[Music] dan jones thanks for coming on the show my pleasure they said this would never happen they said never happened now the two of us in one space it's impossible listen but i want to say i love taking all the credit for your books it gives me enormous pleasure your your role in my success is is much appreciated thank you for all your help best-selling historian dan jones has turned his attention to one of history's most notorious military orders the knights templar so listen templars talk about the templars what's it all about uh it's about
a paradox the idea of a crusading order of a military order is a weird thing if you think about christianity full stop so back in the year of the crusades um there was a sort of vogue for setting up military orders so we have the templars the hospitals the teutonic knights the sword brothers of livonia the you know there's there's a lot of them but the templars are the ones that become most famous what is a military order well if you can imagine a combination of sort of like a monk not quite not technically a
monk but a professed religious person who also happens to be a trained killer or vice versa a trained killer who decides to devote his life and his activities to the service of the church um that's what the templars were effectively they've fought in the front line of the crusades against the enemies of christ in palestine syria egypt the spanish kingdoms portugal and so on all the areas where crusading was going on during the 12th and 13th centuries um but that this was a peculiar thing and people at the time did did did notes that it
was odd that a trained killer could say i'm going to i'm going to continue killing maiming injuring fighting people but instead of this being homicide it will be malaside it will be the the killing of evil and that god will be super happy with me because i killed some muslims uh and or you know pagans or any non-christian uh whereas if i were killing christians it would be a bad thing and so is this a reflection the fact that crusades weren't i mean i know nate the nation state didn't really exist but they weren't like
kind of national endeavors it wasn't like france and england went and invaded the middle east is that is that was was it just this opportunity for sort of mercenaries and non-governmental bodies to to fill that space well if we start with the to answer that i think we can just think about how the templars came into being which is 1119 1120 in jerusalem so we're talking 20 years after the fall of jerusalem to the western christian the frankish armies of the first crusade jerusalem had been in muslim hands 1099 it fell to into christian hens
now we know from travel diaries written by pilgrims in the 20 years that followed lots of christians from the west from in fact everywhere from russia to scotland scandinavia france all over the place we're going to jerusalem on pilgrimage newly christian jerusalem but their travel diaries recorded a the arts of ardor and the hardship of that that journey but also just how dangerous it was you know you were walking into a very unstable uh countryside and if you went to jerusalem and then started you know you wanted to take a trip to nazareth to bethlehem
to the sea of galilee to the dead sea whatever all of these pilgrims note in their diaries that's sort of what i did on my holiday journal it was incredibly dangerous as you walked along the roadside you would see dead bodies lying there who'd been attacked by brigands had their throats slit and their money taken and the roads were too dangerous even to stop and bury them because you know one pilgrim writes anyone who did that would be digging a grave for himself so around 1119 a french a knight from champagne called hugh of pan
decided that he was going to do something about it so he and some of his buddies you know one of the campuses there were nine of them another says there were 30. but a small group of knights got together hung out the church of the holy sepulchre in jerusalem and said you know we should do something about this we should set up a sort of roadside rescue service to guard pilgrims there was already a hospital in jerusalem a pilgrim hospital run by what became the hospitals they said you know people need assistance on the roads
they need guarding so they were like a private security agency uh in hostile terrain and so that was really the problem that the templars were set up to solve but very quickly they expanded beyond their brief and became something else entirely but why what was it about the new world that allowed these organizations to sort of flourish and take on uh quasi or i don't know almost governmental characters didn't i mean they they sort of they all got it's like they all got injected with steroids they became these huge institutions didn't they they did so
um the the the templars like the hospitals and like the teutonic knights were an international military order so they while they had been granted earlier in their history the temple as this is uh approval headquarters and so on by the king of the christian king of jerusalem baldwin ii really their their power and their legitimacy sprang from their relationship with the pope and they were by a series of papal edicts and bulls taken under the papal wing and so the templars were effectively answerable only to the pope which meant that they didn't pay very many
taxes which meant that they weren't under the authority of local bishops or archbishops which meant that they could own property and and and um and place themselves in multiple jurisdictions without being truly answerable to the local king or lord or whatever it was um they were they had a uniform which had a flag which was of themselves and not can you know not that of another uh authority so they were really like a global organization in you know in modern terms to think about how google operates today or any of these big multinational companies that
