Bannon's War Room - WarRoom Battleground EP 1010: The Crusades For Young Men Pt. 1
Aired: 2026-05-15
Duration: 47:58


=== Peaceful Coexistence and Jihad (15:00) ===

[00:00:02]  This is the primal scream of a dying regime.
[00:00:07]  Pray for our enemies because we're going to medieval on these people.
[00:00:13]  You're not going to have a free shot on all these networks lying about the people.
[00:00:17]  The people have had a belly full of it.
[00:00:19]  I know you don't like hearing that.
[00:00:20]  I know you're trying to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it.
[00:00:23]  It's going to happen.
[00:00:24]  And where do people like that go to share the big lie?
[00:00:27]  MAGA Media.
[00:00:29]  I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.
[00:00:34]  Ask yourself.
[00:00:35]  What is my task and what is my purpose?
[00:00:38]  If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.
[00:00:44]  War Room.
[00:00:45]  Here's your host, Stephen K. Bath.
[00:00:47]  Okay, welcome to our six o'clock hour.
[00:00:55]  I've got a very special show tonight.
[00:00:58]  One, because, you know, going around the country and being in Texas, Virginia, other places, and spending time, we'd had some specials during our time in Texas.
[00:01:08]  We would get together.
[00:01:10]  Particularly with some of the younger people in our movement, in the MAGA and American First Movement.
[00:01:14]  And a couple of things I've ascertained.
[00:01:16]  Number one, there's a real fascination out there with the period called the Crusades, particularly among young people and specifically among young men.
[00:01:25]  But there's not a lot of knowledge out there about the Crusades.
[00:01:28]  So I decided to track down Raymond Abraham, and Raymond's over in Europe right now, but to say, hey, let's do a couple of shows.
[00:01:37]  I want to do shows that focus on the Crusades and focus particularly on the Crusades.
[00:01:43]  Four kind of young men, and particularly about those who fought in the Crusades and also why they were called and kind of the history of them.
[00:01:52]  Raymond, you've done a trilogy of books that are, I think, Sword and Scimitar is the first, about the 1400 year war, and I mean real war, cultural, social, political, economic, and kinetic militarily against Islam.
[00:02:11]  You've then done the book of those who.
[00:02:15]  Represented the West, the heroes of the West in these various fights against you.
[00:02:21]  So you take it first generally and you go through the whole movement and the battles.
[00:02:25]  Then we go back to the personalities.
[00:02:27]  I think you have 10 or 11 personalities in this.
[00:02:30]  Defenders of the West are just extraordinary.
[00:02:32]  So you tell the story again, but through the lives of these warriors, which is so motivating.
[00:02:37]  And then the last, probably my favorite part of the topic when it comes to Crusades, you take the military orders.
[00:02:44]  The book is Two Swords for Christ.
[00:02:46]  And you take the, uh, The Hospitallers of St. John's and the Knights Templar that came out of the First Crusade.
[00:02:53]  And you tell their stories.
[00:02:55]  And so, just extraordinary how, on different angles, you tell the story so people have a total comprehensive view.
[00:03:02]  The first thing I want to do is just give the background because a lot of times, and you actually frame it the correct way, people think, oh, the Crusades, you came and say the word on so many Catholic schools throughout the country.
[00:03:14]  You know, after 9 11, they went and took Crusaders off of their, their, uh, You know, as their logos have been their mascots for decades.
[00:03:22]  And they said, Oh, no, no, no, that's so nativist.
[00:03:25]  That's so racist.
[00:03:26]  That's xenophobic.
[00:03:27]  We got to call ourselves the bumblebees, right?
[00:03:30]  Not the crusaders.
[00:03:31]  And, but because the story, we didn't understand our own history in the elites in this country, and particularly in the Bush administration when he called, he went to the mosque, I think, day three, as New York City, lower Manhattan, still smoldering.
[00:03:46]  The Pentagon's still smoldering.
[00:03:48]  There's still a smoking hole up there in Pennsylvania.
[00:03:51]  He goes and says, Oh, no.
[00:03:54]  Islam is the religion of peace, which is the old hook, how they get the elites.
[00:03:58]  Now we've seen 25 years later, we have an active jihadist Marxist movement in this country that politically is growing in strength every day.
[00:04:07]  So give us the context that it just wasn't knights in Normandy and French rural families and the aristocracy in these various European countries just decided we're going to get together in March and go to Jerusalem.
[00:04:22]  It was an invitation, but it was an invitation because, in context, the rise of Islam was really coming and choking off the Holy Land.
[00:04:30]  So, first off, can you put us in context?
[00:04:32]  What are the crusades and how did they really start?
[00:04:36]  Sure, Steve.
[00:04:37]  This is an excellent and complex, and as you pointed out, a very timely topic.
[00:04:42]  And it's a lot deeper and more relevant than most people can even begin to imagine, including myself.
[00:04:47]  The more I study, the more I connect the dots, the more I realize that there's really a bigger story here that has been intentionally suppressed, actually.
[00:04:56]  And so, to answer your initial question about the crusades, so I've already talked about this a lot, and I don't want to take too much time, but essentially, One of the main problems which you just touched on with the crusades is not only that they're presented in a vacuum, which they are, but it's also in the worst possible vacuum.
[00:05:17]  So, like you said, today it's you know the word crusade is such a bad word, uh, you know, schools and have to get rid of it, mascots and this sort of thing.
[00:05:26]  The bumblebee example, and even George Bush, you're right, uh, you know, he made the whole Islamist peace thing, but even he got in trouble because he used the word crusade at one point.
[00:05:37]  Uh, and of course, he didn't mean military holy war, he just meant like crusading.
[00:05:42]  A good endeavor, right?
[00:05:43]  And even that he had to backtrack and apologize for, which again underscores just how loaded that word has become in the pejorative sense.
