10 Films With Glaring Historical Inaccuracies

From the beginning, Kingdom of Heaven ignores its historical roots in the period around the Second Crusade. Orlando Bloom plays Balian of Ibelin, a blacksmith from France who joined his estranged father as he journeyed to the Holy Land, eventually fighting the Muslim leader, Saladin, to a stalemate at the walls of Jerusalem. Except... nope, that's not what happened at all.

Balian of Ibelin was born to a knight in the Crusader-held county of Jaffa, not in France, but he's not the only one that suffered extensive fictionalisation. Patriarch Heraclius of Jerusalem, who appears in the film only to propose converting to Islam to survive the siege of the Holy City, was the main proponent of surrendering the city to avoid this outcome. He personally paid for the ransom of 19,000 of the poorest citizens of Jerusalem.

One of the characters that wasn't completely fictionalised was Reynald de Chatillon, who was by all accounts not a particularly nice person. Fond of torturing priests, raiding the coast of Muslim-held land, and probably littering, Brendan Gleeson's character was one of the few that didn't undergo an enormous change from history to the screen, although he never beheaded Saladin's sister.