The Monks of War

by Desmond Seward

  King Louis spent the following four years at Acre administering the kingdom and he subjected the Templars' great officers to a humiliating punishment. Their Marshal, Hugues de Jouy, had negotiated a treaty at Damascus without the king's permission. Renaud de Vichiers, now Master, had to come before Louis, barefoot, and retract the treaty, kneeling in full view of the whole army. As a result Fra' Hugues was banished for life from the Holy Land.

  The king obtained the release of many important prisoners, including the Hospitaller Master, Guillaume de Châteauneuf, with thirty of his brethren, fifteen Templars and ten Teutonic Knights, though negotiations nearly broke down when the Poor Knights made their abortive alliance with Damascus. An attack on Jaffa by the Damascene army caused the Franks to launch a punitive expedition, during which the little detachment of Lazarus Knights came to grief.27 Joinville describes the incident as follows:

  While the king was before Jaffa, the Master of Saint Lazarus [Fra' Raynaud de Flory] had spied out near Ramleh, a town some three good leagues away, a number of cattle and various other things from which he thought to collect some valuable booty. So being a man of no standing in the army, and who therefore did exactly as he pleased, he went off to that place without saying a word to the king. But after he had collected his spoils the Saracens attacked him, and so thoroughly defeated him that of all the men he had in his company no more than four escaped.28

  Louis' hopes of a Franco-Egyptian alliance came to nothing and his one lasting treaty was with the Assassins through the mediation of the Hospitaller and Templar Masters. Louis' mother, Queen Blanche, the Regent of France, died in 1254 and the king returned home. He left behind a seneschal, Geoffroi de Sargines, with a French 'regiment', but Latin Syria could not replace the losses in manpower it had suffered during his Egyptian campaign and the kingdom would never again know firm government. Not even a saint could save Outremer.

  4

  ARMAGEDDON

  Latin Syria was now a mere string of coastal entrepôts in which commercial, municipal and clerical factions squabbled viciously, heedless of the Cypriot kings' futile efforts to assert their authority. Most barons had left for Cyprus, so military orders, holding what little territory remained inland, were the dying kingdom's last support, and even they quarrelled and fought with one another. Yet this self-destroying anarchy was menaced by a ferocious Mameluke state, the chimera of a Mongol alliance offering a sole, illusory hope of salvation. In 1256 the rivalry between the Genoese and the Venetians developed into civil war over the control of the monastery of St Sabas in Acre. The Venetians were supported by the Pisan and Provençal merchants, the Templars, the Teutonic Knights, and the brethren of St Lazarus and St Thomas. The Genoese were backed by the Catalan merchants, the Hospitallers and Philippe de Montfort, Lord of Tyre. There was a battle in the streets of Acre, ending in a temporary victory for the Hospitallers and the Genoese. An even bloodier battle followed, after which the Genoese withdrew to their own quarter of the town.1

  Yet this period was one of important development for the Hospitallers under Fra' Hugues Revel, 'maistre prodome et sage',2 who may have been an Englishman from Devon. Their militarization was complete, chaplains having been finally subordinated to knight-brethren, while their hierarchy was crystallizing. First came conventual baillis (great officers), then bailiffs of Syria, followed by ones from overseas. All priories and commanderies had to contribute one-third of their revenues for the use of the Order to offset losses in income from lands captured by the Mamelukes. The increasingly aristocratic and military emphasis found expression in the Hospitallers' new uniform. By 1248 the cumbersome monastic cloak had been superseded by a black surcoat with a white cross, soon replaced by a red surcoat with a white cross. The original habit was retained for convent life. As early as 1250 the Templar rule stipulated that a postulant must prove himself a knight's son or the descendant of knights, and priest-brethren were restricted to fewer offices. Similar modifications appeared in the Hospitaller constitutions.3

  The word 'knight' has a certain fairytale flavour which obscures the fact that such a man was a specialized fighting machine. They were often employed by a baronial household in administrative as well as military posts, or they plied for hire as mercenaries. The more fortunate acquired manors, but most were poor, their armour constituting the greater part of their wealth. The suit of armour was undergoing change, however. Plate knee-caps, gauntlets and leg-plates were beginning to be worn, and shields were smaller, while the helmet was the great barrel-helm, though some preferred a light steel-cap under a mail hood. The most curious innovations were ailerons, square pieces of cuir bouilli standing up vertically from his shoulders, on which the owner's coat of arms was painted. Naturally the brethren were provided with excellent equipment.

