406. Norman Conquest: The First Crusade (Part 6)

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0:42with no markups or hidden fees. So when money needs to move, you can see the rate, know the fee you see on Google, with no markups or hidden fees. So when money needs to move, you can see the rate, know the fee, and get on with it. Join millions saving billions on hidden fees by downloading the WISE app today. Be smart, get WISE, T's and C's apply. Host Thanksgiving with industry-leading quality standards from Whole Foods Market. There are no antibiotics in their meat department ever. So carve up turkey and spiral cut ham with peace of mind. Shop organic sides like stuffing mix and cranberry sauce from 365 brand. And guess what? All their delectable pies are made with no high fructose corn syrup.

1:21Gourmet Thanksgiving flavors with the quality you want. Only at Whole Foods Market. Stonefire Naan is made with real buttermilk and ghee. It's the perfect flatbread for any occasion. I put out Stonefire Naan with dips at every dinner party. I make Naan grilled cheese when my daughter has friends over. I use Stonefire Naan to reward the humans who do my bidding. Right. It's perfect for camping trips. Dance for it, feeble mortal. Sorry, is he talking to me, or...? Dance. Ha, From our tradition to yours. Stonefire. Together, we know. hello and welcome to empire with me anita arnon and me william de rempel and we have our old friend peter fragopan back again uh talking about his his very very first book and i think what

2:21was originally his phd uh the firstade, The Call from the East, which takes us even further from the familiar world of the Bay of Tapestry to the furthest frontier that the Normans reached, which is the Eastern Mediterranean, and ultimately a short-lived Norman principality in Antioch, a very, very, very long way from London and Hastings and uh and rural and can I just say for those of you who enjoyed undoubtedly the pasting that we got in the last episode I I wouldn't call it I wouldn't call it being duffed up I like to think of it as you know when you go to a spa and somebody thrashes you with twigs for your own good that's how I that's how I think about it having Peter Frankopan on. You're so mean to me, Anita.

3:06Anita's mum, please have a word with your daughter. No, leave her out of it. She's enjoying this far, far too much. Okay, so let us start, Peter Frankopan, with Manzikert. Now, tell us where, how, and why Manzikert is important. And why it's not all, you don't think it's all it's cracked up to be in many ways. I don't think anybody, well look, Malazgirt today is in eastern Turkey. It's usually called in England Manzikert. It's a battle in 1071. It is a big deal insofar as there is a big set-to between the Byzantine, the Roman emperor, Romanus IV, Diorgenes in 1071, where he fights a massive Turkish force under the command of Al-Baslan, one of the great Celtic leaders, and is captured in battle.

3:54It's in 1071. History doesn't remember you generously if you get captured on the battlefield and you're a ruling emperor. There's no question about that. So it's significant. But no, in terms of its kind of later legacy, and you can listen to us on our legacy podcast talk about this um manzika has assumed a great significance in uh in history not just in in europe but in in turkey too i mean it's celebrated every year uh in turkey with literally hundreds of thousands of millions of people take to the streets to celebrate seen often as the birth of the Turkish state. So it's significant for that reason. Just to explain to people who perhaps haven't got their geography sharpened up. Okay, you go to Dover, you keep going,

4:36cross the Channel and go east. Eventually, you get past Italy, past Venice, you get to Constantinople, modern Istanbul, you keep going, heading towards China. And after about 1,000 miles, you get to the central plains of anatolia at a place called malazgirt or manzikert so it's sort of a bit to the west of the caucasus but it's the kind of you can't miss it is what you're saying ironically you can miss it you can you can miss it uh it's it's a it's it's it's one of it's one of a of a series of routes that connect through from the hinterland of Anatolia in towards the great bowl of the Levant and to the plains of the Tigris and the Euphrates but you can miss it there are other ways of getting through but it's

5:17in what's now modern Turkey and sort of the eastern part of it Peter the reason that I'm very keen to focus our eyes on manzikert at this particular moment in the series on the normans is that among the troops there are not only former anglo-saxons now working for the byzantines now part of the elite varangian guard but also normans from normandy who've come via Italy. And this character who's very interesting, I'd love you to tell me about, Roussel de Béleul, am I pronouncing him right? Yeah, or Russell Béleul. Russell Béleul. Or how he's known from all of our sources, Urselios, which if you're Greek and a Roman speaker means bear. So he's a total bastard. I mean, he's one of the classic Normans

6:06who turns up and says, well, I can help you guys. The Normans that we talked about last time are a Western heavy cavalry, is awe-inspiring, and it's particularly useful against Turkish marauders, much smaller horses, very fast to gallop, but they crumple in front of a heavy cavalry charge. So the Normans are really interesting from the Byzantine point of view. And if you can find people who you can hire and work for you, then there's a place for you. And Russell Balliol gets brought in in the 1070s to sort of stem the flow of small groups of marauding bands into Turkey that are very disruptive. They're embarrassing. And those pinpricks, they do draw blood. So he's brought in by the reign of Constantine Dukas.

