The Tragedy of the Templars

by Michael Haag

  The stage was being set for restoring Jerusalem to the status of a great city, a royal capital. Except under the Umayyads, when Jerusalem was promoted and embellished, the Muslims had reduced the city to a provincial town subordinate to their administrative and military headquarters at Ramla and to their imperial capitals at Cairo and Baghdad. Over the coming decades the Franks would replace all the churches the Muslims had destroyed and build many more; they would construct monasteries, libraries, hospitals, bath houses, covered markets and other institutions; and they would build a royal palace and strengthen the city walls. The increased flow of pilgrims since the Frankish liberation of the holy sites was central to this great revival in the fortunes of Jerusalem and of the whole of Outremer.

  Saewulf of Canterbury, who travelled to the Holy Land in 1102, described the perils facing pilgrims along the way. Arriving at the port of Jaffa as a storm was coming up, he quickly got ashore; but of thirty ships standing in the harbour, only seven survived the battering of the winds and waves.

  Some people were consumed with terror and drowned there and then. Some people were – it seemed unbelievable to many – clutching to the wooden parts of the ship, but as I saw they were cut to pieces or, being snatched off the timber of the ship, were taken off to deep water. [. . .] Of human beings of either sex more than a thousand died that day.2

  Such catastrophes explain why altars were set up in both the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Dome of the Rock to St Nicholas, patron saint of sailors, where prayers were received from pilgrims for safety at sea.

  But a safe landfall for pilgrims was merely the prelude to new dangers. Bedouin had brought havoc to Palestine ever since the Arab conquest, and Turkish tribesmen had more recently added to the violence and disorder. Saewulf told how parties of pilgrims landing at Jaffa were exposed to attack as they journeyed along the hard mountain road to Jerusalem. Pilgrims who wearied and fell behind, or groups that were vulnerably small, were prey to bands of Bedouin who lived in the surrounding wilderness. The bandits did not hesitate to kill to get at the money sewn into travellers’ clothes. Corpses were left to rot along the route up to Jerusalem because it was too dangerous for their companions to leave their party to give them a proper burial. ‘Anyone who has taken that road’, Saewulf wrote,

  can see how many human bodies there are in the road and next to the road, and there are countless corpses which have been torn up by wild beasts. It might be questioned why so many Christian corpses should lie there unburied, but it is in fact no surprise. There is little soil there, and the rocks are not easy to move. Even if the soil were there, who would be stupid enough to leave his brethren and be alone digging a grave! Anybody who did this would dig a grave not for his fellow Christian but for himself!3

  Daniel, a Russian abbot, needed all his courage when his pilgrimage through the Holy Land in 1106–7 brought him near the town of Basham in Galilee. ‘In this pool Christ himself bathed with his disciples and one may see to this day the place where Christ sat on a rock.’ But there was menace in the scene, where tall palms stood about the town like a dense forest and great reeds grew along the streams and in the water meadows. ‘This place is terrible and difficult of access for here live fierce pagan Saracens who attack travellers at the fords on these rivers.’4 The tribes were not the only problem. An especially shocking attack took place at Easter 1119, when a party of seven hundred unarmed pilgrims, both men and women, set out from Jerusalem for the traditional baptism site of Jesus in the river Jordan, east of Jericho. They were travelling, in the words of the German chronicler Albert of Aachen, ‘with joyfulness, and with gladness of heart’5 when they were set upon by a Fatimid sortie from Ascalon, on the coast south of Jaffa. Three hundred pilgrims were slaughtered, and another sixty were captured to be sold as slaves.

  The formation of the Templars arose out of these conditions of insecurity on the roads and the murder, rape, enslavement and robbery of unarmed pilgrims. Only recently a group of nine French knights, most prominently Hugh of Payns, a knight from Champagne who had fought in the First Crusade, and Godfrey of Saint-Omer in Picardy, had proposed to the patriarch of Jerusalem, Warmund of Picquigny, and King Baldwin II, who had succeeded his cousin in 1118, that for the salvation of their souls they form a lay community or perhaps even withdraw into the contemplative life of a monastery. Instead Baldwin, alive to the urgent dangers confronting travellers in his kingdom, persuaded Hugh of Payns and his companions to save their souls by defending pilgrims against brigands on the roads. The Easter massacre along the way to the River Jordan persuasively drove home the king’s view, and on Christmas Day 1119 Hugh and his companions took their vows before the patriarch in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, calling themselves in Latin the Pauperes commilitones Christi, the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ.

