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I'm Caleb Zakrin, editor of the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with Sir Simon Mayall, retired lieutenant general in the British Army. In addition to serving, Simon is also a scholar of international relations with a focus on the Middle East. His latest book, The House of War, The Struggle Between Christendom and the Caliphate, covers the history of conflict between the world's two most dominant religions. with a focus on battle.
The House of War is a highly readable history that provides necessary historical context for understanding present-day struggles. Simon, thanks for joining me today on the New Books Network. Well, it's all kind of really a delight to hear. Thank you very much for having me. I'm glad to have you on. This book, I think, is an excellent overview, and I think it answers...
It answers a lot of questions that I think a lot of people might be having today when they're trying to understand why different groups in the world are fighting today.
Without historical background, it can feel very confusing to try and interpret, understand why certain groups seem to hate each other, why certain groups are fighting, why other groups are allied with each other. And I think that this book... provides that background, provides that history in a way that is not only accessible, but also entertaining.
But before jumping into the book, I was wondering if you could just introduce yourself a little bit. Tell us a little about your background. Yeah, certainly, Caleb. Well, as I say, for your listeners, 40 years a British Army officer. I joined really just as Margaret Thatcher was coming into to be Prime Minister in Great Britain and just before Ronald Reagan came in. So very much the focus at the time was on the Cold War and the face-off with the Soviet Union.
but I'd been brought up in the Middle East. And at university, I always had a great interest in history. History has always been my sort of... You know, great academic enthusiasm. When I was at Oxford, I was very fortunate to study under a man called Morris Keane, who wrote a great definitive book about chivalry, but also taught the Crusade. And I studied it really, you know, almost...
As a historical enthusiasm, little realising that a lot of my career would be focused on the Middle East and that it would spring again into prominence, the whole history of the Middle East and the capacity there. crystallized thoughts and animosities, particularly after 9-11, which sparked a really new interest in this period.
And I served with the Sultan of Oman for three years, so commanding Arab soldiers in a Muslim country in Arabic. I was the operations officer for the first Gulf War, desert storm. And then I was in Baghdad. I was back in Kosovo. I was in Cyprus on the UN line between the Turks and the Greeks.
And through it always, you found these resonances of history. So one found, although one was a professional soldier, when I joined, it was largely you needed to be tactically proficient and technically proficient.
But the more we got into the Balkans, for instance, and certainly the wars of 9-11 in Iraq, in Afghanistan, the more you realize that if you didn't understand history, which gives people narratives that... coalesce around senses of historical entitlement, inspiration and grievance if you didn't have the capacity to at least empathize with the people you were.
either serving alongside or in opposition to. You were fighting slightly blind, and the more you could demonstrate respect to an extent, the more you could draw some of the... some of the you know some of the real the real the real hardness within these relationships so And I finished my last posting was as the British Government's Defence Senior Advisor for the Middle East, but also...
The Prime Minister, Prime Minister Cameron, secured the envoy to Iraq and the Kurdish region just after Islamic State had taken Mosul and declared a new caliphate. and a new caliph and this was the first caliph of course who'd been declared since Ataturk. the sort of great hero for the Turks in the First World War and the founder of the Republic of Turkey had abolished.
the caliphate in 1924 so the book to an extent uh you know traces the the the idea of the caliphate and of course finishes with the death of Caleb Ibrahim, detonating a suicide vest. Ask the last rhetorical question, is this the end of the caliphate? Only history will tell.
So my sort of family background, my academic interests and my professional experiences all sort of coalesced around wanting to try and... provide a readable, accessible histories of the Middle East in a way that makes people see them as sort of applied history, useful to their own understanding of the complexity of a fascinating region. Yeah, obviously you have the experience where you bring to it, where you've seen a lot of the places, you've been in a lot of the places.
that you end up writing about. What was the process like for you for actually writing the book? How did you go about your research and your writing? Well, obviously, Caleb, I read a previous book called Soldier in the Sand, which, again, may be of interest to your listeners.
which was called The Personal History of the Modern Middle East, and it really took... my family story, my grandparents, my parents and my own political experience, military experience, to try and explain the Middle East from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. My grandmother was a doctor, as was her sister, doctors in the First World War in the Mediterranean as part of the campaign against the Ottomans.
And then they went east of Suez after the First World War. My father was in Egypt. He was then in Yemen. As I say, I ended up in Oman and first Gulf War. And so I sort of tied in the idea that every time my family and any guys touched the Middle East, I could use that. But the opening power of the opening chapters, one chapter was on. a basic primer for people to understand Islam, its origins, the Prophet Muhammad, the significance of the Quran.
The idea of the caliphate, the movement of the caliphate from the Rashidim to the Ahmaids, to the Abbasids, to the Mamlics, to the Ottomans. tracking the Sunni capital from Mecca to Damascus to Baghdad to Egypt to Istanbul. And the second chapter was this sort of historical development. And eventually I suddenly thought, I'll take those first two chapters. And what I really wanted to do was turn the history into a television series.
But again, just realistic, I thought the one thing that's in my gift is to write the history. And of course, right in the history of the battle, some... And you know, all the way back to Caduceus and Yarmouk, but then the battles of the Crusades, the battles of the Mediterranean, fall of Constantinople. The headline, of course, is Muslim armies against Christian armies. So that can look like quite binary, quite some black and white.
