The Templars
Page 23
Finally, in 1185 Henry II had begun to use the New Temple as a treasury, relying on the order as a bank. Coin, jewels and valuable trinkets were held in deposit on Fleet Street, making the New Temple a strongbox facility that complemented other nearby royal fortresses such as the Tower of London, a few miles to the east. The order had impressed Henry with the security of its buildings, and the king may also have appreciated the fact that the order had a permanent presence in almost every county of England, as well as most of the major realms of western Europe. Throughout his reign Henry II paid close attention to centralizing mechanisms in government, using his royal sheriffs to project the will and financial policies of his government into the farthest localities. His decision to start using the Order of the Temple as a bank suggested that he saw their potential as a wide-ranging body that could help him in his mission.
In 1188, having heard the news from Hattin, Henry tasked the Templars with helping to collect a levy known as the Saladin Tithe: a tax to raise emergency funds for a new crusade. With their intimate ties to the cause and their infrastructure all over England, the Templars were perfectly placed to go about collecting this money, and Henry trusted them to do it. Fitz Stephen had cause to discipline one unscrupulous brother, Gilbert of Ogerstan, who was caught skimming a personal profit from his tax collections, contravening the stern Templar rules against brothers having any money of their own. Otherwise their role seems to have been a success, for as the years passed and Henry’s crown passed to his successors, the Templars only grew in status and royal favour.
Henry’s son Richard had been instrumental in the Templars’ resurgence as a military force in the Holy Land. He was no less admiring of the order in his own kingdom: in the brief months between his accession as king and his departure for Acre, Richard had issued charters granting, confirming and formally guaranteeing the Templars’ possessions all over England and Wales, and exempting them from a whole raft of royal taxes imposed on landholders across the kingdom. Indeed, not only were they exempted from the crown’s routine impositions on local communities to support law and order, or for the repair of roads and bridges, or for garrisoning royal castles; they were also awarded a special grant of a mark of silver (i.e. two thirds of a pound or 160 pence) to be paid annually to the order by every sheriff in England.4 Their value to the king was so high that he was prepared to allow the Templars near-total immunity from the ordinary demands of royal government and taxation.
Having returned to England by way of captivity in Germany, Richard spent most of the rest of his reign fighting Philip Augustus over his landholdings in Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine. He died suddenly and shockingly in 1199: contracting blood poisoning after being hit by a crossbow bolt while besieging the castle of Châlus-Chabrol in the Limousin. But the cosy relationship between Templars and English kings would continue under Richard’s unlucky and generally despised brother and successor King John. The Templars were one of the few powerful groups in England whom John did not offend or alienate. He relied on them for day-to-day loans, and stayed at the New Temple for important festivals such as Easter. The Templars stood by him for more than five years when he quarrelled with the pope and England was placed under Interdict, and when John was forced in June 1215 to grant his subjects the famous charter of liberties known as Magna Carta. Brother Eymeric, then master of the order in England, was among its official witnesses, his name placed appropriately after the archbishops, bishops and abbots who also testified to the charter’s sealing, but before all the secular magnates.5
Not everyone in England was impressed by this cosy relationship between the Plantagenet kings and the knights of the Temple. A contemporary of Geoffrey Fitz Stephen’s at the court of Henry II, the chronicler Walter Map, devoted several pages of his long book De Nugis Curialium (Courtier’s Trifles) to a sketch of the Templars. Map knew of the Templars’ origins under Hugh of Payns, a man to whom he referred with grudging approval as ‘no coward’, a warrior with a ‘zeal for righteousness’ who prescribed ‘chastity and sobriety to his order’.6 Map did not deny that ‘kings and princes came to think that the object of the order of the Temple was good and its way of life honourable’ and recognized that ‘by the help of popes and patriarchs’ the Templars had been granted high blessing as ‘the defenders of Christendom’ and ‘loaded... with immense wealth’.7 Yet he had his doubts. Given that he was attached to the royal court, which travelled ceaselessly around England, Normandy, Maine and Poitou – all areas where one might stumble across a tract of Templar land or a thriving Templar house – it was easy to see why.