[00:05:52]  Okay, so to fill the vacuum and to give us some context, before the First Crusade, which was called for in 1095, you have literally centuries of Muslim attacks on what was once the Christian world.
[00:06:05]  And by the time of the First Crusade, a huge chunk of that formerly Christian territory is now Islamic.
[00:06:11]  So this would include all the older.
[00:06:14]  More advanced, more Christian regions in the seventh century when Islam came onto the scene, which would include all of North Africa, Egypt, all the way to Morocco, and all of the Middle East, which is all the modern states that you can think of today, basically.
[00:06:30]  Well, from Turkey, of course, Anatolia, all the way down south, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and modern day Israel, Palestinian territories, and so on and so forth, and a large part of Arabia, even northern Arabia.
[00:06:45]  So that all gets conquered in this massive jihad, which again, here we go with the back.
[00:06:51]  And Persia and Babylon and all the creme de la creme of the.
[00:06:57]  Yeah.
[00:06:57]  Persia, I mean, ancient civilizations, Egypt, Babylon, Persia.
[00:07:03]  I mean, you're talking about some pretty big empires that had pretty organized religions, did they not?
[00:07:09]  Yes, yes.
[00:07:10]  Into the Indus Valley as well.
[00:07:12]  And Persia had the Zoroastrian religion, of course.
[00:07:18]  And they actually fell relatively early as well.
[00:07:20]  They fell around the same time that Egypt and Syria did.
[00:07:24]  And again, that's probably because they were closer to the Arabian homeland.
[00:07:27]  So, you know, the neighbors that were right there on the doorsteps were the first to get attacked and the first to get swallowed up.
[00:07:34]  But yes, usually what I'm talking about now is primarily because the jihad was so far reaching historically, you have to really focus on one aspect.
[00:07:43]  So, I usually try to focus, or I am at this point, the Christian.
[00:07:47]  Slash Western world.
[00:07:49]  But of course, yes, Persia, the Zoroastrianists, all the way into the Far East and into Sub Saharan Africa, also through jihad.
[00:07:57]  And these are all diverse peoples with different civilizations and religions, all of whom got subsumed under Islam.
[00:08:04]  Okay, so that's basically the context of, if you fast forward now to the First Crusade, everyone in Europe, the educated classes, of course, the clerical classes, the popes, the nobles, understood what had originally happened to the Christian world in North Africa and the Middle East.
[00:08:22]  So they understood that.
[00:08:23]  And it comes out in their correspondences and letters, and when they're speaking too, they often say things like when Egypt comes back.
[00:08:30]  To Christianity and things of that sort, for example.
[00:08:34]  So now we're coming a couple decades before the First Crusade, and you have another especially savage iteration of jihad under the Seljuk Turks.
[00:08:46]  And they are running amok in the Holy Land.
[00:08:49]  They are committing much worse atrocities than had even occurred before then under the various different Arab dynasties and sultanates, which themselves were also pretty bad.
[00:09:00]  But now it's at a new level.
[00:09:02]  And the atrocities which we have recorded and which were widely spoken about from the Pope, from Pope Urban to Peter the Hermit to Robert of Flanders to Emperor Alexius and his daughter.
[00:09:13]  So we have lots of records of what was happening.
[00:09:16]  And to call it horrific doesn't even do it justice.
[00:09:20]  I mean, the things that are written down are stuff of nightmare, where people are being skinned alive, their entrails are being pulled out, tied to a column, and they're whipped until all their entrails are pulled out.
[00:09:33]  And fall down, for example, women being systematically raped on top of altars, you know, anything you can imagine.
[00:09:41]  And it also spilled over onto pilgrims because you still had European pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land during this time.
[00:09:48]  It was understood that was dangerous.
[00:09:49]  That's part of the pilgrimage.
[00:09:51]  You know, you're undertaking this very dangerous journey on a pilgrimage to visit the holy sites and, you know, to engage in adoration and possibly die while you're doing it.
[00:10:03]  So, and that is exactly what was happening to them.
[00:10:06]  And one of the more notable instances occurred in 1064 because it's widely attested, where a large German pilgrimage went down and they got attacked again by the Turks and everyone was slaughtered.
[00:10:17]  And they talk about a very attractive nun who was warned not to go and she was gang raped to death.
[00:10:24]  And then at the end it says, and those vile men did these sorts of things to all the pilgrims they could ever reach.
[00:10:31]  So this is the backdrop of the first crusade, which we never ever hear.
[00:10:36]  We just hear that out of the blue.
[00:10:39]  I've quoted it before, probably to you as well.
[00:10:42]  John Esposito, Georgetown academic, has this memorable line where he basically says Five centuries of peaceful coexistence between Christians and Muslims elapsed before an imperial papal power play led to a series of so called holy wars and centuries of distrust and dislike, basically, from Muslims who now have a grievance because of what the crusaders did.
[00:11:03]  So, until now, in schools, in colleges, you literally have people and professors and books who teach that.
[00:11:12]  Those centuries that I just told you, where Islam annexed, conquered, subjugated, and destroyed much more than half of Christendom, and as well all those other civilizations in Persia and so forth.
[00:11:24]  This, you have professors telling people that that was the highlight.
[00:11:27]  That was like peaceful coexistence between Christians and Muslims until randomly Pope Urban and all these Franks decided just to go and ruin it all because, well, and now so we have to fill in the vacuum.
[00:11:40]  Why?
[00:11:40]  Well, because they're greedy.
[00:11:42]  Because they're racist, because they're imperialists, because I suppose they're Islamophobes at the risk of being anachronistic.
[00:11:49]  And this is now what's supplanted the truth.
[00:11:52]  So that, and I'll follow up.
[00:11:54]  I want to go as a Georgetown alum.
[00:11:56]  I want to go to Esposito specifically.
