by Dan Jones
The Templar preceptor, incongruous amid all this bowing and scraping in his stark white uniform, emblazoned with a red cross, offered the caliph none of this genuflection. Quite the opposite. He looked on as Hugh spoke to the leader of the Shi’ite world as though he were a slippery hawker in the Caesarea bazaar. Ignoring the eunuchs and the fawning officials, Hugh browbeat al-Adid into repeating, word by word, the terms of King Amalric’s deal with Shawar, before demanding that it be symbolically honoured by an ungloved handshake.
The caliph’s flunkies stood open-mouthed in astonishment, but al-Adid performed his duty and sent Geoffrey and Hugh on their way. A military and political pact between the Fatimid ruler and the Christian states had been sealed with the most intimate ritual the young caliph may ever have performed. Its validity rested in large part on a handshake between a caliph and a Templar. But would the caliph stand by his word? And equally, importantly, would the king of Jerusalem?
The deep personal investment of the Templars in the pact and their holdings in Gaza must have been factors the following year when relations with the king hit a new low. In October 1168, giving little warning even to his closest confidants, Amalric reneged on his agreement with Shawar, ‘mustered the forces of his realm and went down into Egypt’.17 He carried out a lightning siege at Bilbays, butchering the civilians, then headed straight for Cairo at which point he camped outside the gates of the city and waited for the vizier to make him another large offer to leave.
The offer came: this time it was two million pieces of gold – a sum so vast it was almost laughable. Amalric withdrew his troops, put out his hand and waited for the money to start raining. It was a calamitous error.
Had Bertrand of Blancfort or Geoffrey Fulcher been present, perhaps they might have cautioned Amalric to place less trust in the vizier and think twice before undermining their agreement with the caliph. On this occasion, though, they were not consulted. They had opted to have nothing to do with this foolish and impolitic mission, which reneged on an agreement they had brokered in good faith. They had firmly declined to join the invasion: a serious snub to the king, and one that can only have been made after a great deal of reflection and prayer.
While the king of Jerusalem sat and waited for the first instalment of his golden ransom, Shawar contacted his former enemy Nur al-Din and begged his assistance in driving off the greedy Franks. Shirkuh was duly packed off for Cairo, gathering a large army along the way. He managed to elude Amalric in the field and placed his own troops in front of Cairo in such numbers that it became plain there was no hope for the Christians of driving them away. By 2 January 1169 Amalric realized he had no choice but to break camp and return to Jerusalem. He had not collected two million gold pieces. He had not conquered Cairo. He had merely slaughtered the civilian inhabitants of a Nile delta city, sat around for a few weeks and gone home.
This was only the beginning of his troubles. Once Amalric had left Egypt, Shirkuh took the simple, deadly step that he had awaited all along. He invited Shawar for a friendly parlay in his tent outside Cairo. At the appointed time for the meeting he slipped away and went for a walk along the water. Shawar arrived expecting a convivial discussion; instead, he found Shirkuh’s men waiting to kill him. They fell on him, wrestled him to the floor, stabbed him several times and cut his head off. Shirkuh returned from his walk, sent word to the caliph that he wished to visit him in Cairo and marched in, announcing himself the new vizier. After little more than a heartbeat and the severing of a head, Egypt had fallen into Nur al-Din’s hands. Its annexation by Sunni Syria was underway and the days of the Fatimid caliphs, who had ruled from their exotic palaces in Cairo for more than 250 years, were about to draw abruptly to an end. The Templars’ worst fears had been realized: they faced encirclement by a unified and emboldened enemy. It was much as Bertrand of Blancfort and the preceptor Geoffrey Fulcher had predicted in their doom-laden letters to France.
Within months, the resurgent forces of Islam would have a new leader more dangerous than Nur al-Din, wilier than Shirkuh and no less ferocious than Zengi. He would cause the Franks in general, and the Templars in particular, more trouble than they had experienced in seven decades of occupation. To his admirers he was ‘one of the great heroes, mighty in spirit, strong in courage and of great firmness, terrified of nothing’.18 To those who suffered the worst of his wrath he was ‘the rod of the Lord’s fury’, sent to ‘rage and exterminate the obstinate people’.19
His name was Saladin.
