by Dan Jones
Innocent III protected and patronized the order with great zeal. He used Templar brothers as tax collectors, granted the order new privileges and issued papal bulls reconfirming the general protections it had enjoyed for decades. He described members of the military orders as ‘men of character and prudence’ and advised the clergy who went out preaching in favour of his ill-starred Fourth Crusade to always have a Templar and a Hospitaller brother with them.20 Over the course of his papacy he reiterated the Templars’ rights to collect tithes and immunity from tithes charged by other clergy. Innocent reaffirmed the Templars’ right to build their own churches, forbade any other Christians from harming the brothers or their possessions and exhorted the order to examine closely their new recruits to avoid a weakening of the Templars’ collective moral fibre (this was an important issue after Hattin, when there was a pressing need for new men, which threatened to dilute the quality of recruitment). He stepped in to overrule a sentence of excommunication on Girbert Eral, the Spaniard who succeeded Robert of Sablé as master of the order in 1194, and threatened anathema against anyone who dared to disobey Templar commands. Taken together this was a serious restatement of the order’s privilege and power and it did not go unobserved.
The Templars were a useful manifestation of Innocent’s vision of the church militant: ever-present, capable and experienced in the business of fighting the enemies of Christ. In turn, the pope was as good a patron as any of the secular kings of Christendom who had thus far made use of the order. By the time Innocent died in 1216 the Templars were stronger, richer and better connected than at any time in their history. It was true that most of their members and associates lived thousands of miles from the front line of the war against the Muslims of Syria and Egypt that had occupied the brothers in the east for almost a century, and that even in Europe only a small number were militarily active against the Almohads. Few lived the life originally envisaged by Hugh of Payns and St Bernard. Nevertheless, all had a part to play in either funding or fighting in the crusades. While the Templars were diversifying out of military activity into banking, estate management and international diplomacy, the order had seldom been so central to the crusading movement as it would be in the years immediately following Innocent’s death. With Saladin gone, things were stirring again in Outremer: a fifth crusade was planned, with its focus on Egypt and the merchant cities of the Nile delta. This would be a massive undertaking, summoning men and materiel from all over Christendom for an amphibious campaign in hostile territory. It would demand devotion, know-how and money. And who better to turn to for the planning, execution and clean-up of this extraordinary new adventure than the Templars?
* The Domesday Book was a huge survey of property and people in England and Wales, carried out on the orders of William the Conqueror in 1086, twenty years after the Norman Conquest.
† This was the embassy that left Jerusalem in 1184, on which Master Arnold of Torrolla died.
14
‘Damietta!’
A north wind blew down the coast as a steady stream of ships cast off from harbour in a calm bay whose jetty lay in the shadow of a huge new Templar castle. Château Pèlerin, named after the volunteers who had helped to build it, was as large as any other fortification erected by the Christians of the Holy Land over the course of the past 120 years. It sat perched on a rocky spit jutting into the sea not far from Haifa, roughly halfway between Jaffa and Acre, the working capital of the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem. Six miles (10 km) away was Mount Tabor, which the Saracens, led by Saladin’s brother al-Adil, had recently taken and fortified with a military base. Château Pèlerin was conceived in part as a riposte to Mount Tabor, and it did its job well.