6:59He takes over from Romanus IV. In fact, it's Constantine or the Dukas family who orders the blinding of Romanus IV. It's not the Turks who do that because there's a transition of power. And the problems in Asia Minor are to do with a whole set of other paralysis that are facing the empire at the time. And so Roussel gets written about and he's important because of the other problems that the empire is going to have with the Normans. But he doesn't particularly trouble the scorers. In the middle of the 1070s, there's a bit of chatter that he's thinking about taking the throne for himself. But that's the dark arts of propaganda where there's absolutely zero chance. But he's an effective military leader.

7:37He's a hard worker. And he's one of those people you want to have on your side rather than against you. Then this man, Balliol, changes sides peter and and sets up his own principality right in the middle of byzantine anatolia what he he does is it looks like he is um trying to judge the odds of who's going to end up winning and uh figures that the the romans or the byzantines are are going to be on the losing side. So he makes it known that he's willing to bring his men over for the right sum, right value, whatever. And principality means something different. That means that he has autonomy. That means he sets laws. That means he collects taxes. He's not that kind of person at all. There's no sort of territory that he controls,

8:21but he's a blow in the wind. And the fact that he defects is he he's he's he's a blow in the wind and the fact that he defects is a sign that the temperature is cooling on the byzantines and so this is a time of economic paralysis there's been a shortage of um of economic growth as andy burnham would call it uh there's all sorts of pressures in other parts of the empire too the ossification at the top has settled in uh over the course of the last 20 years. No one's been able to make good decisions. It all sounds very familiar. The economy's in free fall. There's a constant devaluation of the gold, which is a sort of don't touch that stuff in the typical Roman imperial world, because the state can't pay its own bills.

9:03And so the fact that things are looking bleak means that Russell Balliol is showing which way things are going to move. And a young general called Alexios Komnenos is sent out to go and deal with him. And he beefs up his army by recruiting a few local bands that will prove reliable. Problem about local bands, as well as your own soldiers, they might defect at any time too. But he's able to capture Russell Bailey and bring him back in. And, you know, it's a bit of apocalypse now. It's a bit of going to get Colonel Kurtz. So it's true that there's a little bit around Russell Bailey of being a danger that you don't want him turning back on you. But he's not in any kind of meaningful way an existential problem of which there are plenty facing the empire at this time and alexius

9:50is the kind of coming man who people are looking to to think you know we need to have we need to have a new a new broom to come in and sweep some of the cobwebs away and make some of the difficult decisions that everyone knows they need to to do now peter your first book was uh the first crusade the call Call from the East. And we're now at that moment. And it is Alexios Kaminis who makes that call. Take us there now, because this is a very, very crucial point in world history. Everything in the next 200 years begins to change on this. Okay, so it's a bit like taking a long run up to get into the sandpit. I mean, so my first sort of big work was a translation of the Alexiad written by Anna Komnina.

10:26It's the first narrative history written in a European language by a woman. Daughter of our mate, Alexius. written in the late 1140s, early 1150s. And Anna provides comprehensive history based on imperial archives and other first-class materials about what is happening in this period from the late 1070s up until the First Crusade. And the picture she writes, she's a writer. Her text has not been particularly well read. It's been dismissed by Edward Gibbon, famously as showing, well, if you're a Byzantine historian anyway, Edward Gibbon called it, says it displays on every page the vanity of a female author, which I'd have thought half your listeners will. So rude. No, of course. And yet so familiar, right?

11:06Rude, yeah. It gets dismissed by modern crusade historians as being written by an old woman working in a convent. All the kinds of classical ways in which texts don't get read if they're a bit inconvenient. It's written in incredibly elaborate, beautiful Greek. But amazingly, it's not written as the Times of London, as a fact-based report. It's a work of literature, but it's not written as the times of london as a fact-based report it's it's a work of literature but it's also one that that uh you need to understand the narrative arc of what it's trying to explain but what happens when alexis takes the throne in 1081 as a young man he's the he has a wife from one of these powerful dynasties so he solves a few problems

11:39by being acceptable to the elites is that he has to deal with three massive problems all at the same time first he's got the turkish incursions in asia minor which are not all that bad they become really bad over the course of the next 15 years that i'll double back on he's got uh petrine or patsy neck uh step nomads from eurasia who have broken through the danube defenses they've come all the way across from above the Black Sea and raiding in large numbers annually onto farms, lands, cities, towns in the Balkans. They're pre-Mongol Turkic raiders. And then you've got our friends, the Normans. Hello again, Robert the Weasel, or Robert Giscard. Sounds better than Robert the Weasel, who has figured out that the problems facing the empire look like an

12:26opportunity. And if he plays his cards right, he could at least expand his realm from Puglia, from the southeastern part of Italy, across the Adriatic, across the Ionian Sea. But, you know, if things work right, he might even have a shot at probably not taking the throne. I don't think he's quite that ambitious or that naive, but he reckons if he can bring a field army close to the capital he might be able to extract proper concessions uh whether that's money titles you name it but you know he can set he can see the vulnerability and in 1081 he launches an expedition across the ionian he sets siege to the most important city on the empire's western flank called direction what's now dures in in albania and then sends parties out over the next couple of years into the interior

