by Dan Jones
Next they moved into the Templars headquarters in the al-Aqsa mosque. ‘The Aqsa mosque was filled with pigs and filth,’ wrote Imad al-Din, ‘and obstructed with buildings from the time of the infidel, this race of perdition, unjust and criminal.’56 The sultan’s forces duly set to work purifying it, knocking down walls and buildings that had been put up during the Templars’ tenancy, and washing the entire building from bottom to top with rose-water. On 9 October Friday prayers rang out in four directions from the Temple Mount, and a sermon was preached by an imam from Damascus, Ibn al-Zaki, celebrating the works of Saladin and calling on all Muslims to continue the jihad.
Fifty Templars who were evicted from their headquarters were allowed to form a guard to escort Christian refugees out of Jerusalem to settle wherever they could find a safe new home. Most made for the county of Tripoli, where the coastal city of Tyre was holding out as a bastion of Latin defiance. The brothers divided themselves into a vanguard and rearguard of twenty-five knights each and marched the bedraggled citizens north, every step carrying them further away from the city of Christ’s Passion, into hostile and dangerous country.57 It was a pitiful reversal of everything the order stood for.
Sixty-eight years had passed since Hugh of Payns and his fellow knights had gathered around the Holy Sepulchre to imagine into existence a new order that would defend the Holy City and protect its Christian pilgrims. It had taken Saladin less than fifteen weeks to massacre its members, imprison their master, seize their castles, overrun the holy sites they had sworn to protect and turn almost everything the order stood for into dust.
It was hard to avoid the conclusion that God had abandoned His soldiers.
* Now identified as ‘Ain Gozeh. See Abel, P.F., Géographie de la Palestine I (Paris: 1938), 445.
PART III
Bankers
1189–1260
‘Come out, heavily or lightly armed, and fight for God’s cause with your money and your lives’
Ibn Wasil, quoting Qur’an IX, 411
12
‘The Pursuit of Fortune’
The international headquarters of the Order of the Temple, once a vast palace in Jerusalem, was now a tent on Mount Toron, surrounded by other tents billeting the great and good of the Christian Holy Land.2 From their humble beginnings, the Templars were humble once more: dozens of their castles lost, hundreds of men dead and their mission in disarray. The brothers took a deep pride in their ability to seek out and endure humiliating hardship.3 Between 1187 and 1189, however, humility and hardship had been thrust upon them. There was no avoiding the evidence of their demise: from their vantage point on Mount Toron they could look down on Acre and be reminded daily of everything they had lost.
The rooftops of Acre were a tight-packed jumble of workshops, houses, churches, fortified towers and commercial properties clustered around a central citadel, bordered to the south and west by the sea and encircled on the landward side by a strong stone wall, beyond which stretched a sandy plain. Acre was one of the largest ports in the Holy Land: the leading commercial harbour on the coast. The city had dazzled the Spanish Muslim writer and traveller Ibn Jubayr, inspiring him to quote from the Qur’an when he recorded that ‘Acre is the capital of the Frankish cities in Syria [and] the unloading place of “ships reared aloft in the seas like mountains”’. Although Ibn Jubayr deplored the stinking streets, filthy with rubbish and excrement, and railed against the conversion of ancient mosques into Christian places of worship, he went so far as to say that ‘in its greatness [it] resembles Constantinople’.4
At the time of Ibn Jubayr’s visit, in the autumn of 1184, before the tumult of Hattin, this magnificent city had been among the most important Christian strongholds in Outremer. Now, in the autumn of 1189, it was occupied by the armies of Islam, as was virtually every other once-Christian settlement below the Sea of Galilee, with the exception of Tripoli and the impregnable island fortress of Tyre. Friday prayers rang out in the place of church bells, and Muslim guards peered suspiciously from the towers punctuating Acre’s stone defences. There was plenty to occupy their attention, for in the summer of 1189 a coalition of Christian troops had begun to assemble, massing forces outside the walls of Acre with one simple aim: to take it back.
