Vulgar History - Muslim Heroine of the Crusades, Iṣmat ad-Dīn Khātūn

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00:00:30.000 hello and welcome to vulgar history a feminist women's history comedy podcast before we get 1.00

00:00:45.380 into today's episode i want to take a moment to acknowledge the deaths and unfolding devastation

00:00:49.960 in palestine and israel i apologize for not speaking up sooner what's happening in gaza

00:00:54.940 and israel right now is horrifying my heart goes up to everyone who's being affected by this which

00:00:59.700 I know includes listeners of this podcast. I also want to state unequivocally that I

00:01:03.800 stand against Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. Gaza is now the deadliest place for civilians

00:01:08.880 in the world. As of this recording, more than 10,000 lives have been lost in Israel, Gaza,

00:01:13.780 and the West Bank, and more than 1.4 million people have been displaced in Gaza. People

00:01:18.280 in Gaza are experiencing daily bombardment, severe hunger, dehydration, and a lack of

00:01:22.940 medical care, not to mention the serious long-term mental health impacts of the violence on

00:01:27.020 everyone, including children. I echo the calls from organizations like Doctors Without Borders,

00:01:31.960 the United Nations, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, Save the Children, and the International

00:01:36.780 Council of Nurses to call for immediate de-escalation and a ceasefire for an end to the bombing of Gaza,

00:01:42.560 for the safe release of the hostages, and for aid to be allowed to enter. How can we help? We can

00:01:48.680 pay attention, share information about this situation, join protests, and contact our elected

00:01:54.020 representatives to let them know we demand a ceasefire. I've put links in the show notes for

00:01:58.240 more information about actions we can all take. If you have the means to do so, consider supporting

00:02:02.900 organizations like MSF, Doctors Without Borders, and World Central Kitchen, which provide necessary

00:02:08.120 help to places in need of medical care and food. The Palestinian Children's Relief Fund, PCRF,

00:02:14.140 also provides medical and humanitarian relief. Save the Children is working to provide essential

00:02:18.820 services and support. I put links to these organizations in the show notes. Learning more

00:02:23.240 about the history of this region can also help better understand what's going on today. Some

00:02:27.560 podcasts that I recommend to listen to to learn about the history of this part of the world

00:02:31.520 include The History of the Crusades, The Islamic History Podcast, Preoccupation, A Not-So-Brief

00:02:37.160 History of Palestine, and Head-On History. Our editor, Christina Lumagi, did an episode of her

00:02:42.180 podcast, East Story is Unknown, about this, and so has the podcast Jew Witches. I put links to all

00:02:47.920 those podcasts in the show notes as well. There are also numerous books that go into depth about

00:02:51.820 the history of the Levant, which is this region, which I'm going to explain in one second. But if

00:02:56.920 you want to read books on this topic and the history, I've put a link to a book list I made

00:03:00.880 up in the show notes as well. So the Levant. Today's episode takes place in a region that

00:03:06.800 English-speaking historians and others refer to as the Levant. And so that's the term I'm going

00:03:11.980 to use for this geographic region. This term, the Levant, was first used in English in 1497,

00:03:17.040 referring to the east or Mediterranean lands east of Italy. I think it's technically a French word,

00:03:22.900 Levant. French people, let me know. But in this instance, this refers to the direction of the

00:03:27.820 east where the sun rises each day. From the western Mediterranean, the Levant was to the east

00:03:32.620 where the sun rose and that's how it received its name. So this is a term that has been used

00:03:37.900 and still is used to refer to different areas in different times throughout history. So first,

00:03:43.420 it was a term used in reference to ancient lands along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea

00:03:47.560 in the Old Testament of the Bible. This region also holds many important cities like Jerusalem,

00:03:54.140 Petra, Jericho, and Damascus. The modern-day Levant includes countries instead of kingdoms.

00:03:59.740 These Levant countries include Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, parts of Syria, and western Jordan.

00:04:04.920 Some people use a broader definition of this area. They can include some or all of the following

00:04:09.320 countries. Cyprus, Turkey, Egypt, Libya, Greece, and Iraq. So if you picture just like on a map,

00:04:15.320 that's the place we're talking about. The borders of the countries and regions we have now have all

00:04:20.700 changed throughout time. But some of the oldest cities ever are in this area and they often have

00:04:26.160 the same name. So I'm mostly just going to be using city names in this episode just to try and

00:04:30.700 make it as clear as possible. So land in this part of the world has always been coveted because it's

00:04:35.520 close to lots of water sources, which is good for agriculture. And so this often led to conflict

00:04:40.800 over who controls the land. Also, it's some of the oldest cities in the world. So as long as

00:04:45.020 there's been people, there's been people fighting about land. So yeah, this is one of the earliest

00:04:50.460 places where agriculture developed. It's also a location that's strategically useful for trade.

00:04:55.260 And then because some of the oldest civilizations started here, there's lots of religious sites

00:05:00.100 there for many different religions. Yeah. And I wanted to do an episode that takes place in the

00:05:04.660 region because it's in the news right now due to the current warfare because this whole podcast

00:05:13.060 like not this episode but this whole podcast is really like I want to learn about stuff and after

00:05:17.340 I do I like to tell you about it so I've been learning about a lot of stuff about this for

00:05:20.820 myself partially just to recontextualize the history of this region like it's more than just

00:05:25.400 what's happening in the news there's such a rich history to this whole area so I've been reading

00:05:29.660 and learning lots about the history of this and I want to share with you some of what I recently

00:05:34.000 learn, including about a very interesting woman who lived in oldie times in this area. So in the

00:05:39.760 usual vulgar history style, if you're not familiar with that, I'm skipping the details of major

00:05:44.040 battles. There's a lot of battles in this story and I am skipping them because that is what I do.

