The Templars

by Dan Jones

The fissures were political, dynastic and sectarian. On one side were the Seljuqs, originally from central Asia, who had built an empire stretching from Asia Minor to the Hindu Kush, blending Turkic and Persian culture and observing religious loyalty to the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, the spiritual leader of Sunni Islam. For twenty years before 1092 the Seljuq empire was ruled by Sultan Malikshah I, but on his death the empire split between his four sons, who fell into fractious dispute.

  Pitted against the Seljuqs was the rump of the Fatimid Caliphate, with its heartlands in Egypt, whose leaders claimed descent from Muhammad’s daughter Fatima. From the mid-tenth century the Fatimids ruled most of north Africa, Syria, Palestine, the Hijaz and even Sicily, loyal to their own Shi’a Caliph in Cairo. In the late eleventh century the Fatimid empire was also breaking up, losing territory and influence and contracting back towards its Egyptian heartlands. Sectarian and political rivalry between the Seljuqs and the Fatimids, as well as within the Seljuq empire itself, had caused a period of exceptional disunity within the Islamic world. As one of their own chroniclers put it, the various rulers were ‘all at odds with one another’.11

  So it was that the Christians of the First Crusade had enjoyed a staggering series of victories. Jerusalem had fallen on 15 July 1099, an astonishing military coup that was accompanied by disgraceful plundering and massacres of the city’s Jewish and Muslim inhabitants, whose beheaded bodies were left lying in piles in the streets, many with their bellies slit open so that the Christian conquerors could retrieve gold coins their victims had swallowed in a bid to hide them from the marauding invaders.12 Greek Orthodox priests in Jerusalem were tortured until they revealed the location of some of their finest relics, including a fragment of wood from the True Cross on which Christ had died, embedded in a beautiful gold crucifix-shaped reliquary.

  The crusaders took the major northern cities of Edessa and Antioch, as well as smaller towns including Alexandretta, Bethlehem, Haifa, Tiberias and Jaffa, the strategically important port city. Other coastal towns including Arsuf, Acre, Caesarea and Ascalon remained in Muslim hands but agreed to pay tributes to be left alone, and would eventually fall to conquest by later generations of invaders. A series of new Christian states were now established along the Mediterranean coast: the county of Edessa and the principality of Antioch in the north were bordered to the south by the county of Tripoli and the kingdom of Jerusalem, which claimed theoretical feudal lordship over the whole region – although this was only ever very loosely enforced.

  Given the unprecedented conditions of their arrival, the sheer distance from home and the sapping nature of waging war in such an unforgiving climate, the Christians’ hold on these lands was still incomplete. By the time of Saewulf’s pilgrimage to Jerusalem, troops, boats and holy men arriving from the west had helped expand the territories subject to the rule of Jerusalem’s first crusader king, Baldwin I. But there were not very many of them and they were threatened by multiple enemies from outside and internal divisions among the crusaders, drawn as they were from parts of the west not renowned for easy co-operation.

  In the summer of 1102 Saewulf thus found himself in a new, small, occasionally beleaguered but aggressive Christian kingdom of the east, whose very existence was thought by the zealots who had established it to be evidence that God had ‘opened to us the abundance of His blessing and mercy’. The Muslims who had been displaced not surprisingly saw things otherwise. They referred to their new neighbours as the product of ‘a time of disasters’ brought about by the ‘enemies of God’.13

  *

  For the next six months Saewulf explored every inch of the Holy City and its surrounding area, comparing the things he saw with his knowledge of scripture and previous accounts of Jerusalem, including one written by the eighth-century English monk and theologian known as the Venerable Bede. Saewulf marvelled at the Temple of the Lord and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Mount of Olives and the Garden of Gethsemane. He went to the Monastery of the Holy Cross, where visitors could peer beneath the great altar and see the stump of the tree from which Jesus’s crucifix had been made, encased in a box of white marble with a little viewing window. He was stunned by the magnificence of what he saw. Of the Temple of the Lord he remarked that ‘its height was more than the hills around it and in its beauty and its glory it excelled all other houses and buildings’.14 He admired glorious sculpture and the city’s formidable defences. In everything he saw scripture coming to life: the place where Peter cured the lame man and where Jesus rode into Jerusalem ‘sitting on an ass, when the boys were singing Hosanna to the Son of David!’.15

