Hi, everybody. Welcome to Dance Know's History. I hope you all enjoyed the podcast over

the last week. Getting a lot of feedback on General Sir Rupert Smith, who beat me metaphorically

around the head and neck like I was an overworked Aid De Corne, and I deserved it. I deserved

it, folks. If you can ask stupid questions of an illustrious general and author, military

strategist, you're going to get short shrift. I imagined the same if I was pestering Frederick

Great, or the martial Dossacks, or in those kind of dudes. On this podcast, I'm hoping for

a slightly gentler reception. I'm talking to the very brilliant young historian, Catherine

Pengoness. She's a historian who's writing about the medieval world of the Mediterranean

and Near East. And she's just written a really interesting book called The Queen to Jerusalem

about the women who dared to rule. They dared to rule in the Crusader States of Utreme.

Have I got that right? I don't know. Utreme is the French-based overseas, and those were

the four statelets, I guess we call them, Kingdoms of Polities, established in the 1090s and

into the very beginning of the 12th century, following the first Crusade. And in these

states, as you'll hear, there was a phenomenon absent from many of the states in Western

Christendom, and that was Queen's Regnant, Female Rulers. It's a piece of history that

we kind of touched upon last year with that lovely podcast about Eleanor of Acritane.

And this just gives us a lot more detail, lots to think about. If you wish to go and watch

medieval history, then the place for you to do that is at historyhit.tv. It's simply

go over to historyhit.tv. It's a web site. You enter it in a browser, historyhit.tv.

It'll take you to a history channel, the likes of which you've never seen before, a revolutionary

new concept in which we have a history channel for history fans on which there is historical

programs, not lifestyle programs, not featuring neo-naxes or alien civilizations, but things

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