Original subtitles

At the end of the 11th century,

a papal call to arms inspired tens of thousands of Christian warriors

to march across the face of the known world,

to reclaim the Holy City of Jerusalem from its Islamic overlords.

These were the first Crusaders, and their seemingly miraculous victory

ignited two centuries of religious war,

as legends, like Richard the Lionheart

and the mighty Muslim Sultan Saladin,

fought for dominion of the Holy Land.

In the 13th century, this titanic conflict

reached a decisive and shocking conclusion.

But for all its drama, this final chapter of the Crusades

has been virtually forgotten.

In the end, the fate of the Holy Land was decided

not on the hallowed ground of Jerusalem,

but in Egypt.

And the ultimate outcome of the Crusades was dictated

not by Christians,

but by the Mongol successors to Genghis Khan,

and by a Muslim slave, a fearsome warrior,

whose story is now all but lost to Western history.

By the 13th century,

after more than a hundred years of Holy War,

and thanks to Richard the Lionheart's Crusade,

Western Christendom retained a fragile foothold in the East.

As yet, Jerusalem remained in the hands of Islam,

but three Crusader states survived,

clinging to the coast of the Holy Land.

These Christian outposts

were ruled by bickering warlords,

with little or no interest in waging Holy War.

Weak, ineffective leaders incapable of defending themselves

from any hostile neighbouring powers.

As factualism and disunity crippled the secular powers of the Crusader states,

the defence of the Holy Land increasingly fell to others.

Above all, the military orders.

The members of these orders combined the ideals of knighthood

and monasticism.

They were, essentially, Christian warrior monks,

the perfection of the crusading idea.

And they would come to play an ever more vital role

in the very survival of the Crusader states.

After the success of the First Crusade in the 11th century,

Christian knights banded together to form the legendary Military Orders.

Today, the most famous of these are the Knights Templar,

but there were others,

including the Hospitallers and the Teutonic Knights.

Together, they formed the elite standing army

of the Crusader states,

and they built a series of imposing fortresses across the Holy Land.

For the crusaders these castles addressed a critical weakness,

a lack of man power.

Ever since they'd arrived in the Holy Land,

the Christians were short of men,

and structures like this acted as nails driven into the fabric of this world

to hold the Crusader states together.

This stunning fortress at Montfort stood guard over northern Palestine,

protecting the port of Acre, the capital city of the Crusader East,

about a hundred miles north of Jerusalem.

It was here that the Holy Orders established their headquarters.

And in the heart of the city,

archaeological excavations have uncovered the remains

of one of their magnificent command centres,

a demonstration of the Holy Orders' extraordinary wealth,

which, until recently, lay almost completely buried underground.

This remarkable complex was built by the Hospitallers,

one of the greatest military orders.

It's extraordinary to think that until a few decades ago,

much of this compound remained buried under rubble,

and it's only been revealed now by tireless archaeological excavation.

The sheer scale and majesty of this place revealed the power

and wealth of the Hospitallers.

This is a monument to rival anything in the Middle Ages.

The Hospitallers began as a charitable order devoted to caring for the poor and sick.

But soon, like their Templar brethren,

they embraced the Crusading ideal.

Eight hundred years ago,

these chambers would have been a frenetic hive

of military and logistical organization.

But this complex also stood at the heart of an international financial institution,

because these Christian knights were not just engaged in the business of Holy War.

The Military Orders received lavish donations from Europe's nobility,

and also became heavily involved in trade,

farming, and manufacture.

By the end of the 12th century,

the Templars had developed such an elaborate

and secure financial system that they virtually became

the bankers of Europe and of the Crusading movement.

In what was essentially the first use of a cheque,

it became possible to deposit moneys in, say, Paris,

receive a credit note, and then cash this in the Holy Land.

Alongside the affluence of the Military Orders,

Acre emerged as a bustling centre of trade between Islam and Europe,

In fact, we now know that the Crusader states were actually

minting their own money, so that even in the midst of holy war,

they could trade with their supposed Muslim enemies.

The whole economy, basically, of the Crusader Kingdom,

was based on this imitation of gold coin,

and the coins are Arabic coins,with Arabic script,

and they are basically imitations made of the coins

that were produced in Egypt.