00:05:49.640 I like to focus on the personalities and the people and kind of try to imagine what it was

00:05:53.760 like to be them and to live in that place. And in order to just focus on the story of the woman who

00:05:58.440 we're talking about today. Also, I do want to state that while religion is incredibly important

00:06:02.780 to everyone in the story. Like it is in a lot of the episodes I do. Religion is not a part of my

00:06:09.280 life personally. So I'm really retelling the story in terms of people and what they did. And I'm

00:06:15.260 hoping to do so as respectfully as possible for religious people. So today's story is about a

00:06:21.000 woman who lived a very, very long time ago, whose name was Ismat Adin Khatun. The references I used

00:06:27.000 for this were Wikipedia, a book called The Crusades Through Arab Eyes by Amin Malouf,

00:06:32.640 the book Queens of Jerusalem, The Women Who Dared to Rule by Catherine Pangonis,

00:06:36.600 the book The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin by Jonathan Phillips, as well as an

00:06:41.260 article from History.com explaining the Crusades. Because I think I said in an episode a long time

00:06:48.640 ago, or maybe on Instagram, that this is a part of history that I have not really learned about

00:06:54.300 before, but you know, diving into this, I learned a lot. And you're going to learn a lot of what I

00:07:00.040 learned as well. So the woman we're talking about, Ismat Adin Khatun, we don't know her given name.

00:07:06.100 This is like an honorific. It's similar to when we did previous episodes on Muslim women,

00:07:11.660 Haram Sultan or Sayyid Al Hura. Those are both honorific titles, not the actual given names

00:07:17.880 that they have. So her name means purity of the faith. And then Khatun means lady or noble woman.

00:07:26.440 So Ismat Adin Khatun. So she's also aka sometimes Asimat. And she was born sometime in the mid 12th

00:07:33.300 century. I have a whole spreadsheet of all the people that we've ever talked about on this

00:07:37.240 podcast. And this is mostly for myself to be like, what time period are we looking at? Who

00:07:41.560 else is around at this time? So this is like 500 years after Fredegand and Brunhild. It's

00:07:47.720 towards the end of the life of Empress Matilda, and about 200 years before Joanna of Naples.

00:07:53.780 And those are the three closest people in time and date to her, but also they all have a connection to

00:07:58.720 what her story includes, Ismat's, which is the Crusades. And the connection with Fredigan and

00:08:05.420 Brunhild is that the Crusaders were aka the Franks, which Fredigan and Brunhild were part

00:08:10.780 of the Frankish kingdoms. Empress Matilda's grandson, I want to say, grandsons were some

00:08:16.800 the people who were out doing the Crusades. And then Joanna of Naples later was Queen of Jerusalem.

00:08:22.700 So a little backstory here, the goddamn Crusades. So first of all, note, the Crusades. And I keep 0.97

00:08:31.060 saying it like that, because I'm putting it in air quotes, because that's not the term I necessarily

00:08:37.280 think of it as, but that's what it's known as, to probably a lot of you. Anyway, so in the 11th

00:08:42.220 century, when this all kind of started, Western Europe, so like what we think of as modern day,

00:08:47.680 like England, France, Italy, Germany, was not very interesting to Islamic writers,

00:08:53.960 so that the people living in and around the Levant area, they regarded their own culture.

00:08:59.580 The Islamic culture is much more sophisticated in advance, which it was due to their progressive

00:09:04.140 achievements in science and the arts. Muslims refer to Europeans as Franks, not because they

00:09:09.340 were all from Fredegand and Brunhills land, but just, I think it's kind of akin to Christopher

00:09:15.420 Columbus. Was it Christopher Columbus or whoever referred to the indigenous people of the Americas

00:09:20.000 as Indians? It's like somebody just kind of used that word. And then everyone was just like, great,

00:09:24.300 that's the word we're going to use. So some of the people just kind of called Europeans

00:09:27.740 Franks. That's just the word they used. And so they saw the Franks, which is people from all

00:09:33.860 these parts of Europe. They were seen as being really preoccupied with warfare and hunting.

00:09:38.600 They had a melancholy temperament, a general proneness to savagery. They're also seen as

00:09:43.940 filthy, unhygienic, and treacherous. And you know what? They were. Myself, as a descendant of 0.79

00:09:50.480 white European people, not wrong. This is not a wrong take. If you read the story of Fredigan

00:09:55.480 and Brunhild, unhygienic and treacherous, yeah, they were constantly dying of dysentery,

00:10:00.880 murdering each other. Correct. Correct. Islamic people of the past.