[00:11:58]  When they say peaceful coexistence, and you look at it, I want to remind the audience that since really, I guess, the first century, right?
[00:12:12]  I guess it's from 73, that really the Jews have been driven out of, to a large extent, the Holy Land, and particularly Jerusalem, which was always kind of the crown jewel, at least in some parts, right?
[00:12:26]  And sometimes.
[00:12:27]  They're gone.
[00:12:28]  And so it's really a Muslim controlled entity.
[00:12:32]  When you had peaceful coexistence, if you did have peaceful coexistence, it's because the Christians surrendered after these waves of jihad.
[00:12:43]  There was some resistance put up, but the resistance essentially collapsed.
[00:12:49]  I'm going to say pretty quickly, but it was gone relatively quickly.
[00:12:53]  And it was really submission, which is part of the way.
[00:12:59]  If you pay a duty or if you pay a tax or if you either convert or just submit to their control, you can live at least somewhat peacefully.
[00:13:09]  They break out in violence all the time.
[00:13:12]  But when Especio and these guys say it, it's because the West was essentially the Christian part of the West in that area was conquered and Islam controlled it.
[00:13:23]  This is except for Constantinople, correct?
[00:13:28]  Yes, correct.
[00:13:29]  But if you, and I read that book, and you know, it's very fuzzy.
[00:13:33]  I mean, ultimately, what you're saying is that what Esposito is saying is that, yes, Islam conquered, subjugated these populations, and then they became, according to Islamic doctrine, what's called dhimmis.
[00:13:45]  And dhimmis are basically a protected class, usually Jews or Christians, who by paying tribute do not get killed, but they essentially live as, at best, second class citizens.
[00:13:55]  So it's openly understood they're being discriminated against.
[00:13:59]  Yes.
[00:13:59]  And that's something that they accept.
[00:14:01]  So, the peaceful coexistence only because they're not fighting back.
[00:14:05]  And when they fight back.
[00:14:07]  Exactly.
[00:14:08]  Or not even fighting back because they're not even asking for equality.
[00:14:13]  That's the whole point.
[00:14:14]  They know their place as second class citizens.
[00:14:17]  It's almost like, you know, pre civil rights movement in America, 1800s.
[00:14:22]  Okay, you can be black and I won't kill you, but as long as you know your place kind of thing, that mentality.
[00:14:28]  The split in the Roman Empire between Constantinople and Rome and Constantinople as.
[00:14:36]  As the new Rome.
[00:14:38]  They weren't particularly close.
[00:14:39]  What did it take to actually have Constantinople reach out to Rome and reach out to the Pope and reach out to the Western Christendom in the church and the really noble families, the nobility and the aristocracy in Western Christendom to say, hey, look, we got to put the flag up here.
[00:14:58]  This is a problem and we need your support.
[00:15:01]  We need military assistance.

=== Byzantine Cooperation Patterns (09:49) ===

[00:15:03]  What caused that?
[00:15:04]  Because that was not an easy move for them to do given how proud they were.
[00:15:07]  And quite frankly, some of the disdain.
[00:15:10]  They had for the older part of the Roman Empire.
[00:15:15]  Yeah, no, that's correct.
[00:15:17]  You know, especially think about it the first crusade is only about 40 years right after the first schism around 1054.
[00:15:25]  So that again itself really highlights the fact that you're right, he wouldn't have taken that extreme step and swallowed his pride, the Byzantine emperor, had it not been such a dire situation.
[00:15:37]  And if you look at a map, you have to recall Asia Minor, what we call today Turkey.
[00:15:40]  Was right before this, you know, 50 years before this, it was still primarily Christian, Armenians, Greeks, and different groups.
[00:15:49]  And then the Western part was primarily under Byzantine authority.
[00:15:54]  And then the Turks come out of the East and then they start causing havoc.
[00:15:59]  I just recently, just to again put this in context, the Armenian genocide, the remembrance date was, I think, April 24th.
[00:16:06]  So, as usual, I did a little research and writing about it.
[00:16:09]  And you start realizing that actually the genocide, which most people, the dates usually is 1915 and 16th during World War I.
[00:16:17]  But if you really understand it, the genocide by the hands of Turks, Muslim Turks, against Christian Armenians in that region goes back over a thousand years ago.
[00:16:26]  It goes to literally several decades before the events that we're describing in the First Crusade, because it was then when the Turks really rushed in and they came from the east.
[00:16:36]  So, who's in the east of Anatolia?
[00:16:38]  It's the Armenians.
[00:16:39]  And it was Greater Armenia, it was a much larger region at the time.
[00:16:42]  And the sources of, again, I was telling you about the horrific atrocities by the Turks, it's especially against these Armenians.
[00:16:50]  And they literally talk about tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of Christians.
[00:16:53]  And these are primary sources, eyewitness accounts.
[00:16:56]  Being just butchered in the most sadistic way, thousands of churches being ritually desecrated, set aflame, crosses being broken and burned, and statues being decapitated, the whole nine yards, okay?
[00:17:08]  So that's what these Seljuk Turks were doing, and they kept going further, further westward into Asia Minor until they were right there on the straits, right, vis a vis Constantinople.
[00:17:19]  So that's how dire it was, and that's why.
[00:17:21]  Give me a second, hang on.
[00:17:23]  It just wasn't individual bad guys.
[00:17:25]  I want to make sure people understand this.
[00:17:26]  This was just not individual bad hombres.
[00:17:29]  Going into a village or going to church, you use the term ritual desecration because it was a weapon and instrument of their conquering.
[00:17:40]  Give me a minute on ritual desecration.
[00:17:42]  What did they do?
[00:17:44]  Oh, okay.
[00:17:44]  Think about what ISIS and these groups do, which is not just attack, kill infidels, but make sure that they go and literally ritually desecrate, let's say, a church and burn, break the crosses and burn it and gouge the eyes of icons and behead statues, which happens all the time in Europe nowadays.