Except for these gold coins, the Crusaders also minted

these Western-looking dinars.

This was the typical coin of the West,

and, besides this one, we also have...

I brought an example of a coin which was minted here in Acre,

and which was probably a fraction of this one again.

So what you see, basically, on this table is, more or less,

the monetary system of the Crusader Kingdom at that period,

and these coins are minted in the millions.

The moment the Crusaders set foot in the East,

they, of course, understood that they had to fit in economically.

To build a castle, the quantities of money that were involved,

we're talking about two million.

Millions of gold coins,

just in the building of a castle over a two-year period.

So the investments, what you see around you of Crusader Acre,

the buildings, the stone, the masons, the people involved,

it must have cost an enormous amount of money and it shows that societies

were at war with each other, but underneath, trade went on.

And it only became bigger and bigger.

In the midst of this tide of trade and earthly transgression,

it seemed the Christians had forgotten their sacred struggle for Jerusalem.

At the same time, the Islamic East had fragmented after Saladin's death.

His heirs, the Ayyubids,

retained control of Egypt, Palestine and Syria.

Ruled, in theory, by a sultan in Cairo,

this was really little more than a loose coalition of rivals.

Given the vast fortunes to be made through trade,

by Christians and Muslims alike,

both sides now had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

Back in Europe, the crusading fire still burned.

But its force was often directed away from the Holy Land,

as the papacy launched campaigns against Southern French heretics,

Baltic pagans and the Moors of Iberia.

For 50 years, those few crusades that did reach the East

failed to achieve any lasting conquests.

The Crusade movement was now in crisis,

and Jerusalem's recapture seemed like an impossible dream.

What was needed was the leadership of a great European monarch,

another Richard the Lionheart,

who could spearhead a new campaign and galvanise support.

The only likely candidate was King Louis IX of France.

Around 30 years of age, tall, pale skinned and slight of frame

he was not quite the storybook crusade hero.

But Louis was born of a line of kings who had waged a holy war

and his royal blood was infused with the crusading impulse.

Louis was a fanatically devoted Christian,

obsessed with the life of Jesus Christ.

In 1238, he obtained what was thought to be

the actual Crown of Thorns worn by Jesus on the cross.

The young king spent a fortune building this magnificent chapel

in the heart of Paris to house his sacred relic.

Even in his youth, the King was renowned for his intense spirituality.

But at the age of 30, a grave personal crisis stirred in him

a profound commitment to the Crusading cause.

In 1244, Louis IX contracted a severe fever

that brought him close to death.

In the grip of this dire illness,

Louis declared his unswerving determination to lead a crusade.

Not since Richard the Lionheart, 70 years earlier,

had a major monarch launched a crusade on this scale,

with this degree of determination and devotion.

In the months that followed,

virtually all the great nobles of Northern France enlisted in the coming Holy War.

One of the Crusade's most important recruits was a young knight

named John of Joinville,

a gifted writer, who became one of Louis' closest confidantes.

As a participant in the coming crusade,

John of Joinville came to know King Louis well,

and witnessed the Holy War firsthand.

Years later, he wrote a vivid account of his experiences on campaign,

albeit one that portrayed Louis in a heroic and almost saintly light.

"The epidemic in the camp began to grow worse.

"Our men had so much dead flesh "on their gums

"that the barbers had to remove it to enable them to chew food and swallow.

"It was most pitiful to hear the moans of men,

"from whom the dead flesh was being cut away,

"for they moaned just like women in the pains of child birth."

John of Joinville's King and hero, Louis IX,

set out to perfect the art of crusading warfare.

His campaign was driven by the same spiritual zeal that empowered

the first Crusaders 150 years earlier,

yet was underpinned by the most meticulous planning.

This fortified town of Aigues-Mortes in Southern France

became the European base of operations for Louis' crusade,

and it was here that much of the logistical preparation

for the expedition took place.

To finance his campaign, Louis amassed a huge war chest.

Royal accounts shows that in two years, he spent two million livres tournois,

much of it on paying for his knights.

Given that royal income was around 250,000 livres tournois per annum,

this was a vast commitment.

