EP. 481: The Saga of the Viking Crusaders

Welcome back, my friends, for another Naval History edition of the Proceedings Podcast. I'm Eric Mills, Editor-in-Chief of Naval History Magazine. Glad to be with you. Support for the Proceedings Podcast comes from General Dynamics Electric Boat, which has a 126-year legacy of delivering the submarines our nation needs to defend our freedoms, which has a 126-year legacy of delivering the submarines our nation needs to defend our freedoms and those of our allies. To ensure our nation's defense now at this critical time in history, GDEB is investing in the next generation of shipbuilding and infrastructure to answer the call. It was EB then, and it's EB now. Learn more at gdeb.com slash about slash EB now. And we are here to discuss what is actually kind of a nice winter's read on a cold day like this, if you have a nice fire to sit in front of. A Medieval Saga, which is our cover story of a January-February issue currently out at newsstands of naval history. This is about the Vikings, great seafarers of old. And interestingly enough, their participation of all things, the Crusades to the Holy Land. Here to talk about this is our ever stalwart contributor, Sam Tangretti, who has written about other medieval topics for Naval History Magazine, in addition to his work as a well-known modern naval thinker. So, Sam, welcome back. It's great to have you. Love the article. Maybe people would be interested to know about what prompted you to become interested in the topic of the Vikings and their role in the Crusades, etc. Well, thanks, Eric. I have a personal philosophy and the work that I do in my day job, which is all on future warfare, that you cannot understand the future if you have not studied the past. Now, I recognize the Crusades for the far past, but I was always interested in them when I was a boy, like many others, reading stories of the Middle Ages, knights, castles, that sort of thing. crusades and um that was kind of typical in the period that i was growing up but i think it's still true for a lot of people witness the um interest in the tv show game of thrones which is basically the medieval period put into a you know a different setting a fantasy setting anyway i was always interested in the crusades and um but if you read about the crusades you never rarely ever do they mention naval operations, the sea, the maritime world. If you read Moses Standard works on the Crusades, it's all about land warfare, but also about the First Crusade moving a lot of troops on land all the way through Europe, through the Byzantine Empire to the Holy Land, but very little about the maritime world involved in it. And I think that I like to research on under-researched areas, on areas that others have not looked at. And it's only been recently, like in the 1980s, that scholars started to take a look at the maritime operations of the Crusades. So I've been fascinated by that. And one of the reasons that one of the big influences on the study of Crusades was a series of books, three volumes, written in the 1950s by Sir Stephen Runciman. Now, if you look at those volumes, you see practically nothing about the sea. Now, Runciman was one of those great, wealthy English professional amateurs like Julian Corbett, and he pretty much defined the understanding of the Crusades for many years. It's not till recently, 80s and so, that Jonathan Riley Smith and some other scholars started saying, oh, the Crusader states were sustained by sea. The Crusades could not happen if they were not resupplied by sea. Many of these operations required naval operations in order to be conducted. And now we have, there are a number of scholars, John Pryor from Australia, who's written articles on that, but nobody's really done a book on it. Yeah. And also there are, well, I take that back. There are some scholarly books, but thus far there's no one who has written a popular history of the maritime operations of the Crusades. So I thought maybe some years from now I would like to do that. And then working with you, the idea came, well, maybe I could talk about some of these operations as individual articles. And so that's what I'm doing. One of the things I just want to point out before we continue the discussion is for many years, study of crusades presents a lot of contradictions. For many years, up until recently and up until 9-11, the consensus based on Rensselman was that this was a very brutal, almost colonialism by the Europeans in that area, which is a completely different interpretation in past ages where it was looked as a reestablishment of what was in fact Christian territory. by the Christians in order to allow pilgrims to go to the sites in the Holy Land. Well, after 9-11, it swung back. The focus on the religious aspect swung back. And now we look at it and recognize that those involved were very serious about what they thought their faith was and that they were doing this for their faith. Most of the crusaders gained nothing by it whatsoever. many of the nobles who went on sold property and stuff to be able to finance them going on crusades and after they had fought and thought they achieved whatever their objectives they came home and so the crusades is a fascinating period because a lot of things that people think about it in modern terms are not not necessarily they're approximately correct let's put it that way Yeah, I share your fascination with this period in history, and it's been such an eye-opener to run the series of articles from you, of which this is the latest, that focus on sea power elements and different aspects of the Crusades. It's fascinating stuff, and I hope it all comes together in this book someday that you speak of. It's a brilliant book idea. Like you say, it has not been done in this form yet, and I think the world would be the path to the door of a book like that. You're right. There's an abiding public fascination in this period. And it's interesting you say how there's sort of a, I don't want to say a misconception, but a framing of the Crusades as being all about gain. You know, it was like manifestacity, cloaked in religious language, but it's really for gain. I think a lot of that comes from the popular fascination with the Knights Templar. And I'm interested to hear your take on this because they famously become quite wealthy as a side effect of their involvement in the Crusades. They credit with inventing the modern banking system, hostels, you know, like youth hostels you stay in along the way, all this. And they amassed a great fortune, which, of course, will lead to their downfall because of the greedy French king. But I wonder if that's part of the popular conception of this is just a materialistic thing. And it really is just one sort of aspect of it with one particular holy order of knights that were going there. Well, yeah, it is. But I mentioned Steve Runciman in the beginning. And Runciman was one of these people who he started, he was an expert on the Byzantine Empire. He started at Cambridge studying that and then he received a great inheritance, you know, millions. So what he did is he kind of left that and spent his time writing, and his focus was on the Byzantine Empire. But he was also, I don't know if you would call him a Marxist, but he was a materialist who did not believe that, he really didn't believe that the crusaders were motivated by faith because he didn't see humans as being that motivated by faith. And also, he loved the Byzantine Empire, and he blamed the crusaders for destroying the Byzantine Empire. So if you read his books, the crusaders are portrayed as ignorant, brutal, rapacious, and