[00:18:04]  So, we actually have the same pattern being shown, which the point ultimately is you know, again, if you read a typical secondary modern history, it'll tell you, it'll just say, yes, the Turks ran in and engaged in violence and then suffer.
[00:18:18]  But they won't underscore this point.
[00:18:20]  They'll miss it, maybe.
[00:18:22]  They won't connect the dots and realize, okay, this wasn't just one group attacking another group, medieval warfare.
[00:18:28]  This was one group that was propelled by an ideological animus, okay, which is what we call today jihadism.
[00:18:35]  And that definitely comes out in the sources, both of them, the Muslim and the Christian sources.
[00:18:40]  The Muslim sources boast about it.
[00:18:41]  Okay.
[00:18:42]  I'm thinking now of they're talking about destroying this major cathedral in Armenia and how they sent this large crucifix to be as a trophy to the Caliph in Baghdad.
[00:18:52]  Okay.
[00:18:53]  And you see that still happening today.
[00:18:55]  I've seen so many videos of ISIS types, including right now what's happening to Armenian churches at the hands of Azerbaijan, where they're literally erasing them from their ancient territories that were ced recently from the 2020 war.
[00:19:08]  So, yes, bottom line is definite ideological animus was infused in these jihadist attacks, though they won't come out in typical history books.
[00:19:18]  It'll just seem like one group attacking another.
[00:19:21]  What was the call for help?
[00:19:22]  What was the call for help?
[00:19:23]  Where did it go?
[00:19:24]  And what was the response in the Christian West?
[00:19:28]  So, the emperor and others, of course, reached out to the pope himself.
[00:19:33]  But we also have letters from the emperor to people like Count Robert of Flanders, who was a friend of his, because despite what we always hear, this sort of ideological divide between Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholics wasn't as stringent or real as we like to think sometimes.
[00:19:50]  And there was lots of cooperation that went on.
[00:19:52]  And to your average layperson, certainly they didn't even understand, just like they don't today, the schismatic fights and what they were about.
[00:20:00]  But so we have these letters and correspondences of basically calling for help, calling for aid.
[00:20:06]  Saying, you know, this is happening to fellow Christians.
[00:20:09]  And again, the idea that you're asking me, so what caused them to respond?
[00:20:15]  And I think it's because learning that such atrocious cruelty was being inflicted on fellow Christians.
[00:20:22]  And see, that's the point.
[00:20:23]  You know, the Franks and the West are Catholics, whereas the East, the Byzantines, the Orthodox Armenians are Orthodox.
[00:20:30]  And that didn't add in any way, shape, or form, that never comes up.
[00:20:33]  You never hear, you know, right before the first crusade that there was some debate or even the Pope himself.
[00:20:38]  Was saying, yeah, well, they're heretics, they have it coming to them.
[00:20:42]  Okay, that never appears.
[00:20:43]  And again, it just shows you that in reality, despite these supposed schisms, which were real, the average Christian, even the Pope, you know, why did Pope Urban II comply?
[00:20:55]  And he didn't require anything, he didn't tell the Emperor Alexius, oh, now you have to agree to papal authority or anything of that sort.
[00:21:02]  Okay, so the reason I believe they were propelled to it is just shocked at the horror that what was being inflicted on fellow Christians, shocked at what was happening to Christian pilgrims.
[00:21:13]  Shocked at what was happening to the Holy Land, the Holy Sepulchre, the Church of the Resurrection, which had been destroyed before and was being attacked periodically, even after it was rebuilt.
[00:21:25]  Lots of sacrilege.
[00:21:26]  So it was actually what propelled them.
[00:21:28]  And historians now know this.
[00:21:30]  Again, this is one of those stories that was much fabricated the motivation, the cause.
[00:21:37]  You can still grab history books by august voices like Sir Stephen Runciman, who's a great writer.
[00:21:43]  And he'll give you the idea that basically, yes, they responded because it was an economic opportunity and it was an adventure.
[00:21:52]  And there were all these second sons who had nothing to inherit.
[00:21:57]  And so they had to go there.
[00:21:59]  Now, historians, after careful research, decades worth, going through vast archives and correspondences and letters, it's become abundantly clear, unequivocally so, that these men were first and foremost propelled by a sincere, pious desire to help their fellow man.
[00:22:17]  Okay, it was actually love, okay, altruism, the muscular variety where Jesus himself says, No greater commandment than to love God with all your heart and to love your fellow man.
[00:22:27]  So they were loving God throughout the Crusades because the Pope specifically focused and actually went and gave this amazing, I guess, sermon in the fields.
[00:22:41]  But there's definitely, if you look at the first Crusades and look where he went, there's a focus on the Normans.
[00:22:49]  In Normandy.
[00:22:50]  We call them the Franks, and they were called the Franks, but the Normans.
[00:22:53]  Why are the Normans, why are they kind of the center of gravity, I would say, for the First Crusade?
[00:23:01]  And when the Pope had looked at the whole universe of what he was going to do, he focused on the Normans in Normandy.
[00:23:08]  Yeah, well, the Normans are characters.
[00:23:12]  So, as we know, the Normans are the descendants of the Northmen, the Vikings, who eventually, I think, with some sort of treaty with one of Charlemagne's descendants, settled in Normandy.
[00:23:23]  In northern France, essentially, and were Christian.
[00:23:27]  But I think they kept something of the Viking spirit still alive in them, and they were a very bellicose lot.
[00:23:33]  But they were also, they were still amongst them.
[00:23:35]  You had very Christian piety.
[00:23:38]  So they made for a very, they were the ideal crusader because they were adventurous, they were militant, they were religious and pious.
[00:23:48]  And they seem to have been giants.
[00:23:49]  A lot of them were really large, and the way they're described in the sources, among them, Bohemond, who ends up, he's one of the leaders of the First Crusade, and he ends up becoming essentially.
