by Dan Jones
When Baldwin V became king, it had been agreed that in the event of his death the next king of Jerusalem should be chosen by a panel that would include the most illustrious rulers in western Christendom: the pope, the kings of England and France and the Holy Roman Emperor. This high-minded principle harked back to the successful selection of Fulk of Anjou. In theory it had much to recommend it, notwithstanding the fact that none of the electors saw fit to take on the job themselves. Relying on the lottery of succession by birth and familial precedence had landed the kingdom with a leper and a child king; this was no way to defend the holiest realm on earth. Unfortunately, in August 1186 when Baldwin died, the notion of an election was abandoned in favour of a ruthless power-grab: a coup that was enabled, and to an extent orchestrated, by Gerard of Ridefort.
The regency of Jerusalem had been contested for several years between Raymond, count of Tripoli, and Guy of Lusignan. Baldwin’s death provided the opportunity for Sybilla and Guy to settle the rivalry for good and in Gerard they found a willing and uniquely well-placed ally. The Templar master had neither forgotten nor forgiven Count Raymond for the insult he had dealt him by selling off his rightful wife for a pot of gold. Moreover, he had a vital hand in releasing the regal paraphernalia that was essential to Jerusalem’s royal ritual.
Rather than wait months for a decision to be ground out by international power-brokers, Sibylla, Guy and Gerard decided to pursue Sibylla’s personal claim to her father’s throne – which meant setting aside the rival claim of her younger sister, Isabella. They convinced Heraclius, patriarch of Jerusalem, to carry out the coronation ceremony before anyone could act to stop them. As a sop to their enemies, they promised that Sibylla would divorce Guy and take a new husband of her own choosing.
A coup of this speed and audacity required practical help, for it relied on Sibylla being able to lay her hands on the sacred treasure required for her coronation. The treasury containing the royal jewels and regalia of Jerusalem could only be opened using three separate keys at the same time. One was held by the patriarch of Jerusalem, another by the master of the Hospital, Roger of Moulins, and the third was in the possession of the master of the Temple.
Gerard and Patriarch Heraclius backed Sibylla’s bid for the crown, but Roger of Moulins was far less sure. Gerard concluded that the best way to reason with him was the most direct: on Friday 11 November 1186, with the gates of Jerusalem closed to bar their enemies from entering the city, Gerard and his allies went to Roger’s quarters in the Jerusalem Hospital and harangued him, demanding that he hand over his key and submit to the inevitable transfer of power. Roger refused. It was only after a physical confrontation between the two masters that the Hospitaller finally agreed to release his key, which he petulantly threw into the courtyard rather than handing it over in a more civil manner.
The coronation could now proceed. As the man who had literally collected the crown from the jewel-house, Gerard of Ridefort had a prime position at the ceremony; he could scarcely contain his glee. When the crown was placed on Sibylla’s head he was close to the altar, and he was even closer to Sibylla’s devious intentions. After she had been crowned, the new queen was asked whom she intended to take as her king in place of the divisive Guy of Lusignan, who was scheduled very shortly to be divorced from her. To the shock of many gathered in the Holy Sepulchre, she called Guy himself forward, commanded him to kneel before her and placed a second crown on his head.
At her shoulder Gerard of Ridefort put his own hand on Guy’s crown and helped settle it. As he did so, he was heard to mutter with satisfaction, ‘this crown is well worth the marriage of Botron’, in reference to the bride that Raymond had taken from him. The Templar master was now the kingmaker. He soon found his place among a hawkish faction at court, constantly advocating aggression as a guiding principle of government, directed both towards the forces of Islam and enemies closer to home. It would turn out to be a deadly combination.
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On the night of 30 April 1187 lookouts in Nazareth spotted a number of Saladin’s armed men heading past the town on a reconnaissance mission directed at the fortified town of Sephoria (Saffuriya), a few miles to the north-west. With its large square stone castle and the remains of a Roman amphitheatre, Sephoria had been earmarked as an assembly point for a Christian defensive army raised by the new king to resist Saladin’s increasingly determined forays into the kingdom. For several years the sight of Muslim armies marching through Latin territory, burning crops as they went, had become more and more common, and now here again were the Saracens, a long way over the River Jordan and marching through the heartlands of Christian country.