Among the Templar brothers living beneath canvas on Mount Toron was Gerard of Ridefort. For nearly a year after Hattin he had been held in a Damascus prison cell, but in June 1189 he had been released as part of a bargain struck between Saladin and King Guy. The king was set loose in exchange for the surrender of Ascalon and he was allowed to choose ten knights to accompany him. The list he came up with included one of his brothers, Aimery of Lusignan, and Gerard of Ridefort, master of the Templars. The tariff for Gerard’s liberty was set high: the order was forced to give up its castle at Gaza. That they did so spoke more to their sense of honour than to military strategy, for while masters were replaceable, Gaza was not. An expensively assembled military hub controlling the routes between Egypt and the Palestinian coast was now in Muslim hands; it was a heavy price to pay.
Still, what was done was done, and Gerard was free. When he returned to power he displaced the acting leader Terricus, who disappeared from the central hierarchy of the order for nearly ten years, perhaps feeling that in surviving Hattin and helping to deal with the aftermath his duty had been done. Gerard was quick to revert to his customary leadership style: belligerence, whatever the cost. There was plenty to animate him. Looking down from Mount Toron towards occupied Acre he would have recognized the Templars’ large palace in the south-western quarter of the city, now home to a lawyer friend of Saladin’s by the name of Issa el-Hakkari. Its loss was intolerable.
Both the Hospitallers and the Templars had kept fine properties in Acre, as befitted their status in the Holy Land. The Hospitallers’ house was in the city, while the Templar house was built on a squat spit of land jutting out into the Mediterranean near an L-shaped sea-wall that sheltered ships at anchor in the inner harbour. The German pilgrim Theoderic wrote that the house was ‘very large and beautiful’, referring perhaps to the large Romanesque arches in its formidable stone walls.5 But it was more than beautiful. Thanks to its prime location in the busiest merchant stronghold, it was the order’s most important commercial hub in the east. The Templars’ commercial interests in Acre were overseen by a high-ranking sergeant known as the commander (or preceptor) of the shipyard at Acre, and it was through him that the principal supplies of goods, munitions and manpower from the west reached the Latin states.6
Large underground tunnels had been dug, running nearly 400 metres (1,300 ft) from the palace cellars, beneath the Pisan quarter to the city’s customs house, known as the Court of the Chain. Here clerics sat on stone benches spread with blankets, accounting for revenue received using pens dipped in ebony ink-stands ornamented in gold.7 To ensure a secure passage to and from this gilded counting-house the order had dug a sophisticated transit shaft, which split at one point into two parallel tunnels, overlooked by a guardroom cut into the rock, where a sergeant brother could sit and look through a metal grille to monitor the traffic passing below.8
To the north of the main palace, in a suburb known as Montmusard, were two more areas belonging to the order: the ‘Templar quarter’ and a large block of stables. Taken together, the brothers’ possessions in Acre were substantially larger than those in Jerusalem. Now all were in enemy hands. The lawyer Issa el-Hakkari had been given everything: their ‘houses, farms, land... crops and other property’.9 Under his management the main palace had been augmented with a large tower that protruded insolently above the city skyline, a visible provocation to Gerard of Ridefort and his comrades on Mount Toron.*
In the first week of October 1189 the Templars had been outside Acre for five weeks. Gerard had had a hand in bringing them there. Fresh out of jail, he had surveyed the wreckage of the Christian kingdom and urged on the king a policy of decisive action to strike back at Saladin. The losses of the Battle of Hattin, Jerusalem and the
True Cross had startled the Christian realms of the west into action and it was well known that the kings of England and France, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and many other illustrious nobles were planning a massive crusade – the biggest since 1096. Accompanied by King Guy’s brother Aimery of Lusignan he had argued that it would be disgraceful if these monarchs arrived and found the king of Jerusalem idle in his eviscerated realm. ‘It is much better that they should find that you have besieged a city’, the two men urged.10 Guy, always susceptible when his honour was impugned, had agreed.
The city he had settled on was Acre. A royal army, rounded up from the remaining rumps of Frankish territory in Antioch and around Tyre, eventually arrived there on 29 August 1189. Initially there were 600 knights, including a modest delegation of Templars, but the numbers had grown significantly. On the last day of August several boats full of Pisan troops had disembarked south of the city and set up camp on the beach. Ten days later fifty more ships had arrived, carrying thousands of Danish and Frisian crusaders commanded by the famous Flemish knight and nobleman James of Avesnes, one of the most respected and feared military leaders in northern Europe. In late September Guy’s enemy, the Pisan nobleman Conrad of Montferrat, who was agitating to replace Guy as king, had brought 1,000 knights and 20,000 infantry up from Tyre. Personal squabbles notwithstanding, this was now a very large Frankish force, capable of blockading Acre from the sea and manning a partial encirclement by land.
