The Templars

by Dan Jones

  Unlike most monasteries, Templar houses were linked together in a coherent hierarchy and answerable to a regional command structure. In the late 1120s one Hugh of Rigaud held responsibility for accepting grants in Provence, Aragon and Toulouse. He held the title of ‘procurator’, suggesting the role of business agent.23 Other early procurators included Hugh of Argentein in England, and Payen of Montdidier, responsible for the order’s activities in northern France.

  The great and good did not always need to be directly involved in holy war to see the benefit of patronizing the Templars. The order made large gains in England in the 1130s, profiting from a bloody conflict (now known as the Anarchy) that engulfed the kingdom following the death of King Henry I in 1135. Henry died without a legitimate male heir and his daughter, Matilda, waged war against her cousin Stephen of Blois to secure the succession. Both sides had good reason to favour the Templars. Matilda was married to Geoffrey Plantagenet, count of Anjou, King Fulk of Jerusalem’s elder son, while Stephen’s home county of Blois was not far from Champagne, the crucible of Templar recruitment and ideology. Stephen’s father had been a hero of the First Crusade, while his wife, Matilda, countess of Boulogne, was a niece of Baldwin I. Stephen and Matilda vied openly to prove themselves the order’s most generous benefactor. In return they hoped for political support and spiritual insurance as the Templars promised to pray for their good fortune and immortal souls.

  During Hugh of Payns’ tour of England in 1128 the order had established a house in London known as the ‘Old’ Temple, near Holborn.24 During the Anarchy a torrent of other royal gifts followed, including land and property in Oxfordshire, Hertfordshire, Essex, Bedfordshire, Lincolnshire, Berkshire and Sussex. In 1137 Stephen’s wife gave the Templars the wealthy and well-connected manor of Cressing, in Essex (now Cressing Temple) to which Stephen later added nearby land in Witham.25 In time this grant would become the basis for a rich and busy estate with scores of tenant families working the land, a sprawling network of monastic houses, kitchens and farm buildings, their labour filling two vast thirteenth-century grain-storage sheds, the Wheat Barn and the Barley Barn, which still stand today.

  Across the Channel the story was much the same. The Templars built up vast networks of property in Champagne, Blois, Brittany, Aquitaine, Toulouse and Provence, establishing preceptories to fix their local presence. Dozens of Templar houses sprang up from the Gulf of Genoa to the new Atlantic kingdom of Portugal, which was also being clawed out of Islamic hands and resettled by Christians under the self-proclaimed first King of Portugal, Afonso I Henriques. During the 1140s, Afonso Henriques cleared the valley of the lower Tagus, eventually conquering as far south as Lisbon, where the river empties into the Atlantic Ocean. As early as 1128 Afonso Henriques described himself as a brother (confrater) of the Templars.26 He placed several magnificent strongholds in Templar hands, including the castles at Soure and Almoural, and in April 1147 issued a charter diverting the revenues of every church in the region of his castle at Santarém into Templar hands ‘for the... knights and their successors to have and to hold with perpetual rights so that no clergy or layperson may make any claim in them’.27 Knitting the Templars into the affairs of his new kingdom brought security and prestige. It was also a practical way of colonizing and garrisoning newly won land.

  With every such advance, and each gift they received, the Templars’ wealth increased, their ability to pursue the holy war grew and their fame spread. Although he may not have realized it, Alfonso the Battler, king of Aragon, had been a pioneer in a movement that would change the face of crusading.

  *

  Over the course of a life spent fighting Muslims Alfonso had given plenty of thought to the idea of a military order. Indeed, he had twice tried to start one of his own: in 1122 he had established the Confraternity (or Brotherhood) of Belchite, named for and centred on a frontier castle town some 20 miles (32 km) from Saragossa. Tax exempt and permitted to hold whatever booty they could take from Islamic hands, knights who chose to offer their services at Belchite swore to maintain undying and implacable hostility towards ‘the pagans’ and never to make peace with them.28 Six years later Alfonso founded another order in an entirely new city called Monreal del Campo, built from scratch and endowed with revenues and freedoms that were explicitly modelled on those granted to the Templars.