Guy and Sibylla’s controversial accession in August of the previous year had been justified as a means of improving the security of the Latin kingdom, but quite the opposite had followed. The woeful dilapidation of Frankish royal power in the years since King Amalric’s death and the confused state of the kingdom would have emboldened any ruler with designs on their lands, but Saladin’s bolder forays were also a reflection of his evolving personal attitude towards the Franks. In the early 1180s he had been content to launch periodic forays into specific disputed regions; after 1186 his vision expanded and he began to regard the Latins of the east not simply as a rival with whom to tussle but as an existential enemy to be cleansed from the earth. Saladin had forged a career by carefully cultivating an image as a purifying zealot, for whom jihad meant everything. He was bound at some point to follow through with his rhetoric. The sultan also fell extremely ill in late 1185: ‘his life was despaired of and a rumour went round that he had died,’ wrote his biographer and counsellor Ibn Shaddad.13 Survival seems to have inspired in him a heartfelt desire to destroy his enemies at any cost.
During the winter of 1186–7 the factions supporting King Guy and his rival Raymond of Tripoli were spiralling towards civil war. Raymond’s disgruntlement at Guy’s naked power-grab had evolved into a full-blown attempt to replace the joint monarchs with a pair of his own choosing: Humphrey of Toron and his wife Isabella, who was Sibylla’s sister. In order to protect himself while he plotted this coup d’etat, Raymond had taken the defiant, near-senseless step of making a personal truce with Saladin, allowing him to carry out exploratory missions on his territory. It was under the terms of this agreement that Saladin was allowed to send 7,000 men marching past Nazareth on the last day of April 1187. The force was led by his trusted and experienced Turkish emir Muzaffar ad-Din (also known as Gökböri, or the ‘Blue Wolf’). The old soldier shared command with Saladin’s trusted son and heir apparent, known as al-Afdal.
Gerard of Ridefort was close to Nazareth on the evening of 30 April as part of a delegation travelling north from Jerusalem to Tiberias with the aim of bringing Raymond to terms with the king. The Templar master had been urging an armed strike on the dissenting count to bring him into line, but Guy had resisted and instead a peace conference was scheduled to take place in Tiberias in early May. Gerard was on his way there in the company of Roger of Moulins and Josias, archbishop of Tyre, together with their respective entourages. They planned to collect the powerful lord Balian of Ibelin at the Templar castle of La Fève, from where they would all go on to Tiberias and attempt to bring Raymond to his senses as calmly as possible.
When Gerard of Ridefort learned that Raymond had allowed Saladin’s men the freedom to roam across his territory, the master’s most combative instincts were stirred. Nazareth was not subject to Raymond’s lordship, and its people were not bound by the truce he had negotiated. Gerard took a hard interpretation of his mandate as leader of the Templars: it was his duty to defend the land.14 He sent to the nearest Templar garrison at Caco (now Qaqun), summoning eighty of the knight-brothers to his side. Roger de Moulins followed gingerly, raising ten Hospitallers; a further forty knights retained by the king joined them. Instead of continuing to La Fève and Tiberias, they all now made for Nazareth with the aim of tracking down the sultan’s forces and putting them to flight.
One hundred and forty knights (the original party and their reinforcements) was a respectably large force considering its hasty muster, but it was dwarfed by the 7,000 men Saladin’s generals had under their command. On the morning of 1 May the disparity became horribly apparent as the Templars tracked down al-Afdal and his army to a wooded area at the Springs of Cresson, a natural fountain not far from Nazareth.* Gerard now had with him nearly a full complement of the Templars’ highest officials: the seneschal, Urs of Alneto; the one-time grand preceptor Robert Fraisnel, who was now serving as marshal of the Temple; and the respected brother James of Maillé.15 They assessed the scene with Roger of Moulins and all decided that a discreet withdrawal was their only option – all, that is, but Gerard of Ridefort.