Louis effectively mortgaged France to pay for his crusade.

In late August 1248, hundreds of ships set sail,

carrying Louis' troops to war,

a formidable Christian army, determined to defeat Islam,

and recapture the Holy City of Jerusalem.

"As far as your eye could behold,

"the whole sea seemed to be covered by the canvas of the ships' sails,

"whose number, large and small, was given as 1,800 vessels."

King Louis stood at the head

of the most perfectly prepared Crusader army ever to depart Europe,

25,000 well-equipped, professional troops.

But unlike the great Crusades of the past,

their destination wasn't Palestine.....

but Egypt.

At first glance, the decision to launch a Crusader invasion of Egypt,

rather than target Palestine and Jerusalem directly,

might seem questionable.

But Louis' actions actually made perfect strategic sense.

Even if some desperate attempt to take the Holy City succeeded,

Jerusalem could never be held, given its isolated position.

But by attacking Egypt,

the heartland of Islam's economic and military strength,

Louis hoped to deliver a telling and deathly blow

to his enemy's power base.

From now on, the war for the Holy Land would be waged here, in Egypt.

Louis' target was Cairo, capital of the Ayyubids,

the fragmented dynasty

whose grip on the Muslim Middle East was faltering.

The French King reasoned that victory here, in North Africa,

would undermine Islam's hold over the Near East,

ushering in a new age of strength and security for the Crusader states,

and opening the road to Jerusalem's recapture.

On 5th June 1249, the Christian army arrived at the mouth of the River Nile,

where they found the armies of Islam waiting for them.

The full array of the Sultan's forces was drawn up along the shore.

It was a sight to enchant the eye,

for the Sultan's standards were all of gold,

and where the sun caught them, they shone resplendent.

This would be Louis'D-Day,

a daring beach landing here at Damietta.

The King was gambling the fate of his entire expedition on this one moment.

Failure would end the Holy War even before it had begun.

As the first Crusaders began to land,

fierce fighting broke out up and down the coastline.

The Muslims launched withering volleys of arrows and spears

onto the Christian landing craft,

and a desperate struggle for the beach commenced.

Many boats couldn't get close enough to land

and, with the possibility of the attack collapsing,

urgent orders went out for the Crusaders to wade ashore.

When Louis, watching from his landing craft,

saw his Royal Standard, the Oriflame, planted into the sands of Egypt,

he leapt over board into chest-high water.

Once ashore, with his blood up, the King had to be physically restrained

to stop him charging headlong into combat.

In the beach assault, the Muslims were said to have lost some 500 men,

while the Crusaders suffered minimal casualties.

For the Christians, the entire landing had been a startling,

almost miraculous, success.

A beach head had been established

and many believed that they'd been lifted to victory by the hand of God.

It was the most stunning opening foray of any crusade,

and overall victory now seemed all but assured.

Louis' army now marched south along the Nile.

Some argued for an attack on the strategically vital port of Alexandria.

But the King decided to risk an advance on Cairo itself,

another huge gamble, one that would strike at the beating heart

of Ayyubid power in the Middle East.

But to reach Cairo, Louis would first have to defeat a mighty Muslim army

that had now gathered here, on the banks of the Nile, at Mansourah.

On the 21st December 1249,

Louis' expedition reached the River Tanis, a tributary of the Nile.

Thousands of Muslim troops were camped on the opposite shore,

and beyond them stood the fortified town of Mansourah.

The water separating the Christians and Muslims was too deep

and fast flowing to cross.

But just as stalemate seemed inevitable,

Louis made contact with an Egyptian traitor willing to betray his people,

an informant who led the Christians

to a secret crossing of the Tanis further downstream.

On the 8th of February, King Louis

and a select band of his troops began to ford the deep river.

The vanguard was led by his brother, Robert of Artois,

alongside a party of Templar Knights.

As dawn broke, the impetuous Robert decided to launch an immediate assault,

directly contradicting Louis' explicit orders.

The Muslim camp was caught completely unawares,

and a mass indiscriminate slaughter began.

The Muslim General, Fakhr al-Din, was set upon by a party of Templars

and cut down by two mighty sword blows.

