by Dan Jones
There were certainly many of those times, and Part III shows the Templars still deeply embedded in the wars against Islam. Two massive assaults on the Egyptian delta city of Damietta were facilitated by the Templars’ financial know-how. Both ended in chaos, with the order’s knights and sergeants fighting desperate rearguard actions in the diseased swamps of a flooded Nile. As the Templars discovered, raising and organizing war funds was one thing; fighting long campaigns on unfamiliar foreign terrain against an enemy far better schooled in the conditions was quite another.
Part III shows the Templars assuming ever more responsibility for the security of the crusader states, which brought them into contact with some of the thirteenth century’s most memorable characters, including the sainted French king Louis IX, with whom they got on famously, and Frederick II Hohenstaufen, the bombastic and free-thinking Holy Roman Emperor who claimed to be the king of Jerusalem and promptly started a war against the men who were tasked with defending it. At this point the Templars had to contend with the appearance of Frederick’s protégés, the Teutonic Order: one of a number of military orders set up in parallel with (and sometimes in imitation of) the Templars. These included the Order of St Lazarus, which attended to pilgrims suffering from leprosy; the Orders of Calatrava, Santiago and Alcántara, set up in the kingdoms of Spain; the Sword Brothers of Livonia, who made war on pagans in the Baltic; and the Hospitallers, alongside whom the Templars had lived from the very beginning and with whom they would fight some of their greatest battles. In the Holy Land the increasing importance of the military orders combined with their growing diversity exacerbated factional conflict and the Templars were dragged into wars between rival groups of Italian merchants and self-interested barons. Ultimately this damaged the political foundation of the crusader states so badly that when a new threat arose in the 1260s the Templars were as helpless as the rest of their Christian counterparts to resist.
Part IV is called ‘Heretics’ and it traces the roots of the Templars’ destruction to events in the 1260s, when the brothers in the east were on the front line of a war against the two most dangerous enemies the crusaders ever faced: Mongol armies under the descendants of Genghis Khan and a caste of Muslim slave soldiers known as the Mamluks. Defeat at the hands of the Mamluks gave licence for more widespread criticism of the Templars than ever before, as their plentiful resources and close association with the fortunes of the wars against Islam now became sticks with which to beat them.
As pressure on the order mounted, they grew open to political attack. This came suddenly and violently in 1307 in an all-out assault by the pious but unscrupulous French king Philip IV. His arrest of every Templar in France on Friday 13 October was the start of an entirely self-interested move to wind up the order and seize its assets. Alternately abetted and resisted by a compromised Pope Clement V, Philip IV and his ministers turned a raid on Templar property into an all-out war on the order across the Christian world, using methods that had already been practised on other vulnerable targets, including France’s Jewish population. Although France had traditionally been the realm from which the Templars derived their greatest support, Philip made it his unwavering mission to try, torture and kill the order’s members, starting at the top with the last Templar grand master, James of Molay, who was burned to death in Paris in 1314, his final words a promise that God would have revenge on the order’s behalf.
Philip’s motives in breaking the Templars with the dual rods of judicial enquiry and personal barbarity had very little to do with the real character or conduct of the members either on the front line of the war against Islam or in France, where their lives for the most part resembled those of monks. Philip’s actions derived from his political preoccupations and his extreme, cruel and callous personal pathology, but he hit the order at a moment when it was more susceptible than usual to attack and slander, and in a moment when public interest in crusading was, if not dead, then certainly vastly diminished. James of Molay’s demise signalled the end of the Templars as an organization, nearly 200 years after their humble origins in Jerusalem. Their legend, however, was only just beginning. This book’s epilogue summarizes the Templars’ journey into the popular imagination and considers the process by which the order has been romanticized and even resurrected ever since.