  The Franks could afford to indulge in such petty squabbles as the 'War of St Sabas' only because their Moslem enemies were distracted by the threat of Mongol invasion. At the end of the twelfth century the nomadic tribes of the Gobi Desert had united under Genghis Khan, and the standard of the Nine Yak Tails had swept like a roaring whirlwind through Asia – 'the scourge of Heaven's fury in the hands of the merciless Tartars'. By the middle of the thirteenth century they had conquered Baghdad, throwing the last caliph, tied in a bag, into the river. Some of them were Nestorian Christians. The legend of Prester John, the great Christian potentate of the East, probably arising from rumours of the Coptic kings of Ethiopia, was well known in Latin Syria and resulted in much wishful thinking about the Great Khan Mongka. King Louis had sent ambassadors to the 'kuriltai' at Karakorum, while King Hethoum of Armenia went in person, acknowledging Mongka as overlord in return for military assistance. In 1259 the great Khan's brother Hulagu, Ilkhan of Persia, whose wife, Dokuz Khatun, and whose best general, Kitbuqa, were Nestorians, sent the horde into Syria, accompanied by a strong detachment of Armenian and Georgian Knights. Aleppo soon fell, followed by the other Moslem towns of the north. On 1 March 1260 three Christian princes, Kitbuqa, Hethoum of Armenia and Bohemond VI of Antioch, rode triumphantly into Damascus. At Baghdad, Hulagu had shown special favour to the Nestorian Catholics, and Kitbuqa was equally kind to the Christians in his new city. By now no great Moslem power existed east of Egypt.

  Unfortunately Mongka's sudden death and the subsequent struggle for the throne forced Hulagu to withdraw most of his troops. Kitbuqa was left at Damascus with a small force, whereupon Sultan Qutuz of Egypt advanced into Syria with a large army. He asked the Christian lords for help and the Haute Cour discussed his appeal with some sympathy. The Tartars were uncomfortable neighbours who tolerated only vassals, not independent allies, and the poulains preferred civilized infidels to barbarous Christians. However, Hochmeister Anno von Sangerhausen warned them that the Saracens would turn on the Franks if they were victorious. Outremer remained neutral. On 30 September 1260 Mongols and Mamelukes joined battle at Ain Jalud – 'the Pools of Goliath'. Kitbuqa was surrounded, his troops wiped out and he himself captured and beheaded – Turkish captains playing polo with his head. Next month Qutuz was murdered by the sinister Baibars, who became sultan in his place, and ruler of Damascus as well as of Cairo.

  'His Sublime Highness, the Sultan an-Nasr Rukn-ad-Din', the same 'Crossbowman' who had defeated St Louis, was a soldier of genius even if, in the words of a French historian, he was also a treacherous and ferocious beast of prey.4 This former slave soon controlled all Saladin's former empire, building countless roads which gave the armies of the Mameluke sultans a mobility unknown to their predecessors. Determined to annihilate both Franks and Armenians, Baibars launched his first sledge-hammer blow in 1265. After taking Caesarea, he laid siege to Arsur, which the Hospitallers had recently bought from the Ibelin family. There were 270 knights in the town, and they fought bravely for forty days. Eventually the Mameluke heavy artillery and mangonels on movable towers breached the walls of the lower town. By now ninety Hospitallers had fallen. The citadel was crowded with refugees and unreliable native troops, and the castell
an surrendered within three days. It was understood that he and his remaining knights would be allowed to withdraw to Acre, but Baibars dragged them off to Cairo in chains.

  The following summer 'Bendocdar' invested the Templar fortress of Safed in Galilee. The bleak stone stronghold controlled 160 villages. Again it was a story of local auxiliaries panicking. After three assaults had failed, Baibars offered a free pardon to all Turcopoles, who started to desert. The Templars began to lose their nerve and sent a Syrian sergeant, Fra' Leo, to negotiate terms with Baibars. He returned with a guarantee of safe conduct to the coast. The knights accepted and opened the castle gates, whereupon the sultan offered them a choice of Islam or death. Next morning, when they were paraded outside the walls to give their answer, the castellan stepped forward, begging his brethren not to apostatize. Baibars had him skinned alive and the brethren decapitated, after which he decorated his new possession with their rotting heads.