But the more I studied it, of course, the reality was the complexity of the Muslim world. And the complexity of the Christian world meant that very often the infidel is a very obvious enemy, but the heretic and the abyssin is much more deadly because they challenge your belief system and therefore for Muslims. Sunni Muslims, it was often the Shia who were much more of a danger. And certainly for both the Arabs and the Turks, over this large span of history, it was the Persians.
as Shia, who were really, really, all the time, people they had to keep an eye on. So although they were obsessed, obviously, with fighting the jihad against... the infant or the Christians. They were often very firmly fighting the Safavids and Shear. And likewise in Christendom from a very early stage came out of the collapse of the Roman Empire. that the Christian church divided between Orthodox and Catholics, you know, Rome and Constantinople, and that became a real fault-like.
and religion was it was still extremely important and again sometimes difficult for a secular liberals to factor religion in the way it has to be factored in. And of course sooner or later of course Christendom got split again between Protestantism and Catholicism. And lo and behold, even Catholic states were very antagonistic to each other. The French Valois and the French Bourbon dynasties. Our families were absolute loggerheads with the Habsburgs, the Spanish and the Holy Roman Emperor.
And you find that the Valois, or the French, have a treaty with the Ottomans for nearly 250 years. and they're rather encouraging the Ottomans to attack the Habsburgs. And then you find that the Suleiman the Magnificent and many of the Ottomans are reaching out to the Protestants.
saying, hey, why don't we both gang up on the Catholics, because we're a lot more in common, because we don't like idolatry. So although every episode in the book... sort of chronologically takes a major battle they're all epic they're all historical some are really decisive there's a sort of unifying narrative that runs through it that sort of tries to set the context as to why these battles only took place quite
Hardly routinely, there was always a frontier line, and frontiers were always moving one way or another, but it wasn't always. People were more obsessed sometimes with the internal religious struggle within their own religion. with the more obvious animation. and I sort of just grew up over that, and I'm pleased with the product, and I was pleased you talked about it being readable and accessible.
because it is complex. There's a touch of what I would call the Bernard Cornwalls or the Tom Clancy's. I like to think of the storytelling about individual battles, but then... trying to demystify some of it for the lay reader, the intelligent, informed lay reader. So for you, back and learning about these battles. What is the perspective, obviously, as someone that has real-life experience?
What is it like going back and reading about some of these battles and trying to understand how they, you know, how they occur, what the strategy was? Like, how does it differ from today? Yeah, I think it's interesting. Again, we focus on the history and they can look at what's going on in Ukraine, for instance, and it looks very different from maybe the soldier and I did, but at the heart of it, there are some really, really very, very enduring lessons. And if I read back to...
You know, the Siege of Jerusalem or Hattim. Issues to do with leadership. Personality. groupthink or otherwise, deference, logistics, organization, clearly tactics, clearly technology. Interesting to see how the mounted knight... with the stirrup and the coached lance with heavy armour, if you could mass the...
A bit like modern tanks against a much lighter enemy. If the lighter enemy was foolish enough to make itself a mass target, you'd actually destroy it. However, if you could use that weight against itself. And that's in a theory of history, you know, heavy, heavy armor or heavy knife. surrounded by marauding people, picking them off, snipers or mounted archers or the like. Issues to do with just thirst, issues to do with morale.
confidence in your commanders um that was interesting and i thought also um i detected uh not so much detected as one began to trace that the way that the Ottoman state particularly was organized, much more centralized and feudal Europe. Feudal Europe could generate cavalrymen and it could generate infantry.
Its logistics was always terribly haphazard because there was no central state. Sooner or later it was the Ottomans who had the centralizing capacity to have artillery trains and engineering. And more and more that influence came into Western Europe. where kings began to say, I don't want feudal bans, I don't want to call up men, what I want to do is you give me money, and I will hire soldiers.
and I will now be able to build up my own artillery capability. So it's quite interesting how the Ottoman way of war began to determine the politics of Western Europe.
as the centralization went in, and actually how money is so important. And it's interesting how, at the time, some of these battles that you've read about, and I'm writing about Caleb, was the drive to outflank The Silk Roads, which provided so much wealth for the Ottomans, was up to a point behind Columbus's journey across the Atlantic, or Vasco da Gama's journey into the Indian Ocean.
So the crusading ideal to an extent, the jihad, the conflict between Islam and Christendom was viewed also through an economic... prison as well as a military prison as well as a religious prison um and so again as a soldier when i could you know one can visualize people being hot and sweaty and tired and frightened and scared and nervously anticipated or inspired. And I think that was quite helpful as a soldier to be able to sort of...
capture them. I mean, they're short episodic chapters, as you know. And each one of them, I said, maybe a book written about them individually. But I was trying to sort of pass on to the reader a little bit of a feel for what it's like to be, you know. rolling your shoulders on a battlement or gripping a sword handle or sweat coming in your eyes as you're looking out through a partly obscured view through a visor and the like.
or fighting on the battlements of Malta, then I end up in the middle of summer. with a mixture of cannons and double-handed swords, and how you get on a sort of technological cusp, and some of it, again, is just the eternal realities, verities of warfare. Work management platforms. Ugh. Endless onboarding, IT bottlenecks, admin requests. But what if things were
Monday.com is different. No lengthy onboarding. Beautiful reports in minutes. Custom workflows you can build on your own. Easy-to-use, prompt-free AI. Huh. Turns out you can love a work management platform. The first work form you'll love to use Yeah, I think it really, really helps. And you talk about these various conflicts, but you begin the book by talking about these two conflicts.