‘Gerard was an energetic knight, but impetuous and rash.’ This was the verdict of the German chronicler Oliver of Paderborn when describing the Templar master’s conduct at the Springs of Cresson.16 Even given the advantage of a surprise attack, it was vain to believe that a few hundred men fighting against thousands would lead to anything but annihilation. Gerard insisted it was the Christians’ duty to charge, ‘in a desire to defend Christ’s inheritance’.17 He taunted the Hospitaller master and James of Maillé for their reticence, sneering that they were cowards.18
The English chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall, describing the scene from afar, put into Gerard’s mouth a long and florid speech, in which he praised the Templars’ disdain for ‘vain and perishable things’ and argued that they were the true inheritors of the Maccabees, who had fought for ‘the church, the law and the inheritance of the Crucified One’.19 In other words, the red crosses on their white mantles positively demanded that they stand and fight. Ralph of Coggeshall almost certainly conjured the words from his imagination, but he captured Gerard’s extreme approach to the norms of twelfth-century chivalry and the idealized mindset of the order more generally.
Everyone who wore the red cross had sworn to serve the order until the end of his life, to be obedient to the master, and to ‘help to conquer, with the strength and power that God has given you, the Holy Land of Jerusalem’.20 Every single Templar at Cresson had at one stage in his life replied, ‘Yes sire, if it please God’ when asked if he was prepared to do those things. Now was the time to make good on that promise. Instructed by their master to ride against an army perhaps twenty times larger than theirs, they had no choice but to obey. The men crossed themselves. They shouted together, ‘Christ is our life and death is our reward’. Then they rode, madly, towards al-Afdal and his horde.21
When Bernard of Clairvaux had written his manifesto for the new knighthood in the 1120s, he had implored Templars faced with mortal danger to say to themselves: ‘Whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord’.22 He told them that going willingly to their deaths in Christ’s name was a sure path to salvation. Of course, it was one thing for Bernard to write this, theorizing a thousand miles from the Holy Land and glorifying in a martyrdom he would never himself experience. It was quite another for a band of ninety Templars, called from their castle and told to attack against impossible odds, to swallow down their fear and do it. Yet they did. Each man spurred his horse forward, and the battle fought at Cresson would live long in crusader mythology.
The cold truth was that of the 140 knights who rode at the Saracens, some of them Templars and others merely carried along in the madness, only a handful escaped alive. Gerard of Ridefort, who ordered the charge, was badly wounded in the fighting but eventually left the battlefield, accompanied by three of his companions. Fifty to sixty knights died in a shower of their own gore; the rest were taken away to imprisonment and enslavement at Saladin’s pleasure. Roger of Moulins, the master of the Hospitallers, who had joined the fray reluctantly, was beheaded, as was the Templar marshal Robert Fraisnel and (it seems) the seneschal, Urs.23 They did not go to their deaths easily: the chronicler Ibn al-Athir wrote that it was ‘a battle fit to turn black hair grey’.24 Nevertheless, as Ralph of Coggeshall put it, ‘cruel death consumed nearly all’.25 The Templars and their companions had sought the crown of martyrdom, and they had found it. So had the master of the Hospitallers along with a number of his own brothers, and a large number of citizens of Nazareth, who had been following the company of knights at a distance, hoping for plunder, only to be set upon by Muslim riders as they fled for home.
Perhaps in tribute to the heedlessness of the charge, saintly legends soon sprung up concerning the conduct of those who had died at Cresson. James of Maillé’s death was transformed into a Christian folk tale and he was held up as an example of the idealized crusader, gloriously and joyously embracing martyrdom. According to the author of a contemporary chronicle, he stood alone when almost all his companions had been killed, ‘surrounded by enemy troops and almost abandoned by human aid, but when he saw so many thousands running towards him from all directions he strengthened his resolve and courageously undertook the battle, one man against all’.26 According to this tale, James’s enemies were so won over by the Templar’s bravery that they urged him to lay down his weapons and surrender so that they could spare his life. He ignored them, and continued fighting until ‘at long last, crushed rather than conquered by spears, stones and lances, he sank to the ground and joyfully passed to heaven with the martyr’s crown’. Later it was said that James’s white horse and uniform had convinced Saladin’s men that he was a manifestation of St George, ‘the Knight in Shining Armour, the protector of the Christians’, such that they had been overjoyed when they had finally killed him.
