by Dan Jones
The transition in kingship unsettled the Christian barons of the Holy Land. Baldwin had married a thirteen-year-old, Agnes of Courtenay, a few years earlier. She was only seventeen at the time of his death, and had borne no children, so there was not much to dispute in Amalric’s succession. All the same, there were grumblings among the major lords of the realm about his fitness for the job. When the new king wrote to Louis VII seven weeks after his coronation, boasting that his accession had been tranquil and well supported, he was slightly glossing over the ambivalent reception he had received from some of his peers.3 He was more truthful in his admission that the troubles facing his newly inherited kingdom were severe, and that ‘Christendom in the east is greatly depleted and under more pressure than usual’.4 Earthquakes had damaged castles and other buildings in Antioch over the previous summer, and Nur al-Din’s forces were now threatening to raze everything that nature had failed to destroy. Reynald of Châtillon, prince of Antioch, one of the toughest nobles ever to arrive in the Latin states and a brutally firm ruler of his principality, had been taken prisoner and was rotting in Nur al-Din’s dungeons. Christian authority in the north was crumbling, while Nur al-Din’s power was increasing. The fearsome atabeg was beginning to close on his ultimate strategic goal: uniting all of Syria under his rule, then taking over Egypt by fomenting a coup against the Fatimid rulers of Cairo, or conquering it outright.
Throughout the 1140s and 1150s Nur al-Din had steadily expanded his authority out of Aleppo and into neighbouring cities and states. He claimed the overlordship of Mosul in 1149, following the death of his brother; in 1154 he ousted the ruler of Damascus. The lands that once made up the county of Edessa were all subdued and under his control by 1164. For the first time since the crusaders had arrived in the Holy Land, Syria was united, while Fatimid Egypt was nearly bankrupt. It had been paying tributes to the Christian kings of Jerusalem ever since the fall of Ascalon in 1153, and the randomness of dynastic succession meant that it was ruled by a series of weak, young caliphs. It was ripe for conquest.
The connection of Egypt and Syria was as worrying a prospect for the Christians as it was an enticing one to Nur al-Din. Joining the two states would encircle the Christian coastal territories with a common enemy in the north, south and east. The fracture which had for decades pitted Sunni Seljuq Turks against Shi’ite Fatimid Egyptians was crucial to the crusaders’ ability to carve out and maintain their kingdom. It was widely understood to be the duty of every Christian king of Jerusalem, Amalric included, to ensure that the two Muslim powers remained divided.
In 1163 the master of the Temple was Bertrand of Blancfort, a toughened veteran of the wars of the east. Bertrand had been elected as the sixth Templar grand master in 1156 following the death of Andrew of Montbard, and had provided military assistance to Baldwin III on several occasions at great personal cost. In June 1157 he was caught up in a humiliating military defeat at Banyas in Antioch; in the course of this ambush, Baldwin had been forced to flee the battlefield and many prominent Franks had been taken prisoner, including the king’s marshal Odo of Saint-Amand, the powerful lord Hugh of Ibelin and Bertrand himself.
William of Tyre described Bertrand as a ‘religious and God-fearing man’.5 His experience as a prisoner of Nur al-Din suggests he was also a man hardened by war. After the defeat at Banyas, Bertrand had been taken to Damascus as part of a shameful convoy: knights were tethered two to a camel, with each camel bearing an unfurled banner decorated with the scalps of dead men hanging from the lance by their hair. Prisoners of the highest status like Bertrand were permitted to ride alone on horseback in their mail vests and helmets, but they too were forced to carry the grisly standard as they rode.6 Bertrand was held prisoner in Damascus until 1159; when Amalric was crowned king of Jerusalem he had been out of prison for nearly four years. He was committed to placing the Order of the Temple at the service of the crown of Jerusalem, but he was wary of putting his men forward to fight a combined force they had no hope of defeating.
The Templars’ first clash with Nur al-Din was surprisingly successful. In the autumn of 1163 information reached the Christians that Nur al-Din was resting his armies at La Boquée (Buqaia) in the county of Tripoli. An ambush was planned, apparently at the instigation of two high-ranking lords from the west: Godfrey Martel, brother of the count of Angoulême, and Hugh ‘le Brun’ of Lusignan, both of whom were visiting the Holy Land on pilgrimage.
