by Dan Jones
Nasr-al-Din’s encounter with the Templars was sensational enough to be spoken about in England, where the acidic court chronicler Walter Map recorded a lively account of the young man’s scandalous adventures.6 Map took special interest in the Templars’ role, as did William of Tyre. Both men heard and recorded versions of the same story: having been ambushed and then imprisoned by the Templars, Nasr al-Din responded not by resenting his captors, but by seeking to impress them. It was said that while he was in prison he turned to the Frankish faith, asking ‘to be reborn in Christ’, and imploring his guards to teach him the western alphabet and the first tenets of Christian belief.7
Neither of the two most informed Islamic chroniclers mentioned this supposed conversion, and Walter Map’s account involves such an obviously embroidered, didactic and romantic version of the tale that it is hard to know what if any part is based on fact. Nevertheless, the essential version of the story as it reached Europe in the later 1150s held that when Nasr al-Din was taken into Templar custody he proceeded to renounce his faith with the ambition of saving his neck.
Unfortunately he had badly miscalculated, as he so often did. The Templars were not a missionary organization. They may have been God’s soldiers, but their purpose was not to bring enemies into the loving arms of Christ; it was to fight and kill them. They scorned those of their own number who flirted with abandoning the faith, even under duress (a Templar brother known as Roger the German who was captured fighting near Gaza around this time was forced by his Muslim captors to raise his finger and recite the shahada, ‘There is no god but God, Muhammad is his prophet.’ On his release Roger was expelled from the order.8 Abandoning faith and betraying oaths was not something the knights of the Temple admired. More than this, the Templars were pragmatists. Their mission was lofty, but the world in which they operated was messy. In the context of the long war they were fighting, Nasr al-Din was not a potential soul saved so much as a wanted man and a valuable prisoner.
The politics of Fatimid Egypt were well known to those who lived and operated in the region, and Nasr al-Din’s captors quickly realized there were men in Cairo who would wish to bring him to account: men who were prepared to pay handsomely for the prospect of revenge. To the Templars, this fact outweighed all others. So after holding Nasr al-Din for ‘a long time’, they opened negotiations to sell him back to his enemies.9 A price of 60,000 pieces of gold was agreed and after a short time Nasr al-Din was collected by ibn Ruzzik’s agents and taken back to the scene of his crimes, shackled and caged and carried though the desert by camel.
The chronicler ibn al-Athir wrote that Nasr al-Din remained silent for the duration of his journey back to Cairo. Only when faced with the city gates did he open his mouth, reciting a short verse reflecting on his misfortunes: ‘Yes, we were once living there but/accidents of fate and stumbling chance destroyed us.’10 Walter Map wrote that Nasr al-Din clung boldly to his newfound Christian beliefs, ending his days tied to a stake and shot to death with arrows. Map was a man whose pen kept pace with his colourful imagination, and in telling this story he deliberately echoed the hagiographies of St Edmund the Martyr and St Sebastian. Other writers agreed that Nasr al-Din was taken by a mob of citizens and ripped apart before his broken corpse was hung from a cross on the huge round stone towers of Cairo’s Zuwayla Gate. ‘The people literally tore him to pieces bit by bit with their teeth,’ wrote William of Tyre.11 Whatever his fate, few would have been sorry to see him go.