  Nevertheless, Saewulf often found the pilgrim roads around Jerusalem eerie and unsafe. The trail inland from Jaffa had been particularly gruelling: a long, tough journey along a ‘very hard mountain road’.16 The general instability of the crusader kingdom was evident all around. Muslim brigands – Saewulf called them ‘Saracens’ – fanned out across the countryside, living in rocky caves, spooking pilgrims who believed that ‘they were awake day and night, always keeping a look-out for someone to attack’. From time to time Saewulf and his party would glimpse frightening figures ahead of or behind them, menacing them from a distance before disappearing out of view. They travelled in fear, knowing that anyone who tired and dropped behind was liable to suffer a grisly fate.

  Everywhere corpses lay rotting in the heat. Some were on the path itself, others just off it, a number of them ‘torn up by wild beasts’ (cliff foxes, jackals and leopards were all native to the mountains of Palestine). These Christians had been abandoned by their fellow travellers without any attempt to give them a decent burial, for in the sun-baked earth the task would have been impossible. ‘There is little soil there and the rocks are not easy to move,’ wrote Saewulf. ‘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.’17

  Six miles (10 km) to the south of Jerusalem he found Bethlehem ‘all ruined’, except for the large monastery of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which contained ‘the manger where the ox and ass stood’ at the time of Christ’s birth as well as a marble table where the Virgin supposedly had supper with the Magi.18 Further south still was Hebron, also ‘ruined by the Saracens’, notable for being the burial place of ‘the Holy Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’ as well as ‘Adam, the first-created man’.19 In the east he saw the Dead Sea, ‘where the water of the Jordan is whiter and more like milk than the other waters’.20 In the north, three days’ ride away, he visited Nazareth, the Sea of Galilee and the city of Tiberias, where Jesus had performed miracles, including the feeding of the five thousand.

  The sheer concentration of holy places was deeply affecting, and Saewulf kept a detailed record of it all, recalling even the ‘smell of balsam and very precious spices’ that stayed in his nostrils when he visited particularly popular shrines.21 Yet he was constantly aware that his pious travels were made through treacherous lands. Churches and towns lay collapsed into jagged stone ruins. Monasteries mourned dozens of brethren massacred for their faith. Horrors old and new commingled. Here was a place where in ancient times St Peter had wet the earth with his tears after betraying the Lord; there a church deserted more recently for fear of ‘the pagans’ who had amassed on the far banks of the River Jordan, ‘in Arabia, which is very hostile to Christians and hates all worshippers of God’.22

  By the late spring of 1103 Saewulf had travelled as far as he could and amply fulfilled his purpose as a pilgrim. ‘I had explored as far as I was able each one of the Holy Places of the city of Jerusalem and the cities near it, and venerated them,’ he wrote. He returned to Jaffa and sought out a berth on a merchant ship heading west. Still his safety was not guaranteed. The open waters towards Cyprus were patrolled by enemy ships from Fatimid Egypt, which commanded enough coastal cities to keep their fleet active at sea, readily replenished with food and water. No Christian ships dared to make a long
journey out of sight of land, for fear of attack. On 17 May Saewulf boarded one of three large ships known as dromonds, which were travelling north together, hugging the coast, stopping at friendly ports and hurrying past unfriendly ones as fast as the prevailing wind and their oarsmen would carry them.

  Some 75 miles (120 km) into the journey, as the dromonds were approaching Acre, twenty-six Arab warships came into view. They were Fatimid vessels, which prompted panic on the decks. Saewulf watched as the two dromonds accompanying his own dipped their oars frantically and fled for the safety of the Christian-held town of Caesarea. His own ship was left stranded. The enemy formed a ring around it, staying just out of crossbow range, whooping with delight at the promise of such a prize. The pilgrims armed themselves for a fight and fell into defensive ranks on the decks. ‘Our men’, wrote Saewulf, ‘were prepared to die for Christ.’23

  Mercifully, this show of defiance was enough to make the Fatimid commander think twice before making his attack. After a tense hour of consideration, he decided there were easier targets to be found, abandoned the assault and made for deeper waters. Saewulf and his fellow travellers praised the Lord and went on their way, reaching Cyprus eight days later, then proceeding to the coast of Asia Minor and continuing along much the same route he had travelled on his outbound journey. Finally they swung north through the Dardanelles towards the great city of Constantinople, packed with even more holy relics to inspect and adore. Throughout their journey they were harassed by pirates and tossed by storms. As he contemplated the journey of a lifetime from the safety of his home, he mused that the only thing that had protected him was the grace of God.

