The Templars

by Dan Jones

  The Templars assembled with the royal army had a new master, the order’s fourth since its inception, owing his position to the retirement of Everard of Barres, who gave up his post at some point after April 1152, deciding to forgo a military life in favour of quiet monastic contemplation alongside an ageing Bernard of Clairvaux. By this point Bernard was in physical decline: unable to stomach anything more than tiny portions of liquefied food, his legs so swollen and painful that at times he could not even sit up to write, let alone walk. He died on 20 August 1153: ‘a ready spirit’, as he put it, ‘in a weak body’. Everard lived another quarter of a century in the peaceful surroundings of the abbey, and was still around to see the Templar patron achieve sainthood in 1174.11

  Bernard of Tremelay, who like so many early Templars was from Burgundy, near Dijon, was not a tested leader; when he brought his delegation of Templars to Ascalon at the end of January he had been master for less than a year. But what he lacked in experience he made up for in bravery and belligerence, and he was about to lead his brothers into their most daring military engagement since the order had been formed. On 25 January 1153 the great siege of Ascalon was about to begin: a decisive struggle to bring the mighty Fatimid city under Christian control. It was an ‘arduous and almost impossible feat’, wrote William of Tyre. Almost, but not quite.

  The first two months of the siege were slow and inconclusive. The citizens of Ascalon outnumbered the Franks outside by two to one. They were well trained, well stocked, and highly motivated to resist, for, in William of Tyre’s words, ‘they were fighting for their wives and children, and what is more important, for liberty itself’.12 Yet while they could resist, they could not counter-attack. From the towers and ramparts lookouts might have reported that Baldwin III’s camp resembled a bristling satellite city – heavily protected against any potential relief force and so well established it even had its own working marketplace. The view from the shore was even less promising: a small fleet of fifteen galleys commanded by Gerard of Sidon blockaded the approach to Ascalon by water. Daily skirmishing took place around the city, favouring first one side and then the other, but the overall state of the conflict was a stalemate.

  Then, around Easter, which fell that year on 19 April, events began to swing in the Latins’ favour. As spring calmed the sea routes from Europe, the annual influx of ship-borne pilgrims came to visit Jerusalem; this was not a crusading force armed for war, but it was still a valuable boost of pious Christians and boats at precisely the time when military reinforcements were needed.

  On hearing of the pilgrims’ arrival, Baldwin III sent orders that no one who entered his kingdom was to be permitted to leave, and anyone who joined the army at Ascalon would receive payment for their part in ‘a labour so acceptable to God’. More importantly, the king forcibly impounded every ship that landed in his ports and diverted them all to the waters around Ascalon. Day after day the Christians’ manpower increased. ‘Great was the joy in camp, and hope of winning the victory was unbounded,’ wrote William of Tyre. ‘Among the enemy, on the contrary, grief and anxiety prevailed ever more and more.’

  The sailors who heeded King Baldwin’s instructions to sail south might have expected an order to join a naval blockade. Instead, when they arrived their ships were beached, the masts cut off and the hulls stripped down to the beams. They were paid a handsome fee for the loss of their vessels, and the timber was handed over to workmen who used it to build siege engines. These included rock-throwing catapults and mobile shelters to protect sappers while they attempted to dig out the earthen embankments holding up the thick city walls. One weapon in particular would decide the fate of Ascalon for the next three decades. It was a giant structure, as tall as the walls, composed of long wooden beams supporting fighting platforms, all covered in a fireproof shell made of animal hides stretched over a wicker frame. Its purpose was to allow Frankish knights to climb up to the level of the battlements and kill defenders on an even plane. Siege warfare was a hallmark of European confrontation, and the structure built at Ascalon was clearly of a very high standard. Its construction was known as far away as Damascus, where the chronicler Ibn Al-Qalanisi wrote about it with a combination of disgust and grudging admiration. The Franks had reduced Ascalon ‘to sore straits’, he said, ‘by bringing up to its assault the God-forsaken tower, in the midst of a great host (may God defend it from their malice)’.13