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By the middle of the 1150s the Templars had spread far and wide across the Latin Christian states in the Holy Land. They were a relatively small force: perhaps fewer than 1,000 knights spread across the three remaining crusader states, although their numbers were multiplied several times thanks to many sergeants and auxiliary troops – in the form of Syrian light horsemen, or turcopoles – whom the order hired as mercenaries in time of need. They had plenty to keep them busy. Letters and chronicles of the time made casual reference to the Templars’ business: a raid here, a skirmish there, men lost in battle or imprisoned in enemy jails, battalions provided to royal armies for military adventure and prisoners taken to raise valuable funds for the order’s ongoing mission. A letter written in 1157 to Pope Adrian IV was typical. After a passage bemoaning the capture of a number of knights, including the master, Bertrand of Blancfort, the letter went on to describe in cheerful terms a raid that the Templars had conducted on a Muslim wedding party. Two hundred and thirty ‘pagans’ had been put to flight, the pope was proudly told; he was assured that every one of them was either taken prisoner or ‘slain by the sword’. Despite the gratuitous violence described (or perhaps because of it), the letter opened by hailing the Templars as the new Macabbees, defenders of those living under or being persecuted by the infidel.12
The centre of operations – the seat of the master, seneschal, marshal and draper – remained the Temple complex in Jerusalem, and by the mid-twelfth century the order had made it well and truly their own. A sense of the Temple’s grandeur was captured by Theoderic, an intrepid German pilgrim who humbly described himself as ‘the dung of all monks’, who visited the Holy Land between 1169 and 1174. In his account of his journey Theoderic described the Templars’ headquarters, which he called the Palace of Solomon, in considerable detail, and his account gives one of the most vivid snapshots of its appearance:
Like a church it is oblong and supported by pillars, and also at the end of the sanctuary it rises up to a circular roof, large and round and also like a church. This and all its neighbouring buildings have come into the possession of the Templar soldiers. They are garrisoned in these and other buildings belonging to them. And with stores of arms, clothing and food they are always ready to guard the province and defend it. Below them they have stables once erected by King Solomon. They are next to the palace and their structure is remarkably complex... A single shot from a crossbow would hardly reach from one end of this building to the other, either in length or breadth.
Above them the area is full of houses, dwellings and outbuildings for every kind of purpose, and it is full of walking-places, lawns, council chambers, porches, consistories and supplies of water in splendid cisterns. Below it is equally full of wash-rooms, stores, grain rooms, stores for wood and other kind of domestic stores.
On the west, the Templars have built a new house, whose height, length and breath, and all its cellars and refectories, staircase and roof, are far beyond the custom of this land. Indeed, its roof is so high, that, if I were to mention how high it is, those who listen would hardly believe me... There too they have founded on the edge of the outer court a new church of magnificent size and workmanship.13
The Temple was not the only thing about the order that impressed Theoderic during his travels. ‘It is not easy for anyone to know how much power and riches the Templars have’, he wrote:
For almost all the cities and villages, which were once frequent in Judea and had been destroyed by the Romans, they and the Hospitallers have captured, and they have built castles everywhere and garrisoned them with soldiers. This is in addition to a great many properties they are known to possess in lands abroad.14
One of the very first things pilgrims saw on arriving in the Holy Land were the Templar castles on the road from Jaffa to Jerusalem. Two of the most prominent among them were Castel Arnald, constructed by the patriarch and citizens of Jerusalem in the early 1130s (during the reign of Fulk I) and handed over to the Templars shortly afterwards, which protected a point where the road narrowed as it entered the mountains; and Toron des Chevaliers (also called Latrun), which guarded another mountain pass. European travellers would have noticed that these differed sharply from the castles they knew from home, where a central tower built on a mound of earth called a motte was usually enclosed by a perimeter wall, forming an area called a bailey, in which outbuildings were placed. In the east, Templars tended to build or garrison enclosed, heavily defended courtyards with practical rooms such as refectories, chapels, ch
apter houses and sleeping quarters built directly into the walls. These thick and functional perimeter walls surrounded a courtyard that was both a cloister and a training ground.15
Smaller Templar outposts could be found to the east of the Holy City on the road to the River Jordan, where Jesus was baptized and pilgrims travelled in large numbers to bathe and pray. Particularly notable on this highway was a tiny but striking tower, less than 10 metres (33 ft) on each side, known as Maldoim, or ‘The Red Cistern’.16 Wherever pilgrims went, the Templars went too. Wherever the order built, they often marked their properties with a distinctive logo, carved into the stone: a triangular shield with an upside down T bisecting its top half.17 Fortresses and watchtowers bearing this distinctive logo could be found guarding the routes throughout the kingdom of Jerusalem, county of Tripoli and principality of Antioch.