In response, Saladin had come to Acre with a sizeable army of his own. Just as the Christian army surrounded the city, so his troops took up positions in an even wider semi-circle, with a command post on a hill of its own, known as Tell al-‘Ayyadiya. From the first weeks of September the two sides skirmished with one another: Saladin’s men sought to maintain supply lines into Acre through weak spots in the Latins’ land blockade and ambushed foraging parties, while Guy’s men worked to keep them at bay. These were little more than exploratory jousts, but numbers on both sides were swelling, and all were well aware that they were moving towards a massive siege at Acre. The result would either be a brake on Saladin’s conquest of the Christian Holy Land, or another chapter in the sorry story of the Latin states’ slide towards oblivion.
On the evening of 3 October the Frankish commanders decided to make their first move against Saladin’s growing army. According to Ibn al-Athir’s chronicle, King Guy realized that although the sultan had a large force with him at Acre, many of his best troops were scattered in other important regions of his large dominions: some to the north in Antioch, others defending the Egyptian ports of Alexandria and Damietta, others watching carefully over the Christian city of Tyre to repel any possible attack on that front. There would be no better time to launch an assault on the army outside Acre, to cut supplies to the Muslims who were pinned down within the city walls. Guy ordered his army to prepare for a large manoeuvre the following day.
On the morning of 4 October, ‘like a plague of locusts, creeping across the face of the earth’ the Christian army assembled at the foot of Mount Toron and advanced across the plain at walking pace towards Saladin’s base on Tel al-‘Ayyadiya. The lighter infantry, armed with bows and crossbows, preceded ‘the main strength of the army... a brilliant sight with their horses and arms and various insignia’.11 Behind them came the elite mounted units: the royal guard, the Hospitallers led by their master Armengaud of Asp and the Templars, led by Gerard of Ridefort.
Carrying the black-and-white banner at the head of the company of brothers making their way slowly but purposefully across the dusty plains of Acre that morning was their recently appointed marshal, Geoffrey Morin.12 Previously the commander of the Templar house at Tyre, Geoffrey had been promoted to his new office shortly before Master Gerard’s release from prison.13 According to the protocols laid down in the Rule, Geoffrey rode with a personal guard of five to ten white-mantled knights, one of whom carried a spare banner in case the marshal’s was damaged or torn in battle.14 He was the most important Templar on the battlefield after Gerard, and the whole order grouped themselves around the two men.
The piebald banner was one of many flags flying as the large Christian army made their way across the plain of Acre, watched by Saladin’s forces. When it drew within charging distance, it was the piebald that took the lead. As the Christians came within striking distance of the Muslim camp, a signal went up and the infantry stopped marching. They parted in two, and out of the gap came the heavy cavalry, charging as one towards the enemy. Unwilling to stand in the way of barrelling horsemen, the troops stationed in front of Saladin’s base camp fell back, leaving the way to the royal tent open. Saladin went with them, and the Franks immediately fell on the defenceless positions, slicing through guy ropes, plundering what they could and killing anyone who stood in their way. The dead included the Muslim governor of Jerusalem, Saladin’s chamberlain Khalil al-Hakkari and a noted poet and scholar, Ibn Rawaha.15 According to one account of the battle, Saladin’s own tent was briefly seized by the count of Bar, a crusader who had recently arrived from the west, although it was apparently not destroyed.16
‘The knights of the Temple, who are second to none in renown and devoted to slaughter, had already charged through all the enemy lines,’ wrote an approving Christian chronicler. ‘If the rest... had pressed on after them and pursued the enemy with equal enthusiasm, that day they would have won a happy victory over the city and the war. But the Templars went too far in their pursuit of fortune and their own inclinations.’17 Not for the first time under Gerard of Ridefort’s leadership, boldness gave way to recklessness.
