Special Guest: Charlie Pearson on the Persian Wars, the Crusades, and the role of conflict in shaping cultural identity

In this episode of the Bristol Grammar School Classics Podcast, Andy Keen and Dan Watkins are joined by historian and educator Charlie Pearson for a rich and thought-provoking discussion exploring the Persian Wars, the Crusades, and the role of conflict in shaping cultural identity.

The episode opens with a question of directions—East versus West—and quickly turns to deeper themes: how the Crusaders were perceived by the sophisticated cities of the Islamic world, the disunity among Muslim powers at the time, and the surprising ways the Crusader states embedded themselves in a patchwork of shifting alliances. The conversation then shifts to the Greco-Persian Wars, interrogating Herodotus’ Greek-centred narrative and how Persian sources seem almost indifferent to the conflict. They consider how both conflicts reveal as much about myth-making and propaganda as about the historical events themselves.

Through wide-ranging comparisons, they examine how ancient and medieval societies constructed ideas of self and other—Greeks versus barbarians, Christians versus Muslims—and how war often became a tool for forging collective identity. Along the way, they tackle themes like nationalism, dehumanisation in war propaganda, gender and power, the role of religion, and the lasting impact of cultural exchange—from spices to algorithms.

The episode ends with a challenging question: what, if anything, is war good for? From advances in medicine to questions of moral justification, the panel reflects on whether some of the most significant human developments have been driven, disturbingly, by destruction.

Transcript

Dan Watkins:
Hello and welcome to the fourth "jumping off" episode of the Bristol Grammar School Classics Podcast. Today we're delighted to have our guest Charlie Pearson—historian, educator—and, of course, as always, Andy Keen.

Andy Keen:
Hello!

Dan Watkins:
Today we’re talking about historical perspectives: the Persian Wars and the Crusades.

Charlie, first of all—east or west: what’s your favourite direction?

Charlie Pearson:
I'm not allowed to say "stupid question," am I?

Right—well, you mentioned the Crusades, so I’ll use that as a starting point. I suppose nowadays, when we talk about “the West,” we tend to associate it with a more modern, perhaps more progressive sort of society. But pinpointing where that idea actually comes from is quite interesting.

Certainly, if you look at the era of the Crusades—the First Crusade, at the end of the 11th century—when the Crusaders arrived in the East, when they reached Constantinople, crossed Anatolia, and headed off towards Jerusalem on their armed pilgrimage, they were seen by their eastern counterparts—the Muslims they were going to fight, and even the Byzantines they were notionally going to fight for—as culturally inferior. Almost not even worth bothering with.

The cities they encountered—or were to encounter when they set up the Crusader States—places like Aleppo and Damascus, these were mega-cities. They had learning, libraries, and populations approaching the millions. Whereas in the West, places like Paris and Rouen were, you know, barely into six figures, if that.

The Muslim populations weren't really impressed. If you read the Western chronicles, the capture of Jerusalem in 1099 is seen as the biggest thing to happen since the Resurrection, basically. But when you read the Islamic chroniclers, they talk about the Crusaders as these lank-haired, pot-bellied people with no culture to speak of. One description paints them as almost not worth the trouble—they had a superseded revelation, and that was that.

One of the reasons the Crusader States were initially successful in planting roots—states like the Principality of Antioch, the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the County of Edessa—was because of the contempt the Muslim entities viewed them with. They didn’t see them as a threat, not something to rally around a jihad against. They were seen more as pawns—shifting allies, rivals you could make temporary use of, even ally with against fellow Muslims.

Dan Watkins:
So if we go back to the Crusades and take “east” as your answer, I suppose when we talk about East and West here, we’re talking about a geographic divide, but also a cultural one. And I guess the main, obvious one is religion. It’s easily reduced to “West = Christians vs East = Muslims” fighting over the Holy Land.

What would you say is the geographic division? Can we actually draw a line between East and West when it comes to the Crusades? And does that line move?

Charlie Pearson:
Well, yeah, it moves a bit—but there’s another divide too. You’ve got Roman Catholicism, which was supposed to be the catholic—the universal—church. That’s where the name comes from. But then you've also got the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Byzantine version of Christendom, which is really quite different.

And they probably saw themselves as culturally and religiously superior to the West as well. The papacy liked the idea of imposing some kind of uniformity, but really, the East wasn’t having it.

If you were going to draw a crude line, I suppose it would be somewhere around the edge of modern-day European Turkey. That’s where you hit the Byzantine Empire. Go further east, into eastern Turkey, and you’re more likely in territory controlled by Muslim powers. But even there, it’s a patchwork. You’ve got Armenian Christians, Greek Christians, Seljuk Muslims, Sunni Muslims, Fatimids, Shia powers, Abbasids—it’s incredibly diverse.