‘Nowhere save in Jerusalem are they in poverty,’ Map wrote. Perhaps he was thinking of the omnipresence of Templar officials across the Plantagenet lands, with regional commanders in the duchies of Aquitaine and Normandy whose authority superseded the notional boundaries between different lordships. Henry II had struggled all his life to exercise rule across the traditionally hostile territories of Gascony, Anjou and Brittany, all of which had different traditions of rule and historical allegiances – yet a single Templar master (the master of Aquitaine) ruled over all three jurisdictions without apparent contradiction or difficulty, marshalling resources and collecting alms, rents and private taxes.8 Equally Map may have had personal matters in mind. The grand Templar house at Garway in Herefordshire, not far from his own birthplace in the Welsh borders, was built with a Holy Sepulchre-style round nave and sustained by 2,000 acres of fertile Welsh borderland.9 This was a very long way indeed from the ideal of Cistercian-style poverty which the order had once espoused.
Among Map’s other grumbles was his objection to the inherent contradiction of the new knighthood, in which men ‘take the sword to protect Christendom, which Peter was forbidden to take to defend Christ’. At root, he simply loathed the idea that the holy city of Jerusalem was defended by homicidal knights. ‘There Peter was taught to ensue peace by patience: who taught these [Templars] to overcome force by violence I know not.’10
In this Map was not alone. His contemporary John of Salisbury, a diplomat at the papal court in Rome, also believed that the basic tenet of Templar existence – the concept of the warrior bound by a religious oath – was an unholy contradiction. John despised the fact that the Templars were not subject to the proper authority of local bishops, and suspected them to be engaged in abominable sin: ‘when they convene in their lairs late at night, after speaking of virtue by day they shake their hips in nocturnal folly and exertion,’ he wrote.11 Likewise, the learned abbot Isaac of L’Etoile, a Cistercian monk from Poitou, saw the Templars as a creeping perversion of the Cistercian ideal. St Bernard had praised the Templars as ‘a new knighthood’. Isaac begged to differ: ‘a new monstrosity’ was his verdict.12
Fortunately for the order, this view was not shared by the pope or by any of the great western monarchs who protected it and made use of its services. For those who wielded power, the Templars combined martial prowess with spiritual prestige and global connections. For this reason, Templar knights were to be found among the inner circle of every pope after the accession of Alexander III in 1159, serving the holy father in his private rooms as a chamberlain. Alexander III also employed a pair of Templars named Bernardo and Francone to look after his financial affairs: testament to the business know-how for which the order was becoming famous.13
In France and its vassal states the Templars were just as close – perhaps even closer – to the crown. There had long been direct contact between the French king and Templar officials in the east, dating back to the Second Crusade. By the end of the twelfth century that relationship had deepened and brothers based at the massive Temple complex just outside the Paris city walls were ready visitors to the royal palace on the Île de la Cité. In 1202 a Templar brother called Haimard, a resident of the Paris Temple, was appointed treasurer to the crown, an arrangement that benefited both parties equally. The Templars gained enormous prestige and political influence from the beginning of a tradition would last for more than a cent
ury. France gained the most modern accounting system in Europe, consolidating all royal income and expenditure through a single set of books, allowing careful scrutiny and management on a scale seen nowhere among their neighbours.14 The French king’s heavy reliance on Templar expertise was mimicked by his subjects. Across the realm, men and women sought Templar expertise in raising loans, guarding treasure, keeping charters, treaties and wills, and transferring funds over long distances.