  The king and patriarch probably saw the creation of a permanent guard for travellers as complementary to the work of the Hospitallers, who were providing care for pilgrims arriving at Jerusalem. The Hospital was located immediately south of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Its ruins could still be seen there in the late nineteenth century until finally they were cleared away by the Ottomans to create the network of market streets seen today – still called the Muristan, meaning ‘hospital’. Already in 600 Pope Gregory the Great had commissioned the building of a hospital at Jerusalem to treat and care for pilgrims, and two hundred years later Charlemagne, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, enlarged it to include a hostel and a library. This was where Bernard the Monk stayed during his visit to Jerusalem in 870. But in 1009 it was destroyed as part of the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim’s violent anti-Christian persecutions. In about 1070 merchants from Amalfi obtained permission from the Fatimids to rebuild the Hospital, which was run by Benedictine monks and dedicated to St John the Baptist.6 But after the First Crusade the Hospital was released from Benedictine control and raised an order of its own, the Hospitallers of St John, which was recognised by the pope in 1113 and came under his sole jurisdiction. Recent research on the origins of the Templars suggests that the knights were probably first associated with the Augustinian canons, the guardians of the Holy Sepulchre, who housed them in the Hospital until the knights received permission to form a separate group.7

  Official acceptance of the new order of Templars came at Nablus in January 1120, when the nine members of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ were formally introduced to an assembly of lay and spiritual leaders from throughout the lands of Outremer. In this year too they first attracted the attention of a powerful visitor to Outremer, Fulk V, count of Anjou, who on his return home granted them an annual revenue, an example that was soon followed by other French nobles, and which added to the allowance they were already receiving from the canons of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Yet altogether these amounted to only a modest income, and individually the Poor Fellow-Soldiers were genuinely poor and dressed only in donated clothes, meaning they had no distinctive uniform – the white tunic emblazoned with a red cross came later. Their seal alludes to this brotherhood in poverty by depicting two knights, perhaps Hugh of Payns and Godfrey of Saint-Omer, having to share a single horse.

  The Templars were also given the use of another hand-me-down. After the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, the king had made do with the Aqsa mosque for his palace, but now he was building a new royal palace south of the Tower of David to the west. As gradually he moved from one to the other, he gave up the successive portions of what had been the mosque to the Poor Fellow-Soldiers. Because the Aqsa mosque was known as the Templum Solomonis, it was not long before the knights had encompassed the association in their name. They became known as the Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici – the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon; or, in a word, the Templars.

  Even now, however, the Templars’ role was modest, and throughout the 1120s they remained in close association with the Hospital, sharing in the task of looking after pilgrims by acting as a gendarmerie, a police force on th
e roads. Had the archives of the Templars survived, there might be more to say; these were taken to Cyprus after the fall of Outremer at the end of the thirteenth century, and they were probably destroyed when the Ottomans overran the island in 1571. That explains why almost everything we know about the Templars comes from sources other than themselves – from bodies such as the canons of the Holy Sepulchre, the Italian trading communities, the Hospitallers and the various chroniclers and pilgrims in the Holy Land, from the Vatican archives and from the French trial documents of the early 1300s, when the Templars were convicted of heresy and their leaders burned at the stake. Nevertheless these numerous sources should have been sufficient to give some clear indication of Templar activity during the first half of the twelfth century in Outremer, but until the coming of the Second Crusade in 1148 the Templars rarely figure in the historical record, and then only in a minor way.