motivated, just like you've said, for gain. but that was part of his political framework and that's the thing about history no historian is truly unbiased because we all have a different world view so you have that element then you have the other element of the view that this was European colonialism against the Muslims of course not mentioned was that that territory was nominally Christian until the 600s in which the Arabs came and conquered it. And then 400 years later, you have the Europeans coming and conquering it back. But the interesting thing, and this is something that a lot of people don't realize, is that for Arab historians, Muslim historians, up until the late 1800s, the Crusades were now important. If you read Arab histories which focused on dynastic, struggles, the struggles between the Shia and the Shiites and the others. Up until about the late 1800s, the Arab historians paid very little attention to the Crusades. It was something that happened. It was happening for a couple hundred years. But look, we're looking at a thousand years of or more of Muslim history. And that was just a piece. What happened was that a number of the Arab scholars supporting who opposed the French, British and all these European colonial powers interfering in the Middle East found this as a topic that they could compare to what was happening then. and suddenly the crusades became a big uh deal in the you know muslim arab kind of imagination that it never had been before so when osama bin laden said something like you crusaders this and that that whole perspective is not something that comes all the way from religious teaching and Islam, although there's connection there, but that perspective is kind of came from the anti-colonial age or the age of colonialism. They suddenly remembered. A great example is you might remember Saddam Hussein had put up statues of the great Saracen leader Saladin, who fought King Richard the Lionheart and others during the Third Crusades. and he put this up and he wanted to be seen as Saladin and stuff but he never mentioned that Saladin was a Kurd the people that he did the most to try to gas or you know persecute and that part's not mentioned you know little detail there so if Saladin was around that period he would have probably been fighting against Saddam Hussein so So the notion of the Crusades, Crusades are fascinating because they're never one thing in the sense that, you know, we perceive them. This is a religious war between Christianity and Islam. Well, yes, it is. But when you get to the details, you find that it becomes a war of princes. You have in the later period of the Crusader States, you had Christian nobles allied with Muslim emirs to fight other Muslim emirs. At one point, you had Christian nobles allied with Muslim emirs to fight Christian nobles. This is a very complex thing. Also, much of the existence of crusader states, you had Muslim populations living under the rule of the crusader nobles. And I've gone through all the Arab literature, the contemporary Arab literature about the time, and there's several of the Arab chroniclers who complain very bitterly. They say the Muslim population will not rise up against the Christian overlords because the Christians charge them less taxes than their Muslim overlords used to. So it's a fascinating period. And it's also we think of people as changing. We think of us as so different than the people that age. But in reality, we're very similar to those people. We just have more sophisticated toys. That's basically it. All the human aspect of it, running from nobility, spiritualism, all the way to greed and quest for power. That's all happening. And that happens today, too. That's a universal truth there, Sam. That's one of the insights of history, too, isn't it? see that's fascinating just in itself it's much more multi-layered and nuanced than it's just they wanted to go take it over and expel the Muslims in fact they just wanted to make it safe for Christians to travel there to visit the sites which doesn't necessarily mean expelling the existing population it means you're there to kind of oversee it that's very interesting to hear and it's also very interesting and it speaks to human nature how it doesn't become relevant to Islamic-oriented history until it's analogous for the current situation when the great powers are colonizing that part of the world. That kind of makes sense. Suddenly, this is kind of reminiscent of something in their past they haven't really given a whole lot of thought to. But let's get to the Vikings now. We want to talk about the Vikings here, because that's also another endlessly fascinating topic for both scholars and the general readership alike. So let's talk about how they became part of this whole crusade movement. And in fact, I'll let you tell the story, but the first actual reigning monarch of Europe to personally take part in the crusades was a Viking. And this is his story, correct? I leave it to you to regale the viewers and listeners. Okay. One of the things that you have to first I want to start with the sources. How do we know this whole thing happened? There's a whole number of sources that we actually have. There's at least four written in Norwegian sometime between the mid 1100s and 1250. The most significant one is called Heimskringla or the Chronicle of the Kings of Norway. And that was written by Snorri Sturlson, who was actually Icelandic, kind of a writer, a poet, and also a political leader, too. Interesting story. He was exiled for a while there in Norway, went back against the wishes of a Norwegian king, was assassinated. as well as being basically a skull, one who took all this poetry together and created a history from it from all the poetry and songs of people's memory. So that's one. And there's at least four other or three other Norwegian histories. But also it appears in histories elsewhere in England and France, and there's a lot of commentary about it. So we do know we do have a pretty accurate, if not accurate, but a pretty consistent view. So this is not just a saga of Vikings. This is something that other people in Europe had acknowledged that happened. Now, the Vikings became nominally, well, the Norwegians, or all the Scandinavians, became nominally Christian starting about the year 900 or 800. And it happened in the same way as Constantine the Great kind of adopted Christianity. That is, it was viewed by them as the religion of success. They kind of understood it, but they thought that this one God manifested in Jesus Christ would give them victory over those other people who were believing in all these gods and Odin and Thor and whatever. And they were successful. So that's how it started. At the same time, the European missionaries are there in Scandinavia. So eventually they are also converting the everyday people to it. But it had strong kingly backing. By the time Sigurd became king, which was in 1103, the official religion of Norway had been Christianity for about 100 years. But it was not, I mean, a significant part of the population accepted it, but there was still a significant part of the population that was pagan. By accepting the crusade, by being willing to go on crusade, Sigurd actually reinforced the official acceptance of Christianity. Now, being a nominal Christian and living the tenets of the faith, of course, in that period were two different things. They didn't stop Viking practices simply because they had renounced Odin and the Norse gods and accepted the new Christian faith. that gradually occurred, but not in the 1100s. Sigurd and his two brothers were joint kings of Norway when