* Philip of Nablus was a future master of the order, holding command from 1169 to 1171.
10
‘Tears of Fire’
The dust kicked up by the marching of Saladin’s massive army was enough to turn the brightest morning into a shadowy, dusk-like gloom. ‘At times the earth groaned under the squadrons,’ wrote his admiring secretary Imad al-Din, ‘and the heavens received with joy the particles of dust.’ In full flight it must have been a truly daunting sight: 12,000 professional cavalrymen galloping ahead of three times as many volunteers. Saladin’s associates boasted among themselves that when the Franks of Jerusalem (whom they regarded as a ‘pollution’ and ‘the filth of the dregs of humanity’) received word that the horde was approaching, they would quake in terror and wish ‘that they had never been born’.1
During the decade that followed the fall of Cairo, Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, a charismatic, politically agile, relentlessly ambitious and extraordinarily self-assured soldier, made himself the pre-eminent leader in the Islamic world and the founder of a dynasty of sultans known as the Ayyubids, after Saladin’s father. Saladin had been a leading commander on Shirkuh’s Egyptian campaigns, not least because he was the old man’s nephew. But the circumstances of his birth did not alone account for his successes, and it did not take long for the nephew to overtake his uncle’s achievements. Within a year of the city’s capitulation Shirkuh had come down with a quinsy – a serious abscess in his throat brought on by an enthusiastic session of gorging on rich meats. He died abruptly on 22 March 1169 and Saladin seized control.2 He swiftly switched the city’s allegiance from the Shi’ite, Fatimid caliph al-Adid to the Sunni, Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, then began a campaign that aimed to bring every major Islamic territory in Egypt, Syria and Mesopotamia under his personal command.
Naturally, Saladin’s ambition brought him many enemies, among them Nur al-Din, who had sponsored Shirkuh’s coup in Egypt and who saw himself, not an upstart Kurd, as the man who was destined to rule Syria and Egypt together. Saladin had other ideas. Through a combination of incisive military leadership, relentless campaigning, strength of personality and a healthy dose of good fortune, between 1169 and 1177 Saladin expanded his range of influence out of Egypt to become the most important threat to other Muslim rulers in Aleppo, Damascus and Mosul. In 1171, on the death of al-Adid, the Fatimid caliphate was formally abolished. Saladin then set about consolidating Sunni rule under his own direction across Egypt.
Attempts to kill him by stealth, plot or on the battlefield all failed. His chief rival for regional dominance, Nur al-Din, died in 1174, and Saladin immediately stepped into his shoes. He first forced his way into Damascus, organizing a swift coup against those trying to press the claim for leadership of Nur al-Din’s eleven-year-old son. He had the boy removed from the city and then married Nur al-Din’s widow to give himself a veneer of legitimacy. Having secured Damascus, the following year he launched a campaign against Nur al-Din’s family and followers further north, defeating them decisively in battle and gaining the towns of Homs and Hama. Respectful entreaties to the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad now paid off, and in recognition of his rising reputation and conquests he was granted the title sultan of Egypt and Syria in 1175. In the late 1170s he continued to press Nur al-Din’s relatives and former associates in Aleppo (which eventually fell to him in 1182) and Mosul (which eluded him). By the start of the 1180s he was unquestionably the dominant figure across the Islamic Levant.
Saladin rooted his claims
for authority on a carefully manufactured image of himself as the true defender of the faith, whose commitment to jihad trumped that of all others. A generous, pious, witty and (relatively) humane ruler, he was also an extraordinarily resourceful judge of men and their motivations, whose character as much as his deeds left a deep impression on those around him. His close followers Ibn Shaddad and Imad al-Din, who wrote detailed accounts of Saladin’s life and achievements, seldom had to strain their pens or their imaginations in search of lavish encomia for their master.
