The Templars

by Dan Jones

  Fraga was in Muslim hands. The citizens had asked Alfonso via intermediaries to lift his siege, accept their surrender and allow the people to depart peacefully. Alfonso had been warned that if he did not do so, then a large relieving army of Muslim warriors would come and destroy him. This only increased his appetite for a fight. With God and the saints as his witnesses he now declared that there would be no mercy. ‘He planned to capture the city and kill the entire Moorish noble class’, wrote one Christian chronicler. ‘He wanted their wives and children as prisoners, and... to confiscate all their riches.’4

  The 200 heavily laden camels that swayed into view beside the banks of the nearby River Cinca on the morning of Tuesday 17 July 1134 might have given the king of Aragon pause for thought. The great, lumbering pack-beasts and their drivers were part of a large Muslim army led by the emir of Murcia and Valencia: a ‘brave warrior’ by the name of Yahya ibn-Ghaniya, better known to the Christians as Abengenia.5 His army included forces from other regional Muslim strongholds such as Córdoba and Lérida, and it was heavily reinforced with men, animals and provisions sent from the Almoravid empire in north Africa – the real centre of power in the western Islamic world, with its capital in Marrakesh. The Almoravids were an exotic and dangerous enemy: their military leaders famed for the desert veil they wore at all times, covering their noses and mouths and leaving only their eyes on show. According to one estimate they had sent 10,000 men to Fraga. Even allowing for exaggeration, the forces now confronting Alfonso were plainly very large.6

  The column of camels approaching the city walls was laden with relief supplies for the citizens. Alfonso ordered his kinsman Bernard, count of Laon, to lead an attack and bring back loot. Bernard demurred, suggesting a more cautious strategy; Alfonso flew into a rage, berating his cousin and calling him a coward. It was a fatal mistake.

  When the Aragonese forces moved to confront the Muslim convoy, the camels and their military guard turned tail and fled. The Christians pursued but found themselves drawn into a trap. The rest of ibn-Ghaniya’s army, which had been divided into four more columns, moved forward and encircled them, and without delay ‘began the attack with spears, arrows, stones and other missiles’.7 Meanwhile, the citizens surged out of the city gates. ‘Men and women, young and old’ all fell on Alfonso’s camp. The men massacred the non-combatant Christians, while the women led a general plunder, robbing the tents of food, equipment, weapons and siege engines.8 Most humiliatingly, the Muslim plunderers stripped bare Alfonso’s chapel, stealing his golden ark and leaving the holy tent ‘torn completely to the ground’.9

  The battle was a rout. Several bishops and abbots were killed, along with dozens of the best knights in Aragon and most of the army’s leaders. Virtually all the members of Alfonso’s household were captured and his entire infantry bodyguard of 700 soldiers was slain. In all his decades of warfare, during which Alfonso had fought battles and sieges from Bayonne to Granada, he had never suffered such a devastating defeat. He slashed and hacked away fiercely on the edge of the battlefield, but the effort was futile, and he was eventually persuaded to escape with a small group of knights. Together they fled west to Saragossa, then turned north towards the foothills of the Pyrenees and the beautiful Romanesque monastery of San Juan de la Peña, where Alfonso’s father was buried. The warrior-king was going home.

  On Friday 7 September 1134 Alfonso died, most likely of wounds sustained at Fraga, although Christian and Muslim chroniclers attributed the cause of death to grief. The wars of Christian reconquest on the Iberian peninsula had lost one of their most fearsome and energetic champions. But if fate had taken away one leader, it brought on his tail a new wave of fighters who would shift the entire direction of the conflict.

