by Dan Jones
The fighting was furious and intense. One of the common people in a ragged shirt climbed the barbican of the fort and fought on the wall when he reached the top. Others of his comrades followed him. They were joined by the troops and the barbican was taken.36
By now it was nightfall, and Muslim guards were stationed at the newly taken barbican to watch for any unexpected attack. Fires were lit outside each of the castle’s entrance points to ensure that no one could pass in or out unnoticed.
Hemmed in, the Templars inside the castle decided to lock down their position and remain behind the walls, a good 7 metres (23 ft) thick, to await relief. They had no shortage of food and arms, and could sit for weeks if required. As they settled in for rescue, they must have expected to hear the hellish thud of a trebuchet bombardment beginning. But instead came another, equally discouraging sound: the scrape of shovels as a gang of Aleppan miners began to dig a tunnel under the fortress’s single great tower in the hope of collapsing it.
For two days the miners dug, until they had produced a tunnel some 20 metres (66 ft) below ground and around 2.5 metres (8 ft) wide. This was deemed sufficient to bring down the tower. The wooden props inside were duly set ablaze, but nothing happened: the great beast of a tower simply stood there. As Monday morning dawned, Saladin directed his entire supporting workforce to the task of putting out the fires inside the mine: a dinar was offered to every person who brought a pail of water to throw into the tunnel.
By Tuesday, word had arrived that help was on the way. The Templars inside the fortress had only to wait a few days and they could be hopeful that the besiegers would be driven away.
Saladin was also aware of time pressing upon him, and he sent his miners back into their charred tunnel to dig as they had never dug before. For two more days they laboured, widening and deepening the shaft beneath the tower. On Wednesday night fires were lit again, and this time the subterranean turbulence was more than the vast walls of the tower could bear. As the sun came up on Thursday morning a section collapsed, to wild applause outside.37 Saladin’s gleeful men rushed in. Baldwin’s relieving army was still several hours’ ride away and what had seemed like a straightforward waiting game was now a last stand.
Behind the collapsed wall the Templars had piled wooden barricades and tents. When the tower fell, a draft of scorching air was sucked into the fortress, searing everything and everyone it touched and starting a fire that spread panic through the castle.38 Saladin’s men rushed in, capturing the most valuable Christians and slaughtering without mercy any Muslim apostates and mercenary archers they could lay their hands on.
True to the spirit of their Rule, the Templar knights did not go meekly into the hands of their enemies. Saladin’s chancellor al-Qadi al-Fadil wrote a lavishly overwrought letter to the Sunni caliph in Baghdad describing the suicidal battle fought amid the wreckage of the burning fortress. He described ‘tears of fire’ falling from the crumbling tower and gave his pen free rein in conjuring the horror he had seen:
The purple shades of darkness were replaced by a pomegranate crimson... It seemed like the dawn filled the night, and the sky was lit by other fires than those of the east and west... The fiery breath devoured men and stone, and a sinister voice of catastrophe cried, ‘I am talking to you, neighbour! Listen to me!’... The infidels cried, ‘Truly, it is a terrible thing!’39
There was more than poetry in al-Fadil’s letter, for he recorded the final moments of the Templar commander as the burning battlements were overrun:
The prince who commanded the place witnessed its destruction and the disasters befalling his friends and companions. When the flames arrived at his side, he threw himself into a hole full of fire without fearing the flames. In burning, he was soon thrown into the other furnace [i.e. Hell].
By the afternoon of Thursday 30 August the fortress at Jacob’s Ford had been taken and the ground lay littered with hundreds of arrows, pathetically abandoned tools and the twisted bodies of the dead, some with their heads split open by sword-blows, some with their limbs hacked off. Horses, mules and donkeys that had not died during the assault were rounded up and taken, as were 1,000 coats of mail from the armoury. Some bodies were left for carrion, and others were thrown into the water cistern: a foolish indignity, given the outbreak of disease that swiftly followed in the sultan’s army.40 Once the castle had been stripped of anything worth looting, Saladin fulfilled the dire promise he had made. He stayed in the area until October, by which time ‘he had demolished the fort and razed it to the ground’.41
The defeat at Mont Gisard had been well and truly avenged. One Muslim writer of the time called the castle at Jacob’s Ford ‘a nest of misfortune’.42 The poet al-Nashw ibn Nafadha crowed:
The destruction of the Franks came speedily,
Now is the time to smash their crosses.