Dan Watkins:
And that same kind of patchwork and complexity exists if we go back to the Greco-Persian Wars, right? There’s an obvious geographic split—the Hellespont is the real crossing point—but even that needs unpacking.

Andy Keen:
The Greeks in Ionia very much felt like Greeks. Hence the Ionian Revolt. The burning of Sardis was a huge deal. And that was a response to Persian rule—the Achaemenid Empire at that point.

But what’s interesting—and it connects to what Charlie was saying about the comparative importance that each side placed on the conflict—is that if you read the Persian sources, you’d barely know there was a Greco-Persian War at all. It’s almost non-existent. You get lots of detail about Darius becoming king, what Cyrus does, what Cambyses does in Egypt—but the Greeks? Barely a mention.

It only really comes from Herodotus, who sees it as massively significant and sort of implies that it must have been significant for the Persians too. But there’s just no evidence that it was. Clearly Darius and then Xerxes were keen to expand the empire, but probably just because... well, it was there. So of course they expanded—like the Romans did.

But Herodotus has this obsession with the idea that Xerxes must have had some personal grudge against Athens. Some emotional animus. And that plays into a kind of Athenian exceptionalism—Athens must be special, must matter more.

There’s also a religious side to it. The Persians were Zoroastrians, so you’ve got Ahura Mazda, this great god, represented on things like the Behistun inscription. But even that was relatively new, and Herodotus doesn’t seem to understand it at all.

Dan Watkins:
No, he kind of just glosses over it. He says they worship gods—but doesn’t really get into what that means.

Andy Keen:
Exactly. He probably means they worship a big god who controls everything. But that’s very different to the Greek pantheon. There’s a brilliant discussion on that kind of thing with Colin Wadey last week—about the concept of God and how it's interpreted.

But Herodotus gets a lot wrong, and he's clearly biased. He sees the Greeks—particularly the Athenians—as special. Maybe that’s inevitable, given that he’s Greek himself. But he frames the Persian threat as this one-way danger: if only the Persians hadn’t expanded in such a brutal way, Greece could have been left alone, been happy.

But that ignores the fact that, at the time, Greek identity itself wasn’t fully formed. And that’s something we’ll come to in a minute.

Dan Watkins:
Yes, and that idea of identity also links back to the Crusades. Did the East and West—Christians and Muslims—see themselves clearly as distinct entities, or was it more fluid?

Charlie Pearson:
That’s a really good question, because as soon as you say “Crusades,” it’s such an emotive term. People immediately think “holy war,” this kind of grand clash of civilisations.

But if you actually went out to the Near East—Aleppo, Damascus, modern-day Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Egypt—you’d find a much more fluid, multicultural environment. It was a melting pot, a fusion of different cultures. People were moving around, trading, intermingling. I mentioned earlier that the frontier between Byzantium and the Islamic East was roughly Eastern Turkey—but again, it’s not a hard border. It’s messy.

At the time of the First Crusade, you’ve got the Seljuks being pushed into Anatolia, and you get what’s called the Sultanate of Rūm—"Rūm" being "Rome," of course. So it’s a very fluid situation.

When people analyse the reasons for the Crusaders’ initial success, they often say, “Well, look, the Muslim states were really disunited.” But I think it’s a bit anachronistic to expect them to have been united. As I said, you’ve got Shia and Sunni Muslims, you’ve got the Seljuks, who were relatively recent converts to Islam—much more warlike, much more expansionist.

Previously, you had the Abbasid Caliphate, stretching from southern Spain across North Africa into the Middle East—but by this point, that had kind of collapsed. So in Egypt, for instance, you had the Shia Fatimids. Basically, the Islamic world was extremely diverse.

And actually, they weren’t so different from the West in that regard. In the West, you had all these tiny polities: you know, the Duke of Normandy rising up and conquering England, but also Sicily. Some even argue the Crusades are really just another Norman conquest in many ways—a lot of those involved were Norman or at least Frankish.

So the basis of the Crusaders’ success is that they go from a Western patchwork of small, decentralised entities into an Eastern situation where there is more centralised power—bigger sultanates, caliphates—yet even then, it’s still quite fragmented. These powers are often warring with one another. So when the Western Christians arrive, they’re often just absorbed into the patchwork. Sometimes, Muslim rulers ally with Christians against fellow Muslims, and vice versa.