in 636 AD. I was wondering if you could walk us through a little bit, you know, these two conflicts, why they happened, what they were about. Yeah, it is extraordinary. 636 is only four years off from the death of mom. It's quite remarkable. So, you know, Muhammad... Dies in his 50s. He's been getting the word of God. from the archangel Gabriel that becomes the Koran, the received word of God.
from about 50, 570, 580 or so. And they're converting this extraordinary, not a total backwater mecca is a well-known trading post. But from his death, for the next four years, his inspired followers under the first Caleb... Abu Bakr, Omar, who takes Jerusalem, Uthman, and then Ali.
basically converts or subdues the whole of the Arabian Peninsula. Meanwhile, the great geopolitical fact... is, of course, the debilitating centuries-long battle between fundamentally the eastern part of the Roman Empire. from Constantinople and the Zoroastrian-Sassanian Persian Empire. which has been hanging around for centuries. And these two great power blocks have been fighting, really, in Anatolia, in the Levant, on the Tigris and Euphrates.
And they both absolutely worn themselves down. There's a famine and there's an economic collapse and there's a loss of taxes. So both sides are very weak. And then out of almost nowhere... come these armies, Arabic armies, inspired by this new religion, Islam. And in 636, the Persians and the Romans are actually trying to have a treaty to confront this. But in 636, the armies of Umar defeat Heraclius at Yama. in Syria, and then turn on the Sassanians at a battle called Cardassia.
And within a couple of years, the Persian Empire is absolutely destroyed. And Umar takes Jerusalem in 637. It's been a Christian place of worship for 600-odd years by now. And it's been a real place of worship for Christians since Constantine converted the Romans to the Roman Empire to Christianity in the middle of the 4th century. And suddenly, Omar has taken Jerusalem. He's taken all the holy land.
Suddenly, his success has taken all of North Africa. Within 50 years, 50, 60 years of the prophet's death, they're into Spain. They're crossing the Alps by 630 to exactly 100 years after the prophet's death. They're only just defeated at the Battle of Tors. So it's very interesting, if Heraclius had won at 686 at Yarmul, we may never really have heard of Islam. If the Persians had held at Kadassir, we may never have heard of Islam.
The next time they're close to being extinguished is probably at the time of Genghis Khan. So the significance of these two battles, which are largely unheard of in the Western world, but very, very well known in the Islamic world. And of course, on the basis of that, this new religion feels divinely inspired.
this have happened you know this this new religion and you know inspired by the quran received word of god the concept of jihad have defeated these two great empires and it um you know it did some and Difficult not to understand how you might feel within 100 years of the death of the prophet. You have completely altered the whole balance of power in what was then the known world. So really, really significant, and as I say, not that well known at all.
Yeah, and I certainly hadn't heard of these two battles before, but they're clearly very important in part because... As we'll discuss in the book, for the most part, from around that time until, with one exception, until about 1917. Jerusalem was controlled by Muslims. So it is clearly a very important moment in time. And so much of the focus of the book is on conflicts in the Holy Land.
Obviously, I think many people, at least in the West, when they think about these conflicts in the Holy Land, they think of the Crusades. So I was wondering if you could talk a little about the Crusades. Obviously, you know, so much has been written about the Crusades. But, you know, what did you find in your study about them? Well, I studied the Crusades in the 1970s, and they had a bad reputation then. Interestingly, largely with, of course, Protestant historians.
gave them a bad name. People like Gibbon gave them a bad name. Runciman was never, or they wrote a fantastic three-volume. magisterial book on the Crusades. And they rather gave the impression that a bunch of, you know, Probably not terribly hygienic. and suddenly had nothing better to do than to go out to the... Holy Land and engage in conflict with what, to all intents and purposes, was actually a slightly more advanced civilization by that stage. This was the high-water mark of the Abbasid.
And of course, I think it was written through the eyes of the Enlightenment, through the eyes of the Reformation, through the eyes of... I suppose all the things that were driving secularism, liberalism, rationalism, So there was a temptation to be rather scornful of the motivations, perhaps, of Nike. or crusaders. I think that's been rather addressed. I think it was always worth reminding people that, you know, Jerusalem had been holy, obviously, for the Jews.
from a thousand bc obviously as we said jerusalem holy to the christians from you know 1 ad or 33 ad death of christ and taken by Umar in 637. And so for 400 odd years, this great site of Christendom had been held by the Muslims. And a coincidence of factors of pressure in the Byzantine world, pushback in the Reconquista in Spain against the Muslims in Spain.
The idea of the papacy, inner power struggle with the emperor, offering that we have the capacity to offer people. You're coming up to the 1,100 years from the death of Christ type thing. You've got millenariness. to offer people indulgences. Go and retake Jerusalem, and if you die fighting, you'll go straight to heaven. It's very, very powerful.