Had the time of their death not been near,
They would not have built the House of Lamentations.43
Searching for a cause to which to attribute the disaster, William of Tyre looked to the general sinfulness of the Latins. He concluded his description of the debacle at Jacob’s Ford with a passage from the psalms: ‘The Lord their God has departed from them’, he wrote, in despair.44
For a time, it seemed that he was right.
* The term ‘grand master’, often used today to describe the overall master of the Templars (as opposed to regional masters) was in fact neither a commonly used nor a formal title in the east. See Burgtorf, J., The Central Convent of Hospitallers and Templars: History, Organisation and Personnel (1099/1120–1310) (Leiden/Boston: 2008) 182.
11
‘Woe to You, Jerusalem!’
For several years, the Holy Land simmered. After Mont Gisard and Jacob’s Ford, both Saladin and the Franks needed time to recover, repair and consolidate. In the spring of 1180 a two-year truce was agreed, allowing the sultan to concentrate on cementing his power in Aleppo and Mosul and the Franks to deal with the crisis of leadership that spilled out from the declining health of King Baldwin IV. As with all great affairs in the crusader states, the Templars were closely involved.
First came the eternally difficult task of drumming up support in the west for the underfunded east. The military orders, thanks to their international infrastructure linking profit-making western houses with the fighting units in Outremer, were a natural conduit for diplomatic relations between the two halves of Christendom. So in 1180 a delegation of Templars was sent to Pope Alexander III in Rome to lobby for the proclamation of a new crusade. Alexander was not a blind champion of the military orders. In the previous year he had presided over the Third Lateran Council, whose edicts had specifically admonished the Templars and Hospitallers for ignoring the authority of bishops and collecting tithes for their own use, but the brothers who made their way to Rome in 1180 were nonetheless successful in convincing him of their great need and hardship.1 He agreed to throw his weight behind the calls for a new crusade led by one or more of the great kings of the day. The Templar delegation passed his appeal for military assistance jointly to the ageing king of England, Henry II, and a new, young king of France. While the brothers were in Europe news reached them that the sixty-year-old Louis VII had died of a stroke, leaving his crown to his fifteen-year-old only son, Philip II (later known as Philip Augustus).2 The turbulence of such a great transition made it hard to direct either king’s attention towards the Holy Land; a third great crusade was not yet to be forthcoming.
Although the Templar mission to Rome did not ignite a new crusade, the order did not just sit back and accept its new situation. In Jerusalem it undertook a bold change in its own leadership. While Odo of Saint Amand languished in his prison cell the order had no functioning master. Robert Fraisnel assumed the title of ‘grand preceptor’, but he could not be elected as master while Odo lived.3 Then, when Odo died in prison in 1180 and and his post fell vacant, the Templars of the central convent chose not to promote Robert Fraisnel, or indeed any other brother in the eas
t. Instead they voted to hand the leadership to Arnold of Torolla, an elderly and experienced knight who had spent much of his long career leading the armies of Christ in Aragon. Arnold had been master of Spain and Provence since 1167, proving himself remarkably successful at attracting sponsorship and enriching the order in a difficult corner of Christendom.4 He had established a reputation beyond his own field of command, for to elect a man of Catalonia in absentia to lead the knights in Jerusalem, Tripoli, Antioch and everywhere else besides showed an extraordinary degree of faith in his talent. It also suggested an awareness that the order needed to take advantage of its role as an international organization. In light of the tormented relationship between the crown and the order under Odo’s leadership, Arnold’s election was a thoughtful attempt to steer the Templars back to their primary duties and away from disruptive meddling in domestic politics.
