Instead of recording the usual hour, we left with about 90 minutes of superb historical analysis and storytelling. We caught him at his home on a lucky free day. Peter Moore: A brief note before this episode with Dan Jones on the year 1147 and the Crusades. This time around that success would not be repeated, but the events of this year would have many other significant consequences.Ĭlick here to order Dan Jones’s book from John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.

It involved some of the major names of the Medieval world: King Louis VIII of France and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine the abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, and Afonso Henriques I, remembered as a central character in the foundation of modern-day Portugal.ĭan uses these characters and this year as a way of showing how crusading history was developing after the wild success of the First Crusade and the Fall of Jerusalem in 1099.

In this episode of Travels Through Time the bestselling historian Dan Jones guides us back to 1147, the year the Second Crusade was launched, drawing on material from his new book Crusaders. As Dan Jones explains, ‘hundreds of thousands of people were involved in this phenomenon over centuries, and all of their experiences were different.’ 1147 and the Second Crusade There were Viking crusaders, Greek crusaders, preachers, hermits and women from as far as Yorkshire. But this is a reductive view.Īll sorts of people were drawn to mark themselves out from their neighbours with the sign of the Cross on their forehead or chest, and to take up arms in the name of Christ. We all have the stereotypical picture of a crusader: the mounted Knight Templar with all his accompanying paraphernalia, riding as part of a great army across an arid landscape somewhere to the east. Launched by Pope Urban II in the 1095, they comprised a series of eight or nine major expeditions from western Europe to the Holy Land, continuing until the 1490s. The Crusades are remembered as one of the most dramatic and boisterous episodes in all Medieval history.

What if the crusader states survive