And you've got a society, of course, that's based on military competence. That is what the warrior class are. They haven't been that long, in many cases, converted to Christian. So quite extraordinary. combination of factors at the end of the 11th century play under Ervin II and suddenly this extraordinary military pilgrimage as it's known goes
And of course it hits the Islamic world at a time when the Islamic world is very heavily divided. The Abbasid Caliphate is weak and there's a Shia Caliphate, the Fatimids, in Cairo. and big cities like Aleppo and Mosul and Damascus. So there's no unity in the Islamic world. And by a series of happenstance, the Crusaders... break their way through to Jerusalem. And on the 15th of July 1099, take Jerusalem. And then, of course, everybody piles in to try and make it successful. There's no real...
strategic advantage, to be honest with you. And if you were a military man, you'd have taken Damascus. You know, Jerusalem had no military advantage, had no economic advantage, but of course it had this status. And it's held for nearly 200 years. It's a bit of a sort of, you know... It's a bit of a roller coaster of a ride. And the Crusader Kingdom does quite well while the Muslim world is not united. More crusades come. Odessa's lost.
But it's always short of manpower. It compensates with castles, which are really helpful. But ultimately, of course, a great war lord arises, the great Saladin. And in a series of missteps by the Crusaders, they're drawn out in early July 1187 and destroyed at the Battle of Hattin. And Saladin retakes Jerusalem. And although up to a point there's the odd truce where...
Christians can continue to go there. There's a small garrison in 1244 that gets destroyed. Richard the Lionheart almost takes it in the Third Crusade. You're absolutely right. It largely stays. dominated by the Muslims, either the Mamlu. ultimately, and then the Ottomans until 1917. So it's an extraordinary story, and the last vestige of the Crusader Kingdom. It's snuffed out in 1291, and there's really nothing decisive about that.
It was inevitable that, frankly, people had lost interest now. There were power struggles between the English and the French in Europe, but the reconquest in Spain had taken place. The Holy Roman Emperor and the papacy were always in competition, and there was an undermining of the whole crusading ideal, frankly. It didn't die out.
There were later crusades, but the 11th, 12th, 13th century crusades that were dominated by the idea of retaking the Holy Land or holding on to Jerusalem had largely died out by then. And I say, you mentioned Cal, there was a renewed interest in the Crusades after 9-11 because Crusader imagery and references were used very much by Osama bin Laden.
in many of his fatwas. And I think people are rather more, I won't say sympathetic to the Crusaders, but put them more in context and are more empathetic. to the environment and the historical time they were operating in. Yeah, but what was the Islamic reaction to the Crusades? How did they respond to it? Because obviously, you know, there's the focus on Jerusalem, but, you know...
In many ways, the Europeans had gone a great distance to, or the Catholic Crusaders had gone a great distance to reach Jerusalem. What was the reaction? Well, the interesting thing is the Fatimids were almost trying to do a deal with the Crusaders in 1097. But the Crusaders were quite hard-nosed. harm those Catholic warriors, Christian warriors. Some of them became even harder than those Knights Templar and the Hospitals.
At certain stages, the Crusader Kingdoms become part of the mosaic between Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad. Aleppo, Mosul, all these sort of cities. almost used the Crusaders. So there's a really interesting, as I say, mosaic of shifting alliances until Saladin manages to destroy the Fatimid. the heretic Shia caliphate in Cairo, and spends 20 years basically fighting to unite Baghdad, Damascus, and Cairo.
And so while the Muslim world is getting more unified and stronger, the crusader world, as it were, or the feudal kingdoms are becoming weaker and more divided. And in many ways, for a long time after the Crusaders went, it became a bit of a side story for the Muslim world because the Muslims were very much back on the offensive, although they lose Spain.
Under the Ottomans, of course, they're absolutely rampant in Central Europe and the Middle East. So to them, it becomes a bit of a sort of footnote of history. They came and they went. Of course, after the First World War, or perhaps a bit earlier than that, as the Islamic world in relative terms begins to decline relative to... the technology and advance of the Western world, it becomes more of a sort of... a feeling that they lost and they're worried about it happening again.
And there is, of course, a sort of modern trade. If you look at the outline of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, it does match up to a point the outline of the state of modern Israel. And so this is why you get the lines of Zionist and Crusader. is this is a second time with the state of Israel that to an extent lands that the certainly hardline Islamists, Al-Qaeda, Islamic State, Takfiris. would say that land that's been taken by Arab Muslims has been lost.
Hence why the reference back to the Crusaders, even though it's a very long time ago, and fundamentally it was a success for the Muslims when they came out, has this modern resonance and is used quite often. to say, here they are again, and we're going to have to have another 200-year campaign in order to re-establish Muslim dominance in the Holy Land. Obviously, the history that's covered in this book is...
It's very sweeping. It's over 1,300 meters. So, you know, if the listeners are wondering why I'm jumping ahead a little bit, why it's impossible to cover everything. But one of the very consequential... battles or, you know, just occurrences that happen is the collapse of the old empires and really the last standing empire, the Byzantine Empire. You talk about the fall of Constantinople.
I think what's interesting on that one, Caleb, is although it's an epic story, you know, and on the 29th of May, morning of the 29th of May, 1453, The armies of Mehmet II come over the walls, or they get through the walls, and the great defender, just every Justinian army along, gets... so unfortunate gets shot. And his removal from the battlefield leaves his Genoese merceries who've been holding the lines they're going to need to give out. And, you know, Constantinople fought.
And although it has a sort of, it's fate. in the 18th, 19th century looks a little bit flaky when the Russians, it's held by the Ottomans until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, well, still is. But it's interesting that that stayed by 1453, of course, a city that had had a population of possibly a million people on any one day with traders was down to about 50,000. It was a small island. There was another small island, Trebisant, on the Black Sea coast.