And jihad, by this point, is a fairly dormant concept. Yeah, my Crusades A Level group had fun with this. There’s this preacher in early 12th-century Damascus called al-Sulami. He’s giving these impassioned sermons saying, “Look, these Crusaders have their own version of jihad—we need to respond!” But apparently only six people were showing up to his sermons. People were pretty contemptuous of the whole idea.

Of course, eventually, that does change. After the Second Crusade, around the mid-12th century, you get the rise of the Zengid dynasty—Nur ad-Din, and then his successor, Saladin, who’s better known. And they probably present themselves as jihadis more for political reasons—as a way of uniting the Muslim world against the Crusader states.

But yeah, as you said, it’s a melting pot of identities. Perhaps a bit more centralised than the West, with bigger cities, but the Crusaders didn’t just arrive as outsiders and somehow manage to survive—as it’s often presented. They almost assimilated into this network of shifting alliances and rivalries.

Andy Keen:
In terms of identity—well, we can argue about whether national identity is a good thing or a bad thing. People seem to treat it as a given, like of course we should be proud of our nation. Let’s park that for a second.

But if you’re going to create a national identity, war seems like a very handy way of doing it. I was thinking of 1984—you know, the idea that perpetual war is a way of keeping people down: “We are at war with Eurasia… we have always been at war with Eurasia…”

Maybe Orwell was onto something—if you want to get people behind a leader, or behind an idea of nationhood, war is a great unifying tool. You give people a shared enemy.

Think of the Battle of Salamis—Themistocles telling people, “Look, if you don’t get on board with this Greek idea, you’ll be part of the Persian Empire.” You’ve got Eurybiades and Adeimantus trying to argue, “Hang on, maybe we could talk about this,” and he just shuts it down.

And that idea—that war creates identity—maybe it’s something that echoes into the modern world. It goes beyond Persia and Greece, beyond the Crusades.

Charlie Pearson:
Yeah, I wonder… is it war being used to create identity, or is it the other way around? Is it about forging an identity in order to prosecute war—conquer territory, win influence?

With the Crusades it’s complicated. I mean, I'm also thinking about modern nationalism. The Crusades, I think, are more about religion than national identity. The Crusaders genuinely believed they were going on an armed pilgrimage to gain remission for their sins. Most of them went back home afterwards—that was the point.

It’s only the ones who stayed behind who then had to face the reality of life in the Levant, navigating relationships with local Christians, Muslims, and others. But they spoke all sorts of languages, came from different cultures. It wasn’t national in the modern sense. In the modern era, it's trickier. Take the First World War—mobilising that number of people required a huge ideological effort. That’s where all the propaganda came in. They had to justify it.

But then British patriotism today is so bound up in memories of the First and Second World Wars. We're obsessed with them. So maybe the memory of war becomes part of identity, as much as the war itself.

Dan Watkins:
And the imagery too—there's a whole topic in our Classical Civilisation course where we look at how imagery builds identity: pottery, statuary, temples. Same with the propaganda of the World Wars: you’ve got figures like Uncle Sam or Britannia—personifications of the nation. These singular images unite people.

Charlie Pearson:
Yeah, and in World War I, you've got a whole continent at war. It’s not just country versus country—it’s blocs of nations. You need a strong sense of shared identity to hold those alliances together. And going back to that earlier point—was it national identity, or was it pulling on other things? I think with the First World War, you’re pulling on national pride and imperial duty.

The Second World War feels a bit different—there’s more of a moral imperative. You’re fighting against an ideology: Nazism, fascism.

And maybe that still resonates. Nowadays it’s the “woolly bleeding-heart liberal internationalists” like me who say we should stand up to Putin because what he’s doing violates national sovereignty.

And weirdly, it’s the nationalists who are now saying, “No, isolationism is best.” Trump saying “America First,” that sort of thing. Yeah, so the historian’s answer—“it depends.”

Dan Watkins:
Exactly. In that case, nationalism and identity become a reason not to go to war.

Andy Keen:
But if you go back to Herodotus and how he views the Greco-Persian Wars—I’ve started calling them “Greco-Persian” rather than “Persian” because “Persian Wars” implies a Greek viewpoint...

But there's also a moral imperative running through it all. The Greeks—at least according to their own narratives—bang on a lot about the Persians being vassals to their king, and how that's a kind of moral failing.

And then Aeschylus flips it around in his play The Persians. There's this great moment with Xerxes’ mother, Atossa—maybe tongue-in-cheek, or maybe he’s trying to fool us into thinking she’s naïve—where she asks, “What is this place, Athens?” And the others have to explain it to her. So, plot-wise, it gives a reason for someone to describe Athens to a non-Greek audience.