their father died. Magnus Barefoot was their father. And he died fighting the Irish in Ireland Once Sigurd took the cross to go on the crusade he had to renounce the Viking attacking other Christians So he focused on, their focus then became as crusaders, attacking the Muslims and pagans. And so it was an interesting combination of going on a crusade to the Holy Land, yet conducting these raiding operations throughout against the non-Christians. Now, presumably the raiding operations supported the return of Christianity in Spain and other places, the Reconquista. But they also made a lot of money for these, which is generally the motivation for most of the Viking raids in the pagan era. So it's a fascinating thing. The other thing that was happening at the time, and this is kind of the context, is that the Scandinavians had already been traveling, even in the pagan periods, the Scandinavians had already been traveling through Russia down to the mercenaries in the Byzantine Empire. and that was kind of a two-way street in a sense that they would travel down, serve in the Varangian guard of the Byzantine emperor, and they were considered part of the most loyal force, even though they were mercenaries, to the emperor because they didn't owe allegiance to anything else in the Byzantine Empire. So the Vikings traveled down there. Meanwhile, they're establishing kingdoms in what is now Ukraine and that. Traveled down there and made money and then traveled back up into Scandinavia, where they told wonderful, amazing stories about what they had seen in the East. And that created a great desire for many of the male population of Scandinavia to say, oh, we want to go on similar adventures. That corresponded with Sigurd's decision to go on a crusade because you had a whole bunch of available manpower that wanted to go adventuring in that period, you know, in that era. So basically, as Snorri Stolson said, there was a group of Norwegians who wanted to go adventuring into the Mediterranean and to the Holy Land. And they wanted one of their kings to lead them. And so it ended up being Sigurd. And so he took the oath as a crusader and it became a crusade. so um the uh the influence the influence of the previous experience combined with some degree of religious fervor you know came together and uh what makes this a bona fide saga if you will um uh a hero's journey in fictive terms uh an epic undertaking is there's they don't just go to the Holy Land. There's a whole lot they do along the way. And it's like each chapter of this journey is a story unto itself. And that's one of the fascinating things about your piece. And if you haven't read it yet, folks, you'll see this in there. It's like it crams a whole lot of stuff into a feature-sized article that's just kind of it's one thing after another, and it's all good. First off, they stop over in England, and let's talk about that, because now there's a relationship with the English Monarchy Alliance, the Norman invasion and whatnot. And I believe they're fed by the king himself. Let's talk about that. Yes. That was Harold I, who was the son of William the Conqueror. So the Normans, origin of the Normans was that Vikings, in about the year 800, came down into France. They were a threat to the king of France. But at the time, France was not France. It was a whole bunch of different kingdoms and stuff. So basically, the king of France was the one who controlled Paris and that region. So they were a threat to him. So to buy them off, he gave them part of Normandy. And so they became, Rolo was the first who became the Duke of Normandy. and he was originally a Scandinavian Viking, became Duke of Normandy with the King of France being the overlord. Although at that time, the King of France didn't have a lot of control over all these nominal subordinate Dukes, princes, and the like. Anyway, during that period from that 200 years, they transformed from a exclusively seagown culture to very much a land culture, and they developed cavalry tactics. And they were known for their strength as cavalry. William the Conqueror, who had a claim to the English throne, kind of a shaky claim, decided to go to England and defeat the King Harold there, Goodwinson, who had a shaky claim to the throne too. So the Normans came back into England. And although they were very much different by this period than the Vikings, they had European eyes. They adopted a dialect of the French language. They still understood, though, that their heritage had been in Scandinavia. So when the Scandinavian king came, the king of England was very obliged to, since he was a fellow king, to provide the entertainment, the victuals, and support that over the winter. You know, the Vikings did not sail during the winter if they could avoid it. Very rarely, particularly because of the type of ships that they sailed along, ships are not steady in, you know, major ocean, tough ocean conditions, high sea states. So they would winter. They would, you know, voyage during the other seasons in winter. And it happened to be that they started their voyage in autumn and then only got to England by the time winter was setting in. And now people wonder, well, why did they start that late in the year? Usually the Viking operations work their way around planting season and harvest season because most of the Vikings, as I say in the article, plundering was a second job. I mean, they ran farms. There were professional Vikings. That's all they did, plundering. But for many of the followers of Sigurd, these were, you know, it was a second job. These are young men going on adventure, getting away from the farm, so to speak. That went with him. and so anyway first one of the first episodes in the saga is visiting england having good relations with the king of england king of england you know wanted to support the crusades without going on one so by uh helping you know by by helping uh supply um the norwegians the siggins siggins force than he was doing something involving the Crusades and maybe that would give him remission of sins or, as I put it, sort of get the remission of sins vibes from Sigurd himself. So they wintered there and then they went on their voyage down towards Spain. And what I find in the sagas is trying to make sense of the chronology, the timeline, because there's nothing in it that said they went raiding on the coast of France. Yet it took them a very long time to go from England in the spring and end up in Galatia, which is the northwestern part coastal region of Spain. It took them, you know, they didn't get to Galatia till winter was setting again. So I'm trying to figure out what exactly were they doing? Why did it take that long? Is it maybe they left England later than the saga, say? Or, you know, was he actually raiding in France? Although he had promised not to do that. I don't know. But he ended up in Northwest Spain in the second winter of the Crusades, which took three years. It was a three-year crusade. And then that was where he had the first noted battle. But it was actually against a Christian force, but his contemporaries would have considered justified. The Vikings got to the Norwegian. This crusade got to northwestern Spain. It was winter. There wasn't going to be free entertainment. So they made a deal with one of the leading nobles in the region. that the noble in Galatia was the kingdom of Leon at the time, would provide a market that is like medieval markets, an ability for the Norwegians to buy food throughout the winter. But apparently after the Christmas period that stopped, which got Sigurd and his force very annoyed since they weren't able to buy. They