by Dan Jones
The crusaders’ first task after setting up camp was to take the tower on the island in the middle of the river – for without it the city was unbreakable. Having formally elected John of Brienne as their leader, they set about the task with their usual gusto. First came an enthusiastic trebuchet barrage, which lasted for many days. Under cover of this bombardment, several of the most spirited and confident groups in the crusader armies kitted out ships with ladders and wooden forecastles and attempted to manoeuvre beside the chain tower and scale its walls. According to Oliver of Paderborn, attack ships of this sort were fitted out by the Austrians, Frisians, Germans and Hospitallers, and the Templars supplied at least one ship. All failed. The Hospitallers’ ladder was shattered, as was that on the duke of Austria’s ship, hurling warriors headlong into the water, where they drowned, ‘wounded in body to the advantage of their souls’. The German and Frisian ships anchored in the river and tried to pelt the tower with an on-board catapult, but a counter-blast of Greek fire set them ablaze and they limped back to base camp ‘pierced with arrows within and without’.17 The Templars built an armoured ship protected by bulwarks, which they rowed directly next to the tower, in the midst of the fighting. ‘No small damage’ was done to it, wrote Oliver of Paderborn.18 Like their German and Hospitaller colleagues, they were forced to abandon the assault.
The crusaders continued to bombard the tower and bridge with their trebuchets, aiming to weaken the connection with the city. In the meantime, work began on shore, under Oliver of Paderborn’s personal direction, to assemble an amphibious destroyer made from two ships lashed together, with four masts, a rotating bridge and a fireproof covering of animal hides. With this anchored in position, a second attempt to storm the tower began. Fierce fighting raged between the defenders of the chain tower and the soldiers stationed on what was effectively a floating fortress. On the shore the churchmen prayed loudly and venerated their finest relic: a chunk of the True Cross said to have been hacked from the larger relic lost to Saladin at Hattin.19 Despite a violent catapult battle and the release of a great deal of Greek fire, for a long time neither side could blast the other into submission. But eventually, during one particularly intense assault on the afternoon of 25 August, the Christians managed to leap from their platform and build a fire outside one of the tower’s lower doors. Smoke and flames licked up through the upper storeys, and the panicked defenders soon realized their situation was hopeless. Many threw themselves out of the small windows to escape the inferno and consequently drowned in the river. One hundred and twelve others surrendered to the duke of Austria. ‘Our men gave thanks to God,’ wrote James of Vitry, bishop of Acre, who was present.20 The first stage of the capture of Damietta was complete.
Shortly after this – amid fierce fighting in the last weeks of August – William of Chartres, the fourteenth master of the Temple, died, along with many other luminaries, including a bastard son of King John of England. ‘More martyrs for Christ, more confessors of Christ, being delivered from human cares at Damietta’, sighed Oliver of Paderborn.21 In his place the order elected Peter of Montaigu, the western master who had come to Egypt via Portugal and the siege of Alcácer. This was a good appointment: Peter was intelligent, experienced and reasoned in his judgements. It was also a notable one, as for the first time the masters of the Temple and the Hospital were siblings. Both orders had been built on networks of high-born French-speaking families, but few things symbolized the essentially aristocratic nature of their membership quite so clearly as the appointment of the Montaigu brothers as masters at the same time.
Although the Nile tower had been taken relatively quickly, successfully tackling the defences of Damietta itself was far trickier. The saffron-coloured Ayyubid standard flew safely above the bristling walls, and months passed in inconclusive projectile bombardments and occasional skirmishes as defenders attacked the Christian camp. There was some cheer when news reached the camp that al-Adil had died on 31 August. ‘Grown old with evil days and sickness,’ wrote Oliver of Paderborn, ‘he was buried in hell.’22 In practice, however, little changed. The vigorous young sultan al-Kamil was still alive and now in charge, and Damietta was still standing firm.
The Templars on the Fifth Crusade faced the same miseries as the rest of the army as winter approached. Conditions deteriorated quickly. Poor provisioning led to a mass outbreak of scurvy. Men limped around the siege camp with their lower legs in agony and their gums swollen and rotting. Some crusaders left, having been away from home for a year, which they reckoned to be adequate fulfilment of their vows. Others arrived, but not all of these were entirely helpful. Leadership was particularly weakened by the appearance of the influential but divisive fifty-three-year-old Pelagius, bishop of Albano, a cardinal and legate sent by Pope Honorius who fancied himself, not entirely accurately, to be a military tactician as well as a curate of souls.
