On 20 April 1191 the fleet of Philip Augustus of France anchored off Acre, bringing food, men and siege engines. The Third Crusade had finally materialized. King Philip postponed an assault until the arrival of Richard I of England on 7 June and contented himself with concentrating a heavy bombardment on the Tour Maudite, Acre's principal bastion; both Templars and Hospitallers had their own mangonel. After recklessly overtaxing his subjects, Richard had made countless enemies during a leisurely journey, in the course of which he paused to conquer Cyprus, then a Byzantine island ruled by a rebel emperor. Yet in the Holy Land he became 'Richard Coeur de Lion', the hero that he is in Grétry's opera and Scott's novel. The 'Accursed Tower' crumbled. A series of ferocious assaults culminated in a particularly savage attack by the English on 11 July which broke the garrison's spirit; the next day Acre surrendered after negotiations conducted by the Hospitallers.
The French king installed himself in the Temple – upon which the brethren broke into vociferous complaints, led by their new Master, Fra' Robert de Sablé from Maine, who had been elected with Richard's support. The king soon moved out, a humiliating concession which shows the power of the brethren. At the end of July, Philip sailed for France, leaving Richard in undisputed command.
Saladin asked the Templars for their word that the prisoners would not be harmed but, knowing Richard's brutal, unreliable temperament, they refused it. On 20 August Richard ordered his English troops to butcher nearly 3,000 men, women and children. Two days later he marched on Ascalon down the coast road with the sea covering one flank, the Hospitallers for his advance guard and the Templars covering his rear. Later they changed places. Because of dense papyrus swamps the column was forced to turn inland, on to the plain before Arsuf.
Saturday, 7 September 1191, was a day of sweltering heat. The Moslems began a terrifying din: drums rolling, cymbals clashing, trumpets braying and dervishes howling. Horses began to fall beneath the arrow storm, but Richard was determined to wait until he could charge on as broad a front as possible. The Hospitaller Master, Era' Garnier de Nablus, a former prior of England, whose knights were on the left, told him that they could not be kept back much longer; but Richard ordered them to hold, and they held. As the rearguard, the Hospitallers had suffered most of all. The order's Marshal could not restrain himself. The whole Frankish cavalry galloped with him. The Turkish squadrons disintegrated. For the Christians it was a victory of some significance; the sins which brought about the judgement of Hattin were forgiven and once more God was on their side.
The sultan started to evacuate coastal towns. Unfortunately, instead of marching on Jerusalem, Richard delayed to re-fortify Jaffa. In November he set out for the Holy City. By January he was only twelve miles away, but the winter rains were unusually heavy and Saladin's army was behind him, so Richard withdrew to Ascalon on the advice of the brethren and the poulains, a wise if melancholy decision. At the Templars' suggestion he set about refortifying Ascalon. The first months of 1192 were spent in deciding the future of the crown of Jerusalem. Queen Sibylla had died childless in October 1190 and the Syrian baronage was anxious to be rid of her lamentable husband. Her younger sister, Isabella, had her marriage to the weak Humphrey de Toron forcibly annulled and, protesting, she was married to Conrad of Montferrat in November. In July 1191 Guy, supported by Richard as a Poitevin, had won the right to keep the crown. Now the English king knew him better, and in April 1192 Richard summoned the Syrian magnates to a council. Unanimously they chose Conrad for their king. However, a week later Conrad was struck down by the Assassins. Within another week Isabella was married to Richard's nephew, Henry, Count of Champagne, young, able and popular, who was crowned in place of Conrad.
There remained the problem of the ex-king. On his way to Palestine, Richard had sold Cyprus to the Templars. They soon upset the islanders by their arrogant administration. In April 1192 there was a fierce uprising and the Templar commander, Fra' Armand Bouchart, fourteen brethren and a hundred troops survived only by taking refuge in the citadel of Nicosia. A few days later, Fra' Armand launched a lethal counter-attack which was successful, but the Templars returned the island to Richard. He sold it to Guy, who borrowed the necessary down-payment from the merchants of Tripoli, then left the Holy Land for ever.
