by Dan Jones
A triumphant song composed around 1146 to rally men to Louis’ crusade had advertised the mission to rescue Edessa in rapturous terms, proclaiming ‘God has organized a tournament between Heaven and Hell’ (Deus ad un turnei enpris/Entre Enfern e Pareïs).31 This tournament continued fiercely when the crusaders marched in their new ranks towards Adalia on the south coast of Asia Minor. They were still the better part of a fortnight from the port, and would be harried by the Turks virtually every step of the way.
The first test came as the army attempted to traverse an area of wetland in which two rivers, their banks thick and slippery with mud, flowed a mile (1.6 km) apart. Crossing the first river was difficult enough: some of the horses, weak with hunger, sank into the mire and had to be pulled out by hand, a tiring task for men who were half-starving themselves.
The road to the second river led the army between two high crags, perfect snipers’ positions: anyone standing at the top of either crag could shoot at the crusader army as it passed slowly below. The army’s new leadership was alert to the danger. Knights were sent up to hold the crags, in a race with the Turks. The crusaders and their tormentors secured one side apiece. In a brief stand-off the Turks tried to intimidate their opponents with a show of contemptuous defiance. Odo of Deuil says they ‘plucked hair from their heads and threw it on to the ground, and by this sign, we were told, they indicated that they could not be dislodged from the spot by any kind of fear’.32 This time, however, the crusaders intended to use not fear, but steel. The road between the crags was blockaded and a force of foot soldiers was instructed to rush the Turkish position. Numbers won out, and soon the Turks were fleeing the crag with Christian troops in lively pursuit. As they descended to the mud flats below they were cut down. Odo of Deuil rejoiced, remarking that the unbelievers ‘found death and a grave in a place suited to their filthy natures’.33
Morale was boosted by this victory, and with it the army marched on to Adalia, reaching the city by 20 January 1148. Conditions remained punishing: horses died by the roadside, where they were either left to rot or carved up for what scraps of meat were left on their exhausted bones. As the stock of pack animals dwindled, the men were forced to abandon the baggage, tents and armour they could not carry on their own backs. When the army came to a halt and made camp outside Adalia, disease began to tear through the ranks, its progress undoubtedly hastened by the weakened state of the half-nourished troops, who found the unscrupulous citizens of Adalia charging extortionate prices for much-needed food.
The winter’s snow and storms came, and a contrary wind blew for five weeks, preventing the crusaders from leaving the city by ship. But the army was now at least competently drilled and capable of protecting itself; three Turkish attacks on the camp outside the walls of Adalia were beaten back, including one in which Templars rode in disguise among a group of other knights to chase away the enemy. They had decided that they would rather keep their chargers alive and go hungry themselves, and the sacrifice now paid off: the sight of so many apparently well-fed horses beneath Christian knights convinced the Turks that the crusaders had managed to resupply, and they retreated.
Somehow, when spring arrived, the crusaders were still alive, having survived one of the most gruelling marches imaginable. The land route into Syria was another forty days on foot, and there was some debate as to whether it would be more righteous to stay faithful to the footsteps of their predecessors, or to take the more expensive but shorter option of crossing by ship to Antioch. After much deliberation and excruciating negotiation with the sailors and ship-owners of Adalia, who pumped every piece of silver they could from their stricken guests, Louis departed in the first wave of sea-crossings. His men straggled along behind him, some finding passage by boat, and the rest attempting to march. Others, according to Odo of Deuil, simply gave up on their promises to reach the kingdom of Jerusalem, and accepted alms and safe passage back through Asia Minor as enfeebled prisoners of a band of Turks.
The Templars had suffered the same privations as the rest of Louis’ army. But without the self-discipline, level-headedness, resourcefulness and commitment to the cause that they had shown, the French king’s crusade might never have made it much past Constantinople. As it was, in early March, Louis disembarked in Antioch and prepared for the next phase of the plan to save Edessa. Once again, the Templars would be heavily involved.
* The king of the Germans, also known as king of the Romans, was a ruler elected by the nobles and princes of the semi-autonomous states of greater Germany.
