by Dan Jones
If Saladin and his generals had underestimated Richard before, the siege of Acre and battle at Arsuf now convinced them to amend their thinking. As the crusaders pushed steadily south towards Jaffa, Saladin sent word ahead to Ascalon, instructing its Muslim population to destroy the city’s defences, burn their houses, shops and granaries, pack up their homes and leave. He preferred to ruin the great coastal city himself than allow it to fall as Acre had, and risk its being used once again as a Christian base from which to threaten Egyptian shipping and launch raids on the roads to Cairo. Released from duty, troops defending Ascalon were redeployed: ‘the strength of the Muslim forces was preserved for the protection of Jerusalem,’ wrote Ibn Shaddad.37
By mid-October the crusader army had reached Jaffa. The march the Templars had shepherded down the coast had been remarkably successful, retaking a valuable clutch of towns on the littoral and securing a morale-boosting victory in battle without devastating casualties. Now attention on both sides turned to Jerusalem. Diplomatic exchanges between Richard and Saladin via the sultan’s brother al-Adil stressed the sanctity of the city to both sides. Richard promised that the Christians would fight to the very last man to win it back, although he also hinted that the return of the True Cross might mollify him in the meantime. Saladin retorted by reminding him that the Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock were the places where Muhammad had encountered angels. He said his inclination was to destroy the cross, an act which would be pleasing to God, but that he was holding on to it for a while in case it proved useful in some way in the future. The closest the sides came to a settlement was an extraordinary proposal by which all Christian settlements on the west bank of the River Jordan would be handed over into the trust of the Templars and Hospitallers, under the ultimate rule of a joint monarchy to be created in Jerusalem under al-Adil and Richard’s sister Joanna. This was a far-sighted proposal but rather before its time; it foundered on Joanna’s indignant refusal to consider joining her flesh with a Muslim, and al-Adil’s corresponding lack of interest in converting to Christianity.38
As it transpired, this high-minded but futile exchange was as close as Richard and the warriors of the Third Crusade ever came to Jerusalem. In December a large force of pilgrims and soldiers set out on the road inland from Jaffa in the hope of storming the city and visiting the Holy Sepulchre, ‘for they had an indescribable yearning to see the city of Jerusalem and complete their pilgrimage’.39 Abysmal weather broke up the expedition, as heavy winds and rain killed pack animals, rusted armour and rotted perishable food. The crowd made it as far as Betenoble (Bayt-Nuba), on the road from Ramla, from where Jerusalem loomed tantalizingly in the distance. But as their destination crept closer, Richard’s advisors cooled on the idea of attempting to besiege the most heavily defended city in the Holy Land, for which Saladin had made it plain he would fight to the death.
According to a Christian chronicle, the Templars and Hospitallers counselled Richard in the strongest terms against attempting to storm Jerusalem, arguing that he lacked the numbers required to besiege the city while also fighting a relieving force, and that even if they succeeded, they would find themselves helpless to hold what they had won. Richard was commanding an army of pilgrims, whose express intention was to see the Holy Sepulchre and get straight back to the west, where many had left unattended families, estates and business interests. Unless the men among them joined the military orders en masse – an impossible prospect – they could not be expected to dig in for the difficult and potentially lifelong mission of holding Jerusalem, along with every other recaptured town west of the Jordan. It would be far better, they argued, to concentrate on the more realistic task of rebuilding Ascalon.
After some deliberation, Richard agreed. He turned his army around and headed back to the coast. Groans of misery greeted the announcement of his decision, but Richard’s mind was made up. His thoughts were beginning to turn to England and to his vast patrimonial lands in northern and western France. Over Easter of 1192 a steady stream of reports began to arrive from home, telling him that his kingdom was under threat from Philip Augustus, who was conspiring with Richard’s devious younger brother John. The king was also suffering from recurring bouts of illness and becoming increasingly bogged down in the labyrinthine politics of the Latin states. Once Easter had passed he found himself implicated in the violent death of the Pisan magnate Conrad of Montferrat, who had managed to sideline Guy of Lusignan after the death of Queen Sibylla in 1190. Conrad had had himself elected as the nominal king of Jerusalem, only to be murdered by Assassins at Acre on 28 April 1192, three short days after his formal acceptance of the crown.