are able to have headquarters here and there but a more a richer than a more powerful van in many cases than some states and are beyond the discipline of states in many ways i think it's quite a mod it's got a problem that has it it's modern equivalent and so quite quite rapidly do they start to you know they start to get buildings and premises and and how does that they become sort of almost landowners so after the templars were founded in jerusalem and they began this job of pilgrim duty they were smart and they
they operated through networks of of important families back in france back in england and gained the patronage the approval and favor of powerful people and that meant two things one that they were recruiting members from among the sort of nightly class people who were already trained to fight wanted to fight wanted to go on pilgrims the holy land and were attracted by the idea of joining an organization that could help them do that but of course that wasn't everybody and and you know a lot of people might approve of the templars but not necessarily wish
to sign up you know so they accrued a lot in donations donations of land donations of money donations of property and that ranged from at the top end of the scale alfonso the first king of aragon left them in his will a third of his kingdom never claimed it but he left him in his world a third of his kingdom on the other end of the scale ordinary men and women were dying and leaving the templars what little they had a coat a couple of animals half share in a vineyard this sort of you know
so they they accrued this in these enormous donations from right through the social scale of in western christendom and one of their early successes was was um to organize that property to organize that um that wealth into a system whereby they set up houses called commanderies or preceptories linked together in a hierarchy answerable ultimately to a grand master in jerusalem and which were very efficient at funneling their profits to war zones mainly syria palestine and egypt or to the spanish kingdoms where the reconquista was taking aim at the you know muslim forces in southern spain
and that would just ask about this were they any good at protecting the pilgrims or did it become a big massive money-making exercise i think they were pretty good at protecting the pilgrims um we have lots of accounts of templars um [Music] skirmishing really so what although their military function by the middle of the 12th century became equivalent to some special forces they were the vanguard or the rear guard of proper big crusading armies they were pulling special ops effectively they were the kind of green berets navy seals of the of the crusading army they
were also manning particularly in in the holy land manning castles watching the roads manning the mountain passes they were there to protect pilgrims as they went about now it was still a very dangerous place but i think there was an awareness certainly there was an awareness on the muslim side we have lots of muslim chronicles when they mention the templars it's with um with a degree of a healthy degree of respect and uh one one islamic chronicler ibn al-attir says they were the fiercest fighters of all the franks it was if you saw them coming
you you knew you had problems and and how did they get on because this sounds to me like a massive jurisdiction problem how do they get on with all the other nightly orders or the government such as it was out in the holy land it was really variable is the short answer and um over time the relations between the templars and let's say the kings of jerusalem moved up and down a lot along with the character of the personality the goals of the templar masters and the individual kings so one good example might be amarok
the first king jerusalem in the mid 12th century who had a very rocky relationship with the templars because on the one hand he recognized that they were extremely necessary parts of the the makeup of the crusader kingdom they manned castles they defended pilgrims they served in his armies if he wanted to go down and fight in egypt he would take the templars with him he used templar envoy and so on and so forth on the other hand um the templars caused him a lot of problems because they weren't technically answerable to his authority and they
would they were in some senses rogue agents so so america the first got into it with the assassins a shiite sect in the mountains um of what's now syria and he was trying to broker a peace deal with the assassins assassins were a sect who specialized in spectacular public murder they were more or less a terrorist organization um they wouldn't touch the templars because they realized the futility of murdering templars because it was it effectively in effect a deathless corporation that if you killed a templar and it was like whack-a-mole another one would spring up
and take his uniform in his place okay so in fact the the assassins were paying tribute to the templars to be left alone but america's king of jerusalem was interested in in a peace deal with the with the assassins that a peace deal between the assassins and the king of jerusalem didn't suit the templars because it would mean the end of the tribute the assassins were paying to them so they unilaterally decided to murder the assassin envoy and scupper the deal which they did king amarik absolutely furious understandably found that he wasn't really to do
able to do very much about it he went to the order the master of the order and said i can't believe you've done this and the master said yes it is a shame isn't it um i know what i'll send the guy who did it to rome for judgment before the pope i mean totally infuriating because it's just sticking two fingers up at the king of jerusalem and saying we might be here in your kingdom but your so-called authority means nothing to us and we'll pursue our own policies and you'd better fit in with them