A state-of-the-art example of military hardware, Château Pèlerin had replaced the older complex nearby at Destroit, erected decades earlier to guard the narrow coastal road at a point that was vulnerable to brigand raids. Whereas Destroit was effectively a large watchtower, Château Pèlerin was a palace barracks, providing garrison space for thousands of troops and a harbour for Templar shipping. It was designed to include every feature of a modern military command centre: a deep ditch protecting the landward entrance; inner defences incorporating huge stone blocks scavenged from an ancient Phoenician wall; a round church; a dining hall designed to hold up to 4,000 soldiers at a single sitting and internal staircases wide enough to allow a knight on horseback to ride around the castle as he pleased.1 It was equipped with ample dungeons, fit to hold prisoners of war, enemies of the order and wayward brothers who had fallen foul of the order’s increasingly detailed Rule (case studies of brothers imprisoned in chains at Château Pèlerin were preserved, relating misdemeanours ranging from brawling and dressing in secular clothing to illicit fondling at night).2 Château Pèlerin was a powerful statement of Christian reconstruction after the traumatic encounter with Saladin, its name a potent reminder of the Templars’ chief advantage as a fighting force: the fact that they were supplied and assisted by a seemingly endless stream of pious pilgrims. It had cost so much money to build, wrote one Christian writer, that ‘one wondered where it all came from’.3
Aboard one of the ships setting off from the harbour in late May of 1218 was William of Chartres, who had become master of the Templars following the death of Girbert Eral in 1200 and that of his successor, Philip of Plessis, in 1209. He travelled with Garin of Montaigu, master of the Hospitallers, and the marshals of both orders. Indeed, virtually the whole Templar central convent in the east was mobilizing, leaving behind only a skeleton crew of castellans and the officials directly responsible for maintaining commercial and shipping operations in Acre.
The military orders were travelling with the entire war machinery of the Latin East. Galleys loaded with weapons and armour accompanied passenger vessels carrying crusaders who had come to the Holy Land from Flanders, Austria and Hungary, and high-ranking churchmen including the patriarch of Jerusalem and the bishops of Acre, Nicosia and Bethlehem. With them too was the new king of Jerusalem, John of Brienne, a nobleman from Champagne who was administering the eastern kingdom on behalf of his infant daughter Queen Isabella II.* Hundreds of ordinary pilgrims were setting sail, too, many of whom had already made a long journey from their homes in Bremen and Cologne, inspired to take crusader vows by the miraculous appearance of crosses blazing in the sky. The Fifth Crusade, first called by Pope Innocent III in 1213, had gripped the hearts of faithful northern Christians, and now those who had taken their vows and set out for the Holy Land were making the final leg of their journey to the city that had been selected for attack: Damietta, in the Nile delta.
*
At almost exactly the same time as one army was leaving Château Pèlerin in May 1218, another crusader fleet was unfurling its sails and heading for the Nile from the opposite direction: leaving the Atlantic coast of Portugal, rounding the Algarve and making its way through the straits of Gibraltar into the calmer, warmer waters of the Mediterranean. It comprised around eighty cogs – huge, oak-timbered ships powered by a single, large, square sail.4 With this fleet was Peter of Montaigu, a long-serving brother from a well-connected crusading family, who had risen through the ranks, serving as Templar master for Spain and Provence, and latterly master in the west, making him the most senior official outside the Holy Land. Garin of Montaigu, who had taken ship at Château Pèlerin, was his brother.†
Peter of Montaigu was a native of the Auvergne in south-west France, and despite having made his career in Europe rather than the east, he had seen plenty of godly warfare at first hand. On 16 July 1212 he had fought at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, in which a coalition of forces from the Spanish kingdoms of Aragon, Castile and Navarre had attacked a huge north African army led by the Almohad caliph Muhammad al-Nasir.
The turn of the thirteenth century had seen a revival of Muslim fortunes in southern Spain, as the Almohads had sought to reconquer lands taken from them by the steadily encroaching Christian kingdoms. In 1195, at the battle of Alarcos, the Almoh
ad caliph al-Mansur inflicted a stinging defeat on an army commanded by Alfonso VIII of Castile. The Christians were driven from the battlefield and lost many castles and towns in the aftermath. The fledgling Spanish military orders who had taken part in the battle were rocked by the defeat: the Order of Santiago lost nineteen knights, including their master, and the Order of Calatrava two castles and an uncertain number of men.5 These were not losses they could easily accommodate, nor could they simply brush off the humiliation of defeat. After much lobbying led by the military orders, Innocent III was persuaded in 1209 to grant the struggle against the Almohads full crusade status, allowing combatants to claim remission from sins for their involvement.
The battle of Las Navas de Tolosa was the culmination of this crusade. The kings of Castile, Navarre, Portugal and Aragon all took to the field, along with the Templars, the Orders of Santiago and Calatrava, and volunteers from France who had travelled to southern Spain, between Córdoba and Granada, for the express purpose of fighting the Almohads.