were actually purchasing the food. They weren't able to buy the food. Now, why that happened? I don't know. Maybe the market ran out of food or whatever. So what they did is they went and they took over the noble's castle, took all this stuff, took his money to, and then went back out. So they had the food. And so they gained their first profit. But his contemporaries were considered that justified because they would argue that that noble was supposed to provide a market. He failed. He did not live up to his contract. So the Vikings came and took what they thought was theirs and more. I have to wonder what he was thinking. Does he know who he's dealing with here? I don't know, but according to all the sources, they said that he left his castle, maybe fled with his retainers and then the Vikings, you know, cleaned up whoever was left and took his stuff. and then they once they did that they went back uh to sail um and then came down uh from galicia down to the um along the coast of what is now portugal but what at the time was controlled by um the muslims by the saracens by the al-mohad dynasty and so since these were non-Christians, Muslims, pagans, then Sigurd and his force were off the hook as far as raiding was concerned. They could do it as part of this crusade. So they had several battles. And in fact, although there are some sources that say not, it seems to me that they coordinated with the kingdom of Leon, which was trying to reconquer the region. Henry, the Count of Portugal, or the future Portugal, apparently collaborated with them. And they had two, they had three major battles in the region. One was in a place called Centra. It's still a major kind of city in Portugal on the Portuguese Riviera, a lot of tourism there. And then down to Lisbon. And in fact, they captured Lisbon, turned it over to Henry Count of Portugal. Then they sailed down and they had another battle at a city, Alcázar, in what is now Portugal. And then after that, it was time to head towards the Mediterranean. They encountered a Saracen fleet. While the Vikings were raiding in the north region, what later were called the Barbary pirates were doing the same thing. and the Mediterranean and up the Atlantic. So you actually had these two, you know, raiding forces meeting each other, and you had the conflict of religion, so you could invoke that too. So the Sigurd's force routinely defeated that. The interesting thing is that in Snorri Sturlson's version, and he wrote it about 1250 is when he's writing. So it's after the time, but he collected all the sources that were contemporary with Sigurd. The sources refer to the Saracens themselves as Vikings because the term Viking was about raiders. The Norse Vikings refer to them as Norse or Norwegian. they accepted the fact that they were going going a viking and then they kind of applied the same concept to the same to the muslims who were doing the same thing in the opposite direction so they were able to defeat those fleet and eventually get in the mediterranean so basically they fought um four major battles before they even got to the mediterranean each of them having a very interesting uh aspect I was really fascinated by that part. I had never heard that other raiding parties, regardless of their background, were referred to sort of generically as Vikings as well. So it must be very confusing to read. You've got Vikings fighting Vikings, which is actually Vikings versus what would later be the Barbary pirates. Right. That's kind of a neat story concept right there. Right. Right. Well, we look at the Scandinavians of the era and we call them all Vikings. But Viking had a very specific term, was a very specific term as they used it. These were the Scandinavians who were going raiding, going on adventures in far territories. That's them. They would not refer to the people who stayed home as Vikings. There were, you know, Norse, Norwegian, Swedes, Danes, Goths, eventually Finns, too. So that's the term they applied. So they applied that term to other peoples who were employed, had the same occupation. Interesting. so they're finally getting across the Mediterranean toward the target destination how does that play out well they had they made landfall in the Balearic Islands and they had two major at least two major battles that have been recorded there now you have to understand that the records of them were not made by historians. They were made by poets and singers. So those who performed in courts, performed for nobles, also performed for the peasants too. So they needed exciting stories. So the saga is not an exact history. It is accurate as far as we can tell, but the focus This is an exciting story. So, for example, when they were made landfall at the island of Formaterra, which is the smallest of the Balearic Islands, there was a which was a pirate haven for the Muslim pirates, the Moors in particular, which was a population that was mixed race, mostly a mixed race population, population because the Berbers of Africa came along with the Arabs. And so a mixed race population of pirates. So there was a cave on that island in which these pirates kept their treasure and the Norwegians raided it and took the treasure away. And they did it by using the cave was designed in a way that you couldn't approach it successfully against a defended force. But the Vikings hung some of their boats down from the side of the cliff, putting forces in the boats so that they could rain arrows into the cave and push the pirates back. So this was an exciting adventure to sing about. So it got great press, so to speak, although it was kind of a minor skirmish in the big sense of things, certainly not as difficult as attacking Lisbon. so they the vikings did that sort of thing they stopped in uh according to the sagas they stopped in uh sicily uh as a guest of the young who would become king roger the second of the uh normans who had conquered uh southern italy and um that part is a little bit um unclear in the sense that The chronology doesn't work very well for that because they ended up in the Holy Land. It was still spring. So somehow they took them from winter to winter just to go from England to Spain. But they were able to go from Lisbon all the way to Accra, Akko, and now in Israel, which was the main crusader port. And it was still summer. So historians are still trying to work out the chronology, whether chronology was right or what actually happened there. But they made it to the Holy Land. And that's when rather than looking at it as a crusade, it's often referred to as an armed pilgrimage. Because once Sigurd got there, they became kind of the spiritual pilgrim. He visited sites associated with Jesus, with other stories of the Bible, was re-baptized in the Jordan and that sort of thing. And so his battles were mostly on the way till he got there And then it became this kind of armed pilgrimage where he was doing that And the question of course is what were his men doing while he traveling around to the various sites He was collecting relics, religious relics to bring back to Norway, that sort of thing. I don't know what they're doing, but they were probably getting in trouble. So the then king of the kingdom of Jerusalem, Baldwin, employed them in conquering Sidon, which is one of the port cities of the Levant that was still in the Muslim hands. So that's their main contribution to an actual, the actual Holy Land reason was the conquest of Sidon. But that was a relatively small part in the whole saga. I wonder did the Christian forces manage to hold and keep Sidon for any great length of time after that we know? Yes. I think a lot of people