Renaissance #204 – A Coalition of Competing Interests (The Crusades part 13)

This episode finds the Crusaders marching through the Anatolian desert, doing deals with French pirates, selling their armour and watching pack animals sliding down wet mountain paths, until finally reaching the city/fortress of Tarsus - where they immediately turn on and kill each other, before eventually moving on towards Antioch. This was less a unified Christian army and more a coalition of competing interests, with each leader vying for their own piece of Muslim territory.

Om Podcasten

Starting in Florence in the 14th century, a new era began to emerge in the West. People like Petrarch, who re-discovered Cicero’s lost letters, and the new humanists - who valued the study of classical antiquity - ushered in a rebirth, or as we know it today, a “renaissance" - in the study of the arts, the sciences, philosophy, and the theatre. They rediscovered what it meant to be human.