As they rampaged through the Muslim camp,

it seemed the Crusaders would be victorious.

But in the heat of battle,

the King's brother made a catastrophic error of judgement,

urging his troops on to attack Mansourah itself.

Once inside, the town's gates were closed behind the Crusaders,

and trapped within, Robert and his men were butchered almost to a man.

Amidst the chaos, Louis tried to rally his remaining men back at the Tanis.

The King stubbornly refused to retreat, and for two dreadful winter months,

his Crusaders endured near-daily Muslim assaults,

sustaining crippling casualties.

The Christians were ravaged by disease and starvation.

Even the King was struck down by illness.

When he finally did try to pull back,

marching north towards Damietta, Louis' bedraggled army was routed.

At nightfall on the 4th of April 1250,

Muslim troops eagerly fell upon the fleeing Christians.

The Crusader King's audacious gamble had failed.

Louis IX's Crusade had collapsed in confusion.

Reluctant to abandon his men, but debilitated by disease,

the King was persuaded to take flight.

Louis, so stricken with dysentery

that he had to have a hole cut in his breeches,

was spirited away by a loyal group of lieutenants.

He was eventually forced to take refuge in a small village,

and there, cowering, half dead in a squalid hut,

the mighty King of France was taken captive.

His dream of conquering Egypt

had ended in abject failure and personal humiliation.

This cataclysm on the Nile stunned and bewildered Christian Europe.

Never before had a Western King been taken captive during a Crusade.

Louis was eventually freed after payment of a colossal ransom

and returned home in shame.

If anything, his piety deepened.

Indeed, he was later canonized as a Saint.

Yet for all his devotion, the perfect Crusader King died

without seeing Jerusalem re-conquered.

Louis' defeat in Egypt marked the end of the Great Crusades in the Near East.

It also spelt disaster for the surviving Crusader states.

For what no-one in the West yet realised

was that it had been no ordinary Muslim army

that shattered the French King's crusading dream.

One of the reasons for Louis' defeat at Mansourah

was that he faced a deadly new adversary.

Spearheading the Muslim assault against him were elite Mamluks, or slave soldiers.

Taken captive in the Russian Steppes as boys,

these Mamluks were sold to Islamic rulers, indoctrinated in the Muslim faith,

and trained in the arts of war.

These fiercely loyal and highly professional warriors

would come to play a decisive role in the final chapter of the Crusades.

Above all, these slave soldiers were consummate horsemen.

Schooled in riding from boyhood, they trained relentlessly,

using an early form of polo to hone their skills.

At first, they had served Saladin's heirs.

But in the aftermath of Louis' defeat, the Mamluks swept to power in Cairo.

Slaves now became the masters of the Islamic world.

The advent of these mighty Mamluks transformed the war for the Holy Land.

But in the Crusades' final chapter, Islam's main enemy was not the Christians,

but another band of empire-building warriors.

Nomadic tribesmen from the vast plains of Asia,

who had united under the leadership of the legendary Genghis Khan,

they were the Mongols.

And it was their titanic clash with the Mamluks

that would dictate the fate of the remaining Crusader states in the East.

The Mongols were a force unparalleled in the medieval world,

perhaps in all human history,

unrelenting, seemingly unstoppable, and utterly uncompromising.

Their rise was mercurial.

In the space of just 50 years, they exploded across the face of the Earth.

By 1260, the vast Mongol empire stretched from China to Europe,

from the Indian Ocean to the northern wastes of Siberia.

They had crushed all who stood in their way,

and now their eyes were fixed on the Holy Land.

It was Genghis Khan who had put the Mongol Empire on the map.

By the 1250s, rule had passed to his successors, who led an invasion of Iraq.

There, in 1258, they crushed Baghdad, devastating the city,

putting 30,000 Muslims to the sword.

Only the Mamluks in Egypt could now prevent a Mongol apocalypse,

engulfing the Islamic East.

In the early summer of 1260, envoys from the Mongol General Hulegu,

grandson to Genghis Khan, arrived here in Cairo,

demanding the Mamluk surrender.

"Only those who beg our protection will be safe.

"We will shatter your mosques, reveal the weakness of your God,

"and then we will kill your children and your old men together.