so they were they were quite good at making enemies and those enemies ultimately contribute to their downfall yeah so if we if we fast forward to the beginning of the four well the end of the 13th century beginning of the 14th century in 1291 the crusader states uh were basically wiped out by mamluk forces from egypt the crusader kingdom of supposedly of jerusalem relocated to cyprus along with the temple you know a couple hundred templars and then the inquest began if you like so from 1291 for about the next 15 years people started to wonder
why the crusader states have been lost and a certain amount of blame some fair most of it unfair was leveled at the templars and hospitals as military orders it was their duty to guard the people and and property in jerusalem manifestly they had failed in that duty so there was a lot of call for a reform um and reorganization of the military orders the idea that they might be rolled into one super order and so on people writing tracts and all sorts of this now moved to 1306 all of this began to intersect with domestic
politics and to an extent foreign policy in france france the heartland of the temple is france it's traditionally it's its strongest recruiting ground france where the templars had bailed out french kings when they've been taken prisoner on crusade where they'd saved french crusading army where they sub-contracted for 100 years the treasury business of the french crown you know they would france was safe for the templars or so they thought until the reign of philip iv philip iv was engaged in a long struggle against the papacy and against a number of popes but most particularly one
called boniface the eighth whom he really hounded to death in 1303 um and once but after bonifacio's death still wanted to dig him up and put him on trial for a concoction of charges uh corruption heresy sodomy sorcery you name it the problem really was that boniface had refused to allow philip to tax the church in france okay put that aside for a second philip was also excuse me philip was also in desperate need for cash it's often said oh philip was in debt to the templars not it's not quite that simple philip had a
massive structural problem with the french economy which was twofold one he'd overspent massively on wars against france against aragon and against flanders two there was a general shortage of silver in europe and he couldn't physically make enough coin the solution had been to successive devaluations of the french currency the economy to put it simply the french economy was in the toilet and philip was casting about for ways to fix it he tried taxing the church it brought him into an almighty conflict with the pope he tried in 1306 to attack the jews of france whom
he expelled on mass there are a hundred thousand jews in france expelled them all there are a hundred thousand jews in france he expelled them all uh took their property that didn't bring in enough so 1307 he began to look at the templars as a convenient order whose whose role was somewhat under question following the fall of the crusader states whom he knew was cash rich and land rich because a because they were running french treasury functions out of the temple in paris he knew how much physical coin they had he also knew they were
extremely wealthy in terms of their landed estates and they were kind of unpopular and they were connected with the pope and it was in his interest to bash the papacy so he put one two three four together and and came up with a plan which was to arrest on mass all the templars in france charge them with a a series of sexed up um in every sense um accusations accusations of spitting on the cross of uh trampling on images of christ of having sort of illicit kissing at their induction ceremonies of having mandated sodomy between
members you know if you wanted to compile a list of things that would shock people in france in the middle ages this was the charges that were leveled at the templars on friday 13th of october 1307 phillips agents all over france at dawn went to every templar house knocked on the door presented them with the accusations and arrested them on mass they were tortured they were put on show trials and eventually an enormous amount of evidence was compiled that eventually an enormous amount of evidence was compiled that appeared to show that templars were individually guilty
of terrible crimes against the christian faith and church and as an institution irredeemably corrupt and was that the end of them once that central prop had fallen once the kings of england and elsewhere immediately go oh we'll have some of that as well no they didn't really once they wanted the the the initial reaction to philip's attack on the templars it seems to have been sort of bafflement i mean even edward ii new to the throne in england and not a wonderful or sensible king couldn't really believe that you know he he was betrothed at
that time and seemed to be married to philip's daughter and so he had an interest in falling in line with the church but people just sort of shook their heads and what is this guy on you know what what's going on here but the process was begun the pope at the time clement v was a gascon he was more or less a frenchman i mean gaskely was was english but it was also part of france he was a very pliable he was a pope that was in phillips pocket let's say he never took up residence
in rome he was the first pope to um to live in avignon he was he was people saw him as a french puppet even for him it was a little much to countenance the the rolling up of the most famous military order in the world so he did the best he could which was to take over the process himself which was to say to the king france you know this is a church matter i'm going to take it over and we're going to investigate the templars everywhere so that had the effect of then rolling the
this policy of investigating the temples out to england and aragon and sicily and the italian states and german states tom and yeah i mean while the evidence in france most of it um acquired through torture was almost uniformly bad and templars were lining up to admit that they'd that committed grotesque crimes everywhere else where torture wasn't really used there's not much to go on i mean in england they sent french inquisitors to to look into the english templars but they weren't allowed to use torture and they became incredibly frustrated because they got nowhere with a