Central to their highest praise was Saladin’s boundless desire to face down directly the accursed Franks who occupied Jerusalem and held sway in the lands of Tripoli and Antioch. Ibn Shaddad wrote of him that:
The Jihad, his love and passion for it, had taken a mighty hold on his heart and all his being, so much so that he talked of nothing else, thought of nothing but the means to pursue it, was concerned only with its manpower and had a fondness only for those who spoke of it and encouraged it.3
This was more than simple piety. Saladin’s greatest insight, which directed much of his career, was the pragmatic understanding that fostering unity in the fragile Islamic world (and cementing his personal authority over it) could best be achieved by rallying his fellow Muslims under the banner of holy war against an unbelieving enemy.
Saladin’s naked ambition for conquest and his powerful anti-Christian sentiment pulled him towards war with the Latin kingdom. The only real surprise was that it took him the better part of a decade to make his first move. But when it came, the Templars were among the first ranks lined up against him.
*
Following Saladin’s seizure of power in Egypt in 1169 relations between the Templars and the king of Jerusalem were fraught. Bertrand of Blancfort died that year, and the order’s central convent elected Philip of Nablus, an eastern-born lord of long-standing service who enjoyed close connections with Amalric’s court. Philip may well have been imposed on the Templars at the king’s request, although it is equally possible that his election was a deliberate move on the part of the order to repair relations with the crown. Either way, it was successful in the short term, for under Philip’s command the Templars returned to Egypt on a (futile) royal invasion. But Philip’s loyalty to the crown outweighed his commitment to the order. By 1171 he had resigned his post to lead a royal embassy to the Byzantine emperor Manuel I Comnenus in Constantinople. The journey was not a long one, but on his way to the imperial court he died.
Philip was succeeded by another apparent Amalric loyalist, Odo of Saint Amand, who had also seen royal service as the marshal of Jerusalem, a top-ranking post in the king’s military command. Presumably the desired effect of Odo’s election was to keep the Temple in line with royal policy, but this time it was less successful. Odo’s actions as leader suggested an aggressive, impulsive temperament, and he came quickly to value the independence of the order above any obligation to serve as Amalric’s puppet.
The first crisis of Odo’s leadership involved a mysterious splinter Shi’ite sect called the Assassins, whose members practised the art of spectacular public murder. The Assassins’ headquarters were at Alamut Castle in Persia, but from the 1130s they also held pockets of territory in the mountains of Syria and occupied a number of castles between the county of Tripoli and principality of Antioch, high in the Nosairi mountains. By Amalric’s reign William of Tyre believed there to be 60,000 Assassins, whose ten fortresses were supplied by the taxes of all the villages nearby. The Assassins probably derived their name from their fondness for hashish, which they used before launching terrorist attacks from Persia to Palestine. ‘If there happens to be a prince who has incurred the hatred or distrust of this people the chief places a dagger in the hand of one or several of his followers,’ wrote William of Tyre. ‘Those thus designated hasten away at once, regardless of the consequences of the deed or the probability of personal escape.’4 Writing later, the German chronicler Oliver of Paderborn heard that ‘the Assassins and their chief, the Old Man of the Mountain, had the custom of casting knives against the Christians to cut off the lives of those who care for the business of Christianity’.5 In truth the Assassins were more concerned with other Muslim leaders, which was why Amalric sought a peaceful accommodation with them against their common Sunni enemies in Syria and Egypt.
To that end, in 1173 the Old Man of the Mountain sent an envoy to Amalric’s court. The envoy was known as Abdallah, and according to the heavily slanted report given by William of Tyre, he was ‘wise and eloquent, skilled in counsel and fully instructed in the doctrine of his master’.6 But Abdallah’s eloquence was not at all to the liking of the Templars, as one of the deals he had been sent to propose would have ended a lucrative source of income to the order.
The Assassins and the Templars were near neighbours and knew each other well. The Templars had a large castle at Tortosa, very close to the Nosairi mountains, which were dotted with Assassin strongholds. The nearest of these, La Coible (Qala’at al-Khawabi) was little more than 5 miles (8 km) away from Templar territory. This was not a mortal threat in itself: the Assassins did not generally bother to target the order, as Templars were by their nature replaceable, and individual brothers mattered far less than the order as a whole.7 They paid the Templars some 2,000 gold bezants every year to be left alone. Cancelling this arrangement was thought by William of Tyre to be high on Abdallah’s list of negotiating points, and he found Amalric willing to concede the issue in the sake of broader security. The king proposed a deal and sent the Assassin back into the mountains under armed guard, with letters of protection to finalize terms with his leader.