  Alfonso died as he had lived, austere in spirit and narrowly focused on deeds of war. As befitted a man who slept on his shield every night and believed ‘it is proper for a fighting man to associate with men and not with women’, he never fathered a child.10 In his will, written three years before his death, the king named as his principal heirs three orders based in Jerusalem: the canons of the Holy Sepulchre, the Knights Hospitaller and the Templars, whom his will described as ‘the Temple of the Lord with its knights who strive to defend the name of Christianity’.11 To these three entities, Alfonso declared:

  I bequeath... my whole kingdom, as well as the lordship I have in my kingdom, the sovereignty and rights I have over all the population of my land, clergy and laity, bishops, abbots, canons, monks, magnates, knights, burgesses, peasants, merchants, men and women, small and great, rich and poor, also Jews and Saracens.

  Just five years after the Council of Troyes had given them a formal Rule, the Templars had been granted one third of an entire kingdom: quite a coup. It also set a course for their future. Firstly it meant that for the next two centuries the Templars would have a part in the Reconquista. Secondly, it demonstrated the spirit of ostentatious generosity towards crusading and crusaders that was growing across Europe, without which the whole concept of the military orders would have failed.

  *

  When Hugh of Payns returned to Jerusalem he did so with the fame of his young order firmly established. But despite his promises to his patrons in France and England he did not throw the order immediately into extensive military campaigning. The Templars’ involvement in the attack on Damascus of 1129 – an assault he had heavily advertised on his recruitment tour – was hardly promising. According to one account the Christian forces conducted themselves ‘very imprudently and... beyond the bounds of military discipline’.12 Baldwin’s forces approached the city in the autumn but unwisely divided their forces; they were ambushed and then scattered by dreadful weather, slain by the defenders of the city amid thick fog and heavy rain. The verdict back in the west was scathing: the author of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle judged that the recruits sold on a glorious new crusade had been ‘pitiably duped’.13

  Over the next ten years the Templars appear to have taken part in just two other significant actions. In 1137 eighteen of their knights were among those besieged alongside Fulk of Anjou in the castle of Montferrand, near Homs in the county of Tripoli (by this time Fulk was king of Jerusalem, having succeeded Baldwin II on his death in 1131). Two years later another ignominious engagement took place, this time in the kingdom of Jerusalem, near Hebron. Several Templars had joined a Christian army that engaged a large band of ‘wicked robbers and bandits’; it was a rash and disorganized skirmish that ended in disarray, with the Christians fleeing across rocky, pathless plains and falling in dispiriting numbers. ‘Some perished by the sword, and others were hurled headlong from precipices’, wrote the chronicler William of Tyre.14

  In its early years the order did not make a habit of joining these sorts of actions; the Templars at this stage were seen as best suited to the important duty of castle-guard. In 1136 they were awarded the job of garrisoning fortresses overlooking the dangerous passes in the Amanus mountains, near Antioch. This was a major strategic responsibility: the Amanus passes were the key routes into Syria from Asia Minor, and controlling them was vital to the security of the county of Edessa and principality of Antioch, as well as the safety of pilgrims coming to Jerusalem over land.

  On 24 May 1136 Hugh of Payns died. No contemporary chronicler mentioned the circumstances of his passing, and the date is only known because it was officially commemorated in the years that followed. What is perhaps most notable is that the order he created outlived him without crisis. The Rule granted at Troyes was silent on the way of appointing a new master, but later additions made it clear that it was done by election, in a chapter meeting at which the most senior Templars from both east and west were summoned to vote. Hugh’s successor was Robert of Craon (also known as Robert Burgundio), a shrewd nobleman from Poitou who enjoyed close links to the new King Fulk of Jerusalem. William of Tyre called him ‘a distinguished knight, valiant in arms, noble both according to the flesh and by nature’.15 At the time of Hugh’s death Robert was
serving as the order’s seneschal, a title taken from the royal household for a steward with extensive administrative duties. Robert was a devoted member of the order, who had abandoned a fiancée at home in 1125 to travel to the Holy Land and fight. Like Hugh, he travelled regularly between Jerusalem and the west, and as master, he spent most of his time soliciting donations from wealthy benefactors in southern France and settling the ongoing legal disputes over Alfonso I’s will in Aragon.16 He had particular success building on the links between the order and the papal court in Rome.