templar they said you know did you have sex with each other and kiss each other and spit on christ's image no and in fact there's evidence which is amazing to me that the french and inquisitors started looking into mass extraordinary rendition for the templars they wanted to take them all across the channel to the county of pontius which was another one of these places that was part english part french where they could torture them because it would be in france and you could do things in through and this is amazing didn't happen in the end
enough evidence was kind of weedled out that they could anyway you get to 1312 all of this evidence from all of these territories is amassed and sent to a church council 1311 church council in vienna near lyon and in by 1312 the temples weren't allowed to represent themselves at this council the king of france parked an army down the road to make sure the council came up with the right result but the result was nevertheless that the templars were to be we're useless as an organization no one will want to join them anymore they're rolled
up and they're shut down they're gone and was this a huge boon to the well certainly the key of france i mean what what was there was there long-term value there or was it a bit of a shortcut short-term income boost much like philip's attacks on the jews he didn't get enough out of it i mean we have to assume although we don't know for sure that the coin in the front in the templar treasury in paris ended up in the french treasury which would have been a short-term gain in income but the templar lands
which was where the real wealth existed you know the long-term wealth were given to the hospitals they were not given to the king of france so uh the plan must have been to appropriate this this this land but it didn't happen and so most of the templar lands everywhere really were uh were granted to the order of the hospital hospitals who then had a real pain of 10 years of legal cases trying to you know secure their rights to these things but um so that so it was really a a futile a wasteful and kind
of a tragic attack because it didn't gain anyone anything all right done let's get down to the nitty gritty why why the mystique why the myth what is going on with the with the templar thing yeah it's funny isn't it we're not sitting here talking hospitals or tutoring knights really i mean when no one's making hollywood movies or big budget tv series or what have you it's the ten it's always it's always the templars right a little bit of it must come from their origins the temple mount uh the the temple of solomon which is
what they were named after now the al-aqsa mosque or at every time the al-aqsa mosque but which was identified by the crusaders with the temple of solomon there's great mystery that you know the heart the central mysteries of the christian faith uh all come from around the temple mount haramusha reef right so there's partly that but i think it's much more than that i think the nature of the templars fall the grotesque black propaganda that was leveled against them and the enormous wealth the unaccountability of the organization the combination of of the military spiritual uh
financial all roll together make this a ripe organization on which to uh to attach conspiracy theory about sort of grand global plans and so on um but but i think the nature of the fall the fact they were brought down so quickly so devastatingly so brutally in such a short period of time and then appeared to disappear it was as if they were just rolled up people find that very very hard to credit and think that no this can't have happened templars must have escaped and they must have taken the ferocity with which the french
crown pursued them must mean that they had something more than just wealth there must be some great secret they'd found in jerusalem this is all speculate total speculation but it you can see why it's alluring um now my normal retort to that point is hey do you remember a company called lehman brothers and what about bear stearns you know they vanished like that in 2008 we know this can happen but that doesn't really answer the substantive point i know which is that hey these guys there must have been something going on now in templar history
you also have big holes partly because the templar central archive which was moved from jerusalem to akka to cyprus disappeared when the ottomans took cyprus in the 16th century it's gone so there's lots of stuff we don't know about the templars pile onto that the fact that templars were genuinely legends in their own lifetime if you go back to 1200 1210 wilsham wolfram von eschenbach writing king arthur stories plonk the templars in as guardians of this thing called the grail now the idea of the grail the history of the holy grail is something that has
a sort of a life of its own um a mystique and a mystery of its own what was it did it exist where did it come from what does it stand for um plug that into the templars and you have this sort of incredible concoction of myth and magic and sex and scandal and um and holy mystery that has just proved irresistible not quite quite understandably to screenwriters to novelists to the people who are making kind of entertainment from the 1200s you know from the early 13th century this is not a 21st 20th 20th 21st
century phenomenon this is as much a part of the history of the templars as the history of the templars so they've got their branding was kind of remarkable even at the time phenomenal um very you know again we like to think us 21st century kids invented branding right i mean the templars they had it down pat in the 11 30s 1140s this for the knights a white uniform for the sergeants black uniform all emblazoned with a red cross which stood for their willingness to shed blood in the name of christ for the blood that christ