As the order grew more famous and respected and useful to king and country, it was little surprise that its possessions flourished. In Marseilles, on the Mediterranean coast, a lucrative dock was established, where in 1216 the Templars were granted special favoured access to the harbour and allowed toll-free and unrestricted access for their ships. These went to provision their brothers in the east with horses, arms, coin and other supplies and also profited from taking pilgrims and merchants to the Holy Land. The Templars of Marseilles were able to offer this valuable service because the order had started to commission and maintain its own vessels, rather than relying on the shipping magnates of Venice, Genoa and other Italian seafaring cities, who were traditionally dominant in maritime transport across the Mediterranean.
Templar properties and houses sprawled from north of Normandy to the Pyrenees. The order was well provided in their traditional heartland of Champagne, where successive counts had allowed the brethren extraordinary freedom to build up their interests. They were granted the right to hold properties and titles of any sort, stopping short only of full lordships. In busy merchant towns like Provins the Templars owned multiple houses and levied heavy taxes on local enterprises including abbatoirs and tanneries, where animal hides were worked into leather. They took a slice of wool production and weaving; charged for the use of mills, oven space and permissions to fish rivers; leased vineyards to winemakers and even owned a couple of fruit stalls in the town centre. Their own, directly managed lands yielded wine and cereal crops.15 All over France the order was collecting rents and tolls, and making a profit on the fruits of their own land. They were by now major feudal lords, and thousands of men and women lived in various forms of bonded servitude on Templar land, owing by ancient custom the sweat of their labour for a fixed number of days per year, or being compelled to present as rent in kind a fixed number of cows, chickens, crops, or eggs.
This situation was replicated across the Christian west. In Italy, the Templar presence had spread rapidly throughout the peninsula as far south as Sicily, where there were major preceptories in Messina and throughout the island. In Aragon – where the Templars’ long history stretched back to the days of Alfonso the Battler – the order owned palatial manors, vineyards and olive groves as well as a portfolio of residential and commercial property. The charter register of the Templar house in Huesca, in northern Aragon, contained records of transactions by which the Templar brothers had bought orchards, wineries, shops and houses. They received pious gifts which sometimes extended to every living possession of Christian penitents who declared that they donated out of their ‘fear [of] the pains of hell and wish to see the joys of Paradise’.16 The brothers would pray regularly for the souls of those who made them their heirs: the better the gift, the more frequent the prayers.
Just as in France and England, this acquisition of land and property in Spain’s Christian kingdoms went along with an elevated political profile for the order. In Aragon this peaked in 1213 when a new king, James I, came to the throne as a five-year-old, following the death of his father Peter II on the battlefield. Young James was entrusted first to the care of the pope, but straight away the holy father arranged for him to be raised by William of Montredon, the master of the Templars in Spain and Provence. James was kept safe for four years from the bloody factional warfare that had killed his father, walled up at the impenetrable Templar fortress in Monzón: a massive hilltop castle compound protected by thick, red angular stone walls and towers, inside which was a preceptory that more closely resembled a private city. When he had reached the age of nine, James began slowly to be introduced to government in Saragossa and the Templars released him back into the world. James I was lukewarm about his time under Templar supervision, writing in his autobiography that while he was held at Monzón his father’s lands were mortgaged ‘to Jews and Saracens’, and ended up badly mismanaged. By the time he was nine years old, he recalled that he could not ‘be held any longer at Monzón, so greatly did we desire to leave’.17 But the order had performed a profoundly important duty. The fate of a king and a kingdom had been placed squarely in their hands and the fact that James grew up to be one of the most successful of the Reconquista kings was appropriate to his formative years spent in the company of Templar knights.