"At present, you are the only enemy against whom we have to march."

The Mamluk Sultan Qutuz responded

by ordering the Mongol envoys' immediate execution.

Their bodies were cut in half and their heads hung from this city gate.

With this defiant statement of intent, the Mamluks went to war.

Sweeping south through Syria,

the Mongols were now just 50 miles from Jerusalem.

For the Mamluks, the fate of the Holy Land

and the future of Islam itself was at stake.

And they decided to confront the Mongol horde head-on in Galilee,

here at Ayn Jalut.

I think, even from the beginning, it was a far-fetched venture.

The Mongols had a terrible reputation.

They had already taken most of Syria.

They had behind them, of course, the entire Mongol empire.

They were virtually undefeated.

Their conquests were accompanied by destruction, by death, by massacres,

and they're the scourge of the civilized world.

The Mamluks were good soldiers too, but they,

since their victories against the Crusaders and... against Louis in 1249, 1250,

they really hadn't had any great victories.

So it was a bit of gamble, and basically,

Qutuz was putting everything into one pot,

he was betting everything that he had on this venture.

If I was gambling in Acre, or in Damascus, or in Cairo, or in Baghdad,

or anywhere else in the area, I would probably put my money on the Mongols.

The Mamluk vanguard was led by a fearsome general named Baybars,

a blue-eyed, Caucasian slave warrior,

who had fought against the Crusaders at Mansourah a decade earlier.

Contemporary accounts describe how the Mongols launched

two devastating charges that shook the Mamluk army to the core.

But teetering on the brink of defeat, Qutuz managed to rally his troops

and mount a decisive counterattack that shattered the Mongol lines

and left their commander slain upon the field.

It's not the first time the Mongols had been defeated,

but it was the first time in a long time, in this area, they'd been defeated.

So the Mongols are thrown out of Syria

and the Mamluks take over Syria up to the Euphrates River

with the exception, of course, on the coast where the Crusaders are still found.

Ayn Jalut was an astonishing triumph for Islam.

Although the Mongols continued to pose a terrifying threat,

their advance had been halted.

But there was a twist to the tale of this historic Mamluk victory.

In October 1260, on their victorious march back south to Cairo,

the Mamluk army stopped in a remote spot in the desert.

Qutuz wanted to indulge his passion for hare coursing.

He was joined by a small group of elite Mamluk commanders,

amongst them Baybars, the man who had led the vanguard at Ayn Jalut.

A count suggests that Baybars asked the Sultan a favour,

and when Qutuz agreed, he reached out to kiss the Sultan's hand.

At this moment, Baybars gripped the Sultan's arms to stop him drawing a sword

and another conspirator stabbed Qutuz in the neck.

The Sultan died beneath a furious torrent of blows.

Before Ayn Jalut, Qutuz and Baybars had been bitter enemies,

rivals who briefly put aside their differences to face the Mongols.

Now, with Qutuz's assassination, Baybars was free to seize the reins of power.

After more than a century and a half of war in the Holy Land,

it would be this remarkable man

who would determine the outcome of the Crusades.

Baybars' story is all but forgotten in the West.

No images of him survive.

Few recognize his name today.

And yet this is the true Islamic champion of the Crusading age.

The man who turned back the savage Mongol horde,

who bent the Muslim world to his will,

and who brought an unparalleled ferocity to the jihad against Christendom.

Once he had seized power,

Baybars' most urgent concern was the legitimisation of his own rule

and the consolidation of Mamluk power in Egypt.

He dedicated the early years of his reign to reshaping the Muslim East,

forging a potent and authoritarian regime.

One of his most cunning political moves

was to re-establish the Sunni Caliphate here in Cairo

because the Caliph, as a spiritual figurehead,

could offer him the legitimacy he desired.

Once he'd selected a suitable candidate,

Baybars publicly swore allegiance to his new puppet

and then pledged to uphold and defend the faith,

to rule justly, and to wage jihad against the enemies of Islam.

In return, the Caliph appointed him as Sultan of the entire Muslim East,

giving him free reign to forge an empire and to crush his enemies.

In early summer 1261, Baybars staged a spectacular procession

through the streets of Cairo, to proclaim his new power and authority.