At the siege in 1453, they could only probably master about 7,000 soldiers, including mercenaries and soldiers of Fortune. So in some ways, although the battle is hugely epic and it is absolutely of historical significance because it is the end, of Constantinople as a Christian city. for 1,100 years, and it has this, alongside Jerusalem and Rome, has this status and this significance in Christian thought.
It's not a decisive battle. By that time, the Ottomans, really for 100 years, have been dominating both sides of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. have pushed well into, they've destroyed Bulgaria, they've destroyed Transylvania, Serbia, largely the Greeks, they're in competition with Phoenicians. And it's really sometimes in the Ottoman interest to keep...
Constantinople going. Sometimes it's in treaty or truce, certainly. There are economic advantages. But Mehmet II comes to be the sultan and he... He realizes this, for him, is what's going to make his mark in history, is to take the red apple, as it was known in the House of Olsen, is to take it. Um... But, you know, they are amazing walls for anybody who's been to Istanbul. They'll know about the great chain that went between Pera and what is now Topkapa Palace.
They'll know the great Theodosian Walls and the great Sea Walls, and it was still, even with an enormous army and only 7,000 invaders, it was still, the walls may have held out, and I think the title of that chapter is The Walls Fail. Um... And as I said, it's an epic battle. Constantine XI, the last emperor, the last Byzantine emperor. right at the end, takes off his imperial insignia and plunges into the Ottoman genissaries and is cut down, his body's never found.
And it didn't really, however, change much of the strategic balance of power in the region. One always felt it was going to fall at some stage, but I think it's the significance. of the final extinguishing of Constantinople has a huge poignancy in the Christian world and is greeted with the Catholics.
even in the Catholic world, which spent quite a lot of time fighting or certainly not supporting. And one of the tragedies, of course, is we never ever really had a unified response by Christendom to the threat of Islam. because the theological, ideological, doctrinal split between the Eastern Orthodox and the Catholic Church played out in power politics. a real tragedy. And the fall, as I say, huge poignancy. It doesn't really alter the balance of power at the time.
It's sort of, I don't know the exact periodization in terms of if people sort of think of that in a certain way as like the... you know, one of the markers of the end of the Middle Ages, the beginning of the early modern period. You then look at the early modern era and a lot of the conflicts that occurred, you know, far from the Holy Land, far from, you know, these old cities.
conflicts in the Mediterranean and Vienna. Can you discuss a little bit about conflicts as well? Yeah, it's interesting because it does switch then. You know, the Ottomans who have taken over, of course, will take over a little while after this. Remember, the second successor, Selim the Grim. We'll give the new Safavid dynasty in Persia a really good kicking, and then we'll overthrow the Mamluks and take Egypt. and would bring back the sword and the cloak of the Prophet Muhammad to Istanbul.
And gradually, we're talking about 100 years after the taking of Constantinople, the Ottomans will adopt the title of caliph, slightly reluctantly. But you get Selim the Grim, and then you get Solomon the Magnificent. But equally, as some of the magnificent of the Ottomans are expanding into the Mediterranean and into the Balkans, of course, the Catholics are completing the reconquest of Spain.
So you almost get this sort of weighing scales. On the one hand, Christian powers pushing south into Spain, and at the other end of the Mediterranean, the Ottoman power going deeper into Central Europe. But at the same time, you've got these two land campaigns going on. You've got a battle for the Middle Sea as well.
And, you know, increasingly the Ottomans become dominant in the eastern Mediterranean. You still have Crete in the hands of the Venetians. You've got Cyprus in the hands of the Venetians. They've got big fortress ports there. But you then get the Bob recall says. come with a huge load of big galley full of jewels and whatever to Istanbul and pledge allegiance to the sultan there. So Ottoman naval power grows. 1522, Suleiman, right at the start of his reign, takes the fortress of Rhodes.
from the Knights Hospitaller survive after the Knights Templar have been suppressed by the Christian Catholic Church. The Knights of St John find a new home in Malta in 1530. which they reinforce and reinforce.
There's a number of big battles fought around Tripoli, among Tunis, up and down the coastlines. A huge slave trade being run against... well-known, you know, the predations of the Barbary Corsairs all along the coastline, the southern coastline or the northern Mediterranean, shipping hundreds of thousands of people to the slave market. And then right at the end of his reign, Solomon tries to take the island of Malta.
So once again, the Knights of St. John are up against the Ottomans and their allies, and they hold out. The great John de la Vallette, 70 years old at the time, marshals his 500 or so knights and 5,000 Maltese, and they defeat an Ottoman army. in a manner that is decisive, because there's contention that if Malfoy had fallen, then the Ottomans, who to an extent had the eastern Mediterranean, could very well have taken the western Mediterranean and may even have reversed.
either gone to Italy or Sicily, may have reversed the reconquest in Spain. And a few years after Malta, of course, there was the Great Battle of Lepanto, Don John of Austria. A battle between around 500 galleys, about 160,000 sailors, oarsmen and soldiers embarked in this massive... maritime battle off the coast of Greece on the Adriatic side. absolutely destroys the Ottoman Navy. Not that it doesn't come back, but sadly the divisions within the Catholic, within Christendom.
between Catholics and Protestants, between the French and the Habsburgs, between the English and the French, you name it, means that it's not followed up. And actually, it doesn't get translated into stopping the Ottoman juggernaut. But what it does do probably is partition the Mediterranean between East with the Ottomans for the next several hundred years and the West for the Christians. And there remains a sort of balance of power there. There's no great...
