The Templars

by Dan Jones

  This was exactly the posture that Saladin wished to goad his opponent into abandoning. Fatefully, it was an approach to warfare that was little in favour with some of the men around the king. As regent he had been mocked for his failure to fight when Saladin had raided Jerusalem in 1183, and he was susceptible to advice that promised to make up for this past humiliation.

  On 2 July 1187 Saladin marched his army to Tiberias at first light and laid the city under siege. The townsmen had neither the appetite nor the capability to resist and their town was soon plundered and set on fire. The garrison held out, but this too presented a problem: Raymond of Tripoli’s wife Eschiva was trapped inside and now risked falling into Saladin’s hands. It was unlikely that she would be mistreated, but the ransom would be vast and the dishonour considerable if she were to be taken prisoner.

  To Raymond’s credit, he set aside his concern for his town and his wife and urged the king to hold firm and not be drawn into a battle on Saladin’s terms. He insisted that it was better to ransom his wife than to be coaxed into a trap. Gerard of Ridefort was consumed by the same mood of righteous belligerence as he had been eight weeks earlier at Cresson, and, along with the new master of the Hospitallers, Armengaud of Asp, he advised precisely the opposite.34 One French source gave Gerard a spirited speech in which he asked in disgust whether the king was really going to listen to the advice of a traitor, and told him his royal honour depended on advancing.35 Given Gerard’s previous vindictiveness and propensity for extremism, this seems plausible. It was, however, scandalously poor strategic advice. Caught between the uncertainty of battle and the promise of a bloodless but shameful defeat, Guy took the Templar master’s advice and decided to attack. He was walking into a trap. As Saladin himself later put it, ‘dawn was about to break on the night of unbelief’.36

  On the morning of 3 July the knights of the Temple assembled in the rearguard of King Guy’s vast army as it moved out of Sephoria and ground its way down the old Roman road running east towards Tiberias. It was, said Ibn al-Athir, ‘high summer and extremely hot’, and there were real practical difficulties presented by marching armed men through the desert.37 The brothers had long experience fighting in these conditions, but they could not avoid thirst, and like the rest of Guy’s army they relied on natural springs to replenish their supplies of water. By noon the army stopped at the town of Turan, which had a fountain, although it was barely adequate to cool the throats of 20,000 men together with their horses and pack animals. Ahead of them lay an arid wasteland, across which Saladin had sent outriders to fill in every well and block every spring they could find. His own army was supplied from the rear by camel trains bringing water up from the Sea of Galilee. He was determined not to allow the crusaders the same comfort.

  The folly of Gerard of Ridefort’s advice now became plain. To advance past Turan meant riding into territory where the army would weaken through simple dehydration with every hour that passed. But having committed to the strategy, Guy would not now change his mind. The Templars in the rearguard, led by Gerard and his second-in-command, the order’s seneschal Terricus, followed as the army ground its way further towards Tiberias. As they rode, the Templars set to work, repelling skirmishing parties sent out from the bulk of Saladin’s forces, who had themselves changed position, marching to Kafr Sabt and halting in anticipation of the Latins’ arrival.

  According to stories told by Templar brothers in the subsequent months and years, a deep unease now settled over Guy’s troops. It was said that as they marched the king’s chamberlain looked at the scorching midsummer sky above them and watched an eagle soar over the royal army, holding in its talons a crossbow with seven bolts (representing the seven deadly sins) and ‘crying out in a terrible voice: “Woe to you, Jerusalem!”’38 Ahead of them, Saladin waited.

  As soon as Guy’s army left Turan, the sultan’s nephews Taqi al-Din and Muzzafar al-Din scrambled to take the town, cutting off the possibility of retreat and any hope of maintaining a water supply from the rear. They were, in Saladin’s words, ‘unable to flee and not allowed to stay’.39 Harassed and moving hopelessly towards a rocky, exposed, dust-dry plateau, the Christian army was now surrounded. They had marched all day at a painfully slow pace and eventually stumbled to a halt, forced to camp a waterless night, with the enemy hemming them in so closely that they could hear troops talking to them in the darkness. ‘If a cat had fled from the Christian host it could not have escaped without the Saracens taking it’, wrote one well-informed source.40 Cries of Allahu Akbar (‘God is great’) and la ‘ilaha ‘illa-llah (‘there is no god but God’) haunted the Christians as they spent a miserable night under the stars. To the north-east loomed the twin rocky mounds of an extinct volcano known as the Horns of Hattin. Below them was a village with a spring, but the route towards it was blocked. There was nothing for the Franks to do but to lie in the dark and suffer.