One distinguished scholar has suggested that a narrative history of the Templars is ‘misleading, because it implies that the order rose and declined, that criticism increased steadily and that certain events caused later events’.1 This is right and it is wrong. Certainly it would be a fool’s task to attempt to write within a chronological framework a comprehensive account of the two centuries during which the order was active in the kingdom of Jerusalem, the Iberian peninsula, France, England, Italy, Poland, Germany, Hungary, Cyprus and elsewhere. The experiences of the thousands of men and women who lived as fully professed Templars or associate members cannot all be contained in a coherent account of their most notable activities. Nevertheless, the Order of the Poor Knights of the Temple undeniably began, existed and ended, and this process occurred over a fixed period in which time advanced in the usual fashion. It is a story that takes us through the broader sweep of the crusades, linking up several theatres of war and a dozen generations of men and women. It is also a story that is more usually told thematically, a treatment that all too often becomes digressive and even dull. My choosing to tell this story as a story in the traditional way does not imply an inevitable moral journey from honour to corruption to hubris to destruction, for such thinking has bedevilled the long tradition of writing about the Templars, dating back at least to the seventeeth century.2 Rather, I simply believe that an account of the Templars can be told chronologically to satisfy readers who like their history told in sequence. I hope that in doing so I have not slipped too deeply into teleology or misrepresented the lives and experiences of the people who lived, fought and died with a red cross on their breast. I also hope that this book will encourage readers to explore the voluminous scholarly literature that exists on the military orders in general and the Templars in particular, by distinguished and brilliant academics including Malcolm Barber, Helen Nicholson, Alan Forey, Joachim Burgtorf, Alain Demurger, Jonathan Riley-Smith, Judi Upton-Ward, Anthony Luttrel, Jonathan Phillips, Norman Housley, Jochen Schenk, Paul Crawford, Peter Edbury, Anne Gilmour-Bryson and many others, on which I have drawn here with the greatest respect and gratitude.
The Templars charged into battle under a black-and-white flag, and as they rode they would sometimes sing a psalm to give them strength. It feels appropriate to quote those lines as we begin our story:
‘Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give the glory, for your steadfast love and faithfulness.’
Enjoy the ride.
PART I
Pilgrims
c. 1102–1144
Fight, I beseech you, for the salvation of your souls!
Baldwin I, king of Jerusalem
1
‘A Golden Basin, Filled With Scorpions’
It was a foul autumn morning in Jaffa when the pilgrims came out of the church. They were immediately swept up in the stampede of a crowd heading towards the sea, drawn by a dreadful cacophony: the scream of timber being wrenched apart and, scarcely audible below the roar of the wind and explosions of waves, the shrieks of terrified men and women fighting for their lives. A violent storm, building over the previous day, had broken during the night and thirty or so ships anchored off Jaffa’s steeply shelving beach were being hurled about upon great mountains of water. The largest and most robust among them were ripped from their anchors, driven into sharp rocks and hammered into sandbanks until, in the words of one onlooker, all had been ‘torn to pieces by the tempest’.1
The crowd on the shore watched helplessly as sailors and passengers were washed from the decks. Some tried to stay afloat by hanging on to splintered masts and spars, but most were doomed. ‘Some, as they were clinging, were cut apart by the timbers of their own s
hips,’ wrote the observer. ‘Some, who knew how to swim, voluntarily committed themselves to the waves, and thus many of them perished.’2 On the shore, corpses had begun to wash up with the surf. The dead would eventually number a thousand, and only seven ships would survive the storm unwrecked. ‘A greater misery on one day no eye ever saw,’ the pilgrim wrote. It was Monday 13 October 1102.
The pilgrim to whom we owe this account was an Englishman known as Saewulf.* He had been travelling for several months, having left Monopoli, on the coast of Apulia (the heel of the boot in modern Italy) on 13 July, a day he described as hora egyptiaca, as it had been thought since the age of the Pharaohs that this was an astrologically accursed date on which to begin an important task.3 And so it had proved to be. Saewulf had already suffered one shipwreck on his passage from England to the eastern Mediterranean; mercifully he had survived. His route had taken him to Corfu, Cephalonia and Corinth, overland via Thebes to the Aegean Sea, then south-eastwards through the Cyclades and Dodecanese islands to Rhodes. Several more days at sea had brought him to the Cypriot port of Paphos from where, after exactly thirteen weeks during which he had travelled some 2,000 miles (3,220 km), he finally arrived in Jaffa, the main port of the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem. He was rowed to shore just hours before the fatal storm struck.