  This fits with the reality of the situation; Outremer was largely at peace with its Muslim neighbours. According to Ibn al Jawzi, the Muslim scholar and chronicler, when the qadi – that is, judge – of Damascus travelled to Baghdad in August 1099 and gave an emotional account at the Abbasid court of the fall of Jerusalem to the crusaders a month earlier, many who were listening were reduced to tears, but no concrete proposals were forthcoming and ‘the people remained aloof’.8 The Muslim inhabitants of Syria and Palestine, wrote the Arab chronicler al-Muqaddasi, ‘have no enthusiasm for jihad’.9 Instead pragmatism prevailed. In 1108 the Damascus atabeg Tughtigin, a Turk who had made himself independent of Seljuk rule, signed an armistice agreement with the kingdom of Jerusalem, which made the Golan Heights a demilitarised zone and divided the revenues from their fertile agricultural lands: one-third to Damascus, one-third to the crusaders and one-third to the local peasants who tilled the land. The following year a similar agreement was signed with regard to the Bekaa valley in Lebanon. These arrangements remained in force until Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem in 1187 and were not disturbed even when the signatories attacked one another elsewhere from time to time. As for the coast, the view taken in Cairo, according to the Egyptian-Syrian chronicler Ibn Zafir, was that it was preferable that the Franks should occupy the ports of Syria and Palestine ‘so that they could prevent the spread of the influence of the Turks to the lands of Egypt’.10

  The greatest danger to the crusader states came from the Turks in Aleppo, who twice, in 1119 and 1122, inflicted heavy defeats on the Christian armies of Antioch and Edessa and put the cities under threat. But Muslim aggression was sporadic, and so far as the kingdom of Jerusalem was concerned, it was easily rebuffed. Before Saladin began his campaigns against the Franks in the late 1170s, the mountain area of Jerusalem was raided only twice, in 1124 and then in 1152, the second assault feebler than the first. Ascalon was the base for Fatimid attacks, but in 1118 its garrison lacked the strength to prevent a small expedition against Egypt led by King Baldwin I; and Ascalon’s raid against Jerusalem in 1124 was possible only because the entire Frankish army was engaged in the siege of Tyre. The coastal plain north of Jaffa was free of menace until the late 1180s, and well before then, in 1153, Ascalon’s power was broken and the city was taken by the Franks. The district round Nablus, 40 miles north of Jerusalem, twice suffered incursions from Damascus, in 1113 and 1137; on the second occasion the Turks killed many of Nablus’ Christians and burned down their churches, but they were driven out again.

  This was the sum of the disturbances that afflicted Palestine for the first eighty years or so after the First Crusade. There were great lapses of time between these incursions, sometimes as long as a generation, during which the Franks established themselves in the country, mixed with its inhabitants, and developed the security and the political structure of the kingdom of Jerusalem and the rest of Outremer. Conditions soon became settled in the East; the security of travellers and farmers in the kingdom of Jerusalem was ‘not much different from the state of security on the roads and in the rural areas of contemporary Europe’.11 Thanks to the Franks, Palestine enjoyed a period of peace and prosperity throughout most of the twelfth century that contrasted sharply with the violence and destruction of the previous century, when it was under Muslim rule.

  By 1128 the Franks had liberated all the places of pilgrimage associated in the gospels with the life of Jesus. They had established themselves militarily and politically in Outremer, where the landscape was still marked by Christian shrines and carried Christian associations, but there was much to recover and rebuild.

  The Temple Mount was the centre of the universe for Jews and the centre of the universe for Muslims too, and because it stood in an open position and was crowned by the gilded Dome of the Rock it could seem to dominate the Jerusalem skyline. But to the west another and higher hill rose above the city, and well up its eastern slope stood the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the dome of its Rotunda, or Anastasis, meaning ‘Resurrection’ in Greek, rising high above the press of surrounding buildings. Here the Templars had taken their founding vows on Christmas Day 1119; thereafter Templar churches would often be round, like the Anastasis. For medieval Christians the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was the centre of the world, the exact spot being in the court between the chapel of Golgotha, marking the site of the Crucifixion, and the tomb beneath the dome marking the place of Resurrection.12 Higher still was the Mount of Olives, east of the city across the Kidron valley (the biblical valley of Jehoshaphat); it was topped by the Church of the Ascension, built in 392, and enclosed a pair of Jesus’ footprints, marking the spot where he ascended to heaven forty days after the Resurrection (Acts 1:2–9).13 Now after the crusaders recovered Jerusalem, pilgrims discovered other footprints of Jesus, this time within the Temple of the Lord, the church that had been the Dome of the Rock, footprints pressed into the Rock itself, a reminder of Jesus’ many visits to the Temple Mount.