And eventually technology changes, maritime technology changes, and the galleus supplanted by it. You know, the man of war, the big three master ship with guns down either side rather than the odd galley. And the Ottomans turn again their attention to fighting the Persians. Thank God for Europeans always breathed a huge sigh of relief when the Ottomans turned east or pushing further into Central Europe and coming up against the Habsburgs.
Yeah. The final battle that you look at in the book is the Battle of Jerusalem in 1917, which is sort of the bookend in many ways of the... of the story of the Holy Land. Obviously, in the book you cover not just battles that occurred in Jerusalem and in modern-day Israel. But this is where the transition occurs, the sort of the final transition that takes us to the present occurs.
from um from ottoman rule to british rule so could you describe this battle uh yeah what occurred here just to rewind just slightly kind of because What we call the high watermark of the Ottoman Empire, you might say the Islamic expansion, is reached outside Vienna in 1683. And that extraordinary battle is actually the inspiration for J.R.R. Tolkien's
Battle of Minas Tirith. The forces of Gondor are the Habsburgs, the forces of Mordor, the Ottoman Empire, the riders of Rohan are John III's Sobieski coming out, and of course Minas Tirith is Vienna. And from that stage, to be honest with you, Christendom... You know, we're getting into...
modern ideas of secularism, of liberalism, of nationalism. We're moving through the Enlightenment. We're moving through the sort of period towards the period of Frederick the Great. We're moving towards the French Revolution. We're moving towards an agricultural revolution, some of the technological revolution. The big imperial battles are taking place.
Europe is fighting itself quite a lot, as usual. The British, the French, the Dutch, the Spanish, those are taking part. And the Russians are entering the fray. And more and more, the Ottomans are viewed as another empire in the great Game of Thrones or Kings. And the Ottomans fall back and back and back, and by the time you come to the start of the First World War... Most of North Africa, frankly, is dominated by the Europeans, the Spanish, the Italians, the British and the French.
Most of the Gulf is dominated by the British by that stage. Iran is very, very weak. Russia and Austria-Hungary have largely chunked away much of the Ottoman holdings in the Balkans. And so you have an empire, albeit an Ottoman Empire, that's weak. It can't reform. It, of course, was held up by the British and the French against the Russians in the Crimean War.
And tragically, at that stage, it decides, the Ottoman Empire decides to throw its lot in with the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians in the First World War. and it would have been to everybody's advantage if the Ottomans had stayed out and remained neutral. Because, a bit like many of the other empires, like the Russian and the Austrian, they were not ready for industrialized warfare.
And of course, having failed in Gallipoli, the British then decide to come in on the great fault line in the Ottoman Empire that was between the Arabs and the Turks. And, of course, the Arabs are the people who were given the received word of God, the Arabs are the people from whom Muhammad came. The Arabs were the people who had the caliphate for 900 years taken over by the Ottomans. And they're susceptible to being told, when we defeat the Ottomans, you will get your land back.
And, of course, you get the big drive on Jerusalem, where you've got the Turkish armies built in there. And, of course, this is the time of Lawrence of Arabia. And you've got problems over in Iraq. You've got Kut and stuff. But this is the time where Lawrence of Arabia and the Arab irregulars of Faisal are fighting on the open flank of the armies of Allenby. and Allenby manages to do a great diversion around Gaza to Beersheba, drives the Turkish army with their German advisors back.
And eventually the Turks and the Germans decide to leave. Jerusalem is an open city. They're not going to fight. a bit like Richard the Lionheart found, it's not really defensible, and if you can defend it, you're just going to destroy, and who wants to be responsible for the destruction of a city holy to three great religions? So the Germans declared an open city and they withdraw. In 1898, Kaiser Wilhelm had gone in there as part of his drive.
for the Berlin-Baghdad railway to say to the Ottomans that he'd like to go and visit. He goes in dressed as a crusader. Can you believe this? they blow open the gates of Jaffa so he can ride through with his helmet on without having to die. When Allenby gets there in 1917, he is told, under no circumstances refer to the Crusades. This is not what we need. ostensibly we're fighting this to give the Arab lands back to the Arabs, release them from Ottoman domination.
you know, make no reference to the Crusades. Thank everybody. Tell everybody all their shrines, their mosques, their temples, their churches will be looked after, that Britain intends to be a really good guardian. It recognizes that Jerusalem is absolutely sacred to three religions. And Alan D'Arcy dismounts and walks in on foot. as opposed to his French counterpart a couple of years later.
who goes to Saladin's tomb in the Umayyad mosque in Damascus and gives it a good kick, saying, Awake, Saladin, my presence here confirms the triumph of the cross over the crescent. well of course as we know history moves on and although the Ottoman lands were divided up among the allied powers mandates were given up under the league of nations the reality was eventually that the
mandate in Palestine, which the British had, is given away. And the state of Israel eventually is declared in 19... 48, albeit with Jerusalem at that stage divided, with the holy sites within it and divided. a very interesting time when Alamy goes in and again the significant of world-weary, war-weary allied nations who are fighting on the Western Front, lost in things to retake Jerusalem.