13:10um he goes back and forth a little bit to keep an eye on the main event back in italy and leaves his son uh bermund in charge of whom we will hear more later exactly but that that requires all of the oxygen in the empire to cope with because that threat is very severe and is recognised as such. So Alexius parks the Turks, does a deal with Suleiman, probably opens up a few of the towns in Asia Minor that has a consequence on that as a kind of price to pay, parks the Pechenegs for a while, and then turns the full beam of what resources he has onto dealing with the Normans. And he does that quite successfully. It takes him a while to work out how to do it. He makes a few mistakes, as you'd expect.

13:50Nothing wrong with that. Not just because he's young, but because it's a difficult thing to do. He's got to bring with him more money. So he starts melting down church silver that's not being used. That makes him a lot of enemies back at home. What are we now in the early 1090s early 1080s by 1085 um he's made himself the master of the situation he pushes the normans back as luck would have it robert giskell dies that helps that buys him a bit of time and then he turns to deal with the petronigs and then as we get into the early 1090s he's picked off two of those big problems he deals with the petronigs at a battle called lavunion at the end of april 1091 there are songs written about it afterwards saying because of that the petronix never saw the the the month of may and it's a

14:36massacre on a industrial scale maybe even an epic scale depending on whether you trust the sources completely but then the big problem is is asia. And there you've had the Turks who've started to now expand right up to the northern shores of Asia Minor. And worse, they've also taken control of ports on the West Coast. And the West Coast, places like Smyrna or modern Izmir, is the kind of launch pad to knock out the Aegean. You could take out islands one by one. You can disrupt traffic. You could become a complete disaster. And so Alexis is now faced with the problem is, how does he mop up those Turks? And he's now faced with a lot of disillusion within his own empire because his elites think that they've been spending too much money, too much time dealing

15:20with other problems. And what really matters are the Turks. And as I try to argue in my book, one of the reasons why he parks Asia Minor last is that's where most aristocratic wealth and landowning is. And if a bit like Putin with his inner circle, if your oligarchs feel some pain, that's not necessarily a bad thing for you if you're exposed. But by the mid 1090s, the situation has turned truly desperate. And in that desperation, I mean, Alexius looks to the West. He says, help me, help me. I mean, is this the beginning of the first crusade, Peter, when he turns and says, I need you? Yeah, I mean, he looks everywhere. He tries to cut deals with the Fatimids in Cairo. He tries to cope and deal with Kiev,

16:02the Chernihiv, the sort of the great early Rus cities where he tries to see if there's military help. But what is important is he needs two things. He needs heavy cavalry because they're super effective. And above all, he needs bulk. He needs a lot of people because the big targets that he needs to take, number one is Nicaea, current Iznik, which is quite good. It's a striking distance to Constantinople in Bithynia, northern Anatolia. But then the big gateway cities beyond, if you could get really lucky, Antioch and perhaps Jerusalem. So he starts to send increasingly desperate messages. He doesn't just send those to the Pope, but he does get in touch with the Pope, but he gets in touch with people

16:43like Robert of Flanders. Robert has done a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the 1080s and meets Alexis on the way back home. And Alexis says, look, I'm having a tough time. Any chance you could send me heavy cavalry? And Robert, when he gets back to Flanders, sends him 500 knights. And so I've just been curating a big exhibition in Bruges where we've had, I think, first time I've ever seen outside the Vatican, one of only two images we have of Alexius in sort of full magnificence because of the connections that are made between Constantinople and Flanders. A hundred years later, sees the rulers of Flanders sit on the imperial throne in Constantinople itself. But at this time, Alexius is sending out feelers to everybody. He's reaching out to people in England. He's reaching out to Anglo-Saxons. There's a colony that gets established

17:30after the normal conquest of 1066. Some Anglo-Saxon nobles flee to Constantinople looking for status and looking for jobs. That's what I want to know. Is it a religious appeal or is it just purely, look, you know what, if you come and help me, scratch my back, i'll scratch your back i mean what is the transaction that is being offered here well the transaction is not can you help me conquer britain the transaction is look i'm a man of status and wealth who's down on my uppers uh will i find a way of having my status well reflected and in an imperial court in constantinople that's quite a high chance and you better chance there than pitching up in palermo for example where you go i hate those normans look what they've done to us but the big carrot that

18:09alexis dangles is jerusalem and how quickly does this message get picked up by the pope because this is the turning point isn't it well first in the 1090s you don't need messages coming from alexis to explain how dire the situation is there's lots of uh of low levels and high levels of violence in the holy land itself so pilgrimage to jerusalem has been important since jesus christ died was crucified and rose from the dead but but there but this picks up with the with the islamic conquer the arab conquests of the 630s that that's that the pilgrimage more or less stops but in the 10 hundreds it starts to become the kind of mass tourism business you have large pilgrimages of thousands sometimes even perhaps

18:51tens of thousands of people go in there because it's expensive to get to it can be dangerous and so on by the 10 90s the conditions in the holy land are the routes across asia minor and even by sea mean that people can't get there so people are aware that there are problems in the Near East. People are aware from pilgrims coming back that this is hostile and it's dangerous more than normal. They are aware that the situation looks bad. And so those alerts, there's already chatter before Alexius primes it. But what Alexius does is he reaches out to three or four of the big figures that he's got proper personal connections with, including people he's met in person. As happens, Robert of Flanders dies.