  Neither the order of Belchite nor that of Monreal del Campo ever really took root. They did not seek or gain the same papal privileges as the Templars, and their sphere of operations never expanded beyond the immediate borderlands that they were tasked with keeping safe. But it was still significant that Alfonso had attempted to inject into his own skirmishes with Islamic foes features of the struggle that was taking place in the kingdom of Jerusalem. By the 1130s the war on the Iberian peninsula had gained the political and spiritual status of a crusade. It was perhaps only natural that it should resemble a crusade in organization, too.

  Certainly in the 1130s and 1140s the Templars flooded into Spain. They never took command of Aragon, for Alfonso’s eccentric will was contested and a conventional political solution found to the succession crisis it provoked. Put briefly, if not simply: Alfonso’s brother Ramiro, a Benedictine monk, was taken out of holy orders and married to the sister of the duke of Aquitaine; the resulting daughter was married as an infant to the count of Barcelona, Ramon Berenguer IV; Ramiro retired back to the cloister and Ramon Berenguer took control of Aragon, merging the kingdom permanently with his own territories. All the same, the order did profit very handsomely from their place in Alfonso’s last testament. As part of the final settlement, made in 1143 between Ramon Berenguer IV and Robert of Craon, the Templars received a formidable grant of income and the custody of six important castles, along with the lands that were subject to those castles’ rule. Several of these were splendid properties and they would become even more so under Templar stewardship.

  The sun-baked hilltop fortress at Monzón, proudly built by the eleventh-century Arab rulers of Saragossa, was redeveloped under Templar ownership to include new defensive walls and towers, stables and barracks. It was one link in a chain of frontier castles – Mongay, Chalamera, Barbará, Remolins and Belchite – which were now placed into Templar hands to be managed, garrisoned and maintained. Since this was an expensive task, the Templars in Aragon were richly endowed. They were promised 10 per cent of the kingdom’s royal revenues, cash to the value of 1,000 solidi (an antiquated but valuable gold coin) payable by the citizens of Saragossa, exemption from any taxes levied by the Aragonese kings and the right to one fifth of any plunder they could acquire fighting unbelievers.

  This was not quite a third of the kingdom, but it was a fortune all the same, and far more than was received by the Hospitallers, who were deprived of their share of the will and given only small territorial awards as compensation (as were the canons of the Holy Sepulchre).29 Of course, the castles and income were not given simply to enrich the Order of the Temple. The responsibility of maintaining border fortresses meant that the Templars now had a direct stake in the Iberian crusades. The charter confirming the Templars’ rights to these castles in Aragon, written in Ramon Berenguer’s name, explained that the purpose of enriching and empowering the Order of Temple was ‘to establish a militia in the power of the heavenly army to defend the Western Church in Spain, to crush, defeat and drive out the race of the Moors... after the fashion of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem which protects the Eastern Church’.30 It may well be that Alfonso, cunning to the last, intended precisely that.

  Across the Latin West the Templars’ reputation was rising, and their property portfolio was growing exponentially. Their leaders had proven themselves politically adept, befriending Christian kings from England to Jerusalem, currying favour with three different popes and inspiring men as temperamentally different as Alfonso I of Aragon and Bernard of Clairvaux to throw their weight behind the order. The Templars were efficiently organized in a pyramid of houses answerable to regional masters and u
ltimately to the grand master in Jerusalem. When challenged, they stood up robustly for their rights.

  Not yet three decades had passed since the first master of the Temple had petitioned at the Council of Nablus for his ragtag band to be given official recognition, a place to sleep and some charitable donations to keep them going day to day. By the late 1140s, the Templars were famous all over the Christian world.

  But fame alone was not enough. The Templars were, after all, a band of holy knights. They were fighting men: warriors whose reason for being was to protect or to kill. And in 1147 the time for killing was upon them. Half a century after the original western charge on the Holy Land, the Roman church was preparing to sponsor another massive and combined military assault on the east. It became known as the Second Crusade, and this time the Templars were at its heart.