00:10:05.160 so there's a writer named al-Masudi who in the 10th century wrote about the Franks and I'm going

00:10:11.460 to put a quote here and this is just like a read for the ages and myself as a white person I see

00:10:17.760 myself in this and I respect this I respect this as a read so quote the power of the sun is weak

00:10:23.080 among them because of their distance from it cold and damp prevail in their regions with snow and

00:10:27.440 ice follow one another in endless succession their color is so excessively white that it passes from

00:10:32.700 white to blue their skin is thin and their flesh thick their eyes are also blue matching the

00:10:37.480 character of their coloring their hair is lank and reddish because the prevalence of damp mists

00:10:42.280 their religious beliefs lack solidity and this is because of the nature of cold and the lack of

00:10:47.560 warmth and i'm gonna say as a red-haired blue-eyed person with alarmingly pale skin correct that is 0.97

00:10:55.460 that is me anyway so we've got this very sophisticated cultured region with um islamic 0.93

00:11:03.520 rulers and we've got like the franks up in europe just kind of being the messes that we know from

00:11:08.180 the fredigan story there's also another group that i haven't talked about which is the byzantine

00:11:12.480 empire which is like i can't explain everything today because i didn't have time to learn it all

00:11:18.200 myself but that's like another group and that's kind of like more to the eastern europe anyway

00:11:23.520 November 1095. The Pope called upon Western Christians to take up arms like their swords

00:11:29.440 to aid the Byzantines in their war against Muslim countries in order to capture these lands. So

00:11:35.760 these lands in the Levant, which were places where Bible stuff happened. The Bible took place in a

00:11:41.620 lot of these areas. Jesus was there. And a lot of these places were at that time under Muslim control.

00:11:46.380 So the Christians in Europe were like, great, let's do this. This is the Crusades. And they 1.00

00:11:51.320 were a major thing at the time to the Europeans. As European history went on, it was like a thing

00:11:57.080 people talked about and remembered as this major thing. And what I appreciated about this, and I

00:12:00.940 got a lot, I told you my references. There's this book, The Crusades Through Arabais by Amin Malouf.

00:12:06.660 And as a person who hadn't read about the Crusades before, I really learned a lot of things from that

00:12:11.040 book and from his point of view, which is basically, this was the thing that was important to

00:12:15.040 the Franks and to the Islamic world. They're just like, okay, like it just was sort of

00:12:20.260 more battles among many battles because like anywhere on earth, like the episode about

00:12:25.700 Malincene, if you will recall, Hernán Cortés and the Spanish came to Mexico and they kind of came

00:12:32.980 in and there were one more group of people, like the people, like the Nahua people who were living

00:12:37.580 in that region had all different factions and groups and alliances already. And so the Spanish

00:12:42.320 came and they were just kind of one more group. It's not like all the indigenous people of Mexico 0.99

00:12:46.760 were all together because they were all at war with each other. Because like I said before, 1.00

00:12:51.100 as long as there's been people, they've been fighting over land. So all these Muslim countries 1.00

00:12:54.520 weren't like, yay, we're all the Muslim countries and we're all great. Like, no, they were, 0.99

00:12:58.300 you know, had different alliances and stuff against each other as well.

00:13:00.500 So then the Crusaders came. And so the writer Jonathan Phillips wrote that most Muslims saw

00:13:08.820 the Crusades as just another invasion among many in their history. And if we look at contemporary

00:13:13.700 accounts written by Islamic people, like during the time of the crusades, they did not recognize

00:13:19.220 any religious or military motive for their crusaders who were simply viewed as arriving

00:13:23.500 from nowhere before wreaking havoc upon Muslims. And the fact that this was like the Pope sent them

00:13:27.980 on this religious crusade, and like the Muslims, like the Islamic people themselves didn't realize 0.76

00:13:34.280 that there was or recognize the religious significance just kind of shows how this

00:13:38.060 kind of wasn't really about religion in my perspective so i mean just to be clear the

00:13:43.560 crusaders were just like like every all the ships of white people coming over to the americas or 0.93

00:13:51.540 doing colonization anywhere like they were just shitty people and a lot of them there's sort of 0.97

00:13:56.200 this sort of stereotype that it was like the younger sons of families like because the older 0.92

00:14:01.620 sons had to stay behind to be the kings or like to inherit the land and the younger sons were just

00:14:05.680 kind of like bored. And so this was just sort of like a little fun thing for them to do. And

00:14:09.580 some of the stuff I read was like, you know, it wasn't just that, but also I kind of feel like

00:14:13.080 it kind of was just that. Anyway, so there's all these different groups of crusaders and they also

00:14:16.760 weren't united with each other. There was different factions within factions. There was

00:14:21.740 one group led by a guy called Count Emicho or Emicho, which was especially heinous, a case for

00:14:28.560 the SVU squad. Under his, his group of crusaders carried a series of massacres of Jewish people in

00:14:34.500 various towns, drawing widespread outrage. So when you're like, you're too murderous for even

00:14:39.840 the Crusaders, this is like a Catalina de Arousal moment of like, look at your life, look at your

00:14:44.920 choices. Anyway, this caused a major crisis in Jewish-Christian relations. So this first bunch

00:14:49.600 of Crusaders, their big focus was Jerusalem, the city. They wanted to claim the city for themselves, 0.91

00:14:55.240 for Western Christians, because of its connection with the story of Jesus. I want to say I was

00:15:00.140 raised Christian, but I haven't interacted with that vibe in a very long time. And I don't know

00:15:05.440 what happened in what cities, but apparently Jerusalem is a city where he was crucified,

00:15:10.900 resurrected and ascended. So like important to Christian people. There's also other stuff

00:15:15.740 happened in Jerusalem to other religions, but I'm just saying for the Crusaders, this is what