It took Arnold more than a year to travel east and take up his post, whereupon he began by shaking up the senior leadership. Robert Fraisnel was moved out of his position as grand preceptor and replaced by Girbert Eral, probably a native of Aragon.5 One of Arnold’s first missions was to to mediate a dispute between the prince and patriarch of Antioch, a diplomatic effort he shared with Roger of Moulins, the experienced and cautious master of the Hospitallers. Settling disputes between bickering factions of Franks was no doubt wearying work but he must have known it was nothing compared to the challenges that lay ahead.6
As soon as the temporary peace expired in 1182 a new series of tit-for-tat campaigns began, with the major tussles for control around two important commercial routes: the caravan roads between Egypt and Damascus that cut through Transjordan, and the disputed territory near Galilee around the Via Maris. Saladin framed his attacks on Christian territory and possessions in the language of jihad, for his claim to supremacy in Cairo, Damascus, Mosul and Aleppo rested on his self-hewn image as the scourge of the infidel. Certain Frankish lords played up gleefully to the stereotype he perpetuated. The worst offender was Reynald of Châtillon, who had given up the title of prince of Antioch and was now lord of Kerak, and a dominant political figure in the Christian states. In 1183 Reynald took a flotilla on a looting expedition along the eastern coast of the Red Sea and into the Hijaz – the most holy province of Arabia – inciting rumours that he intended to invade Mecca and Medina and steal the body of Muhammad. Saladin never forgave him for this insolence.
In the early years of his rule, Saladin had spent much more time fighting Muslims who objected to his rule than he had attacking Christians. In 1182 that began to change.7 With peace officially broken, he invaded the Christian territories twice in two consecutive summers. In the high summer of 1182 he marched an army across the River Jordan and through Frankish lands south of the Sea of Galilee. Then he tried and failed to besiege Beirut by sea. The following summer the sultan was back, menacing similar territory. A very large Latin army was assembled to repel him, led by Guy of Lusignan, who had married Baldwin’s sister Sibylla and was wielding ever more influence in the kingdom. By refusing to give battle and drawing the Muslims into a running skirmish around La Fève, Guy exhausted Saladin’s patience and provisions and forced him to abandon the engagement: a clever tactic, but one that earned him harsh accusations of cowardice from his opponents, including the powerful Raymond, count of Tripoli. This criticism stung him deeply.
In the heat of 1183, with Saladin’s armies now at the fringes of Frankish territory and Baldwin rapidly falling into total incapacity, there were more things to worry about than Guy of Lusignan’s hurt feelings. Baldwin’s leprosy had rendered him childless, and a decision about the future rule of Jerusalem was badly needed. After some deliberation, the king named as his heir another Baldwin: the infant son of his sister Sibylla by William of Montferrat, who died at Ascalon in 1177 before his wife gave birth. On 20 November 1183 the child was crowned co-king in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in a farcical scene described by William of Tyre. The barons of the Holy Land swore their allegiance to the five-year-old as Baldwin V, but William wrote that many of them felt deeply uneasy about the fact that although the kingdom now had two monarchs, ‘since both were hampered, one by disease and the other by youth, [the coronation] was wholly useless’.8
For precisely this reason the resolution of the succession did little to stabilize the political situation in Jerusalem. Indeed, its main effect was to worsen existing tensions between two of the most powerful noblemen in the realm. On one side was the young king’s stepfather, Guy of Lusignan; on the other, Raymond, count of Tripoli, who had served on several occasions as regent, had presided over King Baldwin V’s coronation and expected to be afforded the pre-eminence befitting his status. Guy and Raymond’s mutual loathing opened a fissure in Frankish politics at an already fragile time, and it would have devastating consequences for the kingdom they both thought it their duty to defend. In May 1185 Baldwin IV died at the age of just twenty-four, blind, bedridden and in agony. He was buried beside his father in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the seven-year-old Baldwin V became sole king. This solved nothing, least of all the poisonous rivalry between Guy of Lusignan and Raymond of Tripoli, who was appointed to serve as regent for the underage monarch.