Godfrey and Hugh were men of considerable status. It is highly likely that they had been in contact with Bertrand of Blancfort from the moment of their arrival; certainly by the autumn they knew the Templars in Tripoli, for when they attacked Nur al-Din at La Boquée, Godfrey and Hugh chose as their commander in the field a Templar knight of high rank and serious repute, Gilbert of Lacy.
In 1163 Gilbert of Lacy was the preceptor, or regional commander, of the Templars in the county of Tripoli. Probably in his fifties, he had spent much of his adult life in England, picking his way through the turbulent politics of the civil war now known as the Anarchy. He had sided with Henry I’s daughter and named heir, the Empress Matilda, in her bitter succession struggle against her cousin King Stephen. One chronicle of the time, known as the Gesta Stephani (Deeds of Stephen) called Gilbert ‘crafty and sharp’, saying he was ‘careful and painstaking in every action of war’.7
What was more, Gilbert had a long history of involvement with the Templars. During the Anarchy he had donated a manor to the order at Guiting, a valuable, fertile spot between Gloucester and Oxford in the low, green Cotswold hills. When the fighting was over and Matilda’s son had been crowned King Henry II, Gilbert had judged his political career to be complete: he resigned his lands to his son in 1158 and joined the order. He was a high-status recruit: a nobleman, a warrior and a charitable Christian prepared to abandon the comforts of life at home to lead the armies of the faithful. Two years later he was in Paris as a member of a Templar delegation that stood as guarantors of a peace between the new English king and Louis VII of France (the extensive continental lands held by the Plantagenet kings of England made for near-constant disputes with the rulers of France). For an active soldier, though, there was only one place to be: by 1162 Gilbert had travelled to the Holy Land and taken command of the Templars at Tripoli, and he was now leading the ambush on Nur al-Din’s forces at La Boquée.
The raid caught Nur al-Din’s forces totally unawares. ‘Many of his men were made prisoners, and still more perished by the sword,’ wrote William of Tyre. ‘In despair of his life he fled in utter confusion. All the baggage and even his sword were abandoned... But the Christians, laden with spoils and manifold riches, returned victorious to their own land.’8 The triumphalism of William of Tyre’s account reflects the success of the ambush, but in truth it was only a small setback for Nur al-Din.
In 1164 the Templars were once again involved in a direct assault on Muslim forces, this time in the south. Almost as soon as Amalric was crowned he began planning for a series of campaigns against Egypt, launching his first attack within months of his coronation. Like Nur al-Din he recognized the Fatimids’ weakness and aimed to take advantage of a bitter power struggle taking place in Cairo between the vizier, known as Shawar, and a portly, flamboyant Kurdish general with cataracts in his eyes called Shirkuh, who was attempting to foment rebellion and overthrow the Egyptian government on behalf of Nur al-Din. Amalric was aware that Egypt was a very wealthy land, which could provide lucrative plunder as well as a source of territory to be offered as reward to loyal noblemen who served the crown well. He saw that security around Ascalon and Gaza would be much improved if the crusader kings could lay claim to the Nile delta cities further down the coast, such as Damietta, Rosetta and Alexandria. He also knew trade links with the rest of the Mediterranean would be considerably improved if any or all of these could be taken.9
The Templars joined Amalric’s second march against Egypt in July 1164. The king headed towards the edge of the Nile delta and besieged Shirkuh in the
ancient city of Bilbays. Amalric and his supporters devoted several months to the siege, managing to drive out Shirkuh and claim a financial reward from Shawar for their efforts, but by October they nevertheless had to withdraw without making any important territorial gains. Worse, while they were throwing their efforts into war in the south, Nur al-Din had taken the opportunity to attack them in the north. As soon as Amalric left for Egypt Nur al-Din charged deep into Antioch and on 10 August he engaged a very large Christian force led by Raymond III, count of Tripoli, and Bohemond III, prince of Antioch, at the battle of Artah. The Christian army was said to have included 12,000 infantry and 600 knights, of whom more than 60 were Templars, but this time Nur al-Din had the upper hand. He destroyed the crusaders’ army, killed a huge number of knights, took all of their leaders prisoner, then marched on through Antioch and seized the important coastal city of Banyas. Here was an important lesson for Amalric. The Christians could either attack Egypt or defend their territories from Nur al-Din’s aggression in the north; they struggled when they attempted to do both.