19:30So his son, very unhelpfully, is also called Robert, gets in touch with too. But the Pope is the ace in the pack. And although we think of the Pope today as being the kind of single unifying figure in Western Christendom, at this time, there's a rival Pope who's probably more powerful than Urban. So Pope Urban is the pope at the time, becomes pope in 1088. In the mid-1090s, he's so weak, he's not even able to get into the city of Rome itself, where Clement III, the anti-pope whose primary sponsor is the German emperor, holds sway. And so when Alexis reaches out to Urban, he does so partly because Urban is well-connected in southern Italy, but figures that Urban, as a man who has connections to Clun reaches out to Urban, he does so partly because Urban is well-connected in Southern Italy,

20:05but figures that Urban, as a man who has connections to Cluny and to France, will be able to galvanise more people. The lure that he gives to Urban is he says, if you can help me and we can make this work, there's a chance of church union. And Urban does that partly because he believes in it, obviously. But also he knows that if he can unite all of Europe, he might have a chance of securing union and urban does that partly because he believes in it obviously but also he knows that if he can unite all of europe he might have a chance of securing his own position as the as the sort of the true pope so there's a whole set of factors that come into this you've got to pick through quite a lot of the wisps because the crusade turns into a machine of its own where

20:37people then rewrite the histories afterwards which is why really the sources in syriac and armenian and greek are really important and they usually get left to one side by that the love of cavalry and chain mail that we talked about yeah but not by you peter not by you well that's why that's why i'm a guest star on this week's episode please ask me to come back again and but but this is about settling lots of problems about the council of chalcedon about the ways in which the church has been divided and maybe could be united. So look, everybody has their own reasons, the wisps, as you put it. We're going to take a break now. Join us as those wisps come together and the first crusade begins.

21:23Hello, Goldhanger History listeners. This isina hyde and richard osmond from the rest is entertainment hello everybody every thursday and friday we are reacting to the pop culture phenomenon that is the celebrity traitors we'll be on youtube and wherever you get your podcasts and marina and i are digging into all the castles twists and turns giving our expert opinion on what should happen next now Now, which historical figure do we think would be the greatest traitor? It's tempting to think of an actual traitor. Yeah. A Guy Fawkes or a Kim Philby. But then all of those are traitors who got caught. Philby had a great run, though. He did have a great run. I think he could probably see off, you know, Joanne. Yes, maybe.

22:00And probably sort of where he ended up in Moscow is probably roughly like where the contestants have to spend every night as well. So maybe there's some sort of equivalence. So if you're watching Celebrity Traitors, don't forget to tune into our reaction episodes every Thursday and Friday night at 10 p.m. Find us on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Host Thanksgiving with industry leading quality standards from Whole Foods Market. There are no antibiotics in their meat department ever. So carve up turkey and spiral cut ham with peace of mind. Shop organic sides like stuffing mix and cranberry sauce from 365 brand. And guess what? All their delectable pies are made with no high fructose corn syrup.

22:41Gourmet Thanksgiving flavors with the quality you want. Only at Whole Foods Market. If you're building AI agents, you should check out Strands Agents. It's an open source SDK for Python and TypeScript. The idea is simple. Give a model some tools, let it decide what to call and when, and loop until it's done. No chain configs, no graph orchestration and works with any model provider. It's also open source and built and tested for production agents. Get started at strandsagents.com. Welcome back. So the Byzantine emperor has asked the West for soldiers. And actually, the response is something much larger than he could have anticipated, I'm guessing, Peter Frankopan, because people respond. They respond

23:34in numbers for whatever their wispy reasons may be. So look, I think that it sounds logical that he's not expecting these large numbers. But in fact, all the routes are provisioned. The Crusaders are quite noisy, they're quite grumpy, and they complain. And because of what happens, as we'll get to, they're very motivated to paint the emperor and the Byzantine Empire in a negative light. But there's no complaints about provisioning along those routes, which tells me that water, food, supplies have all been thought through to cope with very large numbers of people. So the big rallying cry comes at the Council of Claremont in November 1095, where they've got a great epic set piece. If you're doing the Netflix version, the Pope stands up in a massive field in