Despite the many privations and terrible risks of seafaring, Saewulf had seen great things on his journey east as he and his fellow travellers had disembarked from their boat every few days to beg accommodation from islanders whom he called, generically, the Greeks. He had gazed on the silk workshops of Andros and had been to the site of the long-vanished Colossus of Rhodes. He had visited the ancient city of Myra, with its beautiful semi-circular theatre, and had been to Finike, a windswept trading port founded by the Phoenicians in an area known by the local people as ‘sixty oars’, due to the roughness of the seas. He had prayed at the tomb of St Nicholas and had walked, in Cyprus, in the footsteps of St Peter. Yet his real prize lay one step further. Once the storm had abated, he would be heading to the most important city on earth: taking on the road south-east to Jerusalem, where he intended to pray at the tomb of Jesus Christ, the Son of God and saviour of all mankind.
For a Christian like Saewulf, who piously described himself as ‘unworthy and sinful’, a visit to Jerusalem was a redemptive journey to the centre of the world.4 God had told the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel that He had set Jerusalem ‘in the midst of the nations’, and this was regarded as more than a mere figure of speech.5 Maps produced in Europe at the time represented the Holy City as the kernel around which all the kingdoms of mankind, both Christian and pagan, grew.† This fact of geography was also a fact of cosmology. Jerusalem was understood to be a place where the heavenly was made manifest, and the power of prayer magnified by the presence of relics and holy sites. It was not just seen, but felt: a visitor could personally experience the sacred details of Biblical stories, from the deeds of the Old Testament kings to Christ’s life and Passion.
Approaching Jerusalem on the road from Jaffa, Saewulf would have entered through David’s Gate, a heavily fortified portal in the city’s thick defensive walls, guarded by a large stone citadel built on the remains of a fortress erected by Herod: the king whom the Bible claimed had put every baby in Bethlehem to death in an attempt to kill the infant Christ. Walking through the city he could see the Temple Mount dominating the south-eastern quarter of the city, crowned with the shimmering cupola of the Dome of the Rock, which the Christians called the Temple of the Lord. Beside this was the al-Aqsa mosque, a wide, low, rectangular building also topped with a dome, built in the seventh century and converted to Christian use as a palace for the Christian king of Jerusalem, a wealthy nobleman from Boulogne known as Baldwin I.
Beyond the Temple Mount, on the other side of Jerusalem’s eastern wall, lay a cemetery, and beyond that Gethsemane, where Christ had prayed with his disciples, and where he was betrayed by Judas on the night of his arrest. Further on lay the Mount of Olives, where Jesus had spent many weeks teaching, and from where he had eventually ascended to heaven. Saewulf wrote in his diary that he himself climbed the Mount of Olives and looked down over the city of Jerusalem, examining where the city’s walls and boundaries had been expanded during its occupation by the Romans.