is quite remarkable at the time, and I think probably not appreciated today, but to retake Jerusalem just before Christmas 1917. uh well something looked on as a very very significant triumph even again militarily it wasn't hugely significant at that stage it was the defeat of the the german the german-backed ottomans in the areas around Jerusalem that was the militarily significant part of that.
but the cultural significance, religious iconography of a British general walking into Jerusalem and declaring an open city and the guardianship of all the sites was very significant. So with this study that you've conducted... What are some of the ways that you think about modern day Muslim Christian relations? how you might think about them differently than how you did before, or just some of the context that you think is necessary and important to understand when people are trying to.
you know, make heads or tails of what's going on today. Yeah. I think, you know, I would say we talked about a bit earlier, kind of, I think understanding geography is really important. I think understanding history and reference points is really important. If you understand history, you understand people's narratives
You've only got to look at what Putin's doing at the moment. He's building a narrative based on entitlement, inspiration, and grievance. And that's undoubtedly what Islamic State and Al-Qaeda have done. I think the key is to be careful about using the expression the Middle East or even Islam as a block. I say to people, the way for my mind to envisage the Middle East is like a set of Olympic rings. You need to put a ring around modern Turkey.
geographically because it has borders, but then an influence ring around it that takes in the Balkans, the Eastern Mediterranean, the Arab world, which is why they're in Syria, why they're interested in Iraq, why they're still interested in other parts of the world.
Then you put another big ring around Iran, Persia, the great Persian empires, the great Persia as a regional power, and Persia, of course, as a Shia. So you've got to look at the... umbra of influence then you put another one around the gulf states to an extent around mecca almost so the arabs you know who were the people to whom god gave the word of the quran through the prophet muhammad
And you have to look at that. And then you look at, again, influence. You know, this is where the original Islamic religion came from. And that influence is all the way along North Africa. It's all the way out to the Far East. And then to an extent, there's a fourth one that goes around Egypt, as Egypt does look on itself as a great civilizational power.
And again, it dominated most of that region, North Africa and the Holy Land for quite a long time under various dynasties. So you've got these four big, big rings. And then you've got a fifth ring which is what I call the trade space. which is what you and I would know the modern states of Iraq, of Syria, of Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel, and throw into that obviously West Bank and Gaza with their very distinctive role, because that's the area where everybody has tried to dominate.
where the Arabs dominated, the Persians have dominated, the Egyptians have dominated in their time, and the Ottomans have. And when you've got that, you begin to then within that, begin to look at the various, you know, the ethnicity within that, and then the confessional division largely between Sunni and Shia, but not, not, not, not totally. And those give you what I call the building block. that mean that if you are seeing some headline about Houthis or
IHT in Damascus or militias in Iraq. You can just say, let me just work out the connectivity. These are Arabs, but they're Shia. Yeah, no, these are Sunni, but they're what I know. These are actually Christians. Oh, these are Turkic people. And the capacity to make that connectivity, I think, means politically you don't go, oh my God, this is all too difficult. It's all too complex.
But like, and I'm not a scientist, I always say to people, it's like looking at a really complex equation. If you are a scientist or an engineer or a mathematician, you can break that down. you know why this is over that and what that symbol means. And I think if you have the capacity to look at the Middle East... you then begin to understand the reference points. What are the points of reference? Why are people using some of these historical resonances? You can unpack.
some of the fatwas from Osama bin Laden or the Islamic State and say, ah, that's the origin of that. That's why that touches a nerve. That's why that reaches out. That's why, of course, Iran, although they're Persians and they're Shia, can still talk about liberating Jerusalem because they are Muslims as well. so they can back Hamas, even though, in many ways, Arab Sunnis are deeply opposed to Persian shit.
They know which buttons suppress. It's why Saudi Arabia can't do certain things within its conservatism because it is the guardian of the two holy cities. Never claim to be caliphs. Claim to be custodians.
Because they know if they're viewed as illegitimate, the Persians will say the high society isn't legitimate. It's why actually the Arabs get very upset about the loss of... spain because that was lost to the arabs or also lost by arabs who were the people who were but they're less worried about the loss of the balkans because that was taken by the ottomans so it doesn't have the same significance
So I think some of these things, I hope, as I say, the two books, Soldier in the Sand and this one, Caleb, People reading them who are well-informed, obviously, but they don't have their own specialization.
reading the mic come back and say ah that that that begins to make a bit more sense i feel more comfortable reading about that than i did before because i i get these i get some of these building blocks as i say geography history ethnicity religion and confessionalism yeah no i i think that's so well said um and Obviously, I think even that framework of trying to understand any contemporary issue is actually applicable, not even just to conflicts in this region, but conflict.
in other regions too um you know very much no i've said exactly that and it's like we say europeans well hang about French, Dutch, Germans, Italians, Spanish. Italy wasn't a nation until 150 years ago. Germany the same. Russia, what's Russia? Russian Empire, Soviet Empire, you're right, India.
So I think the capacity to go back and not be frightened of history, know enough about it to ask the intelligent question, I think that's always a good starting point of your, because I think it's interesting. I read a little bit about this. Tell me a bit more about this today and why this. People respond to that, as you know. That's your historian. Many of your listeners, obviously, are listening because they have an interest in history.