  Meanwhile the emir Qalawun raided Cilicia. King Hethoum's two sons and the Templars from Baghras met them near Darbessaq. But they were too few and, after killing Prince Thoros and capturing Prince Lavon, the Mamelukes swept on to Sis, the Armenian capital, which they burnt to the ground. The little mountain kingdom was utterly laid waste and never recovered completely.

  Three years later, after capturing Jaffa and the Templar fortress of Beaufort, Baibars attacked and stormed Antioch. Amid the usual atrocities one incident shocked even the Turks. The canonesses of St John had cut off their own noses with scissors and gashed their cheeks in order to avoid rape. The appalled Moslems slaughtered them on the spot. Save for the isolated coastal town of Lattakieh, the principality had vanished. The Templars saw that northern Syria was lost and wisely withdrew their outposts at Baghras and La Roche de Roissel. As his subjects said, the sultan 'never destroyed the hiding place of error without giving it to the flames and drenching it in blood'. Baibars wrote a sardonic letter to Bohemond at Tripoli congratulating him on being absent. Gloatingly, the 'Crossbowman' went on to describe the desolation he had created, the butchery of Antiochene priests and citizens, the desecration of churches and how cheaply ladies had been sold in the slave-market.

  The kingdom was tottering, though in 1269 Hugh III was crowned at Tyre, the first Levantine-born king since 1186. Baibars' relentless campaigns were sapping even the Hospital's resources; in 1268 Master Hugues Revel had written that his Order could muster only 300 knights in Syria. The sultan humiliated them further in 1271. He had already taken Chastel Blanc from the Templars when on 3 March he laid siege to Krak-des-Chevaliers. The finest castle of the Christian world, which had defied Saladin, was garrisoned by the Hospitaller Marshal with 200 knights and sergeants of his order. A Saracen writer called this vast and lonely stronghold 'a bone stuck in the throat of the Moslems'. On 15 March mangonels breached the gate-tower of the first curtain-wall and on 26 March battered a way through the inner wall. Most brethren escaped to one of the great towers, but Baibars set up mangonels in the courtyard and their last refuge shuddered beneath a crashing barrage. On 8 April they surrendered and were conducted to Tripoli. An exultant Baibars wrote triumphantly to Hugues Revel: 'You fortified this place, entrusting its defence to the best of your men. All was in vain and you only sent them to their deaths.' In June the 'Crossbowman' surrounded Starkenberg. The castellan, Johann von Sachsen, had few knights, and his Turcopoles went mad with fear. After a week he yielded and was lucky enough to obtain a safe conduct to Acre for himself and his garrison.

  There was no help to be had from Sicily or 'Romania'. The Latin Empire had fallen to the Greeks in 1261 and the Frankish lords of Achaia were fighting for survival. Even Cyprus was attacked by Egyptian galleys in 1271, though Mamelukes were poor seamen and their raid was easily beaten off. The Frankish paradise was at its zenith, with a way of life epitomized in the tournaments outside St Hilarion, the castle named Dieu d'Amour by the barons. Indeed it is remarkable that Cypriot kings tried to save their other, beleaguered, kingdom so often, when it meant leaving this beautiful land.

  Providentially 'the Lord Edward' had arrived from England in May, but with fewer than 1,000 men. Had he had more, this cold, methodical giant would have proved himself a really effective crusader. King Hugh's Cypriots refused to help him, but the Ilkhan Abaga, who honoured Kitbuqa's memory, was more generous, and 10,000 Mongol horsemen galloped into Syria, where they taught the Mamelukes a bloody lesson. Unfortunately they were not strong enough to face the full might of Baibars, who was marching up from Damascus, and they withdrew. Edward did little more than lead a series of small and ineffectual raids, but he impressed the sultan sufficiently to conclude a ten-year peace with Acre. Baibars even paid Edward the compliment of trying to assassinate him – the legendary occasion when the prince's young wife was supposed to have sucked the poison from the stab-wound. Another less romantic story says that the English Master of the Temple, Thomas Berard, provided an antidote. Edward seems to have made much of the English order, helping the brethren of St Thomas build their new church at Acre and endowing them generously. It seems, from the letters they afterwards wrote to him, that their advice was always welcome. But in September 1272 he sailed away from Acre. For the rest of Baibars' reign the Franks were left in comparative peace.