[00:24:00]  The prince of Antioch after it was conquered in 1098.
[00:24:04]  And Anna, the daughter of the aforementioned Byzantine emperor, describes him, and you can just tell she's awed by him.
[00:24:11]  She's just, you know, there was a, he's just this giant and just kind of like he terrified her just looking at him.
[00:24:17]  So I imagine there was a lot of that going on that these Eastern peoples and the Byzantines had not seen.
[00:24:23]  But it is true that amongst the Franks, generally, that's the word even in the Arabic today, when they talk about crusaders or Today in Arabic, if you want to say someone is European or Europeanized or looks European, you say Frank, Al Frunj, because that's in the Arabic mentality, goes all the way back to the Crusades.
[00:24:41]  That's what a white person is or a Christian is.
[00:24:44]  And generally, that was the Frankia.
[00:24:48]  But the North, of course, you have the Norman, who were different in their own slight culture.

=== Avoiding Purgatory Through Crusade (14:13) ===

[00:24:53]  But of course, as time goes by, they do become conflated with the Franks to some degree.
[00:24:58]  But yeah, again, they do stand out for their martial prowess.
[00:25:04]  That's for sure, as do other pranks.
[00:25:07]  We're going to get to that in a second.
[00:25:09]  We're going to get to the call and all that.
[00:25:11]  I want to thank our sponsors, Birch Gold, birchgold.com, promo code BANNON.
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[00:25:55]  Go today, talk to Philip Patrick and the team, particularly with what's going on in the Middle East.
[00:25:59]  Hey, isn't it wild?
[00:26:01]  We're here talking about the first crusade that went in the Holy Land.
[00:26:04]  And guess what?
[00:26:04]  We're talking as President Trump's heading to Beijing, heading to China about the Middle East war and what part.
[00:26:12]  Beijing is going to have in sorting this out, this great powers talk, President Trump's going to have.
[00:26:19]  Brother Ibrahim, Ibrahim is with me, the author of a trilogy of amazing books about the Crusades.
[00:26:26]  We're talking now about the Crusades for young men.
[00:26:28]  We're going to pivot now to the first crusade, a couple of the big personalities and what happened with it.
[00:26:35]  Chapter 845 War Room, 845 War Room.
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[00:27:00]  War Room.
[00:27:01]  Here's your host, Stephen K. Bann.
[00:27:05]  Raymond Ibrahim is with me, the author of just three incredible books.
[00:27:11]  So well, they read like novels.
[00:27:13]  And if you want to give young people in your life, or particularly young men in your life, I strongly recommend you always start with Volume Two, Defenders of the West, these vignettes about these great warriors.
[00:27:27]  Every young man you have will be jacked up after they read it.
[00:27:31]  The whole trilogy you got to read, starting with the overall war, Sword and Scimitar, and then you've got Defenders of the West, and then you've got Two Swords of Christ about the military orders, the monks of the Knights Templar.
[00:27:45]  In the Hospitallers, St. John.
[00:27:48]  Just enormous, incredible stories.
[00:27:50]  The Normans, and the reason is this is a multi part series we're going to do, Raymond.
[00:27:56]  The Normans are so important for the whole story.
[00:28:00]  They had just, and this is the Normans, just to keep it simple, are really the Vikings mixed in with French gals, right?
[00:28:08]  They came down and went up the rivers and into France and they became a military powerhouse.
[00:28:15]  They eventually took Malta and Sicily and they had a whole empire based on.
[00:28:20]  Their military prowess.
[00:28:21]  They took England in 1066 at Hastings, they defeated the Saxons and then had a role.
[00:28:28]  And of course, if you read, you know, if you're a kid raised on Robin Hood, the Normans were considered not the good guys, right?
[00:28:35]  They were kind of hammers.
[00:28:36]  They had a certain Viking way about them.
[00:28:39]  But that's why the Pope particularly knew that, hey, the odds are so long that I'm going to form a Christian army in the West and march that army or take it by sail.
[00:28:52]  To one of the most inhospitable places in the world, the Middle East, and I'm going to take on a group that has essentially conquered most of the known world in their area in five or six hundred years.
[00:29:07]  That would be the Islamic forces now with the Seljuk Turks, but they had already conquered so much coming out of Saudi Arabia.
[00:29:14]  The odds are that are like a billion to one.
[00:29:17]  I guess I'm going to go find the baddest hombres I can find, and that's the Normans.
[00:29:22]  Particularly, you had this system where the lead son gets everything.
[00:29:27]  You've got these other lads who are not in order of going to control anything, and they're a little rowdy.
[00:29:35]  And so the culture has a problem with the male martial attitudes of these people.
[00:29:42]  Why does the Pope decide to go there?
[00:29:44]  And what's the message he gives in that field?
[00:29:48]  I'm going to answer that, but before I do, because you brought up a very interesting point about the Normans and the Battle of Hastings.
[00:29:54]  And they did something else, actually, these Normans, a little around the time of the Battle of Hastings.
[00:29:59]  And before the First Crusade, which is they conquered Islamic Sicily, reconquered it.
[00:30:04]  And that was also another pivotal event that is a sort of precursor to the First Crusade.
[00:30:09]  And it happened again.
[00:30:10]  My dates are a little fuzzy, but I want to say 1060s or maybe 1070s, where they go in and they conquer from the Muslims, the Arabs, the Saracens at the time.
[00:30:21]  So that may as well have been one of the reasons that someone like Pope Urban II did target them because they already had that experience.
[00:30:29]  They've proven their mettle against the Muslims.
[00:30:32]  And they were successful.
[00:30:33]  They were proving it in England as well against the Saxons.
[00:30:36]  So definitely he saw them as the creme de la creme of martial violence.
[00:30:42]  As to your other question, your main question, this is also the time of the truce of God and the peace of God.