They may have killed the man, but they could not kill the legend. Once he was cold and stiff and abandoned to the elements, James’s corpse became a source of holy relics. Some placed dust on the body and then sprinkled it on their own heads, hoping that it would infect them with the dead man’s valour. One man cut off his genitals ‘and kept them safely for begetting children so that even when dead, the man’s members – if such a thing were possible – would produce an heir with courage as great as his’.27
For every holy trinket harvested from James of Maillé’s body, ten were taken from his butchered comrades by Saladin’s soldiers. Gerard of Ridefort wrote to the pope to inform him of the doleful defeat at Cresson, complaining that he had ‘suffered serious losses of horses and arms, quite apart from the loss of men’, and advising the holy father that ‘the evil race of pagans is inflamed to attack the... land more strongly than usual in accordance with the purposes of its iniquity’.28 He did not mention the fact that as Saladin’s army had retreated, his men had borne the heads of dozens of dead Templars before them on their lances.
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Less than two months after the defeat at Cresson, on Friday 27 June 1187, Saladin crossed the River Jordan again, a few miles south of the Sea of Galilee. This time he brought 30,000 men, roughly half of whom were cavalry. They had spent several weeks at Ashtara, assembling their numbers, performing military drills and reviewing battlefield tactics. This was no longer an exploratory expedition; it was an all-out invasion, the long-promised strike to rub out the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem.
As the sultan had made no secret of his intentions, King Guy of Jerusalem had been able to rally his forces. In the aftermath of the battle of Cresson, he had sent out a message calling on every able-bodied Christian man in the east to take up arms and join him in defending the kingdom. This was known as the arrière-ban – a general levy – and its promulgation was a sign of existential danger. Castles were emptied almost entirely of their garrisons, so that ‘no man remained in the cities or the villages or the castles who was able to go to war’.29 The military orders were called up along with every available secular knight. Thousands of mercenaries were hired to supplement the infantry and provide expert light cavalry. The cost of this was borne by a windfall fund paid to the church by Henry II as penance for his role in the murder of Thomas Becket in Canterbury cathedral in December 1170. The funds were intended to pay for a new crusade, and held for safekeeping by the Templars,
who chose to release them in this hour of emergency. One chronicler reported that Gerard of Ridefort, ever looking to settle a score, gladly released the treasure ‘to combat the Saracens and to revenge the dishonour and damage that they had done to him’.30 All told, Guy’s army probably numbered at least 20,000 men, of whom 1,200 were knights, including several hundred white-mantled Templars, representing perhaps one-third of the whole of the order’s elite fighting force in the crusader states. They mustered at the secure base of Sephoria (Saffuriya), where they could be provisioned and watered to meet the coming attack. ‘It was a limitless crowd, innumerable as the sands of the desert,’ wrote Saladin’s chancellor Imad al-Din.31 The True Cross, carried before every Christian army of such a size, was brought out to offer Christ’s protection should it be needed.
Imad al-Din reckoned that the Franks knew they were threatened by an apocalyptic war – ‘the whole of the forces of Islam against all of infidelity’ – and he was correct.32 After the debacle of Cresson a fragile peace had been struck between the king and Raymond of Tripoli, but Guy’s war council was far from united and many among them (including the Templar master) still considered Raymond an untrustworthy traitor. When Saladin’s advance across the river became known, the council’s personal animosities and divided approach to warfare quickly surfaced.
Guy’s instinctive reaction when faced with a hostile army was to stall, play for time and wear the enemy out without bringing them to battle, where he would be forced to face the inevitable lottery of field combat. Despite having assembled one of the largest armies in the history of the Christian kingdom, this was his inclination in July 1187. Saladin’s army was undoubtedly massive, but it was far from unified: ‘as divided in place of origin, rites and name as they were united in their determination to destroy the Holy Land’, wrote one Frankish author of the time.33 Guy’s favoured strategy was to avoid meeting Saladin long enough for his coalition to collapse, and his army to begin to disintegrate.