The Tragedy of the Templars

by Michael Haag

  the dwelling-place of your father Abraham; the spot from which your blessed Prophet Mohammed mounted to Heaven; the qibla towards which you turned to pray at the commencement of Islam; the abode of the prophets; the place visited by the saints; the cemetery of the apostles [. . .] it is the country where mankind will be assembled for judgement; the ground where the resurrection will take place.13

  Ibn Zaki, who had been hand-picked by Saladin for this sermon, was full of praise for the ‘cleansing of His Holy House [Bayt al-Maqdis, i.e., Jerusalem] from the filth of polytheism and its pollutions’, and he called on the faithful to ‘purify the rest of the land from this filth which hath angered God and His Apostle’.14

  By the time Ibn Zaki had delivered his sermon on the Temple Mount the Muslims had gone round Jerusalem and had torn down churches both within and without its walls or stripped them of their decorations, including their wood and iron, their doors and their marble flooring, and converted them to mosques and madrasas. But the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was spared. Some emirs wanted it destroyed in order to put an end to Christian pilgrimages, fearing that ‘kings bearing crosses, groups from across the sea, throngs of different kinds of infidels’ would make their way to Jerusalem, their aim to ‘liberate the Tomb and restore the Kumamah’, repeating the old jibe of the Holy Sepulchre being the Church of the Kumamah – that is, the Dunghill.15 But others argued that what Christians came to worship was ‘the place of the Cross and the grave, not the buildings which can be seen. They would not stop coming even if the earth [on which it stands] were scattered to the sky.’16

  In fact, as Saladin understood, the economy of Jerusalem depended on the pilgrimage trade, and therefore he decided that both the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Hospital of St John should stand and pay their way. Ten Hospitaller brothers were permitted to continue at the Hospital, caring for the sick, and while the Latin clergy were expelled from the city, a number of Orthodox priests were permitted to stay at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. But this did not stop Saladin dismantling the aedicule over the tomb of Christ; the Muslims ‘threw down the marble framework that enclosed the Sepulchre of Our Lord and took the carved columns that stood in front of it and sent them to Muhammed at Mecca as a sign of victory’.17 He also removed the cross from the dome of the church, broke the bells in the tower and blocked up several entrances while the aedicule was kept under lock and key by Muslims. Entrance to the church was generally forbidden to pilgrims until 1192, at which point four Latin clergy, two priests and two deacons, were also permitted to return. But between 1187 and 1192 an exception was made for pilgrims willing to pay an entrance fee of 10 bezants, a sum equal to a man’s ransom at the fall of the city, a small fortune aimed at gouging the maximum price from the Christian faithful.18

  The departure of the Franks from Jerusalem was completed by 10 November. The city gates were shut, and nobody could leave without getting a receipt from a clerk for payment of the ransom and showing it to the guards. Saladin allowed Queen Sibylla to go free without payment, and he permitted the patriarch Heraclius to remove the treasures from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. But those who tried to raise their ransom money by selling their possessions discovered that the glut of items on the market meant that what had once sold for 10 dinars now fetched only one. Imad al-Din estimated that there had been more than a hundred thousand men, women and children in the city, and he reported that people were paying bribes to the gatekeepers to go free, others were lowered from the city walls, and some were smuggled out in panniers slung over the backs of beasts of burden, while a number left disguised as Muslim soldiers. Despite Balian contributing 30,000 dinars for the poor, Imad al-Din reported fifteen thousand people who were unable to pay the ransom and were taken away as slaves.