[00:30:50]  And the church is trying to basically tame these men, the Normans, the Franks in general, from fighting amongst each other.
[00:30:58]  And this is why part of the message of Pope Urban and other ecclesiastical authorities right around the First Crusade was you know, okay, you have this violence, this violent impulse.
[00:31:11]  Well, let's marshal it and use it for a good cause in defense of the widow, of the orphan, of the poor pilgrim who's traveling.
[00:31:18]  Why fight the actual enemies of Christ, not your fellow brethren?
[00:31:23]  And I think that very much resonated with them because it's true, it makes sense, obviously.
[00:31:28]  And you see this now as a major shift, the First Crusade.
[00:31:32]  Whereby knights and these landed barons and Normans who normally fight with each other because they have a proclivity for that sort of thing now start gearing it towards a much more noble cause, which is fighting again in keeping with Christ's commandment for their fellow man and for God Himself by liberating the Holy Land.
[00:31:53]  So I think that is definitely one of the reasons it resonated with these particular kinds of men.
[00:31:57]  And he sent an emissary now to preach that gospel essentially that we have to recruit there.
[00:32:02]  But it's very specific.
[00:32:04]  That it's you can walk us through it, but they were actually calling for the organization of a Christian army to essentially go on a crusade or pilgrimage to the Middle East and take back not simply the Holy Land, but to take back Jerusalem as the great poem, I think it's from Tasso in the Middle Ages.
[00:32:25]  Jerusalem delivered, sir.
[00:32:28]  Yeah, and and this, you know, here we really come to one of the very first obvious points that most people don't notice.
[00:32:34]  Most historians don't mention the people who will tell you.
[00:32:37]  That the crusades were waged for cynical reasons.
[00:32:39]  It was about second sons trying to get land and this sort of thing.
[00:32:43]  If that was the case, you know, what they're doing, these people with this interpretation, is they're completely missing the extreme labor that went hand in hand with crusading.
[00:32:53]  So, first of all, a lot of these men who were landed and were rich, and Godfrey of Bouillon, Raymond of Toulouse, who were captains of the first crusade, they actually mortgaged their land.
[00:33:04]  And some of them were in debt just to raise money so they can go.
[00:33:08]  Crusading and they already had land, they lost their titles, they gave it up.
[00:33:11]  They, um, just to go and fight in the holy land.
[00:33:14]  Uh, one number two, you know what?
[00:33:16]  Why can't they, if you want to be cynical, why don't you just attack your neighbor like they had been doing?
[00:33:20]  Why travel thousands of miles on horseback or on foot for the average pilgrim through dangerous enemy hostile enemy territory?
[00:33:29]  Uh, where most crusaders and the people who went on the first crusade about 70 of them either died or actually gave up and went home just from the actual journey itself because of the starvation of the disease.
[00:33:42]  Lack of water.
[00:33:44]  When you hear about these stories about crusaders turning to cannibalism, it's because of that, because of extreme duress, where they were in positions of starvation and they would eat corpses.
[00:33:54]  Muslims had done the same as well, for example, during the siege of Constantinople in 717.
[00:34:01]  So, my point is, there's a lot of easier ways to have gone about it than doing this.
[00:34:06]  And also, another very obvious difference between the crusaders and the Muslims, which really highlights the idealism.
[00:34:14]  Or the idealistic nature of crusaders.
[00:34:16]  That is to say, that they weren't out just to conquer.
[00:34:18]  They were out specifically to reconquer the Holy Land itself.
[00:34:23]  And that's not what Muslims ever did.
[00:34:24]  What Muslims always did is, right from their first base, beginning in Arabia, they attacked their immediate neighbors, Egypt, Syria, Iran, Persia.
[00:34:34]  And then once they consolidated those areas, they attacked the next region.
[00:34:37]  So from Egypt, they would attack Libya and so forth.
[00:34:40]  And that's the smart way to do it, of course, because you have your reserves right there.
[00:34:45]  thrown in the middle of enemy territory.
[00:34:47]  That's why it was much more successful and pragmatic, the Islamic conquest, because it wasn't idealistic.
[00:34:52]  It was just who's the easiest target?
[00:34:54]  Oh, it's the guy right next to me.
[00:34:55]  I'm going to attack him.
[00:34:56]  The crusaders didn't do that.
[00:34:58]  They weren't out to conquer anyone.
[00:35:00]  They were out to liberate the very important piece of Holy Land to them, because that's where Christ walked.
[00:35:06]  That's where he was crucified, resurrected, and that sort of thing.
[00:35:11]  So it was very idealistic.
[00:35:12]  They threw themselves in the lines.
[00:35:14]  Then getting there itself was a horrific journey that most of them died from, and they lost so much money.
[00:35:20]  So ultimately, what we're saying here is that for the first crusade, definitely, and most of the other ones as well, too, but definitely because we're talking about the first crusade.
[00:35:29]  The number one reason was sincere piety.
[00:35:33]  Okay, sincere piety.
[00:35:34]  I want to drill down on this second because I think this is a good lesson for young men.
[00:35:39]  These men were hard.
[00:35:42]  They were hard men.
[00:35:43]  These guys were fighters, they were warriors.
[00:35:45]  Like you said, the Normans had already conquered Sicily, they had taken at Hastings, beaten the Saxons, who were also from Viking blood.
[00:35:56]  So they're taking on the toughest and they're beating them.
[00:36:00]  And other people associated with the Normans, that's not simply the Normans.
[00:36:04]  These men were also, because in the medieval and the Middle Ages worldview, they were also deeply Christian, right?
[00:36:13]  But they had faults.
[00:36:14]  They knew they had sinned.
[00:36:17]  Part of this, because indulgences later got so out of control, it was one of the reasons that the reform of the church got traction from Luther and others about these indulgences.