The ports of Haifa and Acre were, like Jaffa, popular disembarking points for pilgrims. The Templars had a house in Acre close to the seashore, which Theoderic thought ‘very large and beautiful’. Since Acre was much larger and more centrally located on the coast than Jaffa, this was becoming the order’s most important supply point, where shipments of men, money and equipment would arrive from European ports.18 Outside the walls of the city, Templar castles could be found at notorious danger spots. Where the coastal road below Haifa narrowed to a pass that was vulnerable to attack by brigands, the order maintained a tower on a sandstone ridge known as Le Destroit (Districtum), in reference to the strait through which the road wound. Further inland, placed strategically on the intersection between the roads connecting Jerusalem with Tiberias and Acre with Baisan, was a larger fortification called La Fève (or al-Fule). This was a sophisticated and well-provisioned outpost: Theoderic noted that it was built on a natural pool, from which a mechanical wheel was used to draw water.19
La Fève, taken over around 1172, was one of the biggest castles raised in the twelfth century. At 90 metres by 120 metres (295 ft by 395 ft), it could hold hundreds of troops and horses: an ideal place to gather men ahead of battles and to police a road that ran off to four major crusader-held cities. In the 1180s an Arab writer would call La Fève ‘the best castle and the most fortified, the fullest of men and munitions and the best provided’.20 Hyperbole was also lavished on Le Chastellet, built at enormous expense high upstream on the River Jordan, above the Sea of Galilee. Arab rulers cast envious glances at this menacing enclosure, noting that its walls, built from great stone slabs, were more than 6 metres (20 ft) thick.21
In the county of Tripoli, the Templars manned one of their mightiest castles anywhere in the world, directly abutting the shore and the town wall in the small coastal settlement of Tortosa. The order was invited to build at Tortosa by William, bishop of Tripoli, in response to devastating raids by the Aleppan atabeg Nur al-Din. Although the castle was damaged by an earthquake in the early thirteenth century, it remained a fortification of intimidating scale and heft, with eleven towers built into a double wall, giving it the appearance of a crown. Along with Tortosa came rights in the nearby tiny island of Ru’ad (Arwad); some way inland lay another ominously massive fortress, Castel Blanc (Safita), which belonged to the order from around the same time, in the early 1150s.
As Edessa had fallen before the Second Crusade and had not been recovered, the crusaders’ northernmost possessions were in Antioch, itself under regular attack. Here the Templars’ main focus was their watch duty in the Amanus mountains. The brothers monitored foot traffic from mountainside towers at Baghras, Darbsak and La Roche de Roussel, peering through arrow-slits in the fortifications and ensuring that the right sort of visitors made it through the mountains without molestation, and the wrong sort did not.
Together, this grid of castles and towers defended both the northern and southern hinterlands of the Latin states, and attempted to provide some measure of security at the most sensitive points in between. A small elite force of several hundred knights inhabited these fortifications, backed up by a larger number of sergeants, support staff, hired mercenaries, servants and slaves. All of them were ultimately supplied by the large and growing infrastructure of Templar houses in Europe, which by the 1170s was turning the Order of the Temple into a global organization.
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Meanwhile, in Aragon, Castile-León, Navarre and Portugal the Templars were busy knitting themselves into the fabric of the holy war. By the late 1150s they had been established in the Spanish peninsula for three decades, and had built up a large portfolio of fortresses and properties granted to them by the monarchs fighting the Reconquista.
The most enthusiastic patron in the region was Afonso Henriques, count of Portugal, who had as a young man declared himself a brother to the Templars, suggesting that he had at some time formally become an associate member of the order. He was generous with his gifts. The first castle the Templars held in Portugal was a sprawling fortress at Soure, which the ambitious ruler had bestowed on them as early as 1128, in the first decade of their existence. Soon the order was adding to it. During the 1140s Afonso Henriques had fought his way south, reclaiming Muslim territory around the valley of the River Tagus; in 1144 the local Templars helped him attack the town of Santarém, a former Roman settlement which had been under Islamic rule since the eighth century. Afonso Henriques put an end to that, conquering the city and expelling its Muslim population. For their help in this assault the Templars were awarded the proceeds of all the churches in the newly Christianized town.