The succession of a child not old enough to lift a sword, let along swing it in anger, had a direct impact on the Order of the Temple. In 1184, with the leprous Baldwin IV nearing the grave, and royal authority accelerating towards a major crisis, Arnold of Torrolla’s diplomatic skills were called into service on another mission to the west. The aim this time was to persuade a capable adult ruler from one of the great European realms to come east and assume the crown of Jerusalem by election. The Templar embassy of 1180 had failed to entice either Henry II of England or Philip II of France to come to the kingdom’s aid. Now the master of the Temple himself travelled back, accompanied by Heraclius, patriarch of Jerusalem, and Roger of Moulins, master of the Hospitallers. Their intention was to implore the monarchs to help prevent a catastrophe in the east: to prove themselves truly Christian kings who would come to the aid of Christ’s city and his people in their direst hour of need.
The mission was a failure. In the first place, Henry and Philip had too much at stake in their own realms to risk resigning their crowns; both were sympathetic but refused the overtures. And it came at a high cost. Arnold of Torrolla did not even make it to their royal courts, for during the long expedition – an arduous sea and land journey of more than 1,000 miles (1,600 km) – the master died. The order was compelled to elect its third leader in four years.
The choice they made was fateful. Arnold’s replacement, Gerard of Ridefort, a headstrong soldier very new to the order, threw himself with far more energy into the struggles and turmoil of the Holy Land. But as he did so, he, his fellow Templars and the whole kingdom of Jerusalem were hurtling headlong towards their direst moment.
*
Gerard of Ridefort had come to the east from Flanders or north-west France, arriving by 1175. He knew Arabic and had experience in the highest echelons of secular service, having served Raymond, count of Tripoli, and been named a royal marshal; but his introduction to the order was the indirect result of a fit of pique: he had fallen out catastrophically with Raymond over a disputed marriage deal. In 1179 the count had promised to marry Gerard to the next eligible daughter of one of his vassals who came onto the marital market. But when an heiress did become available, Raymond reneged on the deal and instead sold the hand of Gerard’s intended bride (the daughter of the lord of Botron) to a Pisan merchant called Plebanus, who was prepared literally to pay the girl’s weight in gold. Gerard was deeply insulted, believing his honour to have been impugned. The whole situation was made worse by the fact that French-speaking parts of Christendom had little but contempt for Italians. Gerard left Raymond’s court in a fury. He entered King Baldwin’s service and then, after recovering from a period of illness, joined the Templars. It is possible he was quite seriously ill and that he had sworn a holy
oath to join the order if the Lord allowed him to recover. In any case, Templar life suited him, and once he had taken the white mantle, Gerard was rapidly promoted. By 1183 he was serving as seneschal.9 As second-in-command he was an obvious candidate for promotion to master when Arnold of Torrolla died in 1184, but his selection turned out to be highly controversial.
Almost from the moment he was elected Gerard divided opinion, thanks to a penchant for bold political action that all too often spilled into rashness. To one writer Gerard was a ‘happy man!’ – a blessed and glorious soldier who devoted his life to martial deeds in the name of Christ. In this view his defining characteristics were his chivalric pride and his utter refusal to take a backwards step, even when his life was in peril.10
Others saw him differently, perceiving not a maverick with the heart of a lion but a grudge-bearing hothead who encouraged others to share his own rash inclinations and led many good soldiers to their deaths.11 Which view best described Gerard is not easy to say. Certainly he showed none of the instinctive caution that had characterized the conservative military policies of Bertrand of Blancfort, nor the diplomatic subtlety of Arnold of Torrolla, and his temperament led him and the order into trouble too often. Then again, Gerard lived and led in even less easy times. The route to heaven in the 1180s did not seem to be open to the timid.
In late August 1186 King Baldwin V died at Acre. He was only eight, and had reigned as sole king for little more than a year. The Templars escorted the boy’s corpse back to Jerusalem, where he was laid to rest beside his royal uncle and grandfather in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in a small but lavishly appointed tomb intricately decorated with acanthus flowers, an image of Christ flanked by angels and small carved images of dead baby birds.12 The beauty of the small boy’s resting place could not obscure the fact that the kingdom was now entering a genuine crisis of succession.