00:15:19.500 their connection to it was. They headed down and in 1099, the Crusaders captured Jerusalem

00:15:25.540 and pretty quickly, more quickly than they had expected because they came in with all these just 0.95

00:15:31.940 like messy ass tactics. They massacred almost all of the Muslim and Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem 0.99

00:15:37.680 and then they proclaimed this the capital of the kingdom of Jerusalem. And so they elected a guy 0.97

00:15:43.880 called Godfrey of Bouillon, the Godfrey of soup cubes, was elected Lord of Jerusalem, but then he

00:15:50.900 died. And so then they offered the lordship to his brother Baldwin, a shockingly 21st century

00:15:58.360 sounding name in the middle of this story from a thousand years ago. Anyway, and so on Christmas

00:16:02.880 day in the Basilica of Bethlehem, he became the new, I think it's King. I think he's called King

00:16:08.240 Baldwin of Jerusalem. Anyways, the Crusaders were like, we did what we wanted. So now we're done 0.94

00:16:13.900 and we'll go back home now, I guess, which is what a lot of them done. But because it went so well,

00:16:18.740 The Christian authorities, which I think means the Pope, were like, that went well, let's like do Crusades 2.0. 0.98

00:16:25.060 Let's do some more Crusades. 0.76

00:16:26.160 So the Second Crusade began in 1147, which is about like 50 years later. 0.96

00:16:30.480 This Crusade went badly for the Franks due to the Islamic kingdoms being more prepared and kind of knowing what was up. 0.83

00:16:38.660 And one of the people who was extremely successful in this and a really powerful military commander who made the Franks not do well was Ismail's dad. 0.93

00:16:48.340 So let's talk about her and him and who they were.

00:16:51.340 So today's main character, Ismet al-Din Khatun, was one of three daughters of Muin al-Din

00:16:57.700 Unur, who was the regent of Damascus, which was a city then, which is basically where

00:17:03.800 it still is now, in modern day Syria, Damascus.

00:17:07.900 Fun fact, if you watch Forged by Fire, the TV show about people doing blacksmithing,

00:17:13.040 canister Damascus is a method they use sometimes.

00:17:15.380 But also, that's why I first heard the word.

00:17:16.940 but the city of Damascus. And I don't know its connection to Canis or Damascus. Blacksmiths?

00:17:21.520 Let me know. Anyway, the old city of Damascus is considered to be among the oldest continually

00:17:25.640 inhabited cities in the world. They did excavations on the outskirts of the city,

00:17:29.840 which showed that it was inhabited as early as like 10,000 BCE. 10,000 BCE. That's earlier than

00:17:37.640 anyone we've ever talked about on this podcast. I am fairly confident, but let me double check.

00:17:42.440 Yeah, even Nefertiti, the longest ago person we've ever talked about. That was like 1300 BCE. When I talk about like these are some of the oldest civilizations, it's like the oldest civilizations, like full stop. The archaeology findings there are incredible.

00:17:58.380 So anyway, her dad, Ismat's dad, was probably originally from what we would think of today as modern day Armenia or Turkey, where he was taken in kind of in a harem sultan type thing. If you've heard that episode, we did this podcast before, where people would be taken from there and then they would be enslaved.

00:18:16.140 And the way that men were enslaved sometimes was as like mercenaries. So they were put in the army,

00:18:22.060 but then you kind of, there was a structure where you could move up in the army, even though you

00:18:27.200 entered it being against your will enslaved. Anyway, and that's what happened to him. And

00:18:31.860 he was really good at being army guy. He was a really good military leader. And so he was assigned

00:18:35.940 the position of regent of Damascus. And so one of his colleagues was a man named Nur al-Din,

00:18:41.880 who ruled one of the nearby Syrian provinces. And they were sort of like, I don't want to say

00:18:47.420 frenemies, but they were just kind of like, let's be an alliance, but also let's be kind of suspicious

00:18:52.740 of each other and like ready for one of the other ones to like do something fishy. It was her dad,

00:18:58.720 Ismat's dad's policy to remain on friendly terms with his neighbors whenever possible,

00:19:03.340 whether they're Christian or Muslim. So these guys were like, okay with each other. And so they

00:19:07.880 negotiated an alliance in 1147. I think I said that's the year that the Second Crusade started.

00:19:13.980 So coincidence, or that's why. Anyway, in this alliance, this formalized alliance,

00:19:18.260 Nur al-Din, who is this frenemy, it was arranged that he would marry Ismat al-Din Khatun,

00:19:25.460 today's main character. And so like so many marriages in history, and then we've talked

00:19:29.800 about this podcast, like it was really just to show a way to formalize, like we actually 0.99

00:19:34.000 fuck with each other. Sorry, not literally. We're two places and we're like so committed to working 0.97

00:19:40.500 together that we have like become a family together. And so the majority of sources claim

00:19:47.620 that Nur Adin and Ismat Adin Khatun's marriage was strictly paperwork only in the sense of like

00:19:54.920 they probably never even met each other, let alone consummated this marriage. So this was very much

00:20:00.300 just like on paperwork only like I feel like they lived in different cities their whole lives which

00:20:06.620 his life is gonna end pretty soon so this is where like we don't know was she a child at this time

00:20:12.220 when this marriage was arranged or was it we don't know her age basically but so she's married but

00:20:18.280 kind of like not really asterisk anyway so she remained at home because she like was not in the

00:20:22.920 same city as her husband did she know that this paperwork had been signed unclear anyway so her

00:20:27.460 husband and her dad went out of military campaigns together against the Franks. At one point,

00:20:32.800 Nur ad-Din, her husband, and I just like to highlight this, is like quite a thing to do.