6
‘The Mill of War’
Louis VII reached the Holy Land by the port of St Simeon at the mouth of the River Orontes, realizing that he was broke.1 Quite apart from the blood that had been spilled and the many wounds to his pride, the financial costs the king had incurred on his long journey from Paris to Antioch had exhausted his budget for the glorious pilgrimage. His men had been milked by the Greeks of Constantinople and Adalia, who saw their desperation and sold them food and passage at exorbitant prices. The prospect of now beginning a series of military offensives against Muslim-held cities was more than the king’s coffers could bear. Fortunately Louis was still attended by Everard of Barres, a man personally invested in the French branch of the crusade. It was to Everard that he now turned for help.
The French needed a very large loan, and Louis hoped Everard would fix it. It was no secret that the Templars, although individually committed to a life of poverty, had already grown very rich. They knew the land and the people of the Latin East and were well placed to raise money either by drawing on their own resources or by cajoling others into supporting the cause. Perhaps most importantly, they had a sworn duty to protect pilgrims, and in the current circumstances that could be interpreted as bailing out their king. On 10 May 1148 Everard of Barres left Louis in Antioch and travelled south to Acre to gather funds.
The amount he raised, partly from the Templars’ own funds and partly by mortgaging their properties, was extraordinary. Later in the year Louis wrote to the regents he had left to govern France in his absence and asked them to find 30,000 Paris pounds (livres parisis) and 2,000 marks of silver to repay his debt to the Templars.* It was half or more of the annual revenues of the French crown.2 In a letter to Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis, one of the regents, Louis wrote that he would not have been able to make his journey to the Holy Land without the assistance he had received in all matters from the brothers of the Order of the Temple, and that the order had nearly bankrupted itself to sustain him and his mission.3 Assuming there was a kernel of truth to this, and that it was more than simple rhetoric to cast the Templars in a favourable light, it would seem the order had gone to great lengths to protect the French king from embarrassment and to prop up the faltering crusade effort.
Louis was not the only western crusader king looking to the Templars for help in the spring of 1148. Conrad III had also made his way to the Syrian coastline following a chastening experience in and around Constantinople, sailing first to Acre, before travelling south to Jerusalem, where he stayed at the Templars’ formidable headquarters on the site of the converted al-Aqsa mosque.
By the time of Conrad’s visit the mosque had been given over entirely to the Templars, but it retained its regal elegance. One chronicler called it ‘the richest’ building in Jerusalem.4 It was a vast, elegant rectangular structure topped with a dome, its frontal façade dominated by large arched doors behind a high porch. Around the building, which visiting Christians referred to as King Solomon’s Palace, equating it with the one-time abode of the legendarily wise and wealthy Old Testament king, were a number of new outbuildings in various stages of completion: a hall and cloister to the west and working buildings to the east.5 A smaller mosque to one side had been converted into a chapel – a fact noted by the well-bred Syrian poet and diplomat Usama ibn Munqidh – and plans were afoot for a vast new church to reflect the growing status of the order.
The urbane and erudite ibn Munqidh, who live
d to the age of ninety-three and had an unparalleled perspective on the turbulent first century of the crusades, regarded the Templars as his friends, despite their religious differences. He recorded that whenever he visited the al-Aqsa mosque, the knights would be sure to clear their chapel so that he could pray facing Mecca. He noted this fact, it must be said, in the context of a longer anecdote illustrating the stupidity, barbarity and coarseness of the other Franks – he could not write about non-Templar Christians without uttering oaths such as ‘God curse them!’ and ‘Almighty God is greater than the infidels’ concept of him!’6
A sprawling stable block ran below the compound, built into the platform covering the Temple Mount. It was said that the stalls had been constructed by Solomon himself – although in all likelihood they dated back to the reign of Herod, at the time of Christ’s birth. One writer claimed they could hold 2,000 horses and 1,500 camels; another more excitable visitor suggested the capacity was more like 10,000.
Conrad arrived in Jerusalem in time for Easter. His half-brother Otto, bishop of Freising, wrote that he entered the city ‘amid great jubilation on the part of clergy and people and was received with much honour’. In a sign of the respect afforded to the German king the Templars arranged for his travelling companion, Frederick of Bogen, who died shortly after arriving in the city, to be buried in their private cemetery near the Temple walls.