24:14front of an enormous crowd and says, you need to stand up for your Christian brothers. We're being decimated in the East, in particular to Jerusalem. You need to put down your grievances. You need to put your money to one side. You need to fight for your faith. It's a bit more prosaic. It comes at the end of a council where people have been talking about how to organise the church better. But what Urban does do is over the course of the following months, he leans in. He's travelling around all the time, visiting churches, lords, magnates, aristocrats, telling them to go and to head east. Peter, there's this great cry, aristocrats, telling them to go and to head east. Peter, there's this great cry, isn't there, at the end of the Council of Clermont

24:47when the crowd surges, shout to Deus Livult, Deus Livult, which is now a tattoo on the bicep of Peter Hegseth, the American Defence Secretary. Yeah, which amongst all the other things, the use of the subjunctive is my favourite thing, that we have a United States Defence Secretary or Secretary of War who might even know what that means if he's listening please let us know i would love to do an episode of guest star with pete hebserthorn empire with you too if we can get him uh but it becomes a rallying cry going god wills this and that further gets moving all across europe and what alexis has been very clear about is that he needs heavy cavalry and large numbers of men and he needs that to disperse turkish attacks and above all to capture heavily fortified cities of which the

25:29first one is nicaea um but because the excitement about um deus volt uh goes all around europe the first wave sets out too early before anybody's ready led by a guy called peter the cuckoo as he's called in the greek sources or peter the hermit uh who's a kind of semi-mystic semi-weirdo who brings women children and so on and they start heading marching towards constantinople chanting as they do so and perhaps it won't surprise any listeners with a spoiler alert that they they get basically uh eliminated in in short order and then some of them carted off into slavery for their sins. The main branch of the crusade, they head out with what looked like specific departure dates to help manage that provisioning process.

26:15Some march through down the coast of Croatia, some march through Italy on their way east. And when I was at college, I followed the route of Robertbert curtos uh via bari across to uh what was the new sliver yeah and he is uh he's a norman knight um he's the current duke of normandy as they pass amalfi beaumont is busy trying to shake them down for spare change and to terrify them into you know buying him off he here's what's going on and thinks right maybe i should attach myself to this one i get a bit of glory that goes down well with the ladies i mean literally that's what he's thinking and i can maybe make myself useful he's the younger brother of the duke of pulia uh spares and heirs uh don't

26:54always go hand in hand so he figures right well maybe i should just turn up all these armies eventually start to converge on constantinople and that's a moment of huge vulnerability for the emperor because armies concentrated one place things can go wrong easily so he could sure i mean if you don't if you don't look muscular enough they'll they'll fancy their chances won't they but he but alexis makes them swear an oath tell us about how you know that oath taking yeah so he's he's he's as worried perhaps more worried about the people inside the walls than those outside and the anxiety is not that you get some some unshaved hairy man from northern europe who suddenly thinks oh this looks nice maybe i'll have a go it's the it's the groups and elites who have

27:35been busy whispering against alexius activate them and promise them the earth in return for their military firepower so alexius does does does three things firstly make sure they get they get ferried across the straits of the bosphorus so they're out of striking distance out of harm's way uh second he makes a great effort to meet them all personally he breaks off the leaders from their men so he controls access into the city to make sure that the risks are low and then he makes them swear solemn oaths to him and those oaths that are sworn over religious vows are not done in the classical Roman Byzantine style. They're done in an intelligible, legalistic way that makes sense to these knights

28:12who are from the same sort of chivalric world in the Western style, where they formally become his liege man. That has a set of specific legal implications. And he makes them all promise that whatever they capture, they'll hand back to the empire. And that's a perfectly logical thing because once they've done that, they're all going to obviously go back home because why would you stick around, right? What's the point? But also he wants to make sure that his personal security is going to be guaranteed. So that solemn oath is seen as being an important thing. It's recorded in all of the Western sources as well as in the Greek ones. some of the rulers bristle at the idea that they're going to become

28:50somebody else's uh pash and somebody else's uh sort of um a little helper and so they resist it but he's able to squeeze them into doing it he's able to explain there's nothing personal um but that there are reasons for it. And they all do that. The troops then arrive in Nicaea and Alexios turns up to watch the action and goes, right, this is going to take a few months. You're going to need to build assault siege engines. You're going to need to stop anybody getting in and out. There's a lake to one side that makes Nicaea a little bit leaky, but we've got to squeeze them into submission. He then sends messages inside to the Turkish governor saying, look, we can do this one of two ways. And I would definitely pick the easy way because it will end

29:28badly for you. To which the Turks say, are you joking? Have you seen the size of these walls? Have you seen how high they are? No chance. We're going to be impregnable. Plus, by the way, look at how many people there are outside the city, how you're going to feed them, keep their horses pastured. They might be able to put up a decent show for a few weeks, but of course they're going to disperse. But that's how White Castles are so important. To Alexius' amazement, the Crusaders start chopping down trees and building siege engines, and they storm the city. And he doesn't think this is even going to be possible. And within a matter of days, Nicaea is turned over and turned over to his hands. To his hands, not the Crusaders.