  ‘There were about 7,000 men’, wrote Imad al-Din,

  who had to accustom themselves to an unaccustomed humiliation, and whom slavery split up and dispersed as their buyers scattered through the hills and valleys. Women and children together came to 8,000 and were quickly divided up among us, bringing a smile to Muslim faces at their lamentations. How many well-guarded women were profaned, how many queens were ruled, and nubile girls married, and noble women given away, and miserly women forced to yield themselves, and women who had been kept hidden stripped of their modesty, and serious women made ridiculous, and women kept in private now set in public, and free women occupied, and precious ones used for hard work, and pretty things put to the test, and virgins dishonoured and proud women deflowered, and lovely women’s red lips kissed, and dark women prostrated, and untamed ones tamed, and happy ones made to weep! How many noblemen took them as concubines, how many ardent men blazed for one of them, and celibates were satisfied by them, and thirsty men sated by them, and turbulent men able to give vent to their passion. How many lovely women were the exclusive property of one man, how many great ladies were sold at low prices, and close ones set at a distance, and lofty ones abased, and savage ones captured, and those accustomed to thrones dragged down! 19

  Two great lines of Christian refugees were led out from Jerusalem: one bound for slavery, the other for freedom. The ransomed refugees were assembled in three groups, Balian and the patriarch Heraclius taking charge of one group, another being placed in the custody of the Hospitallers, and the third under the protection of the Templars. After one last look back at Jerusalem and the brow of the Temple Mount, the refugees were led to the coast, where they were distributed between Antioch, Tyre and Tripoli.

  Saladin did not wait for the ransom period to expire; on 30 October he left the city for the coast, camping outside Acre on 4 November on his way north to attack Tyre, ‘the only arrow left in the quiver of the infidels’.20

  PART VI

  The Kingdom of Acre

  IN THE EARLY 1190s, in a remarkably short and powerfully effective campaign, Richard the Lionheart, king of England and leader of the Third Crusade, together with his allies the Templars, delivered a series of powerful blows against Saladin and recovered much of Outremer. In name and number the revived crusader states were as before, but their outlines were diminished. There was the kingdom of Jerusalem, although its capital was at Acre, which the Templars made their new headquarters. To the north was the county of Tripoli. But the Muslims retained control of the Syrian coast around Latakia for some time, and so the principality of Antioch further to the north was now no longer contiguous to the other crusader states. Nevertheless the Third Crusade, in which Richard relied heavily on the Templars, had saved the Holy Land for the Christians and went a long way towards restoring Frankish fortunes. In this Richard was abetted by the military orders, whose great castles stood like islands of Frankish power amid the Muslim torrent. More than ever Outremer was relying on the military orders in their castles and on the field of battle, and the power of the orders grew. In fact, at no point in their history would the Templars be more powerful than in the century to come.

  Saladin died soon after the Third Crusade, and his dynastic empire dissolved, so that a quarter of a century later Frederick II, Holy Roman emperor, was able to mount an expedition against Egypt that forced Saladin’s heir to cede control over Jerusalem. But the recovery of Jerusalem was brief and no more than symbolic; the life of Outremer had passed to the coast, where Acre, the new capital of the kingdom of Jerusalem, was a thriving cosmopolitan mercantile port that bore comparison to Constantinople.

  When the remnants of Saladin’s dynasty, the Ayyubids, were overthrown in Cairo by the militaristic Mameluke Turks in 1260, a foreboding crept across Outremer. A slave warrior elite who soon extended their control from Egypt over the whole of western Asia, the Mamelukes could call upon boundless resources and the vast manpower derived from the continuing westward migration of Turkish tribes to subject Outremer to insistent and unrelenting attack. No amount of fighting excellence by the Templars or others in Outremer was sufficient to withstand the onslaught for long.

  20

  Recovery

  CONTRO
L OF THE COAST had always been essential for the security, the supply and the development of Outremer. But in its eagerness to capture Jerusalem the First Crusade marched past Acre in 1099, making no attempt to occupy the city. The conquest of the coast was left to King Baldwin I, who took the sea ports of Caesarea, Jaffa and Arsuf and in 1104 captured Acre with the help of a Genoese fleet. As other leading ports such as Tyre and Ascalon were still in Fatimid hands, Acre became the chief port of the kingdom of Jerusalem, and it attracted merchants from the great trading cities of Italy and Provence. Genoa, Pisa, Venice and Amalfi, and also Marseille, established themselves there, each community with its own quarter and piazza, with its own church, court house and warehouses, as well as its own mills, bakery and butchers. Also each community enjoyed a high degree of autonomy and was administered by its own representative; the interests and rivalries of these trading colonies would dominate the affairs of Acre throughout the two centuries to come.