  * ‘Every good gift and every perfect boon is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom can be no variation, neither shadow that can be cast by turning.’ (James 1:17)

  † Interdict was a severe sentence of earthly limbo, which took the form of church closure, usually imposed when a local ruler had fallen out with Rome; it could only be lifted by the pope or his direct representatives.

  ‡ The terms ‘commandery’ and ‘preceptory’ can be used largely interchangeably, as can the ranks of the officers who oversaw them, known as either commanders or preceptors.

  PART II

  Soldiers

  1144–1187

  ‘They were the fiercest fighters of all the Franks.’

  Ibn al-Athir

  5

  ‘A Tournament Between Heaven and Hell’

  I mad al-Din Zengi toured the mine that his sappers had dug beneath the northern walls of Edessa and declared himself pleased.1 They had been working for four weeks, and the tunnel now extended into the ‘belly of the earth’, its dirt walls held up with strong wooden beams and its mouth protected by Zengi’s siege catapults, known as mangonels, which kept the city’s few defenders – a rabble of cobblers, bakers, shopkeepers and priests – pinned down behind barricades, avoiding a constant bombardment of heavy stones. Alongside the boulders flew arrows: according to one Muslim chronicler, the air was so thick with missiles that even the birds stayed away.2

  Zengi was a difficult man to satisfy. At sixty the atabeg of Mosul and Aleppo was still good-looking, with dark, sun-baked skin, greying hair and striking eyes. One admirer called him ‘the bravest man in the world’; another told of his extraordinary prowess with a bow and arrow, honed by countless hours spent hunting everything from gazelles to hyenas.3 Yet even his admirers recognized that he was a vicious individual, whose military success sprang from a lifelong reputation as a butcher. Zengi was casually inventive in the violence he directed towards enemies, subordinates and intimates alike. He crucified his own troops for marching out of line and trampling crops. If his military commanders irked him he either killed or banished them, and castrated their children. A fit of pique directed at one of his wives ended with her being summarily divorced and dragged to a stable block to be raped by his grooms while he watched.4 William of Tyre thought him ‘a very wicked man and a most cruel persecutor of the Christians’ and ‘a monster who abhorred the name of a Christian as he would a pestilence’.5 In short, Zengi was one of the most terrifying military leaders in the entire theatre of Islamic and Christian conflict. It was just as well for his sappers that they could dig straight.

  Having finished his assessment of the mine, Zengi announced that he had no complaints. He returned to ground level and offered his congratulations to the engineers waiting outside for his instruction. Set fire to the struts, he told them. The flames would finish the job.

  Edessa was a jewel in the Christian east. The county was the most northerly of the crusader states, and the city one of the first places captured during the First Crusade. It lay a long way inland: an outpost of Frankish rule a day’s ride beyond the banks of the River Euphrates, deep inside territory otherwise controlled by the Seljuqs. The city’s population was a cosmopolitan blend of Greek and Armenian Christians and a relatively small ruling class of Franks, whose homes, shops and bejewelled churches were ‘surrounded by a massive wall and protected by lofty towers’.6 Edessa was further blessed by its possession of the holy shrine of the Apostles St Thomas (‘Doubting’ Thomas) and St Thaddeus, among dozens of other precious relics.

  Less fortunately, Edessa was ruled by Count Joscelin II, a short, thickset, swarthy man with bulging eyes, a large nose and smallpox scars all over his face. Joscelin was a mediocre military campaigner, a drinker and womanizer. All the same, had he been in Edessa Zengi would most likely have left the city alone. But on 23 December 1144 Joscelin was out of town visiting his castle of Turbessel, several days’ ride west beyond the River Euphrates, along with the majority of his mercenary troops. The great stone fortifications he had relied upon to secure the city in his absence were now creaking as Zengi’s forces hammered against them.

  A well-dug mine beneath a vulnerable stretch of wall was a very difficult thing to counter. The art of sapping was a specialist task, associated at one time with experts from Persia, who understood the specific requirements of bringing down heavy stone fortifications.7 When Zengi’s men set the timbers alight, the wood – which had been smeared deliberately in grease, tar and sulphur – quickly collapsed and the tunnel that it supported caved in.8 Above it, a large section of the stonework near the city portal known as the Gate of the Hours lost its foundations. The mortar holding it together cracked, and then the whole edifice gave way. A large gap of 100 cubits (45 m or 150 ft) opened, and Zengi’s forces rushed over the rubble and put the city to the sword.