Bertrand of Blancfort saw this clearly. Like his predecessors he wrote letters and sent envoys to Louis VII of France, hoping to excite him about the prospect of leading another crusade; in October and November 1164 the master sent two letters outlining the uncomfortable drawbacks of fighting on two fronts in the Holy Land at the same time. This was more than a matter of military theory. At Artah the Templars had lost sixty knights, many more sergeants and a great number of the light Syrian mercenaries known as turcopoles, whom they hired to bolster their numbers in the field. These were significant numbers of men who would be costly to replace. Only seven Templars had escaped.
‘Most serene king, the troubles in the two lands of Antioch and Jerusalem are too numerous to enumerate’, Bertrand wrote in his first letter. He followed up a month later, complaining about the miseries inflicted by Nur al-Din while he had been occupied in Egypt. ‘Although our king Amalric is great and magnificent, thanks to God,’ wrote Bertrand, ‘he cannot organize a fourfold army to defend Antioch, Tripoli, Jerusalem and Babylon [i.e. Egypt]... but Nur al-Din can attack all four at one and the same time if he so desires.’10 Bertrand demonstrated a stark understanding of the calculus of warfare in the east: it was largely about numbers. Nur al-Din had them. The Franks, for the most part, did not.
Here, then, were the first signs of a breach between the expectations of the king and the capabilities of an overstretched military order. Bertrand concluded his letters to Louis by telling him that he was sending a personal messenger to explain what he could not put in writing. This messenger, Walter Brisebarre, was ‘honest and careful in God’s business and has been involved in these events from beginning to end’. Was this a coded way of telling the king that he could expect a truth less varnished from his messenger than he was prepared to put in writing? We cannot know. Yet it was clear in the autumn of 1164 that while the Templars were prepared to assist Amalric, their master had reservations about the prospect of lasting success while he was on the throne.
*
On 30 January 1167 Amalric marched out of Ascalon once more, on his way to Egypt. This time the Latin army was on a mission to halt another assault on Cairo by Shirkuh, aimed at expelling the Fatimids from the city. Amalric was riding south at Shawar’s request, having been offered an enormous bounty as the price of success. In return for Christian assistance, Shawar had promised to pay the king of Jerusalem 400,000 dinars. By weight this was 1,700 kilos (3,750 lb) of solid gold. With strategic necessity now allied to the promise of cold, hard cash, Amalric and his men were prepared to endure the hardships of a desert march, through whirlwinds so thick with sand that it was impossible to do anything but dismount from one’s horse and lie down until the blinding, abrasive storms raged themselves out.11 They were also prepared to disregard the fact that Egypt was in a state of acute internal chaos, and in no position to pay the fanciful sum its vizier had promised.
Once again the Templars rode alongside the king, although this time the mood must have been strained, as the previous year Amalric had hanged twelve of the order’s brothers in a fit of rage. In 1166 a high-status nobleman and royal associate called Philip of Nablus* had joined the order following the death of his wife, donating a significant number of landholdings in Transjordan for the Templars’ use. Transjordan (also known by its French name, Oultrejourdain) was a highly volatile region on the fringes of Egypt, over which Amalric and Nur al-Din were vying for control.12 Such a major transfer of property in a sensitive part of the kingdom had to be signed off by the kin. Amalric had agreed but he regretted his decision almost immediately.