Conrad spent much of his time in Jerusalem in Templar company. Otto of Freising noted that he went on a tour of the venerable sites, ‘visiting the holy places everywhere’.7 The Templars must have insisted on providing their services. For all that they were evolving into a combat brigade, the brothers were still at root members of an organization that offered security and guidance on the pilgrim trail.
Alongside this itinerary of prayer and celebration, Conrad planned for the forthcoming war in the north. Jerusalem had a new king, Baldwin III, who had succeeded his father Fulk I on the latter’s death in 1143. Now aged sixteen, well educated and with an easy aristocratic bearing, Baldwin had been ruling for three years alongside his mother, Melisende, and was chafing to lead a major military expedition. In Otto of Freising’s words, the emperor therefore agreed with the young king, the city’s Latin patriarch, ‘and the Knights of the Temple to lead an army into Syria about the following July to take Damascus’.8
*
Damascus was, indisputably, one of the jewels of the Muslim world and the most significant city in southern Syria. The tenth-century Arab geographer known as al-Muqadassi described it as one of the ‘brides of the world’, a town ‘crisscrossed by streams and encircled by [fruit] trees’, blessed by the presence of the finest mosque in the entire Islamic world. The Great Umayyad Mosque, founded in the seventh century, was an immense, lavishly decorated building, its walls covered in marble and gilded mosaics, which was reputed to have cost ‘eighteen mule-loads of gold’ to build. It was considered by the faithful to be the fourth-holiest site in the world after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem: so pure that spiders never spun their webs in its corners.9
Although a large clay citadel stood alongside the mosque, providing Damascus’ defensive hub, the city walls were relatively small and weak. Miles of orchards surrounded the city on every side, dense thickets of fruit trees walled off into small plots navigable only along single-track paths. These were awkward obstacles to be sure, but not impossible to surmount. So on the face of it Damascus seemed a feasible target for Christian conquest. Seizing control of Damascus might represent a triumph on the scale of the capture of Acre and even Jerusalem.
Yet Damascus was not Edessa, the city whose plight had prompted the calling of the Second Crusade. It was not mentioned in Pope Eugene’s Quantum Praedecessores and was not the city whose salvation had been preached across the west by Bernard of Clairvaux. Its defences may have been largely composed of fruit trees rather than huge walls that required sapping, but it was no easy target all the same. This had been proven as recently as 1129 when King Baldwin II had failed to take the city, a defeat greeted with contempt and indignation in the west. What is more, in 1148 its governor, Mu’in ad-Din Unur, was an ally of the kingdom of Jerusalem, with which he shared a common enemy in the form of the aggressively expansionist Zengi. To divert the whole focus of the Second Crusade away from Edessa and on to Damascus was a bold and apparently abrupt change of focus, in which the Templars clearly had a hand.
Many things had changed in the three-and-a-half-years since Edessa’s fall in 1144. For one thing, Zengi was dead. The old tyrant had been murdered in his bed in September 1146: attacked by an unhappy servant while he was passed out drunk and left to suffer a slow and painful end.10 Zengi had been succeeded by his two sons, the younger of whom, Nur al-Din, was if anything even more belligerent than his father. As the new governor of Aleppo, Nur al-Din was determined to keep his boot pressed firmly on the throats of the Christians in the county of Edessa, and to extend his reach further south into the neighbouring principality of Antioch.
According to the chronicler Ibn al-Athir, Nur al-Din, aged thirty when the crusaders gathered on the outskirts of his city, was ‘tall and swarthy in stature. He had no beard, except for on his chin, and he had a wide forehead. He was a handsome man with charming eyes. His dominion extended very much... the fame of his good rule and justice encompassed the world.’11 His name meant Light (Nur) of the Faith (al-Din).