  Zengi’s men concentrated on murdering Franks rather than Armenians but otherwise made little distinction between their victims. ‘Neither age, condition, nor sex was spared,’ wrote William of Tyre.9 Six thousand men, women and children were killed on the first day of the sack. As panic gripped Edessa’s civilians, they stampeded for the citadel in the middle of the city. But this only led to more deaths, for in the crush of people running for their lives, dozens were trampled. Hugo, archbishop of Edessa, under whose watch the government had been left, was cut to pieces with an axe.

  Zengi’s men tore through the streets, spending Christmas Day ‘pillaging, slaying, capturing, ravishing and looting’ until ‘their hands were filled with such quantities of money, furnishings, animals, booty and captives as rejoiced their spirits and gladdened their hearts’.10 It was said that they took 10,000 children prisoners, for sale into slavery.11 Finally on 26 December their leader ordered the terror to cease; he commanded his men to start rebuilding the city’s defences and went on his way. Edessa, one of the four great cities of the Latin East, a proud totem of God’s love for the Franks, was back in Islamic hands. The shock would reverberate through the whole of Christendom.

  *

  In 1147 the Templars’ house in Paris was under construction, just outside the north-eastern stretch of the city walls on a patch of swampy land that is now the chic neighbourhood of Le Marais. It was given to the order by the pious French king Louis VII. Like many of his noblemen, Louis saw plenty to admire in the Templars and regularly made gifts to the order; in 1143–4 he assigned them the proceeds of rents levied on Paris’s money-changers.12 In time the Paris Temple would become one of the most astonishing urban fortresses in the west, its vast four-turreted central tower, the donjon, soaring over the skyline, advertising the order’s wealth and military prowess. In 1147, however, the Temple was still in the early stages of development. The marshes, watered by the Seine and its tributaries, were being drained in order to make them habitable. There was much still to do.

  Over Easter 130 Templar knights assembled in the city – among them Everard of Breteuil, Theodoric Waleran and Baldwin Calderon – drawn there as part of a swell of powerful crusading men who had come to show their support for a movement that had been building ever since Edessa’s fall thirty months earlier.13 The
y would have stood out unmistakably from the crowds: their white mantles were striking enough, but now a red cross could be seen emblazoned across their uniforms. There would have been at least an equal number of dark-cloaked Templar sergeants and still more servants and support staff around them, giving the impression that a private army was in town, of a size that could ordinarily only have been raised by the greatest lords in Europe.

  At the centre of the Second Crusade, and overseeing events in Paris, were two men of great repute: Pope Eugene III, a former Cistercian monk and friend of Bernard of Clairvaux; and Louis VII, king of France, whose personal piety was such a hallmark of his kingship that his wife, the fiercely intelligent southern duchess Eleanor of Aquitaine, sometimes wondered if she had married a monk and not a king. Eugene had invoked his supreme spiritual authority to call for a new crusade. Louis had agreed to fight it.

  The sight of the pope and the king of France side by side in Paris made a deep impression on observers. The monk, crusader and chronicler Odo of Deuil, who saw them together at his home abbey of Saint-Denis on Easter Day (on which occasion the pope blessed a gigantic, golden jewel-encrusted crucifix known as ‘The True Cross of the Lord Surpassing All and Every Pearl’) called it a ‘double marvel’ to see ‘the king and apostolic father as pilgrims’.14 The crusading movement had not lacked for western noblemen to join its ranks, whether as permanent leaders or as warriors who lent their swords to the effort for a limited tour of duty, but no monarch had thus far been tempted to leave his kingdom to do the Lord’s work, with the exception of Sigurd of Norway, who had sailed to Jerusalem in 1107. Forty years on, all that was about to change. Better yet, it was not only Louis who had agreed to go crusading: his promise had been matched by Europe’s second most significant ruler, Conrad III, king of the Germans.*