changed his hands back and forth. Right. No, actually Sidon was one of the last places that when the crusaders were driven out, when the crusade kingdoms were destroyed. And it was actually by the Mamluks of Egypt. that was one of their last footholds if you go to Sidon the waterfront is such that there's still remnants of a castle that sat right on the waterfront that could be at that time cut off from the mainland from the rest of the city and that was kind of the last, one of the last refuges of the crusaders once they were driven out, they went to Cyprus which was in their hands and a knight's hospilator uh the kind of rivals to the templars um controlled much of that the templars were there too uh and basically the crusade forces retreated into uh to cyprus is where they where they pulled out of sight and went there so the one place they did significantly capture, did remain in Western hands, so to speak, until pretty much the end. That's no worry. Yes. Yes. Eric, sorry. No, I was just going to... Please, go ahead. Oh, I was saying, and that episode actually kind of describes some of the Crusades. They captured Baldwin and Sigurd captured the city and they didn't expel the Muslim population. Most of the population stayed. They did take the nobles, you know, leaders and hold them for ransom and the sort of things you would do in any medieval war, whether you were in Europe or in the Levant. So the idea that the Crusades were a fight of extermination between two religions was never accurate. It was a very complex situation. But they held that. And once that was done, Sigurd considered his crusade over. I mean, he achieved something. He saw all the places he wanted to see. He achieved something. And now it was time to head towards home. And he did that via Constantinople. he took the remnants of his force to Constantinople to visit with the Byzantine Empire who was Emperor who welcomed him congratulated him on his great success this whole thing and Sigurd decided to travel back to Norway by land and people say that's kind of odd for Vikings to want to travel back by land But the reason was that most of his men decide to stay. They decide to join the Varangian Guard, go adventuring on their own. So when Sigurd actually got back to Norway, he only had about 100 followers with him. So, you know, since it's estimated that he had somewhere up to 5,000 followers when they left, he actually only got back with 100. Now, a lot of them might have been killed along the way, of course, but there was a substantial portion that decided they wanted to stay in that region. These are young men seeking adventure. And Constantinople is very welcoming to them. They love having them there. Like you say, they're the elite mercenary guard. And, you know, they're wined and dined with great fanfare when they get there. You can see how that would hold some appeal. Like, I don't want to go home yet. It's going to be cold there. This is going to be pretty good for me. And he didn't hold that against him at all, the king. No. And also you have to remember that the inheritance system was basically primogenitor. That is, the oldest son would inherit the family's wealth. So the younger sons had to go do something else. This was very true throughout the Crusades. most of the crusade knights were the younger sons of the nobility who weren't going to inherit anything so they needed to go find their fortune in the world crusade was very convenient for them to go do that now a lot of them ended up coming back most of many of them most of them ended up coming back, but it was also an opportunity to go out and get property. I mean, as standard medieval warfare, if you besieged the city and you conquered it, or even if the city surrendered, the treasure was yours. That was expected. And in fact, if the city surrendered, usually they kind of ransomed themselves. They said, okay, we surrendered to your authority. We accept your authority. Oh, by the way, here's how many of the Arab term, Arab Maya, what's called Byzants. This is how many Byzants we're going to give you and leave us alone. And that was routine, you know, redeemable thing. So there was gain to be had, but that wasn't the primary motivator for most of the crusaders. Now, in the case of Sigurd, I think that was the motivator for most of his force, most of his men. He came down adventuring. He wanted to get rich. And Sigurd himself did it really. That wasn't his interest. He was going as an armed pilgrim to the Holy Land, demonstrating the importance of himself as the king of Norway. And then when he went back up through Europe, it was a diplomatic tour. He went and visited with the various kings and nobles until he got to Denmark. And then the king of Denmark gave him ships to cross. He gave all the remaining ships to the Byzantine Empire that he had. And the saga says he took the prow of his longship, kind of dragon prow, which was gilded, and took it to the great cathedral of Constantinople, Hagia Sophia, and presented it as his demonstration of his Christian commitment. Now, today, as Christians, we wouldn't think slaughtering a lot of people is Christian commitment, but you have to put in context of the times. We're talking 12th century here. That's right. You put it in context of the times. One of the reasons for the Crusades, and this is clear by modern scholars, is that the Pope wanted to get rid of these people out of Europe. Because these are young men, warriors, trained in combat. If they stay in Europe, they fight wars against each other. So one of the motives, not admitted motive, but one of the motives of the popes in encouraging the crusades was get rid, get these guys out of Europe because the pope wanted to achieve a Catholic peace in Europe. sincerely wanted to end fighting in Europe. So how can you end fighting in Europe if you have all these rootless warrior trained nobles along with all their men-at-arm retainers? If they're in Europe, they're fighting each other. And if you get them to fight outside of Europe against the Muslims for a holy purpose, then you've created kind of a zone of peace, so to speak. Now, it didn't quite work that way, but that was one of the ideas behind not just freeing the Holy Land, not just making it safe for the Christian pilgrims. And pilgrimage was a big thing in those days. I mean, people think that the medieval people did not travel. they traveled mostly related to uh the christian faith uh pilgrimages were a big thing if you remember you know um the uh um canterbury tales you know right i was just thinking that too it's all about uh these stories that are told by these pilgrims going to canterbury which was major religious center in England at the time. Now, people did that. It surprises people today because we have a perception that the medieval periods, the peasants were tied to the land. They never went anywhere. They were ignorant. There's truth in that. But also, people were traveling. Just as they did in the Roman Empire, too. well on his journey his overland journey back Sigurd actually goes through what's now Kiev in Ukraine does he not remember that right yeah no no he did not go to Kiev but many of he actually did not but many of the Scandinavians came down through Kiev because the easiest way to get to the Mediterranean by land was to travel down the rivers in what is now Belarus and the Ukraine. The Dnieper River goes right through Kiev. You can't get to it directly from the Baltic. You have to do some portages, portages coming from the French, where you actually took the ship, you put rollers under it, Usually I would cut trees as rollers, and you actually took it from one