In September Richard made a treaty with Saladin: peace for five years and the Franks to keep the coastal towns from Tyre to Jaffa. The Third Crusade had failed to attach Jerusalem to the narrow strip of land, ninety miles long and never more than ten miles wide, which was the new Outremer, a string of coastal towns. In October 1192 Richard left Palestine. The next year Saladin died the death of a saint at Damascus and his sword was buried with him, for, as the Prophet said: 'Paradise lies under the shadow of swords.' The Moslem counter-crusade slackened. His heirs, the Ayubites, were busy disputing his inheritance and Outremer settled down under King Henry's capable government. The Temple of Solomon and the Hospital were lost with Jerusalem, so the brethren moved their chief houses to Acre.
In September 1197 Henry fell from a window fatally, and the wretched Isabella was married for a fourth time, to Amalric de Lusignan, Guy's youngest brother. Amalric had inherited Cyprus in 1194 on Guy's death and had recently been given a crown by the Emperor Henry VI. Amalric took up residence at Acre, a good friend of the orders: they had intervened on his behalf when he quarrelled with King Henry. At the same time, Amalric built a kingdom in Cyprus which endured for three centuries.
Lusignan Cyprus resembled Outremer in that it was ruled by a French-speaking king and had an aristocracy with an Italian merchant class. Castles and churches were built in the French style and the new Cypriot culture was Latin and feudal, Roman clergy being installed and Orthodoxy persecuted. Both Hospitallers and Templars founded commanderies, the most notable being at Kolossi whence the sweet St John wine still comes. However, the brethren never obtained the power they had in Syria, for the king was stronger and his thirteen barons weaker than in Jerusalem. Cyprus was a beautiful country and free from border warfare, yet ultimately it ruined Outremer. Settlers preferred its fertile soil, its lemon and orange groves and gentler climate, to the stones, heat and danger of Palestine, while the possession of Cypriot manors by the Syrian baronage lessened their stake in Jerusalem's survival.
The one important event in Amalric's reign was the abortive German crusade of 1197. Its sole achievement was to found the third great military order, the Teutonic Knights, in 1198; they were installed in the St Nicholas Gate at Acre. As the new brotherhood developed in the Baltic rather than in Palestine, its rise is dealt with in another chapter.*
About this time another order was emerging, the Hospitallers of St Thomas of Canterbury at Acre, usually called Knights of St Thomas Acon. During the siege of Acre, William, chaplain to the Dean of St Paul's, moved by the English crusaders' misery, began nursing the sick and wounded. After the city's capture, aided by King Richard, he built a small chapel and purchased a cemetery, founding a hospital and a nursing brotherhood restricted to Englishmen.12 Probably they did not turn military until the Fifth Crusade.
In 1229 the Bishop of Winchester ordered them to copy the rule of the Teutonic Knights. The habit was a white mantle and red cross, which had a white scallop shell on it. The new order acquired lands in Cyprus, Sicily, Naples and, later, Greece, while in England its headquarters was the Hospital of St Thomas Acon in London, on the site of what is now the Mercers' Hall.
The original house was the actual birthplace of Thomas Becket and had been presented to the brethren by his sister and brother-in-law. The brethren of St Thomas were always a small brotherhood, most Englishmen preferring to join the Hospitallers or the Templars.
The principality of the tough Cilician highlanders was expanding, and their ruler, Lavon II, had nearly succeeded in capturing Antioch with its half-Armenian baronage. Lavon had occupied the Templar castle of Baghras, which commanded the road from Antioch into Cilicia, after Saladin had evicted the brethren. He did not return it to the Poor Knight
s, who seem to have taken a very unecumenical attitude towards Eastern Christians in general and had unpleasant memories of Prince Mleh. Lavon then tried peaceful means, marrying his niece to Bohemond III's son, Raymond, to procure an eventual merger of the two principalities. He appreciated the advantages of both papal and imperial support. Something of a shotgun marriage was arranged and the Monophysite Armenian Church recognized the nominal supremacy of the pope's jurisdiction with little enthusiasm. The union was never very effective, though the Armenian bishops took to Western mitres and croziers, but in January 1198 at Sis, in the presence of a papal legate, the Jacobite patriarch and an Orthodox archbishop, Lavon was crowned King of Armenia by the Catholicos from Etchmiadzin. The Western coronation rite was used. Frankish influence grew stronger and the 'sparapet' became a 'cunstabl', the 'nakharar' a 'baron'. There was more intermarriage, and in old age Lavon himself married Amalric's daughter, Sibylla de Lusignan.