  On 29 March 1139, during one of Robert of Craon’s visits to France and Italy, Pope Innocent II issued a bull (an official letter under a papal seal made from lead, for which the Latin word was bulla) addressed to the Templars. Like all papal bulls, this one was known by the first words of its text, Omne Datum Optimum (‘Every good gift’), a quotation from the Epistle of James.*

  Omne Datum Optimum granted the Templars a range of extraordinary privileges. The pope praised the knights who had joined the order for transforming themselves from ‘children of wrath’ into listeners who have abandoned worldly pomp and personal possessions.17 He then confirmed knights of the Temple in their right to ‘always bear on your chest the sign of the life-giving cross’ – a symbol which, when emblazoned in red on the Templar knights’ white mantles, came to be an iconic uniform.

  Innocent’s support of the Templars made sense. He had been helped through a major political crisis between 1130 and 1138 by Bernard of Clairvaux: the papacy had fallen into schism and Bernard had backed Innocent’s claim over that of the antipope Anacletus II. When the schism was settled in Innocent’s favour, he had every reason to return the favour by showering the Order of the Temple with spiritual bounty. Even so, Omne Datum Optimum was exceptionally generous.

  The bull placed the Templars ‘under the protection and tutelage of the Holy See for all time to come’. Robert of Craon and his successors were to answer to no one but the pope: they were made explicitly independent across Christendom from the authority of kings and patriarchs, barons and bishops, and their customs were sweepingly declared to be free from the meddling of ‘any ecclesiastical or secular person’. The Rule drawn up at Troyes was confirmed, and Templars were designated ‘defenders of the Catholic Church and attackers of the enemies of Christ’, a licence so broad as to be effectively all-encompassing.

  The Templars were guaranteed the right to be ruled by a master drawn from their own number and were exempted from paying tithes – the taxes routinely collected by the church from its flock – while being permitted to take tithes from those who lived on land they owned. This income was to be reserved exclusively for their own use. They could appoint their own private priests to administer the ‘sacraments and divine offices’, ignoring the authority of local bishops, and could build oratories – private chapels – at Templar houses, where brothers could be buried. Templar priests were answerable to their master; a highly unusual state of affairs, as their master, while sworn to obey the Rule, did not himself have to be ordained.

  Together these grants gave the Templars enviable privilege, independence and autonomy. In comparison, the Hospitallers, who had expanded from their medical and pastoral role to support a military wing from around 1120, did not have their Rule confirmed by the pope until 1153, though they too were busy building up a network of property and favour in Europe to support their mission in the Holy Land. The Templars were further protected by the ultimate papal sanction: anyone who harassed them would be excommunicated, forbidden ‘to partake of the most holy body and blood of our Lord, Jesus Christ’, and sentenced to ‘suffer severe punishment’ at the final judgement. This was a very serious threat, since according to ancient church texts the punishments scheduled to greet the faithless and disobedient on the Day of Apocalypse included being burned in a vast pit of pitch and brimstone, hung by their eyebrows over a lake of fire and gnawed through the belly by a writhing mass of worms.18

  The Templars’ excellent relations with the papacy would continue well into the middle of the twelfth century. Celestine II, who held office for six months between Innocent’s death in the autumn of 1143 and his own in March of the following year, issued on 9 January 1144 a bull entitled Milites Templi (‘Knights of the Temple’), which granted all who joined them relief from penance and a guaranteed Christian burial. The Templars were also allowed once a year to open churches that had been placed under Interdict† and to hold services there, at which they could collect donations. Finally, Pope Eugene III, a Cistercian abbot and protégé of Bernard of Clairvaux who held office from February 1145 until July 1153, drew up a third bull, known as Militia Dei (‘The Knighthood of God’), which reconfirmed the Templars’ right to appoint their own priests and build their own private oratories in which they could hold services free from the dangers that might arise should they ‘mingle with crowds of men and meet women on the occasion of going to church’.19 Framed this way, it sounded as if Eugene’s purpose was to relieve the Templars from the burden of mixing with women and the grubby poor. But this masked a valuable financial privilege: Templar oratories were permitted to collect tithes and charge fees for burying the dead, even when these were established in the jurisdictions of other churchmen. In addition, they did not have to pass any of the wealth they collected to their local bishop, archbishop or abbot. This seemingly innocuous privilege would allow them, in time, to amass untold riches.