This was not the sort of business for which Richard had travelled to the east. In June he agreed to have one more tilt at Jerusalem, but once again, having reached Betenoble the Templars and Hospitallers convinced him that it was folly to go any further. After an aborted plan to invade Egypt, on 2 September 1192 Richard agreed to a three-year truce with Saladin, which froze territorial gains as they stood and granted Christian pilgrims unmolested access to pray at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Five and a half weeks later, on 9 October, Richard boarded his ship at Acre and set out for home. As his galley left the harbour, those on board would have been able to see the towers of the Templar house receding behind them. For some in the king’s company the sight may have had a special poignancy. According to one account, Richard attempted to travel back to England incognito, disguised in Templar uniform and surrounded by a bodyguard composed of Templar brothers.40 If so, this was hardly surprising. The knights of the Temple had been with him all the way. They meant to remain with him until the end.
*
Richard’s journey home was almost as eventful as his crusade. He had made several dangerous enemies during his time in the east, among them Duke Leopold V of Austria, whom he had insulted and humiliated during the division of spoils after the fall of Acre. A white-mantled Templar disguise was not sufficient to keep the Lionheart from falling into Leopold’s hands when he was shipwrecked in the Adriatic several weeks after leaving Acre. Richard would spend nearly eighteen months in prison at Trifels Castle, held hostage by Leopold’s overlord Henry VI, the Holy Roman Emperor, who demanded – and received – a ransom of £100,000 for his release, a sum roughly equivalent to the cost of an entire crusade.
None of this, however, could detract from the general sense that Richard the Lionheart had saved the Franks of Outremer. He had arrived in the Holy Land as a new king with everything to prove. He left as a living legend: hated by some, revered by others, feared by all. His name would quickly become synonymous with the Christians’ desire to win back Jerusalem at almost any cost. Fifty years after his death, Muslim mothers were said to quiet their unruly children by saying: ‘Hush! Or I will send king Richard of England to you.’41
Saladin, nearing the end of his life, was deeply struck by his opponent’s chivalry and military skill, and with good reason. Brutal as Richard could be, he was an inspirational commander who valued martial skill, religious zeal and discipline, and knew how to deploy it to best effect. This had direct implications for the Templars. Richard’s pragmatic decision to co-opt both military orders into his direct sphere of command had helped secure his victory. His deployment of the Templars for the purposes they were created and willingness to heed their advice restored stability and pride to the order following Gerard of Ridefort’s impetuous and disastrous administration. Robert of Sablé died in 1193, a year after Richard’s departure, but his appointment had been an unqualified success, providing purpose and discipline at a moment of crisis. This mattered just as much back in England as it did in Outremer, as the order continued to enjoy the patronage of the crown.
There was one more, very tangible way in which Richard had altered the world in which the Templars operated. During the king’s final year in the Holy Land, he and his protégé Robert of Sablé struck a short-lived deal that would have long and quite unforeseen consequences for the order. It centred upon t
he island of Cyprus, which Richard had conquered from the Byzantine governor Isaac Comnenus shortly before he sailed into Acre in 1191. Having taken the island, Richard needed some way to run it. He alighted on the idea of selling it to the Templars.
In 1191 this made a good deal of sense: the order had lost dozens of castles and towers to Saladin’s conquests, and no longer had a permanent base; Master Robert, the man authorized to make such a decision, was Richard’s creation and the order, although depleted in manpower, was still cash-rich from its steadily growing estates in the west. The two men agreed a fee of 100,000 gold dinars. The Templars advanced the king a down payment of 40,000 and sent twenty knight-brothers and around 100 other fighting men, commanded by Reynald Bochart, to rule Cyprus from the citadel in Nicosia, the largest city in the centre of the island.