On the death of Bohemond III in 1201 the Templars and their new Master, Philippe du Plaissiez, opposed the succession of his baby grandson, Raymond-Ruben, whilst supporting his younger son, Bohemond of Tripoli. They would not tolerate an Armenian regency. In the ensuing war against Lavon the brethren were joined not only by the Antiochenes but also by Malik az-Zahir of Aleppo. However, the latter soon made peace after being badly mauled by the fierce Haiots. Then it was the turn of the Templars, a war of night raids followed by dawn pursuits in the hills along stony mountain paths, and of ambushes in the steep valleys of the Taurus. The struggle lasted for nearly twenty years, the Hospitallers supporting Raymond-Ruben, the Templars Bohemond. They were also fighting each other, and Innocent III reprimanded the Templar Master, saying that his Order's job was to fight Moslems, not Hospitallers.
The Armenians trusted the brethren of St John and gave them Selefke, the key fortress of Eastern Cilicia, from where they launched frequent razzias into Moslem territory, probably assisted by Teutonic Knights; it was no doubt on one of these that the Hochmeister Hermann Bart was killed in 1210. The Germans' presence exacerbated their feud with the Templars, who disputed their right to wear the white habit, chasing them out of Acre. The same year the Poor Knights allied with Malik of Aleppo and Kaikawas of Konya. Brethren and Turks rode together into Cilicia, where they captured the mountain stronghold of Partounk and even threatened Sis, the capital. Lavon was horrified and made peace, returning Baghras to the Templars, a triumph for their ruthless diplomacy. In 1213 Prince Bohemond's son, Raymond, was stabbed to death by Assassins at Tortosa and the next year the patriarch of Jerusalem met the same fate. As he had been a loud critic of the Hospitallers, and the Assassins paid them tribute, some contemporaries suspected their connivance. At last, in 1216, Raymond-Ruben captured Antioch and its citadel from the Templars, installing a Hospitaller garrison under Ferrand de Barras, the castellan of Selefke, and handed over Jabala to Fra' Joubert, castellan of Marqab. But in 1219 the Antiochenes rose and brought back Bohemond, who confiscated all Hospitaller possessions. The Order appealed to Rome in vain, though the pope did succeed in reconciling Hospitallers and Templars in 1221. The latter were no longer active in Armenian politics, since their old enemy, King Lavon, had died and Raymond-Ruben had been murdered. Not until 1231 did Bohemond make peace with the Hospitallers.
King Lavon had left a daughter, Zabel, by Sibylla de Lusignan, and in 1222 the cunstabl, Constantine of Lampron, married her to Bohemond IV's younger son, Philip, who joined the Armenian Church, then out of communion with Rome. Nevertheless, the Hospitallers continued to support him. The new king behaved with such arrogance that he was murdered in 1226, Zabel being forcibly married to Constantine's son Hethoum. When the sixteen-year-old queen fled by night from Sis to the Hospitallers at Selefke, pursued by the regent, the castellan Fra' Bertrand sold both fortress and fugitive to Constantine, a cynical if practical decision. Later this Order supplied Armenia with an annual tribute of 400 horsemen while both Constantine and Hethoum became Hospitaller confratres. Happily Hethoum proved a kind husband and a great king, who reconciled his Church with Rome and followed a policy of alliance with Antioch. Firm government put an end to the brethren's intrigues.
The long struggle had shown them at their worst. Nevertheless one must see them as monks with a genuine sense of spiritual brotherhood, albeit monks living in barrack-room cloisters. They obeyed their Masters just as monks do an abbot and the good of their Order came before everything else. Their 'caravan priests' must have had considerable influence as spiritual directors – ideologists who decided difficult points of Christian dialectic, campaigning with the brethren rather like the commissars who rode with the Red cavalry in the Russian Civil War. Only they could hear the brother-knights' confessions.
They were not without writers – the fact that they were not intellectuals and could not read Latin did not mean that brother-knights were illiterate. The Templars produced several poets, troubadors and trouveurs, including one Grand Master, Fra' Robert de Sablé. Towards 1180 'the Templar of Temple Bruer' (a preceptory near Sleaford in Lincolnshire) was writing Norman French verse translations of 'Thais', and of Latin poems on Anti-Christ and on St Paul's descent into Hell; one is dedicated to his superior, 'Henri d'Arci, frère del Temple Salemun'. This unknown English poet of the Order also produced a prose translation of the 'Vitae Patrum'.13 Such austere and didactic literature was obviously considered suitable for brother-knights. Undoubtedly their best mind was a Hospitaller, Guglielmo di San Stefano, who wrote a scholarly but brief history of his Order besides legal treatises which show considerable knowledge of the Nicomachean Ethics and of Roman law. In 1286 he commissioned a clerk at Acre to translate Cicero into French. It is significant that Fra' Guglielmo was not a chaplain but a brother-knight.14 However, such men were probably exceptions rather than the rule; some clerical contemporaries sneered at the military brethren's lack of learning.