30:09And that's going to be important, right? It's going to, because that's going to annoy people who've left their homes, left their businesses, been promised the world, you know, chopped down trees, have made siege engines. And hang on a minute, are we being circumvented here? I mean, look, if you've got a grievance, I mean, if you think about the other way around and you've come from, let's say you're a non-royal lord or a non, you know, and you think, right, well, I quite like to be the governor of a town in Asia Minor. You've got to not speak the right language. You know, the day to day humdrum of walking around checking the bread is being baked properly and charges paid right. You know, that's not that exciting.

30:50And the Crusaders are quite realistic that they understand that these big targets are important to provide a supply chain that will link further eastwards as well and that they need to be in christian hands but none of them are thinking at this point that there's value in in trading what they've left behind to be a provincial governor some are thinking about imperial service maybe they Maybe they could be a general. Maybe they could become an aristocrat. Maybe they could marry the daughter of a well-to-do Byzantine and have a comfortable life. But most of them are thinking about getting to Jerusalem. So having seen what they do in Nicaea, Alexios goes, right, the next target is Antioch. And Antioch is an even more formidable death star. It has been in Byzantine

31:25hands until the 1080s. They captured it about 120 years earlier and its fall is one of the kind of great pillars being taken out of the fortifications of their eastern frontier. So recovering Antioch is an absolute primary essential goal. And the Crusaders spend the best part of a year camped outside in conditions that start okay and deteriorate very quickly people start eating the seeds from horse manure uh they get picked off from archers in the towers their army sent to harass them from behind they're on the brink of oblivion repeatedly but they don't break the siege because they and just i mean they could just carry on to jerusalem that's where that's where they're aiming for they don't do it because of these oaths they've

32:10given to alexios and because they recognize antioch is a sort of bulwark city when they eventually break in in uh 1098 through you know turning turning one of the board one of the one of the tower guards uh armenian Firuz, who lets them in. Even though they get into the city and capture it, they then face the next problem, which is they're going to get attacked from outside, where a new Turkish army comes to rub them out. So they look like they're going to get destroyed all over again. Right. And also, I mean, in the interim, while they're eating the seeds out of horse manure, some don't stick around, you know, oath or no oath. I mean, peter the hermit or peter the weirdo as you like to call him he's off i mean they just decide right i've

32:51had enough um so that leaves them looking quite vulnerable some do leave like stephen of blois who goes to get relief from alexius and meets him at philomelia in in central asia minor and tells him that the crusade army is on the brink of annihilation and alexis then has to do a calculation which is is it worth throwing good money good men after bad should he march to the aid of a lost cause or should he stick still and just because the crusaders at antioch it doesn't mean his other problems have have gone away but that decision not to advance becomes the kind of the grievance around which burman in particular is able to capitalize and it's one of the reasons why the byzantine empire gets because its reputation

33:29besmirched but but the but the crusaders at antioch there's no two ways about it the heroism the the tenacity the the flirting with disaster on on an epic scale repeatedly before its conquest makes this one of the great military campaigns in medieval history. Now, Peter, you mentioned twice now this figure Beaumont. Tell us about him. He's a giant and he's one of the people that most fascinate, but also horrify your favourite historian, Anna Kamina. Well, he's an arsehole. I mean, he's an absolute bastard. I mean, he's selfish. He's vain. He's quite talented uh he's a cunning he's he's a cunning so-and-so um and he's a duplicitous um oath-breaking uh bet noir that the emperor has i mean he's already been a thorn in the side of the 1080s uh where he effectively

34:21ends up under delivering i mean for all of the kind of marauding raids he does into the interior during Robert G. Scull's campaigns, he actually goes back between his tail and his legs. He comes to Constantinople with the Crusaders and is not really what someone, Alexis is that keen to see. And he tells Alexis he's very willing, if Alexis would be so willing, to take command of all of the Byzantine armies. He's willing to take control of all of the empire's eastern armies if Alexis would be minded to appoint him to that position, to which you can imagine Alexis's response. When he gets to Antioch, he figures, right, I've got a perfect storm of propaganda that's going to work. This has been a big target that's cost a lot of of lives a lot of men and a lot of energy so when the crusaders head

35:09on to jerusalem which is their primary target which they end up taking uh in june 1099 berman doesn't go with him so the oath that he's given to get to jerusalem he doesn't fill that one he's promised to give stuff back to the byzantines when the byzantines turn up and say look uh you need to hand this over berman says i don't think so in fact the people who've broken the oath are you because you didn't come to march our aid and although there are a few byzantines fighting along with us we're the ones who suffer blood and uh and losses in return so burman starts to mount a very specific uh dark arts campaign of propaganda particularly with a text called the guest of frankorum which is a sort of widely circulated because a bestseller in europe in the early 1100s that

35:49casts beurman it becomes because beurman is the great hero always a step ahead of everybody else and alexius as a as a man who is always going to be double crossing everybody he meets and beurman eventually gets squeezed in antioch and it it's a great story. He then has to get back to, he wants to go back home to Southern Italy. Just before we go there. So he does establish in Antioch another Norman principality. So we've seen in the course of this series, these, you know, first of all, Normandy, then Britain, then South Italy and Sicily. Now there's a new one in Antioch, which is specifically run by this Norman Beaumont. Yeah, and it's basically a city-state. So it takes over all the existing administration.