Bochart found on Cyprus a population that was unwilling to be ruled. One chronicle recorded that the island’s inhabitants ‘could not bear the indignities the Templars inflicted on them’. Most likely this meant that the order attempted to levy stiff taxes to raise the 60,000 dinars they still owed the king of England. Whatever the case, in April 1192, while Richard was negotiating Jerusalem’s fate with Saladin and al-Adil, a major rebellion broke out on Cyprus. The castle at Nicosia was besieged and on Easter Sunday, of all days, the Templars were forced to fight their way out with cavalry charges that left blood running in the streets and trickling into the River Pedieos.42 They then rode out into the fields and mountains on a punitive rampage of waste and death. Bochart and his men had failed and the order had overreached. Richard was prevailed upon to dispose of Cyprus in some other way.
His solution was to transfer the island to Guy of Lusignan. In exchange he asked Guy to compensate the Templars for their losses and to assume the remainder of their debt. Guy was adrift following the death of Sibylla and the subsequent loss of his crown. Marginalized by Conrad of Montferrat in a poisonous factional conflict, there was a certain attraction in removing him from the Latin mainland. Guy had been present when Richard first conquered Cyprus, and he was willing to hold it as a fiefdom of Richard’s western empire. Installing him in place of the Templars was a solution that suited everyone. Guy was once more a king, Richard was rid of an island he had conquered but could not rule, and the Order of the Temple could retain valuable, revenue-generating estates on Cyprus without the onerous responsibility of government.
* It would have been only slight consolation for Gerard to see that the Hospitallers’ house, with its apartments, church and wards for treating the sick, had been converted by Saladin into a school.
† Henry II died a miserable death on 6 July 1189 with his two surviving sons, Richard and John, in rebellion against him.
13
‘Nowhere in Poverty’
Geoffrey Fitz Stephen’s new book looked splendid. Nearly 100 sheets of parchment, carefully cut and assembled by one of London’s finest bookbinders, were delicately stitched into a pair of small beechwood boards, each covered in soft brown leather. Weird and wonderful decorations were stamped on the leather: lions and herons, legendary winged snake-dragons known as wyverns, tiny flowers and intricate leaves. Between them all was a picture of the Biblical king David, sitting cross-legged with his crown on his head, playing a harp. Metal clasps held the book closed and a little tab of parchment poked out from the base of its spine, so Fitz Stephen could pull it from the shelf at his leisure, and inspect its tight, neat lines of clerical handwriting.
When he did so, row upon row of abbreviated Latin script leapt off the page to form a pleasing image of a flourishing business, of which Fitz Stephen was the chief executive officer. This was not a large volume, but it was an incredibly valuable one – a census of landed property that was like a private Domesday Book.* It described in minute detail all the possessions of the Order of the Temple in England, where Fitz Stephen was the master.1 The pages listed the many fine things that fell under his care: manor houses and homesteads, sheep-farms and water-mills, churches, markets, forests and fairs, sprawling estates and isolated villages where dozens of men worked in serfdom, owing compulsory fieldwork during harvest season to the order in return for their own small plots of land. This was a property portfolio accumulated over more than half a century from pious donations and smart business deals. It included hundreds of interests scattered across England: from Connerton, in the far south-west of Cornwall, to Linthorpe, a sparse hamlet in the far north-east at the mouth of the River Tees, where a century and a half earlier Vikings had still landed their longships. Between these two extremes Templar properties could be found in almost every county of England. Some were truly magnificent, such as the vast manor at Cressing in Essex, or the wealthy preceptory at Bruer in Lincolnshire, where a graceful compound of buildings spilled outwards around another large, round-naved church. Others were ordinary city houses rented out to tenants or simple and unglamorous patches of farmland in the quiet countryside. The power of all these properties lay in their combination, for together this was a proud and profitable empire.
Besides being the master of the Templars in England Fitz Stephen was a well-connected aristocratic figure of high social standing who counted among his friends bishops and abbots, princes and kings. He had taken charge of the order towards the end of Henry II’s reign, around 1180, and his leadership over the decade that followed was something of a coming-of-age period for the order in England. For two generations there had been Templar houses in the realm, populated by brothers praying and working on behalf of their benefactors and their warrior colleagues in the east. Under Fitz Stephen, however, the English Templars had cemented their special status as a favoured order whose services were seen as indispensable by the crown.