So I need to know enough about a subject to ask the intelligent question. And then it's sort of, it's like unpeeling up whatever you want to unpeel. It gives you the capacity to keep digging a bit further and then you pick up a good book or you read a general book like this.
that that story of malta is interesting i might read a full book about malta which will give me a bit more context or that individual sullivan magnificent let's let's dig a bit more into him and if it if it acts as a bit of a tin opener to a period of history that still has these resonances. If you are Erdogan, you need to know about Selim.
The latest bridge over the Bosphorus is called Selim the Grim Bridge. Well, hey, if you're an Egyptian, you know exactly who Selim the Grim was, because that's when the Ottomans came to overthrow you and take the sword and the cloak of the prophet back to Istanbul. Do other people sell him the Grimm? What? Game of Thrones? Right, right. I mean, it does. I think, you know, as an American, you know, America at least...
Who knows, the foreign policy regime is changing very quickly, but at least up until recently, American... You know? forward policy has been interested in almost every single region. in the globe. And I would say in general that the knowledge of most Americans of any given region is extremely limited, especially the history of it.
You know, there's a parochialism that I think can be found despite, you know, this notion of, you know, of essentially playing the role, you know, a similar role that the British Empire once played. I think, you know, it's a really interesting point, Caleb. If you aren't America And you're talking about 1258, you know, the sack of Baghdad by Genghis Khan. What if you're a Frenchman or a Brit? You've got a $12.50.
You know, if you study your own history, you know who was on the throne properly. You've got an idea. Yeah, probably knights in armor. It's Henry III. It's Simon de Montfort, isn't it? It is interesting that as an American, the 1258, you have to reach back to your Polish origin or your Italian origin or your German origin or British origin. You name it. And it's something that we sometimes need to remember about America. And it's absolutely comment, not criticism. But it does mean that...
When we studied our history, we automatically, because of what we did, have a slight feel for because we were in India we were in the Middle East we were We had knights in armor. We had Richard III. So to an extent, even though we didn't study the Middle East, we knew about it because it touched it.
And I think that is just a very valid comment because you go into certain parts of the world where... I think for the Americans, and I say this in absolute humility, as the greatest, greatest of Transatlanticists and the hugest fan of the great... country in the United States. You don't have that sort of interest in it.
Why would you? And yet, you're dealing in parts of the world where history, you know, for America, it's been so successful because to say, that's history. We don't want to be... driven by history we we all got away from europe exactly to get away from bloody religion and you know repression and this sort of thing and hierarchy and class system.
But, of course, when you go back into the old world, be it in the subcontinent or Southeast Asia or the Middle East, where history and religion remain, you have this absolute division between church and state. In Britain, we have an established church. I happen to be a Catholic. But you go into the Middle East where the issue of religion, there is no separate state because it is driven by the Koran or the Hun.
And it's quite easy to be dismissive or say that's complex. But unless one can factor it in, there's a temptation to look on all military operations, military. rather than, as Christ was to say, they're all political in their own way. And that politics is very heavily driven in many parts of the world by a sense of history and certainly by religion and the capacity to understand it all. preparedness to understand, I think, is important for a senior commander, certainly.
Yeah, no, I think that's true. And I think, you know, there's... You make a great point that the history of the United States compared to other nations is so limited, which means that if you really want to tell a far-reaching story of... you know, the American people, you have to go elsewhere. You have to look at other cultures. You have to go to other places. And, you know, the other thing too, I feel, with history is that the history of the United States interactions.
beyond just our own hemisphere. are in a certain sense still part of the modern contemporary world. There's obviously been many histories written on it, but it doesn't have that depth that you get elsewhere. in other places. Which has been a huge strength, I think, for America. But inevitably, if you are going to be globally present, which you are...
History is important, but as I say, we were all brought up with medieval history. Now, that's not to say we're denigrating it because it's viewed as being too exclusive or a little bit too... you know, elitist or something. But if you do know your medieval history, I find I can go to Damascus or Baghdad. And we can be quite quickly back in the Middle Ages when we're chatting about things, which is helpful. And it's just a passion and enthusiasm of mine.
but sitting, smoking a Hubble bubble pipe in a mired mosque. in Damascus looking around you or going to Istanbul and going to Hagia Sophia or something or walking the Theodosian walls. with a sort of, you know, squinting your eyes and looking down on what might have been the... the hordes of Mehmet II on the 29th of May 1453, I think is...
It's just a sort of part of a cultural upbringing, which is inevitable from old Europeans. It's our weakness as much as our strength, to be honest with you. Yeah, I think that that can certainly make sure there's... You know, there can be an overattachment.
which can lead to lack of innovation. And then also... uh you know a blindness that like leads to getting trapped in situations where even the people that are leading us have no idea of the history of the places that they're getting involved in. You know, that's just how things go. Yeah, absolutely right. The story of history, while you're dealing with the cars you're given and people reach positions of power and influence in all sorts of fields. bringing their own backstory with them.
and their own enthusiasms and their own ambitions and interests. Well, Simon, it's been a delight to speak with you about your book. The title is The House of War, The Struggle Between Christendom and the Caliphate. I definitely recommend people go and pick the book up. Obviously, if you've been listening, Simon's a great storyteller, so I promise that you'll get that same experience in written format, too. So it was really wonderful to get to chat.
Great. Thank you very much indeed, Calvin. Greetings to all your listeners. Many thanks indeed.