As an adult, James I maintained his close links with the order, although he did not lavish them with the overt favouritism that they received in England and France. The war against the Almohads continued throughout most of his sixty-three-year reign, and the king proved himself one of the great crusader kings of the western theatre, relying heavily on both Templars and Hospitallers in his campaigns. With Templar encouragement and a good deal of military help, between 1229 and 1235 James conquered the islands of Mallorca, Menorca and Ibiza from the semi-independent Almohad ruler Abu-Yahya: a huge military undertaking that involved thousands of troops on both sides and protracted siege warfare. In the invasion of Mallorca the Templars provided around 100 knights, several transport boats and plenty of strategic advice, for which they were rewarded with a share in the island as it was divided up between the many groups who helped conquer it – although this was not equal to the one-fifth of all lands they helped conquer that had been promised to them in 1143 when Alfonso I’s will was finally settled. Nevertheless, the Templars of Aragon continued to assist the king in his war of Christian conquest: when he turned his attention to invading Valencia he had twenty Templar knights and a commander in his army. In 1238 James drove out the Moors of Valencia and began colonizing the surrounding area to form a new kingdom, with himself as king. The Templars were handily rewarded, with a house in the city, gardens and farmland – although again their gains fell way below the one-fifth threshold they thought they had a right to expect.18 The conquest of Valencia was also a mixed blessing for the order: its completion in 1244 meant that Aragon had sealed off its final frontier with the forces of Islam, reducing the urgency of their mission in the kingdom. Although the Templars kept command of some formidable castles, their role was set to diminish from its twelfth-century peak. They nevertheless remained a much more prominent presence in Aragon that elsewhere in the Spanish kingdoms, particularly Castile and León, where the smaller, native military orders were preferred to the supranational giants who owed their name and sent their wealth to the Temple and the Hospital in Jerusalem.
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Among the many princes and potentates in Christendom who did value the Templars, enrich them, use their services and inoculate them against the grumblings of the late twelfth century’s waspish court writers and priggish abbots, few were so energetic in their support for the order as Pope Innocent III. Born Lotario dei Conte di Segni, Innocent assumed the papacy on 8 January 1198, before his fortieth birthday, and ruled over the church with all the fearsome force of his outsized personality until his death in 1216. He was a great church reformer, the scourge of those monarchs (such as King John of England) who did not fully respect the authority of the Holy See, and a whole-hearted advocate of the church’s militant mission in the east.
Encouragingly for the Christians, Saladin died at dawn on 3 March 1193, following a ‘bilious fever’ which lasted for around a fortnight. He was fifty-five or fifty-six years old, and in his astonishing career he had changed the whole shape of politics in Syria and Egypt, establishing his Ayyubid dynasty and creating a legend that would live on for centuries. Saladin’s biographer Ibn Shaddad wrote that ‘the world was overwhelmed by such a sense of loss as God alone could comprehend’.19
That sentiment did not extend
to Innocent III. Saladin had done more damage to the crusading movement than any other man – and he had died without ever loosening his grip on Jerusalem or returning the great relic of the True Cross that had been kept at the Holy Sepulchre and was once the pride of the Latin church. In 1202–4 Innocent launched the Fourth Crusade, intending to attack Jerusalem by way of Egypt to take adavantage of the confusion in the Ayyubid world caused by the sultan’s death. During Saladin’s lifetime he had divided up his empire into regional fiefdoms governed by various relatives: Saladin’s eldest son al-Afdal managed the lands around Damascus; his second son al-Aziz Uthman held sway in Egypt; and his third son al-Zahir Ghazi controlled Aleppo and northern Syria. The sultan’s brother al-Adil was based at Kerak in the Transjordan. On Saladin’s death this diffusion of power created a tussle for overall supremacy which would rumble on for many years to come.
With the Ayyubid empire momentarily in disarray, the Fourth Crusade sought to seize the initiative. Unfortunately for Innocent it was a fiasco in which European troops and a Venetian fleet set out for the Holy Land but instead diverted to Constantinople, which they ruthlessly and greedily looted before installing a new Latin ruler, replacing the Byzantine Greek emperor Alexios III Angelos with the count of Flanders, who assumed the imperial title as Baldwin I. Despite this embarrassing failure, Innocent remained passionately concerned with the fate of the Latin Christians of the east and devoted to the idea that they might still win back Jerusalem. Innocent saw the Templars in the east as manning the front line of the Holy Land’s defence and, in common with the ruling class of the day, viewed their brothers in the west as invaluable administrators and diplomats.