  The Templars, led by Master Bernard of Tremelay, must have observed the construction of the siege tower carefully. When it was ready, and had been dragged into position alongside a carefully selected point in the walls of the city, the Templars positioned themselves in the vicinity of what was now the focal point of intense daily fighting, much of it taking place high above the ground.14 Baldwin’s catapults slammed rocks into the city’s walls, while on the top of their formidable tower, men-at-arms battled the resisting soldiers in hand-to-hand combat and shot arrows at panicked citizens running through the streets below. Out at sea, an Egyptian fleet of seventy galleys had arrived with favourable winds blowing up from the south, scattering Gerard of Sidon’s now hopelessly outnumbered naval blockade. But this was incidental to what was taking place on the battlements on the land side.

  By mid-August the siege of Ascalon had been underway for more than six months. Morale within the city was plummeting. So long as Baldwin’s army could use its tower, it held the advantage; relief by sea was useful, but the city could only be fully rescued by driving back the besiegers on land. The leading citizens took counsel and resolved to do anything they could to destroy the tower. The only way they could see to do this was to somehow build a fire that was so hot it could destroy the thick hides protecting the tower’s timber skeleton. The men and women of Ascalon were put to work collecting ‘dry wood and other material suitable for kindling’, wrote William of Tyre. ‘There seemed to be no other hope.’

  During the night of Saturday 15 August the plan to bring down the tower was put into action. Every piece of fuel that had been rounded up was carried to the wall nearest the tower and dumped over the side. Little by little a pyre was built in the gap separating the tower from the masonry. When it had risen high enough, pitch and oil were poured on top. Then a flame was dropped and the bonfire began.

  The breeze that had carried the ships along the Levantine coast blew in towards Ascalon from the sea. Over the course of the night, however, it abruptly changed direction, and a brisk wind began to come in from the east, behind the Christian armies. For the people of Ascalon this was a disaster. The swift breeze fanned the flames at the base of Baldwin’s tower, causing them to leap hungrily upwards. And as they grew, the flames blew against the city wall, superheating stones and mortar that had already been weakened by months of pelting from the Franks’ trebuchets.

  As dawn approached on Sunday the siege tower still stood. But the wall could take no more. The hot stone cracked, and as the first light of dawn crept up behind the besiegers, a large portion of the wall crumbled. Then the rubble collapsed with a roar, and men on both sides scrambled from sleep, grasping their weapons. As they did so, there was another crash. Tumbling stones had ploughed into the base of the siege tower, cracking the wooden ship-masts that formed its vertical struts. They shattered, and the terrible machine wobbled, almost throwing off watchmen who were perched on its balconies. But it did not fall. And before it, Ascalon now lay open.

  Bernard of Tremelay and his fellow Templars were either camped close to the tower, or more alert during the early dawn than their Christian comrades – or possibly both. As soon as they heard the sound of masonry crunching into the base of the tower they were up at arms, hurtling towards the breach in the wall. Bernard took personal command of his men.

  ‘The Franks (God curse them) are the most cautious of all men in war,’ wrote Usama ibn Munqidh, who spent four months fighting running battles against Christian raiding parties in the countryside around Ascalon during the years immediately before the great siege.15 The Templars that day
were anything but. As dust from the collapsed hole settled, some forty knights pushed past the siege tower, climbed over the stricken wall and headed into the city. Then, wrote Ibn Al-Qalanisi, ‘they rushed into the town, and a great host were killed on both sides’.16

  What prompted Bernard of Tremelay to give the order that only his own men should storm the breach in Ascalon’s walls? He must surely have expected support from the rest of the army behind them. What is certain is that it was the last significant decision he ever made. Inside a city that had been under siege for six months, the Templars found themselves outnumbered by desperate men. The citizens picked up their weapons and moved in. Others dragged beams of wood towards the hole in the wall and started building barricades. The Templars were trapped. Even if there had been an escape route, their Rule forbade them from fleeing the battlefield. Their fate was sealed.