This was a more generous assessment than the crusaders would have allowed. Under Nur al-Din, Edessa had been subjected to another horrible massacre, in response to a failed liberation attempt by its ousted leader, Count Joscelin II. The city’s defences were destroyed and its remaining Christian population either killed or enslaved. It was now too late for the crusaders to save any souls in Edessa. To complicate matters, in 1147 Nur al-Din had undermined the Christian alliance pursued by Damascus’ governor, Unur, by sealing his own treaty with the city. Nur al-Din had married Unur’s daughter, and the rulers of Aleppo and Damascus began to present an increasingly united front against the Franks. So by the summer of 1148 it made a great deal more sense to attempt to break a dangerous partnership than to chase a losing cause in Edessa. Another option was to try to take Ascalon, a port held by the Fatimids, some 30 miles (48 km) south of Jaffa, but since this was about as far removed from the initial purpose of the Second Crusade as was possible, it was rejected.12
On Thursday 24 June 1148, the feast day of St John the Baptist, the town of Palmarea, near Acre, was filled with more or less every important person in the Latin East. King Conrad, King Louis and the eighteen-year-old King Baldwin III of Jerusalem were all present, along with Baldwin’s mother and co-ruler Queen Melisende. A plethora of noble dignitaries from east and west were accompanied by an impressive cast of princes of the church, including the patriarch of Jerusalem, two archbishops and a papal legate. Alongside these grandees sat the masters of the Hospitallers and the Templars, Raymond of Puy and Robert of Craon, now among the leading decision-makers in the crusader kingdoms.
The purpose of the meeting (often called the Council of Acre) was to come to an agreement on the target of the forthcoming military action. William of Tyre recorded that a serious debate broke out about the adoption of a Damascene policy: ‘opinions of diverse factions were offered and arguments pro and con presented’.13
Yet if we can believe Otto of Freising’s account, the matter was all but pre-decided. Once Louis had agreed that the policy was sensible, the only matter to be discussed was ‘when and where the army should be mustered’.14 Confidence was high. According to ibn al-Qalanisi, their ‘malicious hearts were so confident of capturing it that they had already planned out the division of its estates and districts’.
The conquest of Damascus would not prove quite so simple.
*
Ibn Jubayr, a Spanish Muslim traveller who visited Damascus in the late twelfth century, described the city as incomparably lush: ‘The paradise of the Orient... perfumed flower gardens breathe life into the soul... gardens encircle
it like the halo around the moon... its green oasis stretches as far as the eye can see, and wherever you look on its four sides its ripe fruits hold the gaze.’15 But on Saturday 24 July 1148, as the combined troops of the crusader army began to hack their way through this fertile wooded belt, they did not find it quite so inviting.
William of Tyre described the tense, claustrophobic approach to Damascus as the armies of the three Christian kings picked their way, often in single file, through the narrow orchard paths on the outskirts of the city. The tracks they used were ‘wide enough to allow gardeners and caretakers to pass through them with pack animals that carry the fruit to the city’, he wrote, but for a large body of troops dragging weapons and the machinery of war, leading oxen and camels hauling a huge baggage train, they were dangerously inadequate. Defenders hid between the trees, leaping out to attack the soldiers as they passed, or took aim from the top of watchtowers dotted here and there to guard the orchards from trespassers. ‘From these vantage points they kept up a constant downpour of arrows and other missiles,’ he continued. Mud walls hid men carrying lances, who spied on the invaders through peepholes, waiting for the best moment to spear their enemy from the side. The crusaders advanced in ‘peril of instant death’, William wrote; ‘from every direction there was equal danger’.16
Despite these ambushes, the sheer weight of numbers and determination was on the Christians’ side. They forced a path through the orchards, demolishing walls and barricades set up to block their path. Hacking their way between the trees, they finally came to the banks of the River Barada, which passed under Damascus’ city walls.
A delegation had assembled on the banks of the river, lined up with catapults and archers to defend the city gates. But a furious direct charge by Conrad’s German cavalry scattered this first force: knights leapt from their horses and ran forward with their swords swinging. Conrad himself fought in the fray with noted success: it was said he savaged one Turkish knight so grievously that he cut off the man’s head, left shoulder, arm and part of his torso with a single blow. Soon the river leading through the western suburbs of Damascus was secured and the crusaders began digging in, erecting their own barricades with trees felled from the orchards. ‘The mill of war’, observed the Damascus chronicler Ibn Al-Qalanisi, ‘ceased not to grind’.17