Innocent III launched the Fourth Crusade in 1204, as usual a mainly French affair. However, en route the Venetians' blind but exceedingly cunning Doge, Enrico Dandolo, persuaded the crusaders to help the pretender Alexius Angelus to secure the Byzantine throne. When the new emperor failed to make good extravagant promises of payment, the crusaders stormed Constantinople on 12 April. For three days they plundered and murdered their fellow Christians; even priests joined in the sack, which culminated in the desecration of Hagia Sophia, the Orthodox St Peter's, where a drunken prostitute was sat on the patriarchal throne. Then the conquerors elected a French emperor and a Venetian patriarch, carving out baronies and duchies. The second Rome had fallen at last. A horrified pope cried out that Greeks could not be blamed for hating Latins whom they knew only as treacherous dogs; but instead of reinstating the rightful patriarch, he confirmed the Latin usurper and the pseudo-emperor. Left in peace, the Eastern Empire might have revived, as so often in the past, to provide a strong bulwark against Islam; the ephemeral Latin Empire would soon fall before despised 'Griffons', to be overrun in turn by the Turks. But few Frankish colonists would set foot in Palestine while land could be had in Greece or on some Aegean island. For the barons 'Romania' was a paradise and the court of the princes of Achaia has been compared to Camelot. And the military brethren acquired many new commanderies.
On Amalric's death, Cyprus went to his son, Hugh, while Jerusalem passed to his young step-daughter, Maria, who in 1210 married John de Brienne, a soldier of fortune who at the age of sixty was surprisingly vigorous. Since 1201 the ruler of Saladin's empire had been the Sultan Saif ad-Din al-Adil, known to the Franks as Saphadin. Once an ardent champion of the counter-crusade and belonging to a Moslem military brotherhood distinguished by special trousers, he was now ageing. Exhausted by family quarrels, Saphadin adopted a peaceful policy towards the Christians.
For six years Outremer enjoyed peace largely because of the Albigensian crusade. Ostensibly a holy war against the melancholy and repellent sect of the Catharii, Manichaeans who abominated the flesh, it was a campaign by the nobles of northern France against those of Lang
uedoc whose lands they coveted. The French commanderies of the Hospital and Temple took a small part in the campaign. At this time heresy menaced Catholic Europe, and Innocent III encouraged the foundation of fresh orders to cope with it. Extremist tendencies were either contained within the Franciscans or were combated by the Dominicans who staffed the new Inquisition. The mendicant friars' organization reflected that of military brethren, with provinces and Master Generals.
The Fifth Crusade materialized in 1217 to the secret dismay of Syrian Franks. In September King Andrew II of Hungary and Duke Leopold of Austria landed at Acre, joined in November by King Hugh of Cyprus. King John summoned his barons, including the Masters – the Templar Guillaume de Chartres, the Hospitaller Garin de Montaigu and the German Hermann von Salza. However, the next few months were frittered away in fruitless campaigns. Eventually King John decided that a hard blow struck at Egypt was more likely to regain Jerusalem than any direct assault. Accordingly, a Christian armada from Acre sailed up the Nile to invest Damietta in May 1218. The Egyptians attempted to cut the Franks off from the sea by placing a great iron chain across the Nile, but in August the Crusaders stormed the 'Tower of the Chain', opening the approach to the city walls. Old Saphadin died, his end hastened by mortification. More reinforcements arrived from Europe with an arrogant legate, Cardinal Pelagius. Damietta was bombarded, each order having artillery. On the night of 9 October 1218 the Egyptians made a surprise attack on the Latin camp but were beaten back by King John and the Hospital Marshal, Fra' Aymar de Layron, with only thirty knights, until sufficient help arrived to drive the Mamelukes into the Nile. On 29 August 1219 the Franks attempted to storm the town but were repulsed with very heavy losses, the Templars losing fifty brethren, the Hospitallers thirty-two, including their Marshal.
The Monks of War Page 5