00:20:37.860 He marched all the way to the coast and expressed his dominance of Syria by symbolically bathing 0.79

00:20:42.600 in the Mediterranean, which is like high drama. It's camp. I love it. And so her husband, Nur 0.87

00:20:48.180 ad-Din, his dream was to unite the various Muslim forces between the Euphrates and the Nile to make

00:20:52.900 a common front against the crusaders. But like I said before, like all these places 0.99

00:20:57.960 that have been around for like 10,000 years, like there's a lot of like people who work together,

00:21:03.080 people who don't like working together. So it's quite a challenge to try and get them all to team

00:21:06.400 up together. But Nur ad-Din, convincing person, he managed to unite the major cities of Mosul

00:21:13.280 and Aleppo, which are both still cities today, under his rule. So the third prong of this,

00:21:19.060 the part that like he needed to have under his rule as well to make it all be one united thing

00:21:23.280 was damascus which is the place that ismat's dad was the regent of at around this time her dad

00:21:29.900 died of dysentery and he was buried in a university he had founded and i mentioned that

00:21:34.820 just because sometimes i forget how old the concept of a university is anyway so her brother

00:21:41.020 took over his region of damascus but this is the same sort of thing we often see where somebody's

00:21:45.240 a strong ruler and then their like useless son becomes regent and is like not good. Anyway,

00:21:50.680 so her brother was soon overthrown by her husband, awkward, Nur ad-Din, but now he had Damascus. So 0.92

00:21:56.300 from this point on, all of Syria was unified under the authority of Nur ad-Din. And then King Baldwin 0.61

00:22:02.580 of Jerusalem, I don't know if it's the same King Baldwin now, it says King Baldwin III. 0.62

00:22:07.280 So two more Baldwins, like Alec Baldwin has all those children. So King Baldwin III of Jerusalem

00:22:13.700 died. And out of respect for such a formidable opponent, Ismat's husband, Nur ad-Din, refrained

00:22:19.840 from attacking. You know what? Good on him. So there's a chronicler who's from the Franks.

00:22:26.320 He's named William of Tyre. And he reported Nur ad-Din said, we should sympathize with their

00:22:32.260 grief and in pity spare them because they have lost a prince such as the rest of the world does

00:22:36.420 not possess today. Cool of him. So Nur ad-Din just kept kind of like bringing together more

00:22:41.820 these Muslim territories, conquering more places, including Egypt. And then he believed, you know, 0.83

00:22:48.160 a job done. Like he had accomplished his goal of uniting the Muslim states. But then he was

00:22:52.500 seized by fever due to complications from what sounds like tonsillitis. He died aged 56 in 1174

00:22:59.160 in Damascus, leaving Ismail Ad-Din Khatun, a widow for a man she never met. So he died. And then

00:23:07.880 Unlike how he was like, this is cool. Baldwin died. I want to attack. Baldwin's successor,

00:23:12.400 King Amalric of Jerusalem was like, he just died. Then I'll attack. So he decided to besiege

00:23:18.480 the city of Banias, where Ismat seems to have been living at the time. So a bit about Banias.

00:23:26.980 This is a site. It's kind of cliffs, kind of mountains in the Levant called Golan Heights.

00:23:34.100 So at this point, this was one of these extremely old cultures, not 10,000 years old, but a thousand years, like Banias, the city had been lived in for a thousand years.

00:23:44.520 The ruins are actually still there.

00:23:46.380 The ancient city was mentioned in the Bible when it was a.k.a. Caesarea Philippi.

00:23:51.600 And so the significance of this to Christian people is this is the place where Jesus confirmed Peter's confession that Jesus was the Messiah.

00:23:58.480 this location was abandoned and destroyed in 1967 as part of the six-day war which is a thing you

00:24:06.380 can google if you'd like to learn more about that we're focusing on much centuries earlier than that

00:24:12.020 but just to show how long the city was around for um the site today is a place of pilgrimage for

00:24:16.840 christians and presumably was at this time too for all these jesus related reasons and that's why

00:24:22.240 Amalrakh wanted to take over. But Ismat Adin Khatun was like, try me, bitch. So she didn't 0.99

00:24:28.780 say bitch. She was just like, try me. A geographer called Ibn Jubayr, who was a traveler and poet 1.00

00:24:36.480 from Al-Andalus. Remember, that's kind of modern day Spain. He described Banias, the city, and kind

00:24:42.780 of like why it was important and what it was like at that time. The city is a frontier fortress of

00:24:47.180 the Muslims. It is small, but has a castle round which under the walls flows a stream. The stream 0.97

00:24:52.780 flows up from the town by one of the gates and turns a mill. Commanding the town is a fortress

00:24:56.660 called Hunin, which lies three leagues distant from Banias. And our correspondent, William of

00:25:02.380 Tyre, who note in general, not a fan of Muslims, not a fan of women, not a fan of Muslim women,

00:25:10.840 but wrote really good things about Ismat, which is how you know she's pretty cool to impress even