body of water, rolled it a number of miles to the next, then sailed down that river, and then you may have to do another potage to another river. But anyway, they came down that route to join the Varangian Guard. Most famous of that was a predecessor of actually connected to Sigurd and his brothers, a great uncle or something like that, named Harold Hadrada. And he came down. He was exiled because his uncle, who was Olaf, later Kenali St. Olaf, who was the king of Norway at the time, was defeated in a battle from rivals. And so Harald escaped the battle. And obviously now Lelis went down, became the chief of the Varanian guards, became incredibly wealthy, took that wealth, went back up to Norway to fight to be the king of Norway once again, since he had a claim to the crown. He also tried to take the kingdom of Denmark, was defeated, but then went to England. And he was the predecessor. If you recall in the William the Conqueror's conquest in 1066, Harold Goodwin, who was the claimed king of England, had to fight both invasions. First Harold Hadrata down from the north. William was coming up from Normandy. Harold decided that Hadrata was the main threat. He went and defeated them. The same time William was landed, Harold Goodwinson took his force, went back down to fight William the Conqueror. By that time, I'm sure they were exhausted. And that was one of the reasons that William was able to defeat him. They had previously fought a very hard battle against the Norwegians. Now they're coming down against the Normans. These were not coordinated attacks. And a lot of other things were happening in England at the time. But that's that. Now, in the article, I say had had been severe counselor, which is what kind of the translation, but actually means, pardon my French, hard ass. It was Harold Hardass. He was like the, I mean, his men were afraid of him. He drove them. And so that's how he got the nickname. Hydrada is actually a nickname rather. It's not a family name. But he was very successful because he was a taught leader. That's amazing. Yeah. I don't want to get out of the rabbit hole, but you're making me think of all these digressions here. Like, that's one of the great what ifs of 1066. What if he'd taken on Williams' invasion force first, instead of being all beat up by Harold before he went down there? How history would have been different. Oh, yes. Yeah, the Vikings had great nicknames. My favorite one was always Eric Bloodaxe. I love that. That resonates with me. Anyway, this is a fascinating story. eventful journey indeed. Now, you mentioned how Snorri Sturlson's Heimskringla is the principal source of this. Is there a preferred English translation of Snorri Sturlson? I'm sure there's multiple ones. Go to the free one. Go to Gutenberg Project online. And that has a version of the Heimskringle that is the one that I used. The English translation, it's a good one because it comes from a compilation of translations from the 1800s, and the translators took the Norse poetry and rhymed it in English. I mean they didn't it's a doctor translation but poetry rhymes so they took it what would have rhymed in Norse wouldn't necessarily rhyme in English but they made it rhyme in English so it's a much more entertaining version I think you would call it I have the modern anthology oh good I'll check it out I have the modern anthology Sagas of the Icelanders and I think it might be some of it's in there. The whole thing, I'm not sure, but I haven't taken that off the shelf in a while. That seems like a pretty good modern edition as well. The Icelandic sagas are such an important source. When there's an oral tradition, you have to go by those oral hand-me-down accounts when there's nothing else to go by. Luckily, in the case of your story here, it is supported by other European points of view while it was happening. It's chronicled elsewhere as well. Right. And William of Mansbury of England contemporary wrote about it. Thomas Menachas, which was a Thomas the monk who was originally German, wrote about it. there were others who were writing about it. So we don't just have the Norse sagas that comment on it. Now, they didn't necessarily write about all the adventures, but they acknowledge there was this King Sigurd. He came down. He did these sort of things. He ended up with the Holy Land. This is the conquered side and et cetera, et cetera. So there were a number of European chronicles about it. And there's some commentary by Arab chroniclers at the time too about it, that these Norse people, these strange people came down to support bioships, to support the crusaders. The only one, you know, I pick on Steve Runciman's version of the crusades. He has only like one paragraph about Sigurd and his three volumes of History of the Crusades. And he actually has a couple of facts wrong. He says that Sigurd visited Castile in Spain, but at the time Galatia was not part of Castile. It was not until 1230 or sometime that Castile had conquered or combined with the kingdom of Leon. He also makes some other comments, but he doesn't use Stirlson as a source. He uses what is called the Agap of Noreg King Sora saga, which was another reference, but a very short one to Sigurd that's contemporary. That's a little bit earlier than Stirlson, but he also relies on some secondary sources in French. so um i think that uh sterlson's version is uh much more superior to all the other versions so but that's because at the time you know the historians writing about the crusades didn't pay attention to the sea and there's a lot to it um during the crusade period and slightly before the normans who are conquering southern italy with sicily which was in muslim hands and technically could have been considered part of the crusades although often it isn't you know they developed a the their version of the tank landing ship uh they developed a ship in which they could open up the bow drop a ramp and have the knights on horses go directly from the ship into the battle you know You know, there's all these maritime aspects happening. It was called Tarifa, was the type of ship. It's actually an Arab term, Tarifa, which is a horse transport ship. So there's these various aspects of the Crusades in the maritime world. And it was the maritime operations that sustained these states, bringing the supplies, bringing the knights, bringing the horses, bringing all the equipment to the Levant, mostly out of Marseille, Barcelona. Those are two big ports. Those were the ones that the Templars used in particular. But also from Sicily, from other ports in Italy, Venetians and their fleet played a big role. Genoese and their fleet played a big role. Pisa, Pizans from Pisa played a big role. So you have also maritime operations and up till now, or let's say up till the 1970s, 1980s, a lot of that was neglected. In the 1970s, as I said, there was a Australian scholar named John Pryor who started writing about this and he focused a lot on the structure of the ships. None survive. We have no surviving examples of the Crusader ships. We do have the Viking longships, but we don't have any plans or anything of the horse transports. We know about them because of what the chronicles wrote about and described So it was difficult to study that But I was also inspired by an article written by an English scholar by the name of John France that was titled The First Crusade as a Maritime Enterprise. And that kind of inspired me to actually take a look at all these maritime operations that are really understudied. And that's one of the elements that made me look at. Another element, and this is personal, is my name, Tancredi, which