[00:36:29]  Was it not something that the church said that if you go on this crusade, And you're there and you go all in on trying to take back the Holy Land and particularly Jerusalem, that you will get a special indulgence.
[00:36:43]  You will get saved.
[00:36:45]  And these guys, in their own hearts, knowing that they were devout Christians but not perfect people, that this kind of combined two things saying, hey, look, with all the problems I'm going to have, if I sign up for this, I got a path to eternal life.
[00:37:04]  Yeah, a lot of that is correct, but I would caution people to keep in mind that this has to be understood through a Catholic paradigm.
[00:37:11]  And it wasn't about salvation, it was about avoiding purgatory or lessening it in as much as they could.
[00:37:20]  And this is actually one of the reasons people try to attack the Crusades because they make it sound as, oh, the Pope was selling salvation.
[00:37:28]  Well, he wasn't.
[00:37:29]  Actually, the idea of salvation was still that it was through Christ, through baptism, through grace, and so forth.
[00:37:36]  Because of the Catholic notion of purgatory, unless you lived an absolutely sinless life, you would still have to go there, which was extreme suffering after this life.
[00:37:45]  It was temporal, it was temporary, but it just shows you that to these people, they took it seriously and they were trying as much as they could to avoid that law of suffering.
[00:37:54]  But in this, unless the suffering in purgatory, which obviously became a big issue in the Reformation, but in the purgatory, they're making the direct connection that your profession of combat arms.
[00:38:09]  Can lessen your time in purgatory.
[00:38:11]  That's a different pitch.
[00:38:12]  That's a pitch that people hadn't heard before.
[00:38:16]  When you read the history, they go, hang on a second, let me get this right.
[00:38:19]  I'm a warrior.
[00:38:21]  I'm basically a professional, right?
[00:38:24]  Because everybody there was kind of advanced amateurs or professionals that in the profession of combat arms, I can actually lessen my time in purgatory and get to heaven quicker, correct?
[00:38:40]  Yes.
[00:38:40]  And the flip side of that is because they were armed warriors, they knew they were going to go to purgatory because engaging in so much violence and bloodshed, much of which, of course, was not just, you know, so they were trying to use their weakness, which was making them spend a lot of time in purgatory, to help them get out of spending so much time in purgatory by instead of engaging in unrighteous violence, engaging in just warfare.

=== Knights Facing Social Media (08:51) ===

[00:39:06]  Just give me a couple of examples.
[00:39:08]  We'll do this in the second episode in more detail as we talk about the process of the First Crusade.
[00:39:13]  But just give me a couple of the personalities that jump off the page at you that young men are fascinated by the Crusades, but who are some of the big personalities you would like people to focus on, particularly in your book, Defenders Against the West?
[00:39:30]  Yeah, definitely the first one because in the privacy of my own mind, I had to determine who were the most impressive.
[00:39:37]  And chapter one of that book, Defenders of the West, is dedicated to Godfrey of Bouillon, Duke Godfrey.
[00:39:43]  And he is really paradigmatic of what we're talking about, very idealistic.
[00:39:47]  Very impressive.
[00:39:48]  He was landed.
[00:39:50]  He was the Duke of Lorraine.
[00:39:53]  He wasn't the oldest son, but he became Duke through his uncle, actually, who favored him for whatever reason and made him his heir.
[00:40:02]  And despite that, he sold everything, mortgaged everything, raised whatever money he could, raised an army, and went on to the First Crusade.
[00:40:12]  Very pious, according to the sources, including contemporary sources.
[00:40:15]  And again, this is the irony.
[00:40:17]  He's one of the men that, when I was reading, I mentioned Sir Stephen Runciman.
[00:40:21]  And Runciman uses him as an example of a naive leader.
[00:40:26]  He should have never been a leader.
[00:40:28]  He liked to listen to monks and engage in theological debates.
[00:40:32]  And Runciman just completely condemns that as so silly, as opposed to his brother, Baldwin, who he presents as being more politically adroit and whatnot.
[00:40:42]  But when you read the sources, what you get is a humble man, a pious man, a strong man.
[00:40:51]  I quote how he was raised, him and his brother, by their mother.
[00:40:54]  And it's very typical for knights.
[00:40:57]  From birth to about seven, this is when they learn about God and religion.
[00:41:02]  And if they're going to learn any letters, it would be around that time.
[00:41:05]  And then from seven to about 14, they would be given to some family relative, almost like a mentorship, where they start learning all sorts of things, including etiquette, but also horse riding and discipline, and doing duties.
[00:41:23]  And then from about 14 on, this is when they're really, you can see them as squires, and they're engaged in full on combat.
[00:41:31]  Not exactly what kids do today, you know, with their Game Boys and video games.
[00:41:35]  But so they would be engaged in that sort of thing, very edifying, very fulfilling until about 21 when they were knighted, essentially.
[00:41:43]  And this is the same story for Godfrey.
[00:41:45]  But we also learn that through his youth, he was just seen as an immensely stalwart warrior.
[00:41:51]  According, they'll say legend, but according to the sources, multiple sources, with one sword stroke, he split a Turk vertically.
[00:41:59]  Okay.
[00:42:01]  One part, a Turk on a horse, and one part slipped off, and the other part dangled on the horse.
[00:42:06]  And, you know, all the Muslims and the Turks freaked out because it ran back into Antioch looking like that.
[00:42:13]  So he fought a bear.
[00:42:15]  Again, these are true stories.
[00:42:16]  It sounds.
[00:42:18]  Instead of naive, if the military orders, if the Templars had been around or the Knights of St. John had been around, he would have been the type of monastic.
[00:42:27]  I mean, the reason Runciman goes after him is naivete.
[00:42:31]  Immensely spiritual.
[00:42:32]  He's almost like a Zen warrior, right?
[00:42:34]  He's a very, very deeply esoteric Christianity, too.