had shared the name which was so evocative of christianity's central mysteries they were very it was a very potent sexy idea and i think when you look at the templars over the years they made many enemies and only one of them really understood where the templars were vulnerable so you take the great sultan saladin for example he thought the way to get rid of the templars was to kill them after the battle of hattin 1187 when jerusalem fell back into muslim hands the aftermath of hattina did anyway but after the hatting campaign saladin paid a
big fat fee to have every templar who his men could capture brought to him lined up 200 temples and hospitals 200 temples and hospitals were lined up in front of saladin and he allowed his religious entourage to volunteer to behead them one by one these were guys who were not headsman not executions right there's a bloody scene and he thought this was the way to get at the templars to kill their members but he was wrong because within 10 years the templars had bounced back the person who understood how to damage the templars was philip
the fourth because he understood it was a brand it was a brand it was values he attacked the templars chastity their probity uh their religiosity all the things that were at the core of why people donated to the templars why people joined the templars he came up with this list of of accusations that said yeah you've taken vows of poverty chastity and obedience and you haven't been obedient to the church you've been rolling around in this filthy money of yours and you've been shagging each other like that's so you went hard at the temple of
central values and that was where they were weak the the myths around the templars the hollywood rewriting there's going to be people listening to this watching this desperate to know can you just rule out holy grail secret treasure if the templars had any secret treasure it remains secret uh and i see no special reason to believe that they did have any as the holy grail well there's a connection between the temples and the holy grail but it says it's it's like the connection between james bond spectre and mi6 it exists in in fantasy and it's
a very long running and one of the most successful entertainment business stories of the last 800 years because that's its history but do we mistake it for actual real fact was the holy grail an actual real thing no of course it wasn't it was a trope it was a a literary idea so we mustn't mistake that for truth but why i know i am i'm not here to kill fun right and i think you aren't either i think as historians like the temptation can often be to say you're like you come across like the fun
police like the joy suckers right you want to look at all these kind of great films and tv shows and novels and say that's what you got wrong this is all nonsense okay like our my business and your business and all of our business as historians is is presenting the the facts as best we have can discern them but i don't think it should i don't think it's zero sum and i think that the templars would not be fun if you take away all the myths but all you've got to remember is that here's the
history and here's the myth they can co-exist it sounds to me like quite a lot of other organizations our history begin as something and then kind of morph into something else now you could look at east india company as a kind of transnational organization that becomes um an imperial power unintentionally uh and and is it that by the end of the templar period they would they were they lost some of the legitimacy because they weren't actually no longer fulfilling the job that they were they'd been set up to do yeah i think there was a
a certain degree of criticism of the templars was justified after 1291 and they'd been set up to defend the crusader states and there weren't no crusader states left to defend you know so you can understand why people began to question them you know you also have to think about this was the poor the order of the poor knights of the temple of solomon their seal the image on their seal was of two brothers on the same horse poverty was supposed to be ingrained in them by the time you get to the sort of the early
13th century they've been overtaken as the kind of cool poverty you know the men by the mendicant orders you know they weren't poor anymore you had someone like francis of assisi wandering around turning up to the fifth crusade dressed in in bare feet and in sackcloth effectively this is a really this is what you call it like this is a poor brother whereas by that point the temple the templars has grown extremely rich and the master you know he had kind of an enormous coterie of servants about 10 horses of his own a strong box
to keep his valuables in um you know his own private cook his own private scribe saracen translator all of this stuff juxtapose and there's this great moment which i've described in the book where at the fifth crusade the templars are there with the you know with the christian armies and along comes francis of assisi himself and he says i'm going to take care of this and he goes over to to see the sultan and tries to convert him to christianity and the sultan is absolutely flabbergasted to see him and sends him packing uh miraculously without
beheading him um but there's this this juxtaposition and the templars by the 13th century were clearly no longer poor and that was a that had been they'd been set up to be dependent on charity on handouts but they've had so much charity and handouts they are extremely wealthy they'd also become financially extremely sophisticated so you know people often say the temples are the first bankers but it's you know this idea that you can deposit money in one temple house and withdraw it in another i mean that's not quite and that's not even even a part
of it they were into financial services in a big way it was it wasn't just banking deposit-based banking they were uh subcontracting all a huge swathe of treasury duties from the french crown for 100 years like half of the french treasury was running through the paris temple they were doing that job they were employed by popes to collect crusading tax from all over europe and deliver it to where the crusade was happening again the fifth fifth crusade you've got templars in england france portugal hungary all going out collect physically collecting tax from people and funneling