was originally Tancredi, traces it back to the Crusades. It's an originally Norman French name, came down with the Normans as they conquered southern Italy, became Italianized, and there was several Tancreds that fought in the Crusades or ruled over Sicily. That also interested me in this history. You can't trace it back directly. Most of the crusaders, many of the crusaders had what are called at the time natural children, which meant children out of marriage. So you can't really trace the family lines that well at all because of so many natural children. But the natural children took the surnames once we had surnames. In that period, surnames did not, they didn't use surnames. The Tancred came from the original kind of founder of the family in Normandy, who happened to have 10 sons and six or so daughters. And one son inherited everything. So the nine sons had to go adventuring to create their own kingdom. And at least five of them went down to Italy, first to serve as mercenaries, and then eventually to conquer a whole bunch of stuff. Until they created the kingdom of the two Sicilies, which is confusing because you look on the map, there's only one Sicily. That was southern Italy and Sicily. How about that? You have this history in your veins. That's a whole other interesting angle to it. And I can understand your fascination, additional fascination with it from that. Right. Go ahead, please. And also the naval, you know, my profession, my naval experience, because, you know, you can envision what that was like if you've been at sea and you've dealt with the elements and you've deployed long distances. And what they did is amazing. And the ships that they had, I mean, it took incredible courage to do this sort of thing. But on the other hand, you know, life was thought of differently then. People died very young. The Vikings considered death in battle as very honorable. The two elements, particularly before the Christian era, the two elements was personal honor and comradeship. Now, you gain personal honor by prowess and battle. And then you also develop the comradeship with your fellow warriors. And those were the two things most important to male population at that time. So it was fairly natural for them to get involved in these sorts of activities. Mm-hmm. Well, I think you're involved in what sounds very much like an emerging historical field, if you will, subfield, if you will. And the fact that there's obviously a rich maritime component and amphibious type vessels and whatnot involved in the Crusades. And this is scholarly speaking. It's just barely the surface has been scratched by this. So it's really fascinating to be on the front line of this coming out and reading it. And I feel like you're really on to something with this. And we've loved the installments of your sort of ongoing research that have appeared in the magazine. And we'll certainly look forward to seeing more of them as more of these develop. It's just endlessly fascinating. And I would just close with reminding people that Sam here is a very prolific and prize winning contributor, both proceedings and naval history. and is very much a part of the reliable stable of contributors to both magazines and both fronts, historical and the current and the future. You cover all the bases, Sam. Also, most probably know this in our sphere, but you're now the editor-in-chief of the Naval War College Review. Congratulations on that. That's a very prestigious publication. We've always loved it. Well, that's a very scholarly publication, very different than the focus on how naval history or even proceedings. We accept mostly long, you know, 5,000 to 10,000 words, scholarly contributions. If any of your listeners have that sort of contributions, I'm also bringing back two features. One is called Research and Debate, which is a shorter, very well-researched article-type thing of about 3,000 words or 3,500 words, which is the sort of thing Proceedings does. But, you know, the same sort of, you know, I don't want to say 100 citations, but the same thing, only shorter and focusing on sort of a controversial view of current operations of the future or history. And then something that was previously called set and drift, which is basically a much shorter 2,000 words of, usually by a practitioner about naval operations of sorts. Because the feedback I get on the journal, and I've only done one issue thus far, edited one issue thus far, and it's online. Go to the Naval War College website or just Google Naval War College Review. takes you to that site. The print editions have not been printed yet. And one of the things I inherited in this job is a big budget cut. So I have to manage that. But if people want to look online, what we're doing now, and there's certain things that we're doing that is a little bit different. We feature the author's names on the cover, which was never done before, because I want people to look at it and say, oh, I like that guy's writing. We combined scholars, some from the Naval War College, but mostly from outside with practitioners. And I'm looking at some large, some of the noted naval authors, too, to contribute to. Upcoming issue has a big review essay by Norman Friedman. And so we want to combine that so that if you pick up the journal and you're not necessarily someone who will read a, you know, 9000 scholarly treatment of something, you have other things that will be of interest. But the one thing about the review, its job is to take precise, very intensive analysis, scholarly work on a naval related subject as kind of the basis for the people, for new concepts, for the work that OPNAV does, maybe the joint staff does. We're providing the basic research on those topics and then others will take them and promulgate them or by writing about them in proceedings, you know, in a more attractive way. We're doing the basic research, and that's what we publish. We publish the basic research. There are some excellent articles on how the Navy determined to defeat the kamikaze threat. There's in the current issue just out one of your authors and Naval Institute Press authors, Len Heinz, has an excellent article on the development of SG radar in the Solomon campaign. And you say, hmm, it sounds like a very technical subject. But what that did was it created the concept of the CIC, Combat Identification Center. center. That whole concept came from the use of this radar in the Solomon's campaign. And Len lays it out very precisely, went through all the sources, including combat narratives and stuff very well. And what I view is my mission, as opposed to what you're doing, what Bill Hamlet it does is I get that basic, long, precise research, and hopefully it becomes into the defense dialogue, overall defense dialogue. But generally what it does is others who write for proceedings or naval history or whatever, use that as a resource and then kind of refine that in ways that the concepts can be derived and be useful today or, you know, interests bring ideas to the reader. In my own writing, what I try to do is very much that, you know, I do publish, you know, scholarly articles with, you know, 150 citations, that sort of thing. But what I really like to do is take that and write it in a way that an interested reader who's not a scholar, who doesn't want to read a 10,000 word explanation on a very specific subject can benefit from that. The goal, I think, is to take a scholarly topic and present it the way that Jim Hornfisher or Ian Toll or Rich Frank does or Vince O'Hara does. in a way that readers enjoy. History is not what happened. History is what people remember. And they're going to