Knights of the Temple had been involved in England’s great affairs of the realm almost since Hugh of Payns’ visit in the 1120s. During the civil war known as the Anarchy, both sides had sought Templar favour. In 1153 when the Anarchy was resolved by a treaty granting the English crown to the future Henry II, a Templar knight by the name of Oto (probably the master) was an official witness. Under Henry, Templar knights had been seconded to the king’s court, where they worked as diplomats, a role in which the international nature of the order gave them a certain neutrality and mutual acceptability. When Henry arranged a complex marriage deal between one of his infant daughters and the son of the French king Louis VII, three Templar knights had taken delivery of the castles forming part of the child-bride’s dowry. In 1164, when Henry quarrelled with Thomas Becket, his truculent archbishop of Canterbury, the then master of the English Temple, Richard of Hastings, helped mediate. When Henry’s loose and angry words resulted in Becket’s murder before the altar of Canterbury Cathedral in December 1170, and the king was forced to pay a large fine in penance, he deposited it with the Order of the Temple, who sent the money east to be spent on troops for the Hattin campaign. Henry had appointed a Templar, Brother Roger, as his almoner – the man responsible for ensuring that charity was distributed to the poor on the king’s behalf. His barons followed suit, including the glamorous knight-turned-statesman William Marshal, who also appointed a brother as his almoner and would take Templar vows on his deathbed in 1219.2 England’s Templar masters – men like Richard of Hastings and Geoffrey Fitz Stephen – were drawn from well-to-do dynasties whose sons were used to going into ministerial service for the crown. The work they did on the king’s behalf made the order a visible and reliable part of public life.
Fitz Stephen ran the order from plush London headquarters, whose grandeur reflected the esteem in which the English Templars were held, and the wealth this allowed them to amass. Originally they occupied the ‘Old’ Temple in the London suburb of Holborn, to the north-west of the thick-walled square mile of the City. In 1161 this valuable piece of real estate was sold to the bishop of Lincoln and the Templars’ central convent moved half a mile or so south, where the brothers built the ‘New’ Temple at a fashionable riverside address on Fleet Street. Here they had access to t
he busy waterways of the Thames, useful when the fastest way to travel to and from the City was by boat. On the road side, the New Temple was perched directly on the main thoroughfare connecting the mercantile heart of the City with Westminster, where the palace and the towering abbey were a hub for royal and religious business.
Fitz Stephen’s predecessors had constructed a large monastic compound, with halls for the brothers who lived there, stables, a cemetery and an orchard. An earth-and-stone wall ran around the perimeter, and at the heart of it all was a round-naved church built from Caen stone – limestone quarried in Normandy and envied across northern Europe as the finest building material that money could buy. The circular nave of the New Temple church almost gleamed as the sun moved over it. The architecture was devout and purposeful: its shape deliberately echoed the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, a reminder of the crusading mission of the Temple, and an implicit boast of the order’s wealth and global reach. It was also competitive. At the same time as the Templars were building their round church at the New Temple, the Hospitallers were constructing a round church in their base at Clerkenwell, to the north-west of London.3
1185 had been a golden year for the English Templars in their new headquarters. Firstly, the compilation of Geoffrey Fitz Stephen’s inquest into Templar possessions had begun: commissioners sent back reports of diligent investigations the length and breadth of the country to the New Temple for sifting, sorting and transcribing on the pages of the master’s beautifully ornamented record book. On top of this, Heraclius, patriarch of Jerusalem, had visited England.† As one of the greatest churchmen on earth, Heraclius’ presence in London was a marvel in itself. Although his considerable powers of persuasion had failed to convince Henry II to take up the throne of Jerusalem, Heraclius nevertheless contributed fruitfully to the English branch of the Templars by consecrating their round church at the New Temple. This honour would only have been bettered if the pope himself had left Rome to bestow his blessing.