  Edward profited from his experience, which taught him how to conquer Wales. Previous English kings had been unable to cope with impassable terrain and fast-moving enemies, but he now employed Syrian methods: sea-to-land assaults, sea lines of communication, and advances consolidated by castle administration points, whose small garrisons could be switched quickly from place to place along the coast.* This strategy proved remarkably effective. While it is impossible to say whether his great fortresses like Conway or Beaumaris were copied from Palestinian models, the king had learnt how to use them in Outremer.

  King Hugh III finally abandoned his ungrateful kingdom in 1276. The new Master of the Temple, Guillaume de Beaujeu,5 a relative of the French royal family and an incurable intriguer, had systematically hindered the king's policies, and next year Charles of Anjou proclaimed himself king with the support of Fra' Guillaume. Hugh tried to return in 1279, but, though the Hospitallers were sympathetic, his attempt was frustrated by armed opposition from the Poor Knights. Returning to Cyprus, the angry monarch burnt out the Templar preceptories at Limassol and Paphos. However, Charles's government collapsed when he lost Sicily in 1282. King Hugh then returned, opposed by both Templars and Hospitallers, to die at Tyre in 1284. By now the kingdom was really a feudal republic in which merchants, brethren and barons quarrelled noisily. In 1279 the Knights of St Thomas had written to King Edward describing the alarming conditions in the Holy Land and their own gloomy forebodings. The Templars and their Master became involved in the deplorable squabble at Tripoli between Bohemond VII and Gui Embriaco, Lord of Gibelet. The Poor Knights, who were always baronial in their attitude to authority, consistently supported the rebel against his overlord, razing Botron to the ground (the castle once coveted by Gerard de Ridefort), and Templar galleys attacked those of the prince-count. This struggle lasted from 1277 to 1282, from the moment when Gui abducted an heiress until the day when he and his brothers were buried in a ditch up to their necks and left to starve.

  Strategically the Frankish position never ceased to deteriorate despite some slight success. In October 1280 a Mongol army occupied Aleppo, while in the same month a raiding party of Hospitallers from Marqab, chased by 5,000 Turcomans, suddenly turned on its pursuers and cut them to ribbons. When the Mongols had withdrawn, 7,000 vengeful Saracens led by the Emir of Krak surrounded the great castle, but the garrison of no more than 600, led by brethren in red surcoats, galloped out to rout the astonished infidels. Another Tartar expedition entered Syria in the autumn of 1281, accompanied by King Lavon III of Armenia and a Georgian force. A detachment from Marqab joined them, including the English prior of St John, Joseph de Chauncy from Clerkenwell. However, the allied army was defeated outside Horns. Two years later the Mamelukes o
verran Lattakieh, the last remnant of the principality of Antioch. Outremer was crumbling piece by piece, its manpower dwindling with every battle.*

  Without warning Sultan Qalawun and a vast army appeared before the mountain stronghold at Marqab on 17 April 1285. The Hospitallers had their own mangonels mounted on the wall towers and succeeded in putting the Mameluke machines out of action. However, on 23 May a mine brought an important tower crashing down. The castellan then discovered that other tunnels had been dug under the moat, reaching below the inner towers. Realizing that the castle was lost, he managed to obtain excellent terms from Qalawun. The garrison were allowed to withdraw to Tortosa, while the twenty-five Knights of St John in the keep were permitted to retain their arms and take away all personal property. Never again would the Office be said in the beautiful chapel.

  Coastal Syria was still a western land, even if sadly shrunken. Most fiefs had been overrun, and the wealthiest class comprised the merchants and many nobles then living in the towns, like the mayor of Tripoli, Bartholomé Embriaco, who belonged to the Gibelet family, while younger sons often joined the military orders. At Beirut the Ibelins stayed on in their magnificent villa, with a rich income from local iron mines. Syrian Franks enjoyed comforts almost unknown in Europe. There were still farmers who not only cultivated the fields round the towns but also tilled those near the inland castles. Acre's architecture was splendid in the French style: the royal palace, the luxurious houses of the barons and merchants, the beautiful new Gothic Church of St Andrew, and the vast headquarters of the Orders. So imposing was the Hospitaller church that the city was called St Jean d'Acre. With double walls and many towers manned by handpicked troops, a fortified promontory, it was inconceivable that infidels should take this strong seaport.