00:25:15.680 him. So he wrote that Ismat, with courage beyond that of most women, send a message to this king

00:25:21.160 demanding that he abandon the siege and grant them a temporary peace. She promised to pay a large 0.88

00:25:25.680 sum of money in return. So this is Ismat negotiating, like Amalric is trying to take

00:25:31.460 over this place, Banias, and Ismat is like, how about diplomacy? So Amalric, in the hope of

00:25:39.520 extorting a larger bribe, at first pretended to spurn her plea and continue the siege. So for about

00:25:45.280 15 days, he continued, this is William of Tyre writing, with vigor and zeal and caused his foe

00:25:51.100 great trouble with his siege engines and in various other ways. Finally, he perceived that

00:25:55.120 the ability of the Turks to resist was steadily increasing and began to realize he had no chance

00:25:59.700 of success. Meanwhile, Ismat's envoys kept insistently demanding peace. He finally decided

00:26:05.920 to accept the proffered money, and on the release of 20 captive Christian knights in addition,

00:26:10.020 he raised the siege with the intention of undertaking greater projects later so i mean

00:26:15.300 this is why i wanted to talk about ismat adin katun because all this stuff's happening she

00:26:20.400 was born when the crusades were happening her dad was a big guy in the crusade she was married to

00:26:24.160 this like main crusade or well i guess anti-crusade derp anyway she was living among all this war and

00:26:31.960 she was so clever like the diplomacy the peacefulness of this like this is kind of the 1.00

00:26:38.240 role the women have in a lot of cultures and societies where they're seen as like the peacemakers 1.00

00:26:43.360 or the peacekeepers. And she really demonstrated how that can be such a powerful thing to do. Like 1.00

00:26:48.900 he was trying to siege and through diplomacy, she got him to not, to just call the siege, like not

00:26:54.460 using, not leading army, not, you know, like just using her soft skills, quote unquote. So from this

00:27:01.640 anecdote, we can glean some things about what she was like. She was noble. She was courageous,

00:27:07.580 certainly she was determined. And also on the way back after giving up the siege, like she got

00:27:13.140 to keep Banias, King Amalric fell ill from dysentery, which turned into a fever. Wilhelm

00:27:18.800 of Tyre wrote about how he died, which is after suffering intolerably from the fever for several

00:27:24.000 days, he ordered physicians of the Greek, Syrian, and other nations noted for skill and diseases

00:27:28.180 to be called and insisted they give him some purgative remedy. But they couldn't fix this

00:27:33.920 and he died. So Nur ad-Din's former general, so this is her husband, no, her husband died,

00:27:43.720 then the siege, then Amalric died. And so her dead husband's former general was a guy called

00:27:50.800 Saladin, who had by now taken over Egypt. And he claimed that he, because remember Nur ad-Din had

00:27:56.560 taken Damascus as one of his last places. So Saladin was like, great, I'm his successor. And 0.96

00:28:01.540 I'll be in charge of Damascus. And he did exactly what Nur ad-Din had done. And he legitimized his 0.95

00:28:08.000 claim by marrying Yizmet ad-Din Khadun in 1176. So like for the exact same reason, just showing

00:28:14.220 like, you know, like we're going to combine these families. Like I'm family to this place now

00:28:20.300 because I just married her. Like the other guy did the exact same thing. These two actually met

00:28:24.680 each other. And just to make this all a little complicated a little bit, or not complicated,

00:28:30.480 but just sort of like, okay. So Isma Adin's marriage with Saladin was proclaimed as her

00:28:36.260 first marriage. I mean, to be fair, she didn't meet the first husband. This is publicly proclaimed

00:28:40.800 as her first marriage and people didn't know about her marriage with Nur Adin until he had

00:28:45.540 died. So it's all just kind of like, was that even a marriage? Unclear. Anyway, so this is a quote

00:28:50.440 from the book Queens of Jerusalem by Catherine Pangonis. Isma Adin Khadun was married to the

00:28:56.160 two greatest warlords of the medieval Muslim Middle East. She was the companion and confidant

00:29:00.740 of two of the most impressive and powerful men of her generation and must have had a unique

00:29:04.740 understanding of the two leaders who shaped the fate of Islam in the Levant. She is a figure of

00:29:09.340 great historical significance despite the lack of information available about her personality,

00:29:13.780 her appearance, and her life. So this is like the main thing we know about her was how she 0.98

00:29:18.920 used diplomacy to call off the siege, but we're going to read between the lines and talk a little

00:29:22.940 bit more about her second husband, kind of her first husband, Saladin, because one of the things

00:29:28.980 we know is that he wrote to her every day when they were apart. So he was very fond of her,

00:29:35.720 clearly. And who is this guy? Saladin. So full name, Salah Adin Yusuf ibn Ayyub,

00:29:42.440 commonly known as Saladin. He was born around 1137 and was probably therefore of similar age

00:29:48.300 to Ismat probably. He was from a Kurdish family born in Tikrit in present day Iraq. So we know

00:29:55.460 his personal name was Yusuf. Saladin aka Saladin is his honorific. It means righteousness of the

00:30:02.340 faith. So he wasn't enslaved to begin with. He was from a military family and he kind of like grew

00:30:08.600 one up in the ranks of the military just by being good at it. This is where I'm going to be like

00:30:13.600 not going into the details of all the battles, but no, there were several and he did very well

00:30:18.820 in them. And by mid 1175, he was proclaimed Sultan of Egypt and Syria. And he was so successful. He

00:30:25.980 was a frequent target by some people called the assassins. This is just side note. I can't not

00:30:33.920 tell you about this. So in this time, and starting a couple hundred years before this time in the

00:30:39.840 mountains of this region, there was a group of people, an order of people, you might say,

00:30:44.240 and their whole deal was being spies slash murderers, basically. So over the course of

00:30:50.420 nearly 300 years, they killed hundreds of people. The modern term assassination is stemming from the

00:30:56.240 tactics used by the assassins. Like that's the name of their group. And now it describes the

00:31:01.640 kind of stuff they did, but that was also the name of their group. It's an Arabic word.