She says, “Well, who do they follow as king?” And they reply, “They don’t follow anyone.” She’s stunned—“How on earth do they get together and fight an army if they don’t have a dictator telling them what to do?”

And the answer is: passion, justice, morality—the free moral choice of the free Greek citizen. It’s not fear of punishment or duty to a monarch. It’s a sense of what is right.

I wouldn’t want to push it too far into “democracy vs tyranny” because most Greek states weren’t democratic. It’s not so much democracy as it is freedom that’s being held up. Athens is democratic, but Sparta isn’t. Corinth isn’t. The idea is: “We Greeks are free; they are not.” That’s the key binary.

In The Persians, the Greeks sing what was probably a completely made-up song about being free Greeks fighting the evil Persians. It’s theatre—but it presents the war as a clash of values.

It’s one of several binary oppositions the Greeks construct: free vs enslaved, Greek vs barbarian, man vs woman. And interestingly, you’ve got female figures in Persian culture—like Atossa and Artemisia—who are powerful, which the Greeks find strange. That’s feminising in their eyes, and it's linked to otherness.

Dan Watkins:
There’s this idea of the Persians as luxurious, soft, decadent—pyjama-wearing, as it were.

Andy Keen:
Yes, the trousers are key! The Persian men wore trousers and that’s seen as a moral failing. Because the Greeks believed a noble man shouldn’t care if his legs get cold.

Charlie Pearson:
So, do the Greeks see themselves as liberating the Persians from tyranny, or are they just “othering” them?

Because we know dehumanising the enemy is a common tactic. And in this case, the Persians are the aggressors—they brought war to Europe. So the Greeks see themselves as defending, not conquering.

Andy Keen:
Yeah, I don’t think the Greeks would’ve thought of it as a liberation. But they certainly believed in their idea of freedom. I think, had things played out differently, they might’ve liked the idea of the Persians being free too.

The real problem with Persia, in their eyes, is the tyrant at its heart. That’s what makes Persia “the other.” Tyranny is key. And one reason tyrants can get away with it, in this view, is because they’re surrounded by comfort—cushions, gold, elaborate decorations. In contrast, the Greeks are out there doing a hard day's work, earning a living.

So, yeah, this idea of "othering" connects to that term “barbarian,” which is worth unpacking.

Dan Watkins:
Absolutely. And just a note to any non-Classicist listeners out there—firstly, shame on you—but secondly, the Greek definition of themselves was often in opposition to others. The enemy comes, and the Greeks go, “Right—they're that, so we must be this.”

The binaries get very strange. Male vs female, free vs enslaved. Even though the Greeks owned slaves, they believed that not having a tyrant gave you freedom. And again, let’s remember—democracy is just Athens. But other unifying forces included shared religion and, crucially, language.

Andy Keen:
Yeah—they might speak different dialects, but it’s still intelligible. And there’s this idea that if you can’t communicate politically, you can't be part of the polis. You’re a private citizen—and the Greek word for that is idiotēs.

Dan Watkins:
Right, so if you can’t speak Greek, you're an idiot—not in the modern sense, but in the sense of being outside the political process.

And “barbarian” just means someone who doesn’t speak Greek. It literally comes from “bar-bar”—as in, someone who just babbles incomprehensibly.

Charlie Pearson:
It’s interesting to compare that to modern examples—like the World Wars. You’ve got some really dehumanising propaganda—posters, cigarette packets with images of Germans bayoneting babies.

The goal isn’t to debate political systems; it’s to say: these people are monsters. They’re not like us.

I mean, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori—it is sweet and right to die for your country. But only if you believe the people you’re fighting aren’t really human. No one naturally wants to kill another person. So warmongers have to make us want it. And you can do that with propaganda, even on the back of a cigarette packet.

Andy and I were talking earlier about the idea of nations as imagined communities. Quite often, they’re invented from the top down.

I’m definitely in the camp that sees modern nationalism and patriotism as the last refuge of the scoundrel. Nationalism is incredibly effective—and incredibly flexible.

There’s a scholar called Anthony Smith who calls nationalism “the chameleon doctrine.” It can be used to mobilise almost any population. It can be post-imperial, anti-colonial, socialist—look at Castro’s Cuba.

Even though socialist theory says we should unite through common humanity and class solidarity, nationalism gets folded in anyway. And on the other side, it can be extremely right-wing, ethnic, or even liberal. It works for almost anything.

Nationalism can be a vehicle for turning subjects of monarchs into citizens of nations—with rights and freedoms. But we were wondering: is it actually worse in the modern age?