36:32He has got no people who are bureaucrats and know what to do, so he keeps everybody in place. And at this point, it's not quite clear exactly what status it would be. Principality is what it becomes with the Prince of Antioch, and that's an upgrade on Berman as the bastard son of Robert the Weasel, who doesn't have a fancy title. These things, they do matter a bit, but more important is, do you have power and wealth and authority? Okay, but it matters a little bit. So the stories about Berman, I mean, as you say, there's books written about him as propaganda. There's also sort of propaganda running the other way that, you know, he was a savage bastard who spit roast Turkish prisoners in the full view of the Turks. And he did that to create terror. I

37:19mean, I know that I think we did run Simon before, didn't we, if memory serves right, William. I mean, is this something that he really did or he wanted people to think he did or his enemies wanted people to think he was this savage? I mean, where does that story come from? I think all of that. I think the question is who's writing it for audience, when and so on. But, you know, Bermondale does, what he does understand is he does understand the value, I suppose we'd call it, of his own brand. And he understands that once the Crusaders have got to Jerusalem and they're then stuck working out, well, what do we do with this place? We all quite like to go home. Who's going to stick around? Even if we can find

37:58a few who stick around, like Godfrey of Bouillon, or Boulogne, from northwestern Europe, agrees to become not the king of Jerusalem but to become the guardian of the holy sepulchre his brother doesn't have too many problems he takes over and takes the royal title even if you can leave a few people behind how you manage it how you protect it becomes a different challenge and the crusaders are stuck thinking about how do they solve this one obvious answer would be hand it over to the Byzantines and let it be their problem, but they choose not to do that. Berman understands that this offers him an opportunity to maximise his own fame, glory and so on. So in the early 1100s, he thinks he should

38:37expand his territory in Antioch. He gets captured by the Turks because he's not as good at his job as perhaps he thinks he is. He then gets ransomed. And to get back home, to spread the message about how glorious he is, he disguises himself in a coffin surrounded by dead chickens, where he lets it be known that he's been killed. And the putrid smell means that no one opens the coffin to take a look. He then gets back home and he's the Harry Styles or the William Dalrymple, the Anita Arnand of the early 12th century. Everyone's talking about him. Everyone wants to know what it was really like. And did he really spit roast people? Did he really murder on this scale? Did he really get the better of the emperor? How come he's so handsome? How come

39:18he's so good looking? How come he's so wonderful? And he becomes the single most desirable man in Europe to the point that he gets married off to the daughter of the King of France. And he becomes the single most desirable man in Europe to the point that he gets married off to the daughter of the King of France. And that's from Berman's point of view is a very, very good outcome. It's a good outcome. He bought a bastard, a younger son, and now he's got the King of France's daughter. Being Berman, he thinks, right, do I fancy heading back to Antioch, which is quite a long way away. And trust me, I've been there before. Quite hard work. Maybe I can use all of this to mount yet another campaign on the western flank of the empire,

39:51wobble that loose Byzantine tooth, make myself the master of Epirus and maybe beyond. And if nothing else, I'll be able to get extra extract value titles, names, glory, money from Alexius, who is his his bet noir. So he gathers together everybody he can. He badmouths the Byzantines saying, look, we fought one campaign to defeat the infidel in Jerusalem. This one is about the Antichrist, about Alexius, who's a schismatic. He doesn't worship in the right way. These guys are all super dodgy and people believe him. All that propaganda goes down quite well. The fact that he's able to say Alexis didn't pull his weight in the first crusade. And then that gets picked up by papal sources that go, maybe we should just drop that story of Alexius too.

40:32Maybe we should make this a papal thing. It was Urban's campaign that made this all happen. And it's about the power of the papacy, which becomes super valuable in the Middle Ages and much later too. And so Berman then crosses over to the same place, to Dyrrhachion. At this time, Alexisis is waiting for him knows how to deal with him traps him bleeds him dry and then makes him sign a humiliating peace treaty that's included in in full in um in called the treaty of devil or diabolos in the alexiad that sets out all the terms that are crucial that are excruciating for the Normans and for Berman, including that Berman's broken his oaths, that he's behaved badly, all the rest of it. And unfortunately, the problem for Alexiad

41:14is that he dies a couple of years later. And by this point, nobody cares because they're looking at Antioch, where Berman's nephew Tancred is now in charge, looking at the Holy Land, thinking about how wonderful it is to be in a world where men have served with honour. And Berman becomes an important, becomes a useful tool for everybody. But the price to pay for all of this is the reputation of Alexius personally, but also of the Byzantine Empire as a whole. So he opens Pandora's box. And I suppose the question for us Byzantine historians is, was that a price worth paying? Was the First Crusade, despite everything that follows? And the answer is that Alexis was in a kind of Zelensky-like position in the mid-1090s.