  At dawn the thirsty Franks rose and armed themselves, expecting an onslaught. Cruelly but brilliantly, Saladin prolonged their torture by letting them stumble onwards a little longer towards the Horns of Hattin. Then he ordered his men to set alight the desert scrub. Plumes of smoke filled the air, rasping at parched throats and providing, Saladin hoped, an image of awaiting hell. Finally, once the plain was thick with acrid woodsmoke he gave the command to his archers to nock their arrows. They drew and released. The arrows filled the air ‘like a swarm of locusts’. Infantry and horses started falling.

  Half-blind, hot, tired, weak and under fire, the Franks’ discipline began to sag. A counter-attack was essential so, according to a letter written by a merchant in Acre who heard reports filtered back from the battle, Guy turned to the Templars and asked them to lead the attack on the tormentors. ‘He gave orders for the master and the knights of the Temple to begin hostilities... Attacking like strong lions the knights of the Temple killed part of the enemy and caused the rest to retreat.’41

  Terricus, the seneschal, found himself alongside Raymond of Tripoli, who was commanding the vanguard. With them was Reynald of Sidon, leading the rearguard, and Balian II of Ibelin. Together the four men led a targeted charge at the part of Saladin’s army commanded by Taqi al-Din. But instead of holding position to take the attack, Taqi al-Din instructed his men simply to part as the horsemen barrelled towards them, allowing them to fly through the lines untouched. Once they had passed, his infantry closed ranks once more, blocking the route back. Four of the most senior Christian leaders on the battlefield were now cut off from the rest of the men whom they were supposed to be commanding. With little other option, they spurred their horses and fled. In his open letter to all Templar brethren of the west some days after the battle, Terricus felt compelled to explain that it was only ‘with great difficulty that... we ourselves managed to escape that dreadful field’.42

  The army they left behind was now heartily demoralized, crippled by thirst, weary and exhausted. But they were not yet defeated. ‘They understood that they would only be saved from death by facing it boldly’, wrote Ibn al-Athir:

  So they carried out successive charges, which almost drove the Muslims from their positions despite their numbers... However, the Franks did not charge and retire without suffering losses... The Muslims surrounded them as a circle encloses its central point.43

  The fighting continued throughout the afternoon. Despite the heat it was a brutal contest. Saladin himself recounted in grisly and poetic terms the ferocity with which his men attacked the Franks:

  The eyes of the spears were directed at their hearts... Rivers of swords sought out their livers... The horses’ hooves massed dust clouds for them; showers of arrows, shooting out sparks were sent down on them, merged together by the thunder of neighing horses, with the lightning of polished swords flashing alongside them.44

  The Frankish army now broke up. According to Ibn Shaddad, ‘one group fled and was pursued by our Muslim heroes. Not one of them survived’.45 King Guy and his knights prepared to make a final stand.

 
The king and a group of knights, probably including Gerard of Ridefort and his Templars, had managed to scramble up to the Horns of Hattin, where the ruins of Iron Age and Bronze Age fortifications offered some natural protection. Reaching the higher ground, the thirsty, weary men would have been able to look down in agony at the great, unreachable expanse of cool water that was the Sea of Galilee. Making the position briefly defensible, they erected King Guy’s bright red royal tent. Into it hurried the bishop of Acre, carrying with him the one thing that the Latins hoped could save them: a jewelled casket holding the fragment of the True Cross, on which Christ had suffered and died. It had to be defended at any cost.