Dressed in his finery, Baybars and the new Caliph rode in procession

through the heart of Cairo.

Baybars was to be invested as the Sultan,

the ruler of Egypt and the Muslim East.

His subjects would come to love and fear their new master,

Baybars, the blue-eyed former slave.

Transfixed and terrified by the spectre of another Mongol invasion,

the Muslim Near East willingly accepted Baybars' tyrannical rule.

And with unrivalled and absolute power in his hands,

he set about creating the perfect military state.

The Mamluks dedicated themselves to military training, striving to achieve perfection as warriors.

They were taught to deliver precise sword strikes

by repeating the same cut up to a thousand times a day.

Baybars encouraged his troops to experiment with new weapons and techniques.

His army became the most highly trained and disciplined force

of the Crusader era, more than a match for Mongols and Christians alike.

Baybars' Mamluks were a force more numerous,

disciplined and ferocious than any yet encountered in the war for the Holy Land.

And one with no interest in reaching an accommodation with the Crusader states.

These enfeebled Christian enclaves, now encircled by the Sultan's mighty Middle Eastern empire

were horrendously vulnerable and exposed.

In the spring of 1265, Baybars marched out of Egypt.

He'd actually mobilised his troops to counter an expected Mongol invasion of Syria,

but this never materialised.

And ever the ruthlessly efficient commander,

with his army already in the field, he turned his gaze on the Crusader states.

Weak as they were, the Christians could still turn to the elite knights of the Military Orders,

and to the formidable fortresses that had preserved and protected

their fragile foothold in the Holy Land for nearly two centuries.

Arsuf, like several other fortresses throughout the Levant, is a masterpiece.

It is the last word in military architecture.

The complexity, the quality of the building here,

the quality of the garrison inside, it's just a remarkable piece of work.

Capturing the castle at Arsuf would be a fearsome challenge for any army.

Yet when Baybars arrived here in March

and deployed the full force of his Mamluk military machine,

he quickly proved his mastery of siege warfare, down to the finest detail.

Baybars was an incredibly well-organised sultan.

His logistics are a masterpiece.

When we go back to the archaeological finds here,

you can see it, you can see how careful he was about the planning.

So if you look at all the walls around you,

you look at the foundations of the castle, you look at the towers,

it is built out of local stone, it's a very porous type of beach stone.

You look at the catapult stones, this is not from here.

The catapult stones are made out of a very, very dense, hard lime,

that comes from the foot hills of the Samarian hills.

So when he was planning out the siege, he says,

"I cannot bombard the castle with the same stones

"that the castles are built here, "because there's not going to be any impact."

So he's got somebody, 15 kilometres away from here, chipping those stones away.

That is a lot of work. I mean, it will take at least,

I would say a week, maybe ten days, just to get your ammunition ready.

Baybars knew he had time.

There was no help that was going to come from outside.

And because they did not have help coming from anywhere,

they were fighting a lost battle.

After three days of fierce fighting, Baybars took control of Arsuf.

Those Christians who survived were taken into slavery,

and then forced to demolish their own castle.

Baybars was on his way to fight the mongols, he was not planning a beseige

but he has got the army here,

he has already paid them to arive from Cairo to the coast, so why not utilize them?

And he done it.

Baybars' policy of devastation meant that the Crusader states now faced total annihilation.

But the Sultan was not just a brutal military genius,

he was also a frighteningly efficient bureaucrat,

who imposed his will across the Islamic world.

So this is a town called Lod.

In the Middle Ages, this place lay on a key route through Palestine,

and it still holds one of the great treasures of the Crusading era.

Or be it, a little bit hard to find.

Far from the usual trail of awesome Crusader castles and mighty cities,

it's nevertheless a potent reminder of his unique achievements, an unloved medieval treasure.

This is Baybars' bridge.

Still standing, almost 700 years after it was build.

and, incredible, it's still got traffic running over the top of it.

We know it was constructed under Baybars' rule

because it bears his famous lion emblem.

And symbols like this appeared on scores of bridges

constructed across the Near East under his reign.

It may not look that impressive, but this unassuming bridge was

just as important to Baybars' military strength and power

as any of the magnificent weapons he could bring to bear in war.