it to egypt i mean logistically that's an incredible operation it's very very hard to do and you've got to be not only skilled in getting money out of people but accountancy you've got to be effectively like the brown brown van securical guys of the middle ages taking this money down into a war zone so none of that was in the original purpose of the templars though they're supposed to be guarding pilgrims so this organization becomes something quite quite different by the end you've demonstrated there's still a great public appetite for medieval history out there at
a time when a lot of people saying kids shouldn't be learning at schools and all that stuff why do you think it's still matters fundamentally it matters to me because you know i've i've always loved these stories it's a time of i've got it's a very it's a formative time uh in which in this country in england in the united kingdom some of the real building blocks of today's political um social legal cultural kind of world where that's where where they came from it's it's a but it's also a very strange world and it's got
that lovely balance like it's a sweet spot for me which is between uh being recognizably similar you know we're sitting here in the law courts and while you know the legal profession dates back to the high middle ages in in this country and so the ends of court that's a medieval institution it's still with us today and yet it's also incredibly weird you know this weird stuff goes down in the middle ages and it's a mindset that takes you some effort to get into so i think for me that's that's the the feel of the
period that's what i love i think um it it is often read as old-fashioned to say that things you know we we we need to learn about things like magna carta because they made us the men we are today or and you know that's not quite it i mean these things are valuable to study in and of themselves and they happen to our ancestors and our people they're part of who we are and where we've come from and that that's that's not a question of of trumpeting them and and and being also victorian and wiggish
and and triumphalist about our history it's just to say that every country has its history and peoples of every country i think if they want to be good citizens of that country or to know the history of where they're who they are and where they're from you know when you look you read the sources you immerse yourself in medieval history do you what strikes you is it the the similarity in our conditions the sort of universal human response things or do you think this is a different world it's actually very hard to navigate it their
ideas are different they believe different things about what we would now call science the natural world the the the the spiritual world what's up emotions in your mind um it's it's it is both that's a terrible historian's answer to give i realize but it is both it's it's that you can on at one moment feel um [Music] extraordinarily close to uh the characters who whom you're writing about and and and feel their uh elemental human struggles and and flaws and and problems and then and but the next the turn of the page just say you
know what this this stuff is is batshit crazy and i've no idea what you guys are on you know with particularly with this effusion of of of re of christian uh particularly this fusion of sort of christian thought into absolutely every aspect of life and the kind of the weird cosmology of a world in which uh if something goes wrong it's because of our sins we must have been sinful that's really that's all that's kind of the opposite of the way we think normally now we think if something goes uh it goes against us it
would be incredibly unlucky and if we do something that's successful it's because we're incredibly great human beings and the the medieval world doesn't seem to conform to that it's all seen through a sort of lens of piety that if um if you lose a battle and you know you go into battle you're parading a fragment of the true cross above your head and thinking that this is going to help you out and you lose the battle then there's this always these enormous periods of soul-searching people saying i mean how on earth did we lose that
what it must be because of our sins imagine if every time england got knocked out of a world cup on penalties you know we all went around saying it's because we're bad people it's because as a nation we've sinned too much i mean maybe that's they maybe that's the answer maybe we should be thinking more more in that way i don't know but i don't suppose you want to get into english football too much um and you've found you've you know you've enjoyed big success in america as well why do you think the americans are
i mean we know that on paper of course america founded uh overwhelmingly with english irish and scottish immigrants therefore there's an interest in british medical history but why do you think why does it touch a nerve over there i think it's tremendously exotic in the united states i think um my american friends my american readers you know i i think find the things that we take for granted sitting here outside a church which dates back to the 13th the 12th century and to be almost unimaginably uh brilliant and exotic because um as you rightly say
you know the western takeover of the continental united states is a relatively recent thing the united states has an incredibly rich and learned history of its own you know you only have to look at civil war to to see how uh how deeply engaged with and uh invested in the history our american friends are but you don't have castles in i mean you've got the hearst castle right i mean that's about as good as it gets and and so i i just think that we are enormously blessed in europe and in this country with a