00:31:05.580 So I have in the past, in a silly way, claimed that Fredegand invented assassination.

00:31:11.560 In fact, so she did introduce the concept to medieval Francia, literally this group,

00:31:17.680 the assassins, literally invented assassins.

00:31:22.300 And the Western world was introduced to the concept of assassins by the works of Marco

00:31:28.820 Polo, who was a person, not just a game to play.

00:31:32.960 Mirko Polo was a Venetian guy who lived 100 years after all this stuff happened.

00:31:37.180 Anyway, the assassins, like Fredigan, their preferred method of killing was by dagger,

00:31:41.560 nerve poison, or arrows. And they kept trying to kill Saladin, and he kept outsmarting them,

00:31:47.320 and that makes me like him even better. And also them. So, but then we get 1186.

00:31:52.900 Ismet Adin Khatun died during a plague epidemic. So maybe a plague. She might have also died from

00:31:59.120 maybe tuberculosis, some sort of illness-based thing. Saladin was off at this time on military

00:32:04.140 campaign, writing her letters every day as he always did when they were apart. He was actually

00:32:08.800 recovering from his own lengthy illness at the same time. Maybe a plague also? I don't know.

00:32:13.740 Anyway, but this is where we kind of learn by reading between the lines a few more things about

00:32:17.760 Ismat. So his advisors knew that once he learned that she had died, he would be so affected that

00:32:24.080 it might affect his own recovery from illness. So they concealed the news from him for three

00:32:28.900 months that she was dead. So he continued to write her long letters every day. And then they had to

00:32:36.820 go through and censor the letters being sent to him in case somebody mentioned that she was dead

00:32:40.660 because they just didn't want him to know. And this is the sort of thing where she was clearly

00:32:45.180 so important to him. And they knew that she was so important to him. The fact that they hid her

00:32:49.140 death. We don't know a lot about her, but we know a lot about him. And we know that she was

00:32:53.600 clearly so important to him. He was involved with other women as well, but he was not writing

00:32:57.820 any of them letters every day. So she seems to be the woman most cherished by him. Seems pretty

00:33:03.940 certain that they did not have any children. I feel like how often were they even in the same

00:33:08.900 city? It was a letter-based relationship. He did have children with some of his other partners.

00:33:13.420 One of his children was a daughter named Munisa Khatun. And some people think maybe that was

00:33:18.460 Ismat's daughter, but probably was not. A year after Ismat died, Saladin led his army in the

00:33:25.100 Battle of Hattin, in which he defeated the crusaders and he reestablished Muslim military

00:33:30.000 dominance in this region. And then he died in 1191 in Damascus. And his possession at the time

00:33:38.200 of his death was only one piece of gold and 40 pieces of silver. So even though he was really

00:33:43.380 successful and he was the sultan of all these areas, he had given away his great wealth to

00:33:47.940 his poor subjects, leaving nothing to pay for his funeral. He was buried in a mausoleum in the

00:33:52.840 garden outside the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, Syria, which is going to be a whole thing,

00:33:59.420 let me tell you, in a second. So despite the religious differences and the fact they're always 0.99

00:34:05.380 at war against each other, Saladin was respected by the Christians, including Richard the Lionheart,

00:34:12.140 who was the son of Eleanor of Aquitaine, who is played by Anthony Hopkins in the movie The Lion

00:34:20.300 in Winter. He's also the main king in Disney's Robin Hood movie. His brother, Prince John,

00:34:26.400 is the one who sexes them. Anyway, Richard the Lionheart, famous crusader. So he once praised 1.00

00:34:30.960 Saladin as a great prince, saying he was without doubt the greatest and most powerful leader in

00:34:34.940 the Islamic world. Saladin, in turn, stated there is not a more honorable Christian lord than

00:34:40.140 Richard. Saladin and Richard sent each other many gifts as tokens of respect, but never met face to

00:34:45.180 face. As a result of the Crusades, which went on for like hundreds of years. So at first, all these

00:34:50.620 people coming down from Europe to the Levant and there like wasn't roads. But so it really

00:34:55.820 built up more infrastructure so people could go back and forth, which affected trade. Roads

00:35:01.260 improved. The cultures had more to do with each other. There's a whole thing I've been reading

00:35:06.000 recently about how there's a pattern that you see often on Christmas sweaters and things it's like

00:35:11.160 an eight-pointed star I always thought it was a snowflake but it's actually a motif from

00:35:15.660 Palestinian artwork and craftspersonship and the reason that this symbol it's called the star of

00:35:22.560 Bethlehem came to Europe and now it's so sort of omnipresent in like Christmas sweaters is because

00:35:29.100 of this like from this crusades era just sort of like these artistic motifs and stuff just moved

00:35:33.300 around. Just people were exposed to other cultures. Anyway, so this also resulted in

00:35:38.040 increase in shipbuilding, the manufacturing of various supplies. This ongoing hundreds of years

00:35:45.040 of on-off wars had other effects as well, culturally. Okay, so Saladin's tomb, 1898,

00:35:51.860 hundreds of years later, Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany, who is the grandson of Queen Victoria.