  Blocked into a hostile city with no chance of retreat or rescue, the Templars were massacred. None was taken for ransom – not even their master. This was unusual for such high-value prisoners. It spoke to the fearsome reputation the Templars held among their enemies and the pent-up fear and desperation of citizens who had been pinned down under enemy assault for half the year. No amount of wealth or booty was worth the lives of forty of the ablest Christian soldiers in the region who had presented themselves unsupported for the taking. No detailed record of the fight between the citizens of Ascalon and the knights of the Temple survives, but at the end of it, every single one of the Templars was dead.

  It would take another week of fighting before the inhabitants of Ascalon could be forced back from defending their patched-up wall and agreed to hand over their city to Christian rule and sue for peace. On Saturday 22 August Baldwin III’s standard was raised over the highest tower in the city. But it had come at a high cost: the final battle had been fought with the butchered bodies of the forty dead knights of the Temple dangling from the ropes hoisted high up on the city walls.

  *

  Bernard of Tremelay was succeeded as master by the pious and literary seneschal Andrew of Montbard, who served until 1156. Although the loss of forty brothers was a serious depletion in the order’s fighting manpower, as an organization the Templars were not fatally damaged. Recruiting new men was always possible thanks to the burgeoning network in Europe, particularly around their traditional heartlands of Burgundy, Champagne and Poitou. They remained in possession of the castle at Gaza and were an important military element in the kingdom of Jerusalem’s security policy. In the far north Templar knights still manned castles guarding the passes through the Amanus mountains, but the hostility prompted in some by the siege of Ascalon illustrated the ambivalence with which the Templars were increasingly viewed.

  William of Tyre was scorching in his disdain, ascribing the worst and basest motives to Bernard for ordering a suicide mission. The Christian custom in battle, he explained, was that plunder belonged to the plunderer. So, he argued, faced with the chance to make the first foray into Ascalon, the Templars decided that they should be the only looters allowed in, reserving the spoils of victory to themselves. ‘Out of cupidity, they refused to allow their comrades to share in the booty,’ he wrote. ‘Therefore they alone justly suffered the peril of death.’17

  Could this be true? William was writing in hindsight, by which point he had developed a firm distrust of the order’s independence and occasional disregard for royal orders. Yet in his long and detailed history of the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem he had also extended praise for the order’s robust defence of Gaza, and reported other episodes with relative equanimity. Plainly, there was a genuine feeling among his sources that Bernard of Tremelay’s behaviour at Ascalon had been foolish at best and at worst simply greedy.

  No other writer covered the events in such depth, making William of Tyre’s judgement hard to interrogate. The secrets of de Tremelay’s heart left the earth as his corpse was hoisted above the crumbling walls of the city into which he had led his men. But could he really have imagined he could defeat an entire city with just forty men?

  In 1154 the Templars remained a vital component in the kingdom of Jerusalem’s military capability. Other than at Ascalon they maintained their discipline on the field, their Rule insisting that commands were to be obeyed unerringly and that martyrdom was preferable to flight. Yet at the same time it also seems clear that while obedience and discipline within their own command structure was tight, the same was not necessarily true when it came to fighting with others. Templars owed allegiance to no one but God, the master and the pope. Neither kings nor patriarchs had any formal command over them, and though their able services were sought and willingly given, in the end the Templars were ultimately free from any effective oversight. They defended the idea of Christendom and the honour of Christ, but how they did so was technically a matter for their own instinct and judgement.18 For the most part, this made them an extremely agile and useful elite fighting force. At times, however, their independence made them dangerous, and they came to be suspected as much as they were admired by the secular rulers with whom they had to share the field of combat.

  * When at camp, the piebald banner identified the location of the seneschal. During battle, it was the Templars’ marshal rather than the seneschal who physically raised and carried the flag and who organized its protection. Upton-Ward, J.M. (trans. and ed.), The Rule of The Templars: The French Text of the Rule of the Order of the Knights Templar (Woodbridge: 1992) 44, 59–60.

  † Bezants were the high-value gold coins of the crusader kingdom, minted in imitation of the Arabic dinar and the Greek hyperpyron.