The Templars had fought in the rearguard at the battle, and Peter of Montaigu had witnessed the carnage that ensued as the Christians tore into the Muslim forces, chasing Muhammad al-Nasir (who had succeeded al-Mansur in 1199) from the field, his bodyguard of chained black African slaves failing to protect him from the devastating cavalry charges. The king of Castile crowed after the battle that the Christians had lost only twenty-five or thirty men, while they had killed 100,000 Muslims.6 In fact, there were substantial losses on the Christian side, heavily borne by the military orders. The Templars lost the Portuguese master, and the master of the Order of Santiago also died. But it had been a morale-boosting victory and seemed to suggest that God was smiling once again on the Christians.
Now, six years later, Peter of Montaigu’s ship was sailing away away from the scene of another victory. Disappearing on the horizon was the shattered fortress of Alcácer do Sal (al-Qasr), some 40 miles (64 km) south of Lisbon, which had been placed under siege the previous autumn by a united force of Portuguese Christians and crusaders from Frisia and the Rhineland, who had battered it for months until its walls had finally come crashing down.
The enthusiastic assault had forced Alcácer’s Muslim defenders to abandon it in October 1217: a victory heralded by yet another appearance of the Holy Cross in the night sky. The triumph owed much to the Spanish Templars, who had come en masse under their master Pedro Alvítiz to help with the siege.7 ‘The Saracens were conquered through divine strength,’ wrote one chronicler; ‘one of their kings was killed and with him a great many were massacred or led into captivity.’8 This was just the sort of success that the western crusaders hoped to replicate as they converged on the Egyptian coast.
*
‘Damietta!’ wrote the German churchman and historian Oliver of Paderborn, who had travelled from his home near Cologne to take part in the Fifth Crusade. ‘Renowned among kingdoms, most famous in the pride of Babylon, mistress of the sea.’9
The city was rich, prosperous and busy: worth every syllable of this enthusiastic eulogy. To its west flowed one of the largest of the many waterways that formed the Nile delta, where salt water mingled with fresh water that had come hundreds of miles from the Ethiopian highlands, and hungry crocodiles basked in the shallows.10 On the eastern side of the city was the saltwater Lake Mansallah, long, shallow and heaving with fish. An abundant water supply meant that the city was surrounded by fertile farmland and villages, and the townsfolk amply stocked year round with staple crops springing from the Nile’s flood plain.11 Yet Damietta was more than just the hub for riverside agriculture. It was one of the great port settlements of the region: convenient for traders from the flourishing Italian city-states of Genoa and Venice, and well connected to the coastal towns of the Levant. With a fair wind a ship could travel from Acre to Damietta in less than a week. The opulent city of Cairo was in easy reach of the south. Damietta was a regular stopping point for merchant ships hugging the coast of the southern Mediterranean and a traditional hub for seafaring traders of the west to access the overland caravans heading east towards India and China, their camels and wagons loaded with exotic silks, spices, salt, gold, timber, oils, medicine and slaves.‡ Like Alexandria, across the delta, Damietta was an alluring prize, attacked with wearying regularity by the various imperial powers who had risen and fallen in the eastern Mediterranean during the previous 500 years.
For the Christian soldiers gathering outside Damietta in 1218, travelling from England, Flanders, western France, the German principalities, Austria, Hungary and many other places besides, all of this wealth was undoubtedly tantalizing. But so, too, was Egypt’s spiritual lure. Damietta did not feature prominently in the life of Christ, but it was an entry point to Egypt, the land from which the Israelites had fled to roam the wilderness; where Moses had received the commandments; where the Virgin Mary had cleaned Jesus’ clothes in a holy spring (the well in question was a noted point on the pilgrim trail, where faithful Christians gathered to wash themselves on the feast of Epiphany, in a garden full of balsam trees). More than any of this, though, in the minds of the crusaders of 1218 Damietta was the crucial first step to regaining Jerusalem.