William of Tyre recorded what happened next. ‘Under the escort and the guide... provided by the king, Abdallah had already passed through Tripoli and was about to enter his own land,’ he wrote. But as Abdallah approached the mountains, he was ambushed. Walter of Mesnil, a Templar knight recognizable by the fact that he had only one eye, along with other unnamed accomplices in Templar uniform, ‘rushed the party with drawn swords and killed the envoy’.8
The news of this appalling treachery sent Amalric into a frenzy. He summoned his barons and ranted to them that ‘the royal authority seemed to be put to naught and undeserved infamy [was] brought upon the good faith and constancy of the Christian profession’.9 He sent two barons, named by William of Tyre as Saher of Mamedunc and Godechaux of Turout, to ‘demand from the master of the Templars... that satisfaction be rendered to the king and the entire realm for this sacrilegious outrage’. He wanted Walter of Mesnil’s one-eyed head on a platter.
Unfortunately, Odo refused to co-operate. He claimed it was a matter of internal discipline, most likely pointing to the papal bulls granted in the 1140s, which placed the order outside royal jurisdiction and made it answerable only to the pope. Odo said he would impose penance on Walter and send him to Rome for judgement. ‘He forbade anyone, on the part of the pope, to lay violent hands on the brother,’ wrote William of Tyre, noting that the master also ‘added other remarks, dictated by the spirit of overweening arrogance with which he was possessed’. These must have been fairly full-blooded if William, who enjoyed sprinkling his chronicle with colourful anecdotes wherever possible, deemed them unfit for public consumption.
The expectation that Odo would be a pliable Templar master thus died together with Abdallah. Amalric eventually arrested Walter of Mesnil. He sent two knights to confront the master at Sidon, had Walter pulled out of the Templar house where he was being kept and dragged him in chains to Tyre, where he was left to rot in a royal dungeon. Yet that was as much as he dared do. Somehow he restrained himself from imposing harsher measures on the order at large, exercising moderation that William of Tyre found surprising.10 Relations were left to smoulder. The Templars remained committed to the defence of the Latin states, but it was a role they performed on their own terms, with a fierce sense of independence from royal oversight.
In 1179 there was an attempt, at a general synod of the western ch
urch in Rome known as the Third Lateran Council, to put checks on the military orders’ freedom from authority and oversight, in the religious sphere if not the military and diplomatic (it is possible, although not proven, that William of Tyre himself led this effort; he attended the council as archbishop of Tyre and representative of the eastern states). The truth was that the Templars and Hospitallers performed an increasingly essential role which no one wished to hamper unduly. This would become starkly apparent in the 1180s, when the threat posed by Saladin grew; every day made it more apparent that internal divisions were less important than the simple struggle for survival.
*
In December 1177 a messenger staggered north from Jerusalem heading to the castle of Harim, near Aleppo. He was ‘mutilated and lacerated’, bloodied, weak and barely alive, but he clutched a precious cargo: an open letter to all the Christian faithful, describing events that had taken place a few weeks previously between Ramla and Ibelin at a place called Mont Gisard (Tell al-Safiya). It was written by Raymond, the acting master of the Hospital in Jerusalem, where medical facilities had been stretched to the limit. This was a serious matter in itself. The Hospital in Jerusalem was as palatial as the Temple: directly opposite the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, it had eleven wards and between 1,000 and 2,000 beds for the sick and wounded.11 It took a major crisis to overwhelm this institution – and yet that was exactly what Raymond’s letter described. A Christian army including many Templars and Hospitallers had clashed with a force of Saladin’s warriors; thousands had been killed on both sides, and many who survived were now gravely injured, their wounds being patched up by the brothers of the Hospital and their souls by the prayers of the faithful. ‘Marvellous are the works of the Lord,’ wrote the Hospitaller. ‘Blessed is he who is not shocked by them.’12