  8

  ‘Power and Riches’

  The vizier’s son had escaped from Egypt, but people had been trying to kill him ever since. In the early hours of Friday 29 May 1154 he fled Cairo, leaving through the massive, fortified, rectangular towers of the city’s Victory Gate with a small party of family members, their few remaining friends and as much treasure as they could carry from the royal palace. For the eight days that followed they were harassed relentlessly by nomadic Arab tribesmen armed with bows and swords, who chased their little convoy as it hurried towards the dusty hills flanking the Valley of Moses, near the ancient city of Petra. They were heading north to take refuge in Damascus where Nur al-Din might protect them, but their chances of arriving there unharmed seemed distressingly remote. Every hour of daylight brought a fresh round of attacks.1

  The vizier’s son, Nasr al-Din, and his father, Abbas, had good reason to run. Behind them they left Cairo spattered in blood. Days earlier the two men had successfully conspired to kill the Fatimid caliph, al-Zafir, as revenge for his attempt to remove Abbas from his post; the assassination had triggered the violent deaths of several of the caliph’s brothers, a steward of the royal household, at least one manservant and a substantial number of Egyptian soldiers.

  This was not the first murder that Abbas and Nasr al-Din had committed, but it was certainly the most spectacular. At the time of the caliph’s death Abbas was serving as his vizier, or chief minister, the highest political position in the land, a post which he had achieved by slaying the previous office-holder. Nasr al-Din, meanwhile, was the caliph’s best friend, confidant and, so the rumours went, lover: an extremely handsome young man with whom the caliph spent his days carousing in the palace and nights roaming the city streets in disguise.2

  The killing of the caliph had been arranged in order to extend the father’s power and erase the son’s mounting notoriety as a sodomite. In the end it achieved neither. The caliph was lured to Nasr al-Din’s house, near Cairo’s sword market, at night and cut to pieces before being thrown down a well. The following day the palace was gorily purged – but even by the Fatimids’ bloody standards, this was a step too far. Al-Zafir was the supreme spiritual and political leader of the dynasty to which every Ismaeli Shi’ite Muslim in the world owed their allegiance: a man, in the words of the chronicler William of Tyre, whom ‘the Egyptians are accustomed to cherish and reve
re as a supreme divinity’.3 His death sparked rioting in the streets of Cairo and prompted the governor of Upper Egypt, Talai ibn Ruzzik, to march on the city and proclaim a military takeover. Instead of seizing command of the caliphate, Abbas and Nasr al-Din had been forced to run for their lives.

  Abbas was not happy about the manner in which they had been compelled to leave Cairo. For one thing, his horoscope had warned him against leaving town on a Friday. His consternation was well placed, for on 7 June, as his party made their way through the desert outpost of al-Muwaylih, having finally (or at least momentarily) outrun their Arab pursuers, they were ambushed by a party of Christians.

  To the Templars and their companions, the sight of Nasr al-Din and Abbas’ caravan train was undoubtedly alluring. Usama ibn Munquidh, the cultured Syrian man of letters, had been in Cairo as a guest of the vizier at the time of the bloodbath and had been forced to take flight with the killers. He was riding with Nasr al-Din and later recalled that their group included horses, camels, slaves, wives and treasure looted from the palace. Nasr al-Din’s horse was beautifully caparisoned, its valuable quilted saddle-cloth embroidered with nearly 500 grams (1 lb) of gold thread.4 These were not just important Muslims: they were juicy prey, laden with booty, and the Christian patrol fell upon them with glee.

  Usama ibn Munqidh described the ensuing confrontation as a battle, but it seems rather to have been more of a trouncing. Some of the Egyptians were butchered; others were captured and relieved of their treasure and their wives. Templars on patrol were formidable opponents: organized, well-drilled and merciless. Those who could run from the onslaught did so, bolting for the hills and leaving their spare horses to gallop away wild. It was a wise choice. When the dust cleared, Abbas lay dead, along with another of his sons, Husam al-Mulk. Nasr al-Din was led away as a prisoner, probably to Gaza, the closest Templar castle. The family’s fall had been swift and painful. Meanwhile, back in Cairo, the new vizier ibn Ruzzik was retrieving the remains of the murdered caliph and preparing to give him a decent burial.5