In late October the Templars’ camp was raided early one morning by a large skirmishing party, resulting in a small cavalry battle in which more than 500 men were killed. The following month the camp was lashed by a three-day storm, which swelled the river, washed away tents and smashed several ships at anchor into splinters. When things finally calmed down in early December, raids continued from the captured river tower. Oliver of Paderborn recorded one encounter in awe: having been sucked too close to Damietta’s defensive barricades by the river’s strong current, one of the Templars’ ships was showered with stones and Greek fire, then surrounded by light enemy craft. Muslim soldiers fastened themselves to the vessel with grappling hooks, then scaled the high wooden sides and engaged in a hand-to-hand battle on deck. ‘When they had fought for a long time, the ship at last was pierced (whether by the enemy or by our own men we do not know) and sought the depths, drowning Egyptians with Christians, so that the top of the mast scarcely appeared above the water,’ Oliver wrote. He went on to liken the Templars who had died in the Nile to the Old Testament hero Samson. ‘So also those martyrs dragged into the abyss of the waters along with themselves more than they could have killed with their swords.’23
Fighting continued through the winter and into the following spring, and still the triple walls of Damietta stood firm. The Templars’ piebald banner could be spotted all over the war zone, joining dozens of others, including those of a relatively new German military order known as the Teutonic Order, which aimed to replicate the structure and achievements of the Templars. The Teutonic Order had their origins in Acre, where they were established as a German branch of the Hospitallers during the great siege of 1190–1. At that time they ran medical services for German troops injured in the fighting, working under canvas salvaged from the sails of their ships. Like the Hospitallers, the Teutonic Order soon adopted a military role, and by the early decades of the thirteenth century they were established as the third great Christian military order of the crusading movement.24
By the summer of 1219 most clear-eyed observers could see that the Fifth Crusade was grinding towards a stalemate. The leadership had fallen to squabbling, and the general feeling was that only a massive surge of troops led by the German king Frederick II Hohenstaufen would allow a Christian triumph. But though he had promised the pope he would do so on multiple occasions, Frederick did not come. It seemed, wrote Oliver of Paderborn, that Damietta would be delivered into the hands of the Christians ‘by divine power alone’.25
That summer a peculiar man arrived at Damietta purporting to be just such an agent of godly intercession. Giovanni di Pietro di Bernadone was a merchant’s son from the Italian region of Umbria who had experienced an epiphany after hearing a preacher describe how Christ had exhorted his followers to go out among God’s people and bring forth the Kingdom of Heaven. According to the Gospel of St Matthew, Jesus had told his Apostles:
Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received; freely give. Do not get any gold or silver or copper to take with you in your belts – no bag for the journey or extra
shirt or sandals or a staff... Whatever town or village you enter, search there for some worthy person and stay at their house until you leave.26
The young man had taken these words literally, and under the new name of Francis of Assisi§ he had embraced a life of poverty, casting off the luxuries of his bourgeois upbringing to become a wandering beggar and preacher, clad in a rough grey habit. He completely rejected personal property and merriment and chose instead to walk barefoot around the Italian mountains, telling anyone who would listen that they ought to repent their sins or face God’s wrath.
Francis soon developed a band of followers, and in 1209 he organized them as the Order of Friars Minor (also known as the Order of Lesser or Minor Brothers and, later, the Franciscans). The friars followed a plain and uncomplicated Rule which Francis had developed on the basis of a few verses of the Gospels. Like the Templars, Francis and his fellows took vows of obedience, chastity and poverty. There, however, the similarities ended; indeed, Francis’ appearance at Damietta in 1219 was a reminder of just how far the brothers fighting there had come from the way of life their founders had envisaged.
It was exactly a century since Hugh of Payns had established the Order of the Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. During those 100 years the Templars had transformed from indigent shepherds of the pilgrim roads, dependent on the charity of fellow pilgrims for their food and clothes, into a borderless, self-sustaining paramilitary group funded by large-scale estate management.
Francis of Assisi was not quite as guileless as he appeared – for one thing, he had managed to have his order blessed by Pope Innocent III. Yet his personal bearing was a striking counterpoint to that of the high-ranking officers of the Temple. Whereas Francis was a freewheeling, shoeless beggar, they were political players with contacts at the royal courts across Europe, property magnates whose estates stretched from Scotland to Sicily, crack soldiers who could afford to build gigantic amphibious bases in war zones and financial experts co-opted into the bureaucratic machinery of Christendom’s leading kingdoms. Whereas Francis led his new order with nothing but a grey woollen smock thrown over his thin shoulders and the words of the Apostles on his lips, Peter of Montaigu was entitled under the Rule of the Templars to four warhorses, up to four pack animals, a personal retinue including a chaplain, clerk, valet, sergeant, farrier, Saracen translator, turcopole and cook, a three-man bodyguard, a strongbox for keeping all his valuables, and a private room for his own use within whichever Templar palace he was visiting.27 The Templars were respected and valued throughout the Christian world, but they plainly could no longer be thought of as radical, uncompromising ascetics.
Upon arrival at Damietta, Francis put himself forward as a negotiator. He walked out of the Christian camp and presented himself to the nearby Egyptian army. There he demanded to see al-Kamil so that the new sultan could be shown the error of his faith. According to James of Vitry, the chronicler and bishop of Acre, Francis ‘preached to the Saracens for a few days but with little result’.28 The sultan politely refused his offer to perform a miraculous walk through fire as proof of God’s favour, and sent the eccentric young man back to his own side. Only al-Kamil’s good humour saved Francis from summary beheading, a fate many Templar brothers had met over the years.
Since neither head-on assault nor the pleadings of a righteous friar had managed to reduce Damietta, the only thing for the crusading army to do was wait until the garrison inside the city was on the brink of starvation. This moment did not arrive until September 1219, by which time the siege had been underway for eighteen months. Reports reached Oliver of Paderborn of extreme hunger inside the city, accompanied by outbreaks of disease.29 Envoys from al-Kamil offered a peace under which the Christians would leave Damietta, receiving in exchange ‘the kingdom of Jerusalem entirely’, with the exception of castles at Kerak and Montréal in the Transjordan, which sat on the crucial land route connecting Egypt with Damascus.30
To many of the weary crusaders – particularly those from France, Germany and England – this sounded