00:35:57.920 note he's the eldest of her 42 grandchildren she had a lot of children he donated a new

00:36:04.280 marble sarcophagus to Saladin's mausoleum I read that and I was like why would he do that

00:36:10.640 as I mentioned before the crusades were not a big thing like at the time they were happening

00:36:16.960 it's just kind of like okay these guys come and they there's like war sometimes but like

00:36:20.320 in terms of Arabic and Turkish history it was described in one book as a small blip

00:36:25.260 on a very large radar screen. So this changed, like Saladin himself was not like a super big

00:36:31.840 hero for hundreds and hundreds of years, because the Crusades were not really a big deal in Islamic

00:36:37.560 history. But the Crusades were such a big deal to like the West, right? And so Wilhelm is the

00:36:44.100 grandson of Queen Victoria, I'm sure in England, they've talked a lot about the Crusades, and she's

00:36:48.240 from Germany, right? So her husband is from Germany. So anyway, it was all really built up

00:36:52.600 to like Western European people. And so he was really into it. And he thought Saladin sounded

00:36:57.020 like this great hero. In fact, the first Arabic language history of the Crusades wasn't published

00:37:01.800 until 1899. Coincidentally, the same year that Wilhelm was on a tour of the Middle East. And he

00:37:07.380 was a fan of this whole thing of Saladin. So he wanted to see that tomb. And what he found shocked

00:37:12.640 him. A neglected crumbling and forgotten wooden tomb tucked away in a small outbuilding of a

00:37:17.640 garden beside the great mosque of Damascus. And I wonder if the tomb was really modest because of

00:37:22.600 he didn't have money and Saladin was kind of like a humble person. Anyway, and Wilhelm had

00:37:27.100 been raised on romantic tales like Sir Walter Scott's The Talisman, which was an 1825 tale of

00:37:32.440 the Crusades. And he basically worshipped the concept of Saladin. So he paid for a new mausoleum

00:37:38.240 out of his own pocket, which was a beautiful marble tomb in the medieval style with a scroll

00:37:42.700 work that has a Byzantine flourish. On a bronze wreath, he inscribed, from one great emperor to

00:37:48.520 another. So what was he even doing there? Why was the Kaiser of Germany in the Levent? So this is

00:37:55.700 actually a second tour of that region, which was meant to strengthen friendly relations between

00:38:00.460 Turkey and Germany. Why were they doing that? Because the Berlin to Baghdad railway was being

00:38:06.700 prepared. And Germany was really focusing on these cultures working better together.

00:38:12.220 The Ottoman Empire is what I'm calling Turkey. The books I read have various names for various

00:38:18.300 places. Anyway, so the Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire would eventually be

00:38:23.760 plunged both into World War I on the same side, which was the side that lost World War I,

00:38:29.680 which effectively ended all of these empires entirely, which is a story for another day.

00:38:34.540 World War I, not a thing I will probably be talking about on this podcast very often. But

00:38:39.860 anyway, Saladin, his body was never moved into the stone sarcophagus, which has instead been

00:38:45.640 place next to the old one in today's refurbished shrine. So the mausoleum now open to visitors

00:38:51.920 has the two sarcophagi, the marble one on one side and the original wooden one on the other side,

00:38:59.300 Ismad Adin Khatun. Do not know where she was buried. But yeah, that's this little bonus episode.

00:39:07.020 I just really wanted to bring some attention to this region of the world and the rich, rich,

00:39:12.540 rich rich history that it has. And the strength of this Muslim woman, the power of diplomacy and

00:39:20.880 peacefulness, I just thought it's a story that I really wanted to share, given everything that is

00:39:25.140 going on in that region of the world right now. As I said at the beginning, there's tons of links

00:39:29.940 in the show notes of podcasts to listen to, books to read, organizations you can support,

00:39:34.700 and I hope you're all doing really well. And yeah, this is a bonus episode. I won't get into

00:39:39.620 all the reminders of all the things. I just want to let you all know that I'm thinking about you.

00:39:43.500 I know there's listeners all over the world who are affected by what's going on right now.

00:39:48.240 And I'm thinking about you. My heart is with you. And until next time, keep your pants on

00:39:54.240 and your tits out. 0.99

00:39:57.600 Vulgar History is hosted, written, and researched by Anne Foster and edited by Christina Lumagi. 0.99

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00:40:53.100 your next move tomorrow. The war is over and both sides lost. Kingdoms were reduced to cinders

00:41:01.340 and armies scattered like bones in the dust. Now the survivors claw to what's left of a broken

00:41:08.540 world praying the darkness chooses someone else tonight but in the shadow dark the darkness

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00:41:38.420 Join the Glass Cannon podcast as we plunge into the shadow dark

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00:41:49.120 See what everybody's talking about and join us in the dark.

Vulgar History - December 17, 2023

Muslim Heroine of the Crusades, Iṣmat ad-Dīn Khātūn

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