  Both the Templars and the Hospitallers had bases in the city. As the nearest good harbour to Jerusalem, Acre became the favoured port of disembarkation for pilgrims; the Hospitallers gave them hospitality, and the Templars escorted them on the road. Theoderich, a German pilgrim and author of a guide to the Holy Land, described the busy pilgrim traffic when he passed through Acre in 1172:

  The Templars have built a large house of admirable workmanship by the seashore, and the Hospitallers likewise have founded a stately house there. Wherever the ships of pilgrims may have landed them, they are all obliged to repair to the harbour of this city to take them home again on their return from Jerusalem. Indeed in the year which we were there – on Wednesday in Easter week – we counted eighty ships in the port besides the ship called a ‘buss’, on board which we sailed thither and returned.1

  Because of the vital commercial and pilgrim traffic that passed through Acre, not to mention the city’s military importance, it was ruled directly by the king of Jerusalem through a governor, who, notwithstanding the autonomy of the trading colonies, ran the police and the justice systems and collected the port taxes which were a principal part of the royal revenue. The kings themselves often spent time at Acre enjoying the Mediterranean weather, and numbers of the barony of Outremer had properties here; both they and the Latin bishop of the city were bound by the feudal levy to raise knights for the defence of the kingdom and to provide bodies of hired troops at times of great emergency; in the fateful year of 1187 the city’s manpower contribution to the kingdom was second only to that of Jerusalem itself.

  Acre was no less important for Muslim trade, and the city possessed two mosques, one inside the walls and one without. Ibn Jubayr, who visited Acre in 1185, was impressed, although that did not stop him from hurling the usual imprecation at anything Frankish.

  In the morning [. . .] we arrived at the city of Acre (may God destroy it!). [. . .] It is the base of the Frankish towns in Syria and the landing place of ‘the ships carrying their sails aloft in the sea like mountains’ [Koran 55:24]. The harbour of every ship, in grandeur it resembles Constantinople; the place of assembly for ships and caravans, the meeting place of Muslim and Christian merchants from all parts, its roads and streets are choked with multitudes having little room to tread.2

  After the defeat of the Frankish army at Hattin in July 1187, Acre surrendered to Saladin without resistance. Of all the seaports of the kingdom of Jerusalem only Tyre remained in Frankish hands; it had been overlooked by Saladin in his rush to take Jerusalem, a serious strategic mistake. Terricus, formerly grand preceptor of the Temple at Jerusalem, reported the situation to King Henry II of England in January 1188, saying that Saladin had now returned to Tyre and was besieging it ‘with thirteen petrarii launching stones nonstop, day and night’, from 11 November 1187 to 1 January 1188. Conrad, the lord of Tyre, led the defence by positioning his knights and infantry on the city wall, and then,

  with the help of the house of the Hospital and the brothers of the Temple, he launched seventeen armed galleys and ten smaller boats in a successful attack against the galleys of Saladin, capturing eleven. He also captured the admiral-in-chief of Alexandria and eight other admirals. Many Saracens were killed. Saladin’s remaining galleys escaped from the Christians to rejoin his army. There Saladin had them drawn up on land and burnt, reducing them to dust and ashes. He was so grief-stricken that he cut off the ears and tail of his horse and then rode it for all his army to see.3

  The coastal campaign was straining Saladin’s resources. His armies had already plundered the Frankish territories and devoured all their grain. Saladin was having to build ships, repair fortifications and install garrisons, yet instead of being a source of revenue the coast was becoming an expense. And worst of all, he was being beaten.