Pope Innocent III had preached the Fifth Crusade in 1213, but he had died on 16 July 1216, ending a bracingly aggressive papacy in which he preached three crusades, excommunicated several princes and reasserted the might of Rome. He did not live to see the armies he had called set off, but his mission was seen through by his successor Honorius III. An intelligent native of Rome who was in his mid-fifties when he was elected pope, Honorius was not quite as bullish as Innocent, but he was committed enough to crusading to divert a tenth of papal revenue for three years to the project and to correspond vigorously with its various leaders, who included King Andrew of Hungary, Duke Leopold VI of Austria, the patriarch of Jerusalem, the masters of the Templars and Hospitallers and John of Brienne, titular king of Jerusalem.12 There was no English king, for John had died amid a civil war in 1216 leaving a child to succeed him. Nor was Philip Augustus of France to be seen anywhere. But Honorius was relentlessly petitioning his protégé Frederick II Hohenstaufen, the king of the Germans whom he had tutored as a child, to demand that Frederick lead his own vast armies south and join in the attacks. The pope had also ordered crusade processions throughout every city in Christendom on the first Friday of every month, ‘so that every believer could intercede in favour of the crusaders by prostrating humbly during his prayer’.13
One thing Honorius did not do, however, was to involve himself in military strategy. He felt this duty belonged to the princes and potentates who had stepped forward to lead the mission. It was partly for this reason that a crusade originally called to restore Jerusalem to Christian rule ended up being diverted to a trading post at the mouth of the Nile, 200 miles (320 km) from the Holy City.
The decision to attack Damietta rather than Jerusalem had been taken in Acre around October 1217 at a war council drawing together all the most senior crusaders from east and west. In a letter to Pope Honorius, the Templar master William of Chartres had explained that Jerusalem could not be taken without first reducing the Saracens’ ability to supply their armies in Palestine from the south and weakening the power of the Muslim ruler of Egypt, who by this stage was Saladin’s nephew al-Kamil.14
The fact that there was yet another new sultan on whom to make war spoke to the continuing flux in the Ayyubid world. In the two decades following Saladin’s death power had consolidated and then fractured once again. In 1201 Saladin’s brother al-Adil (Saphadin) had managed to assert his authority as sultan of Egypt and Syria, subduing opposition from Saladin’s sons. But as al-Adil approached his death in 1218, the empire was split once again, this time between his own sons. Thus al-Kamil (known by the crusaders as Meledin) was installed in Cairo and slated to become the next sultan and ruler of the family; al-Mu’azzam (known as Coradin) held sway in Damascus; and a third brother, al-Ashraf, controlled Aleppo and northern Syria.
*
The ships travelling from east and west converged on Damietta in the early summer of 1218. Those coming from Château Pèlerin reached the Egyptian coast on 30 May, only to find the German and Frisian fleet carrying Peter of Montaigu had already started disembarking. The crusaders established a bridgehead at the rivermouth a short way upstream, and began to survey the city’s defences.
Like any valuable jewel, Damietta was well guarded, protected by three sets of turreted walls, each looming larger than the last. Twenty-eight towers had been built into the walls, and moats dug between them for extra security. Opposite the western wall of the city, in the middle of the river, was an island and on that island stood yet another tower to which the citizens had attached a huge set of chains which could be raised in moments of distress to prevent ships from entering the river through its only viable channel.16 Inside the city its defenders were equipped with every conceivable device for bludgeoning, burning or impaling anyone foolhardy enough to face them down. One of their most potent weapons was Greek fire: a sticky, naphtha-based inflammatory resin that could be sprayed from pipes or hurled, grenade-style, in pots that shattered on impact. Greek fire was almost impossible to extinguish. It was a nasty and highly potent weapon to turn on soldiers attacking from the water. Taken together, Damietta’s defences were as tough as any that a crusading army had faced, and al-Kamil could on top of this be expected to send regular relieving sorties up from Cairo to hinder the course of the siege. Serious planning, discipline and expertise would be required to breach Damietta – all the more so as the attempt was set to begin in the heat of the summer, where temperatures daily exceeded 44°C (110°F) in the shade.