As Saladin’s army retreated and the Templars and their accompanying knights scooped up the booty left behind, no one noticed that a large party of armed citizens had crept out of an undefended gate in Acre and made their way around the back of the battlefield, joining up with some of the sultan’s troops who had initially retreated from the camp. Quietly they moved towards the place where the black-and-white flag advertised the Templars’ location. Then, without warning, they attacked.
Looking back, the Templars now realized that they were isolated from the rest of the army, which was busy engaging Saladin’s right flank. This meant they were now vulnerable to assault from all sides and cut off from any easy communication with their fellow Franks. They attempted to fight their way back to the field, but it was impossible. They were encircled. The only thing to do was to rally around the piebald banner and fight.
One chronicler had Gerard of Ridefort deliver a rousing speech as he assessed the grave trouble into which he had once again led his comrades: ‘Urged by his companions to flee so that he would not perish, he replied: “Never! It would be shame and scandal for the Templars. I would be said to have saved my life by running away and leaving my fellow knights to be slaughtered!”’18 This was literary invention but still it spoke to the master’s principled refusal to back away from danger. This was what had taken him hurtling towards 7,000 men at the Springs of Cresson, and crawling across the smoke-choked, bloodstained scrubland below the Horns of Hattin. He had escaped from both of those disasters, but he would not escape the plains of Acre.
As blades and lances flashed, horses fell and men died in panic, Gerard and his men were overrun. ‘The swords of God overwhelmed them from every side and not one of them escaped,’ wrote Ibn al-Athir. ‘Most were killed and the rest were taken prisoner. Among them was the master of the Templars whom Saladin had captured and freed.’19 This time there would be no prison, no ransom and no mercy: Gerard was summarily executed on the battlefield. ‘He fell slain with the slain,’ observed the Christian author of a chronicle known as the Itinerarium Peregrinorum.20 Somewhere behind him the piebald banner, the last, proud symbol of Templar resistance, was wobbling above its beleaguered defenders. Eventually it, too, fell, collapsing to the ground in the lifeless hands of Geoffrey Morin.
4 October 1189 was another dreadful day for the Latin warriors of the Holy Land. As the Templars were steadily but
chered, the rest of the army was dissolving into panic. Animals ran wild and men lost their nerve. ‘They put the enemy to flight, and were then conquered and fled back themselves,’ wrote a Christian chronicler, in disgust.21 Only a desperate rearguard organized by King Guy’s brother Geoffrey of Lusignan prevented the capture of Mount Toron. After several hours of brutal fighting, the battle drew to an exhausted close. The Franks had been beaten again, losing around 1,500 men, and seeing others stagger back to camp so disfigured by their injuries that their friends could not recognize them. Saladin’s men gathered up the bodies of their victims and dumped them into the nearby rivers; as the corpses rotted, the water ran foul. For those who remained alive outside Acre, it was clear that a long and terrible siege lay ahead. The promised reinforcements could not come soon enough for the Holy Land’s beleaguered defenders – nor, indeed, for the ragtag, leaderless rump of Templar knights who stared down from Mount Toron at their former palace and wondered if they would ever again see their flag raised above its roof.
*
A horribly injured sailor staggered through the packs of soldiers swarming outside the walls of Acre on his way to tell his sorry tale. It was 11 June 1191 and for the last four days the unlucky seaman had been held prisoner and tortured by a band of foreign invaders, who plucked him from the sea following a naval battle, leaving his shipmates flailing hopelessly in the waters all around him.22 The wretched man would have been better off drowning, for although alive he had been cruelly mutilated and sent to the citizens of Acre as an example of what happened to those who defied the armies of God.
The sailor was in one sense just another victim of the siege of Acre, which by June 1191 had been going for twenty-two months, claiming hundreds of lives through violent clashes on land and at sea, malnutrition and disease. Yet he was also a grisly symbol of something bigger. His grotesque injuries had been inflicted on him to advertise the arrival of a dangerous new player. This newcomer was ‘wise and experienced in warfare and his coming had a dread and frightening effect on the hearts of the Muslims’, wrote Ibn Shaddad.23 His great-grandfather was King Fulk I of Jerusalem, but he himself was the king of England, one of the fiercest fighters of his generation and a supporter of the Templars. He was tall, well proportioned and charismatic, with striking gold-red hair and an arm that seemed to have been made to swing a sword. History would know him as Richard Coeur-de-Lion: the Lionheart.