The most holy place of all, and the real object of every Christian pilgrimage, lay within Jerusalem. It was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which Saewulf called ‘more celebrated than any other church, and this is meet and right, since all the prophecies and foretellings in the whole world about our Saviour Jesus Christ were all truly fulfilled there’.6 It was a double-storied complex of interlinked chapels and courtyards, many of which commemorated, and were thought to literally mark the spots of, the central events in the Passion. Saewulf listed them: the prison cell where Jesus was kept after his betrayal; the spot where a fragment of the cross had been found; a pillar against which the Lord had been bound when he was flogged by Roman soldiers and ‘the place where he was made to put on the purple robe and crowned with the crown of thorns’; Calvary, ‘where the Patriarch Abraham made an altar and in obedience to God wished to sacrifice his son [Isaac]’, and where Christ was crucified – here Saewulf examined the hole in which the cross had been held, and a rock split in two, as had been decribed in the Gospel of St Matthew.7 There were chapels dedicted to Mary Magdalene and St John the Apostle, to the Virgin Mary and St James. Most important and impressive of all, though, was the great rotunda at the western end of the church, for here lay the Sepulchre itself: the tomb of Christ. This was the cave in which Jesus had been buried following his crucifixion, before the resurrection. The shrine was surrounded by constantly burning oil lamps and paved with slabs of marble: a still, fragrant place for prayer and devotion.8 Nowhere on earth or in history was more sacred to Christians. As Saewulf wrote in the very first line of his memoir: ‘I was on my way to Jerusalem to pray at the Lord’s tomb’. To stand before the Sepulchre was to venture to the cradle of Christianity, which was why pilgrims like Saewulf were willing to risk their lives to go there.
Pilgrimage was a centrally important part of Christian life in the early twelfth century, and had been for nearly a thousand years. People travelled incredible distances to visit saints’ shrines and the sites of famous Christian deeds. They did it for the good of their souls: sometimes to seek divine relief from illness, sometimes as penance to atone for their sins. Some thought that praying at a certain shrine would ensure the protection of that saint in their passage through the afterlife. All believed that God looked kindly on pilgrims and that a man or woman who ventured humbly and faithfully to the centre of the world would improve their standing in the eyes of God.
Yet Saewulf’s perilous journey was not just devout; it was also timely. Although Christians had been visiting Jerusalem on pilgrimage since at least the fourth century, it had never been entirely friendly territory. For most of the previous 700 years the city and surrounding area had been under the control of Roman emperors, Persian kings, Umayyad caliphs and Seljuq rulers called beys (or emirs). From the seventh century, when an Arab army wrested the city from Byzantine Christian rule, until the end of the eleventh century, Jerusalem had been in Muslim hands. To the followers of Islam it was the third-holiest city in the world, after Mecca and Medina. Muslims recognized it as the location of al-Masjid al-Aqsa (The Furthest Mosque), the place where, according to the Qur’an, the Prophet Muhammad was brought on his ‘Night Journey’, when the Angel Gabriel transported him from Mecca to the Temple Mount, from which they ascended together into the heavens.9
Recently, however, conditions had changed profoundly. Three years before Saewulf’s journey, a dramatic upheaval had torn through the city and the wider coastal region of Palestine and Syria, which had fundamentally changed the appeal and nature of pilgrimage for men and women of the Latin West. Following a bitter and sustained war that raged between 1096 and 1099, major parts of the Holy Land had been conquered by the armies of what would co
me to be known as the First Crusade.
Several large expeditions of warrior-pilgrims had travelled from western Europe to the Holy Land (sometimes they called this ‘Outremer’, which translates simply as ‘overseas’). These pilgrims were known collectively by Christian writers as the ‘Latins’ or the ‘Franks’, a term mirrored in Muslim texts, which referred to them as Ifranj.10 Reacting to a cry for military assistance from the Byzantine emperor Alexius Comenenus, backed by the enthusiastic preaching of Pope Urban II, these men and women had marched first to Constantinople and then on to the Levantine coast to fight the Muslims who held sway there. Urban promised, alluringly, that going on crusade could be substituted for all penances the church had imposed on an individual for their sins – an entire lifetime’s wrongdoing could theoretically be wiped out in a single journey. Initially these armed pilgrims had been little more than an undisciplined, violent mob led by rabble-rousers such as the French priest Peter the Hermit, who whipped his followers into a frenzy of devotion but was unable either to provision them properly or to control their violent urges. Subsequent waves of crusaders were led by noblemen from France, Normandy, England, Flanders, Bavaria, Lombardy and Sicily, driven by a genuinely righteous sense that it was their Christian duty to liberate the holy places from their Muslim occupiers, and encouraged by the fact that Jerusalem and the surrounding area were politically and militarily divided between numerous mutually hostile factions of the Islamic world.