wealth with the fabric of a history that is much more ancient than we often think and and particularly in the united states i think i think they people there seem to to appreciate what we have in a way that we cannot because we take it all for granted and dan what i find fascinating about what you do you medievalist is it's just bewildering because i mean look at weak today we can't agree as a society on whether barack obama was a good president okay sources wildly even even without fake news you know serious journalists and
commentators thinkers question whole aspects of his legacy so how on earth are we supposed to judge and and even write about the kind of characters that you're writing about who and we're basing it on on one single source unsubstantiated we're racing it we're basing it on things written hundreds of years after their death i mean how confident are you that you'll get you're creating a sort of an accurate picture of any of the people you're writing about i think the search for um for objective accuracy uh will drive you mad or you'll become bob carrow
and and still be writing about lyndon johnson you know 40 years after he began which i i admire but i think is is a sort of beautiful form of insanity um one is helped slightly by distance in that uh in terms of your judgment we are further from events and it i would find it much easier to think about the kingship of philip the fourth of france for example uh than i would about the presidency of barack obama partly because we're still living obama you know that's that's all it's still we're we're so far from
any any kind of place where we can really assess this with regard something like barracks barrack obama's presidency with regard to its its long-term medium term perhaps even short term effects it's it's somewhat easier when you go back 800 years and you know you have you just have the the benefit of perspective you also have a more manageable source base and there is something to be said for the middle ages in that uh it is it's possible to master your sources in a way that i i think it must be much harder for you know
modern historians who have to have to read who have so much more that there is to read the flip side of that is that um we have much bigger holes in the sources and you know you can only ever be provisional based on the material you've got so you know you're trading the two things off but you know to go back to your question about the middle ages um one of the things i like is there's just enough material in the middle ages right there's just enough that you can get your head around it without
becoming completely overwhelmed and and have this sort of terrible feeling that you're never going to read all the primary stuff let alone the secondary stuff but there is sufficient that we can have interesting debates and and think critically and disagree um as as historians about what it is we're looking at do you have to though do you have to enjoy the idea that you you can never know i mean i think if you're an 18th century still beyond you you really get a sense that your opinions can harden up you think actually i think i
do know quite a lot about the premiership of of warpole and i can make quite concrete judgments but do you do you think medievalists when you're hanging out with each other smoking your pipes do you almost enjoy the blank spaces and do you enjoy filling that with imagination or obviously considered and footnoted speculation i think so i mean i enjoy it i i i as i as i go on um you know as i write more and think more and read more um i become more conscious of of what that line is between how much
you can you know you fill with historical speculation imagination and how much you know you are you are rigorously contained by your source material and what those lines are and um and you could fill a room full of medievalists and and you would have you would you'd find people drawing the lines in different places um but it's also look it's a really it's a it's a kind of thriving discipline at the moment and i think people are if this is this is helped by its move into pop culture through game of thrones it's you know
extraordinary discoveries like the richard iii thing um which is all you need to say now the richer the third thing um by you know hollywood's sort of awakening or reawakening to the middle ages so i think it's um it's it's a lively old discipline and there's lots of there's lots to go around in it as well you know and i think that partly because of the the sort of gaps in the evidence it's becoming much more interdisciplinary um people are mapping together archaeological work and and textual work and legal work and cultural history and and
and i i think all of that is very fruitful and good for uh for us in general young people you're going to talk to their schools all the time why do you tell them study history um i think history is the subject well look first of all the subject material the subject matter of history is the combined endeavors and deeds of the entire human race dating back to the limit of record so how could you not want to educate yourself in everything that's ever happened secondly i think that more now than at any time in
my life the development of a detector is extremely important and we are bombarded with information and it is part of our experience and in a sense our duty as as citizens to filter to examine to ask why we're being told things because you know there is a there's a form of information wars to use that terrible phrase out there and you know you're going to be able to need to navigate and history teaches you all those skills and thirdly but actually it should be firstly it's just really good fun i mean don't we have a
i have a blast right this is storytelling with the you know with the beautiful bonus that it's all true and it's in some way edifying good for you thanks for watching this video on the history hit youtube channel you can subscribe right here to make sure you don't miss any of our great films that are coming out or if you are a true history fan check out our special dedicated history channel history hit dot tv you're gonna love it