41:57Very, very few options, running out of road very quickly and possibly the lesser of all evils. But the reputational damage was catastrophic and beaumont exploited that cynically deliberately and and and that's why he's not well regarded in by anna kromlina or or by others and she's got a difficult balance because because if her father's going to have a bet noir he can't be a moron he can't be an idiot so she's got to she's got to glam him up a bit to say he's got some qualities because if you see off a rival they've got to be reasonably adroit but um you know he comes about him as a scheming untrustworthy untrusting cynic who's who's after it just for himself and i think that's that's pretty much how things were peter uh nonetheless it's an

42:40extraordinary life beaumont and it ends in a small town in Puglia we have his extraordinary tomb in Canossa di Puglia I went to see it a couple of years ago and you're in the middle of Italy and yet this tomb looks like a Sufi saint's shrine it's somewhere in in the Middle East it's got a shallow dome it's also got these extraordinary bronze doors that are among the finest surviving in medieval Italy and inside there is this tomb with this Latin inscription naming Beaumont so Peter Beaumont has had an extraordinary life and for all the fact that he dies in Italy he has established a principality in Antioch that survives 200 years it is the furthest reach of Norman power to the east yeah it's uh i mean it depends

43:25how you define norman anti-op but you know i suppose 1268 would be the kind of classic point but yeah it's it's it's an outpost and it does what normans love to do which is they love to have a springboard so that they're ready to be there opportunistically in case anything else offers itself as an opportunity and and that is, again, that can sound like, I mean that in a negative way. I mean, that is what politics, power, business is all about, is to make sure you're in the right place at the right time. And the Normans, I suppose, if you join up the Battle of Hastings, the Congress of Britain, expansion into Puglia, Calabria, Sicily, you see how people like Russell Balliol in Asia Minor, the Normans in the First Crusadeade but also in antioch particularly you know they're always alive to what opportunities look

44:11like and again that that is that is like the british in the the age of empire so it's it's true they don't get any further east because to to make things work you need to be thinking about the boring stuff like supply chains and logistics and ports and harbours and how you get material and above all people to come and run your business for you. Antioch offers a huge amount of prestige and it is an important city. It's a great trading outpost that connects into land routes and silk roads heading eastwards and, of course course through into the red sea and into the gulf so it's an important metropolis so i mean look we're in the final moments of this this uh podcast we came to this because of all the history about the bayotapestry because everybody here in britain

44:58is beside themselves with the excitement about the bayotapestry being here but are you saying actually as far as the Normans go, this is pretty weak tea. It's a small story compared to what, you know, the Normans did. All this glamorous stuff further east. Yeah. In the east. No, no. Some of my best friends are Norman historians and some are involved with the exhibition. I think it's not to belittle Beyo or the Normans in Britain, but it's to put them in a wider context and that what's happening in the British Isles has important, not parallels, but has important chapters that are also playing out in the Central Mediterranean and the Eastern Mediterranean too. And so we can't just think of the Normans as arriving across the Channel and then flowing northwards. Those connections,

45:41those ambitions, and how that world is being seen. You know, great authors like Audric Vitalis, working in Normandy in the 1120s, is incredibly well informed about Constantinople. I mean, literally has snippets of gossip that I don't pick up from any contemporary local sources in Constantinople that shows these connections spreading out over thousands of miles. And I think that shows that the Normans have this field division that that unite them back to scandinavia too so so it's it's about putting them in in the in the wider field than just what happens in pevensey bay peter as always it is um oh no it is wonderful there's just no two ways about it i i love having you on it's fantastic it's invigorating i feel like um we've done a marathon i feel

46:21healthy for it i like it it's good come back um but you know we're going to talk about that uh bayo tapestry in more detail in a bonus episode here on empire so thank you very much for listening to our norman conquest series till the next time we meet it's goodbye from me anita arnand and goodbye from me william derimple Dremple. Let it decide what to call and when and loop until it's done. No chain configs, no graph orchestration, and works with any model provider. It's also open source and built and tested for production agents. Get started at strandsagents.com. Stonefire Naan is made with real buttermilk and ghee. It's the perfect flatbread for any occasion. I put out Stonefire Naan with dips at every dinner party.

47:24I make Naan grilled cheese when my daughter has friends over. I use Stonefire Naan to reward the humans who do my bidding. Right. It's perfect for camping trips. Dance for it, feeble mortal. Sorry, is he talking to me? Dance. Ha, From our tradition to yours, Stonefire. Together, we know. This is the sound of confidence. Confidence behind the wheel of the Mazda CX-50 Hybrid. It comes standard with a suite of proactive safety features and lets you explore far and wide with an EPA-estimated 38 miles per gallon combined and electronic all-wheel drive. Mazda, move and be moved. Tap the banner to discover how confidence comes standard. Transcription by CastingWords