Three years later they traded Santarém for an even greater prize. Between July and October 1147, a Portuguese army assisted by seaborne troops from England, Scotland, Frisia, Normandy and Flanders heading for the Second Crusade in a fleet of more than 150 ships descended on Lisbon, besieging it for seventeen weeks, smashing the city’s walls and gates with battering rams, siege towers and trebuchets, then running amok in the streets for several days and massacring the garrison of the citadel in contempt of an oath they had sworn to let the men live.
The conquest of Lisbon was a huge boon for Afonso Henriques. Within a decade he had managed to secure for Portugal the status of a kingdom. To assert his Christian credentials he created a bishopric in Lisbon, endowing it with the churches in Santarém that he had awarded to the Templars. This was not the slight it seemed: as compensation the new king gave the Portuguese Templars the fortress of Cera and the right to found the town of Tomar, to use as their regional headquarters. Gifts continued to flow well into the thirteenth century.
In Aragon the order was also thriving. By 1143 Alfonso’s eventual successor, Ramon Berenguer IV, had come to terms with the Templars in the matter of their recompense for giving up their claim to one third of the kingdom. The order was secure in a string of vast fortresses, perhaps the finest of which was Monzón, a Muslim-built hilltop stronghold by the River Cinca which was all but siege-proof, and which the Templars extended until it was the equal of any castle in the Holy Land. The order now fought in Ramon’s armies and laid siege to cities on his behalf, receiving handsome reward for their efforts. Crusading on the borders of Aragon was every bit as much a combined effort between Templars and kings as in the more famous outposts of the east.
The same was not quite true elsewhere in the Spanish kingdoms. In Castile the Templars were shunted aside before they could gain a real foothold. For a few years they held the castle of Calatrava, but this was returned to the crown in 1158. At this point the rulers of Castile began to show a preference for their own native military orders, beginning with the founding of the Order of Calatrava by a Cistercian monk called Raymond of Fitero in 1163. Three years later in León the Order of Alcántara (also known as the Order of San Julián of Pereiro) was established, and around the same time the Order of Santiago sprang up, devoting itself to the protection of pilgrims on their way to one of the holiest sites in the west, the shrine of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. These orders were more closely dependent on the realms in which they had been established, and never burst the borders to become truly
international organizations like the Templars and Hospitallers. But they showed the ideal of the military order was as popular as ever in every area that had a connection to crusading.
9
‘Troubles in the Two Lands’
King Amalric of Jerusalem was a struggler. He spoke with a stammer, which made eloquent conversation a chore. He ate sparingly yet still grew so fat that his blubbery pectorals hung down to his waist like an old woman’s pendulous breasts.1 He found it hard to charm his courtiers, who thought him taciturn and devoid of small talk, and consistently lost his pious battle to resist the sin of fornication, sharing his bed with married and unmarried women alike.
Most of all Amalric struggled with the infernally complex demands of ruling Jerusalem: holding together the disparate Christian lands of the east in the face of increasingly sustained attack from his enemies who were gathering force under the regional leadership of Nur al-Din. This was a fight waged on several fronts, against adversaries in Egypt and Syria who were gradually finding coherence, confidence and purpose. Amalric was a competent king: one Muslim writer admired his ‘bravery and subtle cunning, the likes of which the Franks had not seen since they appeared in Syria’.2 But during the decade he governed Jerusalem his kingdom grew steadily less stable, and at times this brought him into open conflict not only with the Muslim rulers of Syria and Egypt, but with his own men.
When Amalric was crowned king on 18 February 1163 he was twenty-seven years old. His brother Baldwin III was eight days dead, having succumbed at the age of thirty-three to a bout of fever and dysentery that had worn him down over several months. William of Tyre suspected foul play, blaming a Syrian Christian doctor from Antioch named Barac for giving Baldwin health pills which proved poisonous. Experiments after the king’s death appeared to back this up, for the tablets, when mixed with bread, were potent enough to kill a dog. Whatever the cause, the king died in Beirut and a solemn procession brought him home to Jerusalem for burial. Both Baldwin’s funeral and Amalric’s coronation took place at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.