remember Jim Hornefisher's books long before they remember a very precise 10,000-word article in the Naval War College Review because of the style of writing. And going back to the Crusades, It's one of the reasons that we interpret the Crusades in the way that Steve Runciman did, because he was a good writer. In fact, he said, you know, I'm a writer of literature, not really a historian. So my argument is the person who writes the best about history usually gets, you know, gets the information to the audience in ways that scholarly writing doesn't necessarily. Now, today, using the web and influencers and stuff, you could get conspiracy theories out there very easily. My fear is since people are using social media and stuff, that eventually history will be a string of conspiracy theories like the Templars ruling the world and having a treasure and all that sort of thing, which has absolutely no sources whatsoever. You know, just some stuff. Now, civilizations helped the pyramids built by aliens, you know, and the web is full of that. And most of it has no, absolutely no sources. sources. There are interpretations of things that could be interpreted many different ways. My fear is that history, as far as people remembers, what people remember won't be very accurate. Oh, boy, that's a nightmare scenario. But you know what? You bring up something that has always been sort of a thing for me is all that stuff's out there. Aliens inventing the summer vacation or whatever, make up something, right? Real history is so much more interesting. There's so much there. No matter how much you know, there's more to know. How can you worry about this obvious hocus pocus carnival sideshow stuff when there's this meaty panoply of human experience that's real history that you're never going to learn all of, no matter how much you learn? So I've always been a little mystified by that. but it makes for good quasi-documentaries, right? Right. Go ahead. And I fault many of the trade publishers because they've published things like about the Templars and about the Chinese creating the Renaissance and circumvent. And then it's a grandiose subtitle that claims how such and such changed all of the world. It's a grandiose, overstated subtitle. And also many of them, many of them aren't really history in the sense that they're not, they don't have sources. They have assumptions based on some sort of factoid. And then take that. A good example is the argument that ancient peoples or even medieval peoples had discovered Antarctica because there is this map. The Terry Reising Act, right. Yeah. But what people don't realize is that map makers at the time didn't want blank spaces. And also the Greeks had a theory that the world was balanced. So if there was a continent here, that would be a continent there. So if you look at the Piri Rees map, that's basically the southern end of South America kind of made as a blob because it bounced off things. There's no indication that ancient peoples had ever gotten to Antarctica. And certainly the Atlanteans didn't end up in Antarctica. So, but these books are published as if they're history because they make a lot of money for the trade publishers. That's why you need Naval Institute Press to publish real history. Yes. Amen for that. Just like there's a lot of junk science out there. There's a lot of junk history, too. And we'll just leave it lamented that because that's a whole other kettle of fish. But Sam, thank you. Good luck with the Naval War College review. as you point out, this has always been a very valuable resource for baseline scholarship upon which other things can stand. You mentioned Len Hines. He's having a good month. He's in the upcoming March-April issue of Naval History Magazine as well. So way to go, Len. He's got a foot in each camp, which is the way you want to see. Yeah, Len is a fine scholar and writer, and of course a good collaborator with Vince O'Hara, who is an amazing writer too. Yeah, we don't compete with you in naval history. We are something different. Very symbiotic. It always has been. Very symbiotic. We supplement each other. Yeah, we supplement each other. Yeah, we love you. Yeah, as soon as I get the... I'll be excited about this job once I get the budget issues solved, the personnel issues solved. The journal was about three issues behind. We are caught up now with the last issue. But because it is a government publication, you know, it is free to those American citizens who want to receive it. And for those, if I have the money to print that many copies. So it's a whole different game than if you're running a publication that needs to, that is sold for, you know, profit or for the, or, you know, finance. So we're in a much different situation, which is both good and bad. The other thing that unless authors actually do their own work on it, nothing in the Naval War College Review is copyright because government publications cannot be copyright. They belong to the American people. so those who want to copy articles from it as long as the author has not gone through the process of copywriting that specific article and um you know the the publication is open and then the authors who are are military or government employees or whatever can't copyright it can't copyright their articles so you know this is a very open publication it's published online And every issue of Mabel Warcraft Review is now online, has been scanned online. So, you know, people who go to the website can read the articles. It's not the same experience as holding the journal in your hands and reading it like a book. Part of the budget issue is that, you know, the idea that everybody reads everything online. Well, people will read individual articles online. scholars will google it but very few people read entire journals online you're talking 100 180 pages particularly if it's topics that don't strike them as interesting what we want to do is we want people to read the entire thing because they'll find that the topics they did not consider of personal interest are quite good and and we'll we'll benefit from that there was a issue a few years ago that It had an outstanding article on Dutch maritime painters who went and painted in England for the Royal Navy and for the king. And, you know, you say, well, that's Dutch maritime painters. Why would I, you know, what interesting? And it's so well written and so interesting. And my fear is if you leave everything online and you don't have a print edition, people will not ever experience that. And so I really do believe in both online and print. Oh, same here. And they both serve their purpose. And the fact that you've got all of the World College reviews, back issues and everything, it's all there. That is a massively valuable digital resource for research. And I look forward to delving in there myself. And I very much look forward to going on after this and seeing the current issue now that it's there. And thank you for all you're doing with that. That's important work. And thank you for all you're doing with us. It's been a blast spending this cold, snowy hour talking with you about medieval history. It's a perfect kind of scenario while I'm looking out the window here for this. And look forward to seeing you again, Sam. And we look forward to more from you in the magazine. Keep up the great work on all fronts. And it's been a pleasure talking with you. Thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, it's been a pleasure, Eric. And good luck to you. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Well, that's it for us for today, folks. But I wish you all fair winds and following seed. .