One of the assets Philip brought to the order was a fortified desert cave. Amalric gave the Templars specific instructions that it was to be defended at all costs but straight away the order had lost it to Shirkuh’s men. In William of Tyre’s short and hostile account of the episode, there is a distinct whiff of treachery. According to his chronicle (informed and slanted by his close personal relationship with Amalric, who employed him as tutor to his son) a Muslim force attacked the cave, and the king duly raised ‘a goodly company of knights’ to travel down the River Jordan and fight them off. Before they arrived, however, news reached them that the Templars had surrendered. ‘Disconcerted and infuriated... the king caused about twelve of the Templars responsible for the surrender to be hanged from a gallows.’13
Nevertheless, the Templars supported the campaign of 1167 and rode with the royal army. An inconclusive battle, known as the Battle of al-Bebein, was fought on 18 March some distance south of Cairo. Amalric’s army of Christian knights, backed by a contingent of ‘worthless and effeminate Egyptians’ whom William of Tyre called ‘a hindrance and not a help’, were ranged against Shirkuh’s much larger forces, whose heavy cavalry numbered in the thousands.14 The battle broke up in confusion, with casualties on both sides.
Amalric pushed on. Following Shirkuh he marched back down the Nile delta, heading north-west, and besieged the famous maritime city of Alexandria, blockading it with a fleet and bombarding it with trebuchets from the land. The siege of Alexandria was abandoned only when Shirkuh sued for peace, agreeing to leave Egypt and accepting that Shawar would remain as vizier at Cairo, with a Christian garrison controlling Alexandria. In the short term this seemed a reasonably successful outcome. But within a year, the peace had collapsed, further poisoning relations between the king and the Templars.
*
In 1164 a Templar knight called Geoffrey Fulcher had made his way east from Paris and landed at Acre. Geoffrey was the preceptor of Jerusalem, a veteran of twenty years who travelled extensively between Europe and the Latin states and had close links with Louis VII of France. As a favour to the French king, Geoffrey had spent his first months back in the Holy Land riding around the pilgrim sites, touching each with a ring. He sent the ring back as a present to the king in Paris, along with letters bemoaning the military disasters that had afflicted the kingdom of Jerusalem, and begging for more men and resources.
Three years later, in 1167, Geoffrey had ridden across the desert on the campaign into Egypt. He was chosen by King Amalric as a leading envoy sent to extract from Shawar firm promises that payment would be rendered for the Christian intervention. Geoffrey rode into Cairo with Hugh of Caesarea, a lord who had been born in the kingdom of Jerusalem, and their experiences in the palace were truly dazzling.
As vizier of Fatimid Egypt, Shawar served under the caliph al-Adid, a young man of about sixteen or seventeen who had endured a dreadfully turbulent childhood. His father had been murdered by Nasr al-Din and Abbas; his older brother al-Fa’iz had ruled briefly before dying as a child. Al-Adid had become caliph in 1160, aged around eleven, but Shawar wielded practical power on his behalf. Although this seemed to suit the caliph, who one Christian chronicler thought led ‘a decadent life among his girls’, supposedly keeping a different concubine for each day of the year, al-Adid was nevertheless revered among his people, who believed he held
the sacred power to make the Nile flood.15
The Latins were acutely aware of the Caliph’s prestige, and in treating with the Fatimids they were concerned to extract concessions and guarantees not only from the vizier but also from his master. For this reason, Geoffrey Fulcher and Hugh of Caesarea were sent to Cairo to meet with al-Adid himself and see to it that he would guarantee the promises Shawar had made. Their instructions were that only the caliph’s personal word and handshake would do. Their mission took them on an adventure to the heart of the Fatimid caliphate: a place few men and only a handful of western-born Christians would ever see.
Geoffrey and Hugh called the splendour they had seen on their way to the inner sanctum ‘unique and after a fashion unfamiliar to our world’.16 To enter the palace complex, they later told William of Tyre, they were led down dark, narrow passageways, hemmed in on all sides by dozens of bodyguards armed with swords. At each doorway stood large sentries, who saluted the vizier enthusiastically as he passed. Led by the palace’s chief eunuch, they walked in wonder through vast courtyards surrounded by walkways, marble columns and sparkling fishpools where exotic birds sang strange songs. Eventually they came to the caliph’s chamber, which was hung with curtains embroidered in pearls. They watched Shawar throw himself three times to the floor at the base of a golden throne and kiss the feet of the handsome, sparsely bearded young man while privy councillors and eunuchs looked on from the wings.