  The crusaders’ enthusiasm for identifying the Temple Mount with various biblical events was shared with the Christians of Palestine generally and with pilgrims throughout Christendom, for since Umar’s conquest of Jerusalem Christians had been forbidden access to the Mount and it had become a place of confusion and mystery. Now in a burst of discovery wonderful associations were revealed. Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22:1–19; Chronicles 3:1) and David’s encounter with the angel and his purchase of the threshing floor of Araunah (2 Samuel 24:15–25; 1 Chronicles 21:15–28) both took place on the Temple Mount. The Dome of the Rock, converted to a church, sanctified the spot where Jesus had driven the moneychangers from the Temple (Matthew 21:12; John 2:14–16), the very same Temple that had been built and dedicated by Solomon (1 Kings 6–8). Here took place the Presentation of Christ, where Jesus, soon after his birth, was presented by his parents to the Lord, and the aged Simeon prophesied that the child would be ‘a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of the people of Israel’ (Luke 2:22–32). Moreover Simeon’s own house, where the Holy Family had stayed, and which contained the bed of the Virgin Mary and the cradle and bath of the infant Jesus, was identified as having stood at the south-east corner of the Mount, a stone’s throw from the Templars’ quarters. In the Temple too the young Jesus was remembered for conversing with the doctors (Luke 2:46). In the cave below the Dome of the Rock the angel Gabriel announced that Zachariah would have a son, John the Baptist (Luke 1:5–23); and in the same cave Jesus forgave the adulterous woman (John 8:2–11), making it a suitable place for pilgrims to come for confession.

  Headquartered on the Temple Mount, the Templars were daily in touch with these places and as aware as anyone of their holy associations. And in protecting bands of pilgrims on their journeys from the ports up to Jerusalem and on to Bethlehem and to the River Jordan, the Templars were more familiar than most with the holy sites. Pilgrims would ask them for information and explanations, and the Templars found themselves providing answers and serving as guides. They also began interpreting the holy landscape for themselves: for example, routing the Via Dolorosa through the Temple Mount, the way
previously forbidden to Christians by the Muslims. According to the Templars, after Jesus had been before Pilate at the praetorium, identified as against the northern side of the Temple Mount, and was beaten, spat upon, mocked and made to wear the crown of thorns, he was led up through the Mount where he briefly rested with his cross, the spot marked by a dome within the northwest quadrant and called the Throne of Jesus. Here Simon of Cyrene helped bear the cross (Matthew 27:32, Mark 15:21, Luke 23:26) as Jesus passed through what the Templars renamed the Sorrowful Gate, today’s Bab el Nazir, on the western side of the Mount, and so slowly upwards through the city to Golgotha, the site occupied by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where he was crucified, buried and rose again on the third day. The most sacred procession in the Christian Church, the goal of every pilgrim, the Stations of the Cross along Jerusalem’s Via Dolorosa, was reinterpreted, developed and enshrined by the Templars – until 1187, when Saladin swept everything Christian from the Temple Mount, and the Via Dolorosa was re-routed again.

  In the autumn of 1127 or early in 1128 Baldwin II sent emissaries to the West with the aim of bolstering the foundations of his kingdom. When Baldwin was count of Edessa, he had married an Armenian princess by whom he had four daughters but no male heir, and to secure the succession he and his barons decided to offer the hand of Melisende, his oldest daughter, to a suitable candidate in France. The French king recommended Fulk V, count of the wealthy and formidable house of Anjou, the same Fulk who became an early backer of the Templars after his pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1120. The count, who was a widower, felt the time had come to devote the remainder of his life to the Christian cause in the East, and so handing Anjou to his son, Fulk agreed to return to Outremer and marry Melisende. In this respect Baldwin’s mission to the West was entirely successful; in due course the couple would succeed jointly to the throne, and meanwhile their union strengthened the kingdom’s ties with the West.