  From his command position, Saladin watched Guy’s tent being pitched and the Christians preparing to defend their king and their holy relic. Alongside him was his son al-Afdal, who later recounted to Ibn al-Athir the tense moments that followed. The sultan knew that the enemy’s cavalry would fight with every last scrap of its remaining strength. The men were cornered, and they were arranging themselves for an assault on the one part of the Muslim army that could turn impending defeat into victory: Saladin and his bodyguard of Mamluks. The sultan was, said his son, ‘overcome by grief and his complexion pale’.46

  Younger and less experienced, al-Afdal could not understand his father’s trepidation. As each Christian charge from Guy’s tent was beaten backwards, al-Afdal whooped with joy, and shouted ‘We have beaten them!’

  ‘My father rounded on me’, he later recalled. ‘He said: “Be quiet! We have not beaten them until that tent falls.”’

  Just as Saladin uttered those words, the two men saw Guy’s red tent finally overwhelmed. The king and the True Cross were taken. The battle was over. ‘The sultan dismounted, prostrated himself in thanks to God Almighty and wept for joy.’47

  *

  The blood-streaked battlefield at Hattin was marked by two monuments: a dome erected on Saladin’s instructions known as the qubbat al-nasr (Dome of Victory), and a widespread scattering of human bones, which were lying in fleshless piles all across the plain when Ibn al-Athir visited the site a year later. The sultan boasted of having overseen the slaughter of 40,000 men in battle.48

  Those who survived the Battle of Hattin were at Saladin’s mercy, to be executed or imprisoned as their position dictated. Many were led away into captivity and sold into slavery. Ibn Shaddad heard of one gleeful Muslim combatant leading away thirty Christian soldiers tied together with a tent-rope.49 The price of slaves in the markets of Damascus plummeted due to oversupply. But some captives merited more than a few bezants in the public auctions. Gerard of Ridefort and several hundred Templars and Hospitallers were among those taken alive from the battlefield, in an astonishing parade of illustrious prisoners that included King Guy, Reynald of Châtillon, his stepson Humphrey of Toron and many others. A newsletter sent to Archumbald, master of the Hospitallers in Italy, lamented that more than 1,000 ‘of the better men were captured and killed, with the result that no more than two hundred of the knights or footsoldiers got away’.50

  On the evening of 4 July King Guy and Reynald of Châtillon were brought before Saladin, who was by then sitting in splendour in the porch of his royal tent. The sultan comforted the parched, defeated and terrified king and gave him a cup of iced julep (rose-water) to quench his thirst. This was both a kindness between rulers and a display of hospitality that in the Arab tradition implied that the king’s life was now safe under Saladin’s protection. When Guy handed the cup to Reynald, Saladin’s demeanour shifted; he informed Reynald through a translator that he had not offered him the drink, and that he was therefore not yet safe. The two men were sent away to eat and find their lodgings, then brought back to the sultan’s presence. Guy was seated within the pavilion and forced to watch as Reynald was confronted face to face by Saladin, who had sworn an oath to be revenged upon him for an attack he had made on a Muslim caravan and his pirate raids on the Hijaz back in 1183.

  Saladin harangued the one-time prince of Antioch for his irreligion, treachery and impertinence, calling him names and rehearsing his many misdeeds. He told him that the only way he could save his life was by converting to Islam – an offer he knew Reynald would refuse. When the grandstanding was over the sultan stood, drew his scimitar and swept it into the gnarled veteran’s neck. His intention was to take Reynald’s head off, but in his excitement Saladin missed his mark, severing one of his arms at the shoulder. Reynald fell and servants rushed in, dragged the bleeding man from the tent and finished him off.51 Saladin looked to Guy and reassured him that he was safe from harm. It cannot have filled the terrified king with much confidence.

  Reynald’s death was a matter of personal vengeance for Saladin: the fulfilment of a deadly oath and a grudge held for years. His treatment of the Templars, however, was a matter of cold political and military calculation. The knights of the order, along with their Hospitaller counterparts, had fought with great distinction at Hattin, as was noted by more than one Muslim correspondent, and Saladin had no intention of letting them fight another day. ‘They were the fiercest fighters of all the Franks,’ wrote Ibn al-Athir, and their zealous commitment to holy war was a pillar of the Latin states’ defences.52 Just as he had wiped the Templar castle at Jacob’s Ford from the face of the earth, now he set about eradicating his prisoners.