Because now you’ve got all the trappings of modernity—you can communicate with millions of people at once, travel vast distances quickly, impose national curriculums. Whereas back in the ancient world, maybe the Greek city-states were pulling together out of necessity, and any kind of proto-nationalism that emerged felt a bit more authentic—because they didn’t have all those tools at their disposal.

Andy Keen:
Yeah, and I wonder about that. Sometimes, all we have left is scraps of history—especially in the case of Herodotus, who’s basically inventing the concept of history. So it’s hard to know how much people really bought into the idea of “Greece.” Did your average guy in the agora really care?

He might have said, “Yes, of course, I believe in Greece”—if someone important was listening. But did he really care?

Charlie Pearson:
Exactly. From the modern historian’s perspective, it’s hard, because we live in an age of nation-states—which, in the grand scheme of things, is quite a new phenomenon. Yes, centuries old, but not timeless.

It’s difficult for us to disentangle the idea of “nation” as a group with shared cultural heritage from “nation” as a geographically defined state. Before the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, people may have rallied around shared culture and memory—but with more acceptance that borders were flexible.

And, arguably, that’s more honest. These days, you get claims like Putin’s—“Well, there are ethnic Russians in Ukraine being persecuted, so we must go in and liberate them.” The same old playbook.

We look at Greece today and we see it as a clear shape on a map. It has borders, a government, sovereignty. But in the Classical period? It’s not that simple.

And—excuse my ignorance—but when did we even choose what Greece was?

Dan Watkins:
The Greek city-states were all over the place. Thebes, Corinth, Sparta… some north of Athens actually sided with the Persians. They medized—not just surrendered, but welcomed them.

Andy Keen:
Plutarch famously said that out of the 300 or so poleis, only 32 stood at Salamis and said “No, we’re not having this.” And according to Herodotus, even those 31 would have folded without Athens.

So yeah, post-war propaganda—then and now—is usually very different from the reality. In the case of the Greco-Persian Wars, the Spartans put up their monument at Delphi, the Athenians claim all the credit, Themistocles is lionised…

And the way the story is told becomes the truth—not the events themselves, but their retelling.

Dan Watkins:
Yeah. And I suppose that leads to the big question: if war is so often misrepresented, is there anything it’s actually good for?

Charlie Pearson:
Well… it stimulates things. If you look at the World Wars, for example—huge advances in medicine, prosthetics, plastic surgery. Even in ancient times, Roman medicine improved massively, often under pressure—like in the Colosseum, treating gladiators. Or during the Crimean War—Florence Nightingale, sanitation, nursing reform.

Now, you’d hope no sane person would order a war just to make those advances… but they do tend to happen.

Andy Keen:
And socially, too—women working in factories during the World Wars, entering public life.

Charlie Pearson:
Yeah—although, worth noting, a lot of that was rolled back. Women’s football leagues were hugely popular… and then shut down. The returning men wanted their jobs back.

I personally think the campaigning of the suffragists and suffragettes had more to do with women gaining the vote than the war itself. But I won’t deny the war made women's labour more visible.

You could say women were “doing men’s jobs”—quote unquote—but society didn’t exactly roll out the red carpet afterwards. Still, it shifted perceptions.

Again, though, I’m saying this from a position of great privilege. I’m a bleeding-heart liberal, a universalist. That’s only possible because I’ve never experienced the horror of war. I’ve never had to hate someone for flattening my house.

Dan Watkins:
But we did get spices from the Crusades!

And the number zero—via Arabic scholars, originally from India, but transmitted westward through the Islamic world. Even the word “algorithm” comes from al-Khwārizmī.

I’ve always been of the view that the West got far more out of the East from the Crusades than the other way around.

I can’t reconcile myself to dulce et decorum est pro patria mori—that “sweet and fitting” idea of dying for one’s country. I’d like to believe I wouldn’t have bought into that, even in 1914.

Andy Keen:
Although Aeschylus might’ve agreed with you. Eight years after Salamis, he wrote The Persians—set in Persia, showing the aftermath of war from their perspective.

He’s not glorying in the Greek victory. Yes, he points out Xerxes’ hubris, but there’s real pathos too. It’s about the human cost.

Charlie Pearson:
So looking back, yes—wars do often accelerate certain developments. Penicillin, for example, was discovered before WWII, but mass production only took off during the war effort.

But none of us would say, “Let’s recreate the Second World War to boost antibiotics.”

Andy Keen:
Exactly. So in brief? War—absolutely nothing. Or at least, nothing that justifies the horrors it brings.