  In 1188 Saladin turned his attention to northern Syria, where he stormed one castle after another and took the city of Latakia. But here too he was checked, this time by the massive castles of the military orders. He baulked at the key Hospitaller castles of Margat and Krak des Chevaliers and at the Templars’ castle at Safita called Chastel Blanc and their fortified city of Tortosa – though vengefully he destroyed the church there, ‘one of the largest of its kind’.4

  As soon as the Franks recovered their morale, they made the recapture of Acre their objective, and at the end of August 1189 King Guy advanced from Tyre to besiege the city. His army was small and outnumbered by the Muslim garrison within the walls, but Guy had the benefit of the newly arrived Pisan fleet, which blocked Acre’s harbour. Saladin mustered his forces on the plain of Sephoria in Galilee and marched to relieve his garrison on the coast; fanning out round the city, he encircled the Frankish forces, besieging the besiegers, but the Franks still maintained communication with the Pisan fleet and would not surrender their position. ‘If a ten years’ war made Troy renowned’, wrote the historian Stanley Lane-Poole, ‘surely to Acre belongs eternal fame – the city for which the whole world contended.’5

  Perpetual skirmishing went on between the two armies, with moments of brutality and danger, Ibn al-Athir reporting Bedouins falling upon Christian stragglers and bringing their heads to Saladin for a reward, and women in the Frankish camp dragging Turkish prisoners by the hair, abusing them and then hacking off their heads with knives. But then at daybreak on 4 October the Franks went into action, the Templars on the right crashing into a Kurdish contingent from Diyarbakir and scattering it to flight; the Kurds were next heard from, crossing the Jordan below the Sea of Galilee well on their way to Damascus. The Templar Grand Master Gerard of Ridefort, who had been captured by Saladin and then released in 1187, fell in the attack and received a last acclaim from the anonymous English knight on whose lost journal the Itinerarium Regis Ricardi was based, who said that he was crowned with the laurel of martyrdom ‘which he had merited in so many wars’,6 a washing away of any blame he may have incurred for the disasters at the Springs of Cresson and the Horns of Hattin.

  Saladin rallied his centre and prevented a general rout, and the battle proved inconclusive but bloody nonetheless, certainly for the Franks. On the Muslim side the loss was more by flight than slaughter; the Franks estimated that fifteen hundred of Saladin’s horsemen were killed while being secretive about their own casualties, but according to Saladin’s friend Ibn Shaddad, who saw their bodies being carried to the river to be thrown in, the total Frankish dead numbered over four thousand. Yet even so, the Franks held on and persisted with their blockade of Acre through the winter and all the following year, driving Saladin to despair as he desperately made appeals as far away as Baghdad and Morocco but received no fresh aid.

  In the spring of 1191 the main armies of the Third Crusade arrived. First came the forces led by King Philip II of France, who set up his headquarters outside Acre on 20 April and took command of the besieged and besieging Christians, though to little effect. Meanwhile everyone waited in anticipation for the arrival of King Richard I of England, Coeur de Lion, the Lionheart.

  On his way to the Holy Land, Richard
was distracted by a series of adventures. His mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, had arranged that her son marry Berengaria, daughter of King Sancho VI of Navarre, and had now shipped her to Messina in Sicily, where Richard would marry her as he voyaged east and take her with him to the Holy Land. Eleanor herself had joined the Second Crusade as the young bride of Philip’s father, Louis VI, and now she was stirring things up again, for Richard was already engaged to Philip’s sister Alice. Philip, who likewise put in at Messina, demanded that Richard make financial restitution for breaking the engagement, which Richard did, but in contrast to Richard’s large, flamboyant personality, Philip was a small and peevish man whose bitterness remained. On 30 March Philip sailed from Sicily with his fleet bound for Acre; Richard waited for Berengaria, then sailed on 10 April. Richard’s passage proved tempestuous; his fleet was broken up by winds, one of his ships was lost in a storm, and another three, including the ship bearing Berengaria, were blown towards Cyprus. Berengaria’s vessel managed to anchor safely off Limassol, but the other two were wrecked on the south coast of the island. The ruler of Cyprus, Isaac Ducas Comnenus, had rebelled against Byzantium and established himself locally as emperor; unpopular on the island, the appearance of Franks filled him with alarm, and he imprisoned the shipwreck survivors, confiscated their goods and tried to lure Berengaria ashore, quite likely with the intention of holding her for ransom. A week later, on 6 May, Richard sailed into view with the main fleet and was outraged at Isaac’s behaviour. Writing to his chancellor back in England, Richard himself told what happened next.