Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I'm Dan Snow and today we're going to be talking about the Crusades with Dan Jones, somebody with whom I am regularly mistaken.

That's extremely flattering because Dan Jones won the best narrative historians on earth, his books have sold millions of copies, his programming method in the Night's Templar, which is on history hit.tv, is one of the most successful programs we have ever made on our new digital history channel.

And this episode is a rerun of one we first called a couple years ago. We went around to Dan Jones's house and we talked about the Crusades.

I tried to get him to run me through all the Crusades from one to, depending on how you count them, but you know, seven-ish.

And that's of course before you get involved in the Crusades in mainland Europe, don't even start me on those.

So there is of course plenty to talk about.

While we're on the subject, the most glorious castles I have ever visited in my life are the Crusader castles.

Aleppo, Gerrache, Salahadin's castle in Syria, just Google it, just Google it.

Kerak, Krakta Shivalye, they are unbelievable.

Bizarrely, I was there as the Syrian Civil War was breaking out, I was making a program about their castles.

Amazing, it would have been terribly damaged in that war. You can watch programs like the Crusades, you can watch programs with Dan Jones,

everyone HistoryHit.tv. And over there we've got tens of thousands of subscribers.

It's the world's best history channel. It's like Netflix for history, you're in a lab, just cruise on over to HistoryHit.tv and get a month for free.

Check it out, see if you like it.

In the meantime, everybody, here is Dan Jones talking about the Crusades.

Dan Jones, thank you very much for coming back on the show. It's a big subject.

One of the biggest. When you set out to write about the Crusades, are you mindful of what they mean to people today?

This is not just an abstract sort of softening bit of medieval history.

I'm always interested in topics that can draw the middle ages together with the modern.

Things that people will have heard of to put it at its simplest.

I think Crusades is one of those terms that's just bled into other capillary today.

While I've been writing, I've had a Google alert for Crusades.

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