  *

  The Templar seal, used to authenticate charters and documents, was a wax disc showing two brothers riding the same horse, a reminder of their sworn commitment to a life of poverty. Yet, ironically, by committing to live in penury the Templars become rich. Their commitment to protecting pilgrims in the Holy Land, and their philosophy of godly violence twinned with austere personal virtue, had brought them patronage from on high. And as the mighty fell in, so did the lesser men and women of Christendom, who swelled the Templars’ coffers with bequests of land, property, buildings, feudal income, service and personal possessions.

  The most devoted and able-bodied men could join the order, make their vows, travel to the east and confront the forces of Islam in person, either to fight as knights or to support the order’s operations in some other capacity, as chaplains, servants or sergeants, sworn brothers who wore dark robes and performed vital non-combat functions.

  But life in the saddle on the roads between Jerusalem and Jaffa was not possible or desirable for everyone. Some chose therefore to associate themselves with the order by offering gifts of their possessions. These could be as meagre as a crate of firewood, an old cloak, a sword or a coat of mail, or as lavish as a whole estate, a church, or a large sum of cash, and they often came from those who had no means of joining the holy war in person. In 1133–4 Lauretta, a woman from Douzens (north of the Pyrenees, between Carcassonne and Narbonne) donated land, feudal rights and the labour of her tenants to the Templars, ‘who fight with courage for the faith against the threatening Saracens who are constantly trying to destroy the law of God and the faithful who serve it’.20 An obituary book from a Templar church in Reims, begun a few decades later, listed all the donations of individuals and the dates on which they were to be remembered by the brothers. It commemorated people like ‘Sibylla, niece of Thierry Strabo: she gave to this church a third of her vineyard’ and ‘Baldwin Ovis, for whose anniversary mass his wife lady Pontia gave to this church one stall in the cloth market’.21

  Taken together, the things given by a generous west – money, horses, clothes, weapons – to support action in the east, provided what was known in Latin as the Templars’ responsio. One third of the profits made in each Templar house were sent to the front line, where the order needed them most.

  Donations came principally from four areas: the northern French territories above the Loire (the region of the langue d’oïl), the southern French counties around Provence (the langue d’oc), England and Spain. In order to manage the properties and gifts they received, and to co-ordinate the pro
cess of funnelling the income to the Holy Land, western Europe was organized under the authority of senior officials with responsibility for their own regions. Small grants of land would be parcelled up into larger estates, overseen by a series of monastic-style houses known as preceptories or commanderies.‡ This land was either leased out, farmed for crops or grazed, according to its location. Some of the income sustained the estate itself; profits funded the order. Many of these preceptories would have been hard to distinguish from a regular Cistercian monastery, staffed by a handful of sergeants, with a roster of servants doing menial work to support them.

  In some houses women might be found, and not just as servants: occasionally husbands and wives joined the order together as associate members, meaning they could share aspects of Templar life, but had not taken the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. From time to time particularly wealthy women were even appointed as preceptors and put in charge of the houses to which they had donated – though whether they actually took up their positions or appointed male deputies is not certain, as the Templar Rule was clear about the necessity of strict segregation between the sexes to avoid temptation. Templar houses in the Spanish kingdoms were particularly prone to bending their rules and allowing women to join the order as associates and even full sisters, perhaps because women there had much greater freedom to dispose of their own property.22