  *

  Saewulf was just one among thousands of pilgrims to make such a journey to the Holy Land in the aftermath of the First Crusade. They came from all over the Christian world: accounts of the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem, new and fragile in its first decades, survive from men who travelled from Portugal, Flanders, Germany, Russia and even Iceland. As the Holy Land was in effect a war zone, many found it a hair-raising place. The chronicler Fulcher of Chartres noted in 1101 that when pilgrims visited Jerusalem they came ‘very timidly... through the midst of hostile pirates and past the ports of the Saracens, with the Lord showing the way’.24 A Russian writer known as Daniel the Abbot travelled on pilgrimage from Kiev between about 1106 and 1108. He, too, wrote of the terrifying road between Jaffa and Jerusalem, where ‘Saracens sally forth and kill travellers’, and complained of the number of venerable sites ‘destroyed by the pagans’. On the road to Lake Tiberias he dodged ‘fierce pagans who attack travellers at the river-fords’ and lions that roamed the countryside in ‘great numbers’. Walking unescorted on the high, narrow pass between Mount Tabor and Nazareth Daniel prayed for his life, having been warned that the local villagers ‘kill travellers in those terrible mountains’.25 Fortunately, he survived, returning home to Kiev with a small piece of the rock of Christ’s tomb, broken off surreptitiously by the key-keeper and given to him as a relic.

  Pilgrims in any age expect a certain degree of danger from brigands and robbers. But the hostility of the Muslims who lived in and around the new crusader states was more than merely opportunistic. The losses their people had suffered from the first appearance of the Franks in 1096 were considered shameful and perplexing – a sign of God’s displeasure at divisions in the Islamic world and a call to all the faithful to rise in arms to fight back against the invaders. ‘Armies like mountains, coming again and again, have ranged forth from the lands of the Franks,’ wrote the Syrian poet Ibn al-Khayyat, before 1109. ‘The heads of the polytheists have already ripened, so do not neglect them as a vintage and a harvest!’26 Other writers, such as the far-sighted and wise Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, called for a united effort from across the Islamic world – Turks and Arabs, Sunni and Shi’a – to pull together and wage jihad, or holy war, to achieve ‘the taking back of what [the Franks] took from the country of the Muslims [and] the displaying of the religion of Islam in them’.27

  The jihadist counter-attack al-Sulami had hoped for did not occur – at least, not in the years immediately following the establishment of the Christian kingdom. Bitter divisions continued, making a serious, sustained and effective response to occupation impossible. At the level of high politics and warring princes, the Franks were in Jerusalem to stay. Yet at the same time, for those Christians who risked everything they owned, even their lives, travelling for thousands of miles to visit the holy sites in the east, the kingdom of Jerusalem was a place where rapture and terror were to be experienced side by side, often over the course of the same day. Jerusalem was, as a Muslim writer noted, quoting the Torah, ‘a golden basin filled with scorpions’.28 The desire to brave these dangers added to the allure of a pilgrimage, as discomfort and suffering were thought to be necessary for the redemption of the soul and remission of sins sought by every pilgrim. Yet there were only so many bodies that could reasonably be allowed to stack up by the side of the road, their throats slit and flesh torn to pieces. As the crusading Christians put down roots in this new kingdom at the centre of the world, it became clear that they would need protection.

  That is where the story of the Templars begins.

  * Saewulf makes no mention of his birthplace in his Latin account of the Holy Land, and we have almost no knowledge of his biography save what is contained in his pilgrimage diary. But it is reasonable to assume that he was from England: he drew on materials compiled by the Northumbrian saint Bede and the one medieval copy of his account found its way to the library of Matthew Parker, the sixteenth-century archbishop of Canterbury.

  † A fine example is the Mappa Mundi held at Hereford Cathedral in England. This was created c.1300, but is a perfect illustration of the medieval conception of the world as it existed in Saewulf’s time, and Jerusalem’s central place in it. Guidebooks advised visitors that they could find the centre of the world ‘thirteen feet to the west of Mount Calvary’.