Before Baybars, no-one had been able to rule the Near East from Egypt

because they were unable to communicate with the far reaches of their realm.

Baybars understood this truth

and that's why he threw huge amounts of money at infra-structure,

building bridges like this and roads,

and with that communication system in place,

he was able to create what's known as his Barid.

This was effectively a postal service,

a system of elite riders and messengers,

who would go in relay from point to point,

bringing messages to the Sultan himself.

Forlorn and forgotten as it might look, this bridge was actually a key element

in the success of Baybars' Mamluk state.

When the age of the Crusades began, 200 years earlier,

the Islamic world was in disarray, divided and disunited.

The First Crusade, and most of the Holy Wars that followed,

had been waged against an enemy paralyzed by infighting.

But Baybars' tyrannical rule united the Muslim world as never before,

finally bringing Islam the power to prevail in the war for the Holy Land,

spelling disaster for the few remaining Crusader states.

In May 1268, three years after defeating the Christians at Arsuf,

the Mamluk army arrived at Antioch,

a city of special significance to the Crusades.

Two centuries earlier,

this mighty metropolis had been the Christians' first major conquest in the Holy Land.

Now, it would mark the beginning of the end.

The first Crusaders had taken eight months to break into Antioch,

but when the Sultan Baybars turned the full force of his Mamluk military machine against this city,

it fell within a single day.

As his troops poured through a breach in the defences ,

Baybars ordered that the city's gates be barred so that no-one could escape.

He then had tens of thousands of men, women and children butchered.

The last days of the Crusader states had begun.

The inexorable obliteration of the Crusader states

continued after Baybars' death in 1277.

The Sultan's successors conquered Tripoli in 1289,

and finally seized Acre itself in 1291.

After almost 200 years,

the war for the Holy Land ended in a definitive victory for Islam.

Dark, brutal, and savage as they often were, the Crusades, nonetheless,

left no permanent mark upon Islam or the West.

In truth, the war for the Holy Land had been all but forgotten by the end of the Middle Ages.

So why do these distant wars still seem to exert a profound influence upon our modern world?

In the 19th century, Europe's fascination with the Crusades was reawakened.

These medieval wars were now recast as glorious triumphs

that seemed to affirm the capacity of great powers,

like England and France to forge empires,

to colonise the supposedly barbaric Near East.

The desire to reconnect with the mediaeval past

found its ultimate expression here at Versailles.

King Louis Philippe of France dedicated five rooms -the Salles Des Croisades

- to these monumental, highly romanticised, paintings of the Crusades.

Here is crusading history reshaped in art.

The first Crusaders capturing sacred Jerusalem.

Richard the Lionheart crushing the Muslims at Arsuf,

and even King Louis of France,

the saintly monarch brought to his knees in Egypt,

now portrayed as an all-conquering hero.

This triumphalist propaganda eventually found its echo in Islam,

not least in the promotion of Saladin

as a Muslim hero, second only to Muhammad himself.

And the misappropriation of the past continues to this day.

Five days after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the american president, George W Bush referred on the ensuing war of terror as a crusade.

Many commentators were horrified,

while Islamist extremists, including Osama Bin Laden,

seized upon the President's statement

as proof that the West was still waging a holy war in the Middle East.

The idea of a direct and unbroken line of conflict linking the mediaeval

and the modern eras has helped to give rise to an almost fatalistic belief

that a clash between Islam and the West is inevitable.

Yet careful study of the complex encounter

between Muslims and Christians, in the age of the Crusades,

reveals that the uneasy mix

of peaceful contact and simmering conflict was not so dissimilar

to relations between rival powers anywhere in the Middle Ages.

The Crusades have things to tell us about our own world,

but most of these lessons are common to all eras of human history.

How hatred of an alien enemy can be harnessed,

how trade can transcend the barriers of conflict,

and how faith can inspire extraordinary deeds and horrific violence.

The notion that the struggle for the Holy Land

has a direct bearing upon the modern world is misguided.

We must examine and seek to understand these medieval wars,

so that we can counter the distortion of our collective history.

And, above all, we must place the Crusades where they belong - in the past.

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