[00:42:38]  He's very much more the Orthodox Church and the Western Church, not so much just about the ceremonies and the customs.
[00:42:44]  He's really taking in the spiritual nature of the Desert Fathers, the spiritual nature of the West.
[00:42:51]  He's an immensely spiritual crusader, right?
[00:42:54]  Or knight at the time.
[00:42:56]  I would completely agree with those characterizations.
[00:42:58]  I think they're very spot on.
[00:43:00]  And he was, I think, even when I wrote Two Swords of Christ, I mentioned him as a sort of predecessor of the Knights of the Temple.
[00:43:08]  He's the kind of guy they were modeling because.
[00:43:10]  He also was monastic, that he never got married because he was constantly involved in warfare.
[00:43:15]  Due to his piety, he was elected to become the first king of Jerusalem, and he refused it on condition that he not be called king and instead be called defender or protector of the Holy Sepulchre.
[00:43:27]  And he famously said, I will not wear a crown of gold where my Savior wore a crown of thorns.
[00:43:32]  Okay, so that's the kind of man that he was, and he continued fighting.
[00:43:37]  And when he was elected, people think this is, again, it's funny because we were told, oh, they went to the Holy Land.
[00:43:42]  To conquer land.
[00:43:43]  This was about land.
[00:43:44]  Actually, a lot of them, once they had liberated it, all they wanted to do was go back home, including Godfrey.
[00:43:49]  So it was seen as a sacrifice to stay there.
[00:43:52]  Instead of going back home to your loved ones and safety and your lands, you stay in this desert with hostile people all around you in constant warfare.
[00:44:01]  Not exactly a great deal or a great bargain.
[00:44:05]  But he chose it, he opted for it, and he died.
[00:44:07]  He only lasted for a year before he finally died.
[00:44:10]  And without giving too much away, but there's good reason to believe he was poisoned by a Muslim.
[00:44:15]  But that's the parigmatic type of character.
[00:44:19]  I want to get into all that real quickly.
[00:44:21]  Let's go through all three books.
[00:44:23]  I want people, for this exercise, the second book is probably the best, but the other two, and I tell people, get all three of them because you get the overview of the war and you can see so many relevant kind of facts of the day.
[00:44:37]  The second volume right there, The Defenders of the West, and the third volume about the two military orders, the Knights of St. John and the Knights Templar.
[00:44:44]  Just give me a minute or so on all three of the books.
[00:44:48]  Your research.
[00:44:49]  The years writing it, your great love of this time and this tale.
[00:44:55]  Thanks, Steve, for the opportunity.
[00:44:57]  And just to follow up on what you said, the three books can be read in any order.
[00:45:00]  And so, for someone to grab Defenders of the West, if they really want heroism, inspiring stories, which are based on, of course, the long story, the long war between Islam and the West, yeah, you're right.
[00:45:12]  Defenders of the West fills in the spot.
[00:45:14]  The first, but if you want to read them all and if you want to really get it in, the first book would give you the most general introduction.
[00:45:20]  It's assumed that.
[00:45:21]  You know, the reader doesn't know much.
[00:45:23]  So, the first book, Sword and Scimitar, really covers the long history of conflict between Islam and the West from the rise of Islam in the seventh century up until America's first war with Islam, first war as a nation, which is the first Barbary Wars.
[00:45:36]  So, that'll give you the lay of a land.
[00:45:38]  Defenders of the West will, it's the same, it's the same terrain, but told through the eyes and lives of these various defenders that I highlight.
[00:45:47]  Each chapter is basically a mini biography.
[00:45:50]  And the Two Swords of Christ is like both of them.
[00:45:52]  It's really, this is the one that's Focused on the Crusades because even though I wasn't writing about the Crusades, I was writing about the military orders and they are inseparable from the Crusades.
[00:46:01]  So, really, the book, if you wanted the deepest dive of the Crusades, it's the Two Swords of Christ, but it also gets into the religious theology behind it, the rationale, the Christian rationale of warfare that we're talking about because so many people don't know how can you be a Christian and fight back.
[00:46:19]  Well, you're going to see that these guys were as pious as they come, kind of like what I just, even more so from Godfrey, what I described.
[00:46:26]  Because they literally took vows of monks, but they were just the most, you know, like berserk on the field in warfare.
[00:46:34]  So, how did they rationalize it?
[00:46:35]  So, I definitely get into the theology of that.
[00:46:39]  But it even goes way beyond the First Crusade because at least one of those orders outlasted the First Crusades and actually is still alive till this day, the Knights of St. John, of course.
[00:46:50]  So, yeah, thanks for the opportunity.
[00:46:52]  I got into this field because you could just see how appealing this sort of thing is.
[00:46:55]  And at one point, we're going to talk about why it's so appealing and why it's being suppressed.
[00:47:02]  Social media where do people go?
[00:47:04]  We go to Amazon to get the books, where do they go to social media and your website?
[00:47:08]  My website is raymondibrahim.com, and you'll see links to social media and so forth.
[00:47:13]  And definitely check out my YouTube channel, which is just by my name.
[00:47:17]  You can also type in Holy War because that's what I deal with.
[00:47:20]  But my website should have all of my social media links.
[00:47:25]  Thank you, brother.
[00:47:25]  Appreciate you.
[00:47:27]  Look forward to the podcast.
[00:47:28]  Thanks very much, Steve.
[00:47:29]  Part two.
[00:47:30]  Thank you, sir.
[00:47:31]  These books are amazing.
[00:47:33]  Give volume two, get it for a young man in your life.
[00:47:36]  You'll see it change right away.
[00:47:38]  As he reads about the great defenders of the Christian West, birchgold.com.
[00:47:43]  Take your phone out, text Bannon, B A N N O N, at 989898.
[00:47:48]  You get the ultimate guide, it's totally free.
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