  Imad al-Din reported that Saladin wished to ‘purify the land of these two unclean orders, whose practices are useless, who never give up their hostility and who have no use as slaves. The one and the other are the worst of the infidels.’53 A fat fee of fifty dinars per prisoner was offered to any Muslim who would bring a knight of the Temple or Hospital to the sultan. ‘He ordered that each would have his head cut off and be erased from the land of the living,’ wrote Imad al-Din.54

  A call went out to members of Saladin’s clerical entourage to carry out the sentence. Volunteers were drawn from mystics, Sufis, lawyers, scholars and ascetics, many of whom had never carried out such a deed in their lives. ‘Each of them asked the favour of executing a prisoner, drew his sword and rolled up his sleeve,’ recounted Imad al-Din. Saladin’s soldiers and emirs lined up beside him to watch the grotesque carnival. Then the brothers of the Temple and of the Hospital were beheaded one by one. Some of the amateurs cut swiftly and cleanly and were applauded. Others hacked away with blunt blades. ‘Others were ridiculous and had to be replaced,’ wrote Imad al-Din. All the while Saladin sat and smiled, his grin contrasting with the bleak scowls of the Christian brothers ending their days before him, butchered like sheep.

  ‘Not one of the Templars survived,’ wrote Saladin in his triumphant letter recounting his victory at Hattin. He was not totally accurate. A few years later a Templar knight turned up in Acre claiming not only to have escaped the field at Hattin, but to have made off with the True Cross and buried it for safekeeping, although he subsequently forgot where he had put it.55 Gerard of Ridefort, meanwhile, was spared the bungled cleaving of the Sufis. He was held for a time in a Damascus prison, before being ransomed back to the order at painfully high cost. Terricus led the order until Gerard’s release. When he assessed the human cost of the events that summer, he calculated that between the Springs of Cresson and the Horns of Hattin, 290 knights had been lost: a huge swathe of the Templars’ manpower in the east. This was only a fraction of the thousands of other men who had gone down with them, victims of the master’s thirst for martyrdom, which seemed to embrace everyone but himself.

  Hattin was a humiliating military defeat, a spiritual disaster and the beginning of the end for the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. By stripping the castles and towns of the Christian littoral of anyone who was capable of fighting, and marching them into the hellmouth at Hattin, King Guy had left the realm horribly vulnerable to a rapid assault, which was what Saladin now immediately undertook. In the three months after Hattin, his men swarmed over the leaderless Frankish lands like ants. In rapid succession they overran Tiberias and Acre, Sidon and Beirut, Haifa and Caesarea. Nazareth and
Bethlehem were lost and dozens more towns and castles fell, with only a handful of the greatest inland fortresses managing to hold out. Jerusalem’s port, Jaffa, was taken. Ascalon, won after such a struggle in the 1150s, was gone by September, as were Darum and Lydda. By the autumn every major stronghold in the kingdom of Jerusalem had been lost, with the exceptions of Tyre and Jerusalem itself. On 20 September Saladin arrived before the Holy City, ready to finish what he had begun.

  Jerusalem was by then in no position to hold its walls. Balian of Ibelin commanded a pathetic garrison composed of a handful of merchants and every male over the age of sixteen, who had been knighted for the purposes of mounting an honourable defence. It was completely inadequate. Saladin put his catapults and sappers to work immediately and after nine grim days in which the women of the city wept and shaved their children’s heads as penance for their sins, a breach was made. Balian of Ibelin sued for peace and on 30 September the city formally surrendered on the condition of a peaceful transfer of power with no massacres, and a forty-day amnesty for Christian citizens to buy their freedom before facing enslavement.

  Saladin made his formal entry to Jerusalem on Friday 2 October, the anniversary of Muhammad’s Night Journey, when the Prophet had travelled with the Angel Gabriel to what was now the Dome on the Rock on the place the Christians called Temple Mount. Straight away Saladin sent men up the great golden Dome. They tore down the cross that had been erected on it and, according to a letter sent to England by Brother Terricus, dragged it around the city for two days, ceremonially beating it for the people of the city to see.