  2

  ‘The Defence of Jerusalem’

  The Knights of the Temple were founded in Jerusalem in 1119 and officially recognized at some point between 14 January and 13 September of the year 1120.1 The truth was that barely anyone noticed. The Templars did not arrive on a wave of popular demand, nor was their creation the product of some far-sighted planning between the nascent crusader states and religious authorities in western Christendom. No surviving chronicles of the immediate time, either Christian or Muslim, paid any attention to the first stirrings of the order – indeed, it was only several generations later that the story of the Templars’ earliest origins was written down, by which time it was coloured by what the order had become.2 But this was hardly surprising. Much like Jerusalem’s rulers and inhabitants, the historians and gossip-collectors of the Holy Land in the year 1120 had other, bigger things to worry about.

  The crusaders who stayed to rule in the Holy Land were foreign invaders, trying to establish their command over a mixed population of Sunni and Shi’a Muslims, Jews, Greek and Syrian Orthodox Christians, Samaritans and poor settlers from all over Europe. This was a society naturally divided by language, religion, culture and loyalty, in which everyone was trying to get by in an environment that sometimes seemed naturally hostile to settlement. In 1113 and 1114 Syria and Palestine were shaken by severe earthquakes, which razed whole towns and left people suffocating to death beneath collapsed buildings. Virtually every springtime brought plagues of mice and locusts that swarmed over vines and fields, ruining crops and stripping the bark from the trees. From time to time strange eclipses stained the moon and the sky blood-red. All of these things played on the settlers’ superstitious minds. It was as if the land wished to cast out the crusaders and the heavens to punish them for their conquest.3

  Just as serious as the plagues and omens was the matter of safety and security. Over the twenty years since the Franks had conquered Jerusalem and established their four crusader states, they had been forced to fight hard for a foothold on the coast. There
were some major gains: the cities of Acre, Beirut and Tripoli were taken, thanks in part to regular influxes of troops from the Christian west (including a major expedition from Scandinavia commanded by Sigurd, king of Norway, who helped King Baldwin capture Sidon in 1110). Yet these impressive territorial advances could not change the reality of life beneath the scorching sun of the Levantine coast: unpredictable and violent.

  In 1118, Baldwin, the first king of Jerusalem, died. He was followed to the grave three weeks later by the leading Latin churchman in the kingdom, Arnulf, patriarch of Jerusalem. These two men were succeeded by the count of Edessa, an experienced crusader who became King Baldwin II, and Warmund of Picquigny, a spirited cleric from a prominent family in northern France. Both were formidable characters, but the transition nevertheless prompted simultaneous invasions from the Seljuqs in eastern Syria and the Fatimids in Egypt, bringing a new round of skirmishes and warfare. Defending the kingdom was costly in manpower and morale, and the Frankish forces were constantly overstretched. The chronicler Fulcher of Chartres considered it ‘a wonderful miracle that we lived among so many thousands of thousands [of enemies]’.4

  In the year 1119 things were as bad as they had ever been, thanks to two particularly grave events. The first took place on Holy Saturday, 29 March, following the miracle of the heavenly fire at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. In this yearly ritual an oil lamp kept beside the rock of Christ’s tomb would spontaneously burst alight on the eve of Easter; the sacred flame was then used to light the individual candles and lamps of faithful men and women who gathered to witness it. Unfortunately, in 1119, once the miracle had taken place 700 ecstatic pilgrims ran out of the church and streamed into the desert in the direction of the River Jordan, intending to bathe in its waters and thank God. The river was about 20 miles (32 km) from the eastern walls of Jerusalem and the pilgrims never made it to their destination. The chronicler Albert of Aachen recorded that once they had descended from the mountains to ‘a place of solitude’ near the river, all of a sudden ‘there appeared Saracens from Tyre and Ascalon [two cities still in Muslim hands], armed and very fierce’. They fell upon the pilgrims, who were ‘virtually unarmed’ and ‘weary after a journey of many days, weakened by fasting for Jesus’ name’. It was no fight at all: ‘the wicked butchers pursued them, putting three hundred to the sword and holding sixty captive’, wrote Albert.5