The first four parts of an all-new episode of Professor Darryl Dee’s Great Battles in History podcast has been released. In the inaugural episode, Professor Dee examined the Battle of Thermopylae and its legacy, followed by the bloody Battle of Cannae during the Second Punic War between Carthage and the Roman Republic. Now, Dee takes his listeners to the Middle Ages and the Horns of Hattin, where the Crusader states were defeated by the Ayyubid sultan Saladin in 1187:
The Battle of Hattin is the most famous battle of the Crusades. On July 4, 1187, the army of the Muslim warlord Saladin destroyed the host of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem at the Horns of Hattin. In the battle’s aftermath, Saladin overran the Crusader States. On October 2, he entered Jerusalem. Yet Hattin was not a decisive battle that ended the Crusades. It ushered in a century of renewed and intensified holy war.
Darryl Dee is an Associate Professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, ON. He is interested in 17th- and 18th-century French history, particularly the reign of Louis XIV, the famous Sun King. He is currently working on two research projects. The first examines the uses and abuses of money during the period 1680 to 1726. The second project is a multifaceted analysis of 1709, a year of military, political, economic and ecological crises in France. He also teaches the popular course Great Battles in History for the Department of History at Laurier, the subject of his podcast. He has appeared as a guest on the LCMSDS’s On War & Society podcast, where he discussed his research and the myth of decisive battles.