the city because it had stout walls, but they could at least loot the villages around
32:25it.
32:27They ravaged the outskirts of Nicaea, acting with horrible cruelty to the whole population.
32:35They cut some of the babies to pieces.
32:38They impaled others on wooden spits and roasted them over a fire.
32:44Old people were subjected to every kind of torture.
32:53Well, this action was of limited effectiveness in reducing the world population of Muslims,
32:58because the Crusaders' victims, old people and babies included, were once again Christians.
33:05Nevertheless, the French returned to Civitos extremely pleased with themselves and bragging about their booty.
33:10Whereupon the German contingent decided they had to go one better.
33:15They marched beyond Nicaea and captured a castle, which the Turks promptly surrounded.
33:31Unfortunately, in their rush to get in, they failed to notice that the castle well was outside the walls.
33:42After a week of roasting in the Anatolian sun, they were desperate, drinking their horses' blood and even the contents
33:50of a sewer.
33:51Eventually, they surrendered. However, surrender wasn't that easy.
33:57They were given a choice. They could either be killed or, if they preferred, they could convert to Islam and
34:03be enslaved.
34:06Actually, no Muslim is permitted in Islamic law to enslave another Muslim, but neither the Crusaders nor the Turks seem
34:14to have known this.
34:16This conversion was very simple. It just involved saying Allah is great and Muhammad is his prophet and going through
34:24a little ceremony.
34:32This is the end of the ceremony. These young men are celebrating the fact that they will never have to
34:39be circumcised again.
34:46Faced with the choice between circumcision or death, a lot of the Crusaders seem to have chosen the latter.
34:51However, to do him justice, their leader, Reynold, faced up to his like a man and was duly led off
34:56into captivity.
35:05The Turkish sultan then sent two spies back to the 20,000 French still at Kibitos to spread the rumour
35:12that the Germans had actually captured Nicaea and were going to keep all the loot for themselves.
35:16Well, this triggered off such excitement amongst the French that when the rumours proved to be false, the cries for
35:22justice changed into cries for vengeance and they set off anyway.
35:26They walked straight into the trap. They were ambushed three miles down this road and the people's crusade was finally
35:33wiped out.
35:38So great a multitude died that when they gathered up the remains of the fallen, they heaped up not just
35:47a mighty ridge or hill or peak, but a mountain of considerable height and depth and width.
35:54So huge was the mass of bones.
36:19But the official forces were finally on the move.
36:24Hugh of France was the first to contact Alexius.
36:29Know, Emperor, that I am the King of Kings, the greatest of all beneath the heavens.
36:38It is my will that you should meet me on my arrival and receive me with a pomp and ceremony
36:45due to my noble birth.
36:50Unfortunately, he was then shipwrecked and had to be rescued by the Imperial Coast Guard.
37:04He arrived in a sorry state, but it gave the Emperor a chance to set a precedent for handling the
37:11more awkward forces that were already on their way.
37:16For by this time, the whole of the Pope's official army was on the road.
37:21Or rather, a whole series of armies that would meet up eventually at Constantinople.
37:26Raymond, Count of Toulouse, 15,000 Frenchmen from Provence, well armed and ready for war.
37:45And from Italy and Normandy, Tancred's friends and relations, the Norman war machine, led by Tancred's uncle, Bohemond.
37:57The Emperor's fear was that if they all joined together at Constantinople, they might even turn on the city itself.
38:05So Alexius needed to prevent that by ferrying each of these armies over the Bosphorus before the next arrived.
38:12But he also wanted each of them to swear that any land they conquered would be his and not theirs.
38:21Hugh submitted willingly.
38:25The oath meant nothing to Alexius.
38:27He was the autocrat, the ruler of all men.
38:30But he knew these things had some sort of meaning in the West.
38:33So he was going to extract an oath of allegiance from all the leaders of the Crusade.
38:44And then Godfrey of Lorraine and his brother Baldwin arrived with 20,000 armed followers.
38:51Now they'd taken three months to get down through Germany and Eastern Europe.
38:57When they arrived at Byzantium, the Emperor sent Hugh to greet them, to invite the leaders to come to his
39:04palace,
39:05and, of course, to try and persuade them to take the oath of allegiance.
39:11They were at once resentful.
39:15They didn't like the idea of having to pay homage to him in any way.
39:21Whereas Alexius, who seemed to have rather discovered this Western idea about homage,
39:28delighted to try and use it.
39:33They would not swear homage, so Alexius closed the gates of the city against them
39:38and refused to feed them.
39:41These men had marched a thousand miles.
39:43They'd marched a thousand miles already.
39:47It's a pretty dangerous condition, some of them over winter.
39:51And the one thing that any army commander of the time cared more about than anything else was provisions.
39:57Some are that they had to feed their followers.
40:00They approached Constantinople thinking that there they are, the Emperor is then going to lead them all in this great
40:04army.
40:05What did they find? They find a chap who said,
40:07I'm not going to give you any supplies unless you immediately get across the Bosphorus and out of my hair.
40:12And of course, they react sometimes violently.
40:15But what do you expect them to do?
40:18There was indeed a certain amount of unfortunate behaviour from Godfrey and Baldwin.
40:23They ambushed 60 local policemen.
40:26And then in the middle of Holy Week, tried to storm the walls of Constantinople, the greatest Christian city on
40:32earth.
40:35So, Alexius opened the gates of his city and sent out a well-trained military force to teach these Westerners
40:41some manners.
40:42After which, Godfrey and Baldwin came to the palace and took the oath like good boys.
40:47From now on, the Emperor was going to be overlord of any lands they conquered.
40:52But even when they were taking the oath, one French knight plonked himself down on the Emperor's throne.
40:59If safety pins had been invented, Godfrey's followers would have worn them in their noses.
41:04They were utterly boorish, faced with an ancient rather ceremonial civilisation, which they didn't understand.
41:19And they thought that all these stuffy old officials had no sense of manliness.
41:30And they really were disgraceful.
41:39Godfrey and Baldwin's armies were then shipped across the Bosphorus, and immediately another army arrived.
41:45And another.
41:46As the ferrymen kept shuttling them over, a massive war machine was being assembled on the ancient coast.
42:09Their first objective was Nicaea, the Turks' capital, and the barrier that had spelt doom to Peter the Hermit's followers.
42:19The Turkish Sultan, Kilij Arslan, hadn't expected this lot to be any more of a problem than the last.
42:25So he'd left his wife at home and gone off to fight a neighbour.
42:28However, when he heard that the Crusaders were besieging Nicaea, he returned to discover he'd made a big mistake.
42:37These were not fanatical civilians armed with little more than bad breath.
42:41Kilij Arslan was up against heavily armoured killers.
42:46And professional warhorses.
42:49This is one, and this is Mike Lodes.
42:52This is Max.
42:53He's unique.
42:54Probably the only living representative of a Norman warhorse.
42:58He's got all the characteristics.
43:00Well muscled, densely boned, and a short back.
43:03And of course, short, which makes him easy to get on and off in armour.
43:09The other thing to notice about Max is that he's a stallion.
43:13European knights always rode stallions.
43:15It suited their type of warfare.
43:17Stallions are proud, noble, and brave.
43:20Capable of going right into the thick of battle.
43:23Kilij Arslan found himself facing the largest group of armoured knights ever assembled on Earth.
43:30And they couldn't wait to attack him.
43:38Christmas, Christmas.
43:49Christmas, Christmas.
44:16Christmas, Christmas, Christmas.
44:31The Turks fought in a completely different way.
44:34They didn't use their swords and lances until the enemy were already frightened, confused, and badly damaged.
44:42They used horse archers, hundreds of them, swooping in, circling around the enemy, and picking them off.
44:49Unlike the European knights, they rode mares, since mares are faster and more biddable to wheel and run away.
45:00However, a fair proportion of these mares must have been on heat, which makes the whole affair most interesting from
45:07a stallion's point of view.
45:09Imagine being asked to charge a thousand oriental mares.
45:39No document records what happened.
45:41All that we know is that the Turks fled from the battlefield, and Kilij Arslan felt seriously humiliated.
45:55The knights returned tired but happy.
45:59We're not sure how their stallions felt.
46:13Kilij Arslan withdrew into the hills.
46:16Nicaea lay undefended.
46:18The crusaders had simply to find a way of getting through or over its walls.
46:23Sooner or later, they would capture their first Muslim city.
46:32Alexius suspected that once the crusaders did, they might never give it back to him.
46:37Now, it so happens that Nicaea faces onto a lake.
46:40One night, Alexius' men secretly slipped across the water and made an offer to the inhabitants they could hardly refuse.
46:49Surrender to us, or we leave you to be slaughtered by the men in armour.
47:04As dawn broke and the crusaders were about to launch their great assault, they found the city had already surrendered
47:10to Alexius.
47:11They felt betrayed by the emperor they had come to help.
47:39What shocked them even more was the fact that the emperor didn't torture his Turkish captives.
47:44He didn't even massacre the civilians, who were, of course, Greek Christians.
47:47He didn't even pillage their homes, dammit!
47:49I mean, how could God-fearing soldiers of Christ ever trust a man like that?
47:54From now on, in every crusader's eyes, they were on their own, which was exactly how they liked it to
47:59be.
48:02Now they could get on with walking a thousand miles through hostile territory and rescue Jerusalem with no help from
48:09anybody.
48:12What was it like walking across Anatolia, in the blazing summer, in full armour?
48:19And this is the mail.
48:21Hold on, can I put that on?
48:22The mail.
48:23With about 35,000 rings.
48:25How much does it weigh?
48:27What does it weigh?
48:28A couple of stones.
48:29Oh, good.
48:31David Lazenby, an expert in medieval warfare, came to make sure that I was properly dressed for the walk.
48:39Well, now what else do I need?
48:41I need a sword, don't I?
48:42That's right.
48:44A sword.
48:45Yeah.
48:47It's good for the figure, isn't it?
48:49Yeah, so you're...
48:52Okay, and then I need the...
48:53Then we have an iron helmet.
48:54A helmet of Spangenhelm construction, as it's made in several seconds.
48:59Okay, all right.
49:00A shield.
49:01And the cut shield.
49:04Yeah.
49:04And this is, I mean, this looks like Bear Tapestry.
49:07Exactly.
49:08That's, uh...
49:09What's it as a Norman Star cut shield?
49:12A spear.
49:13All right.
49:15I suppose we better go for it, then.
49:17Still a thousand miles to go.
49:20And we better go.
49:24When the Crusaders set off down this road, they could have had little idea what lay in store for them.
49:30One Crusader wrote home that they would be in Jerusalem in five weeks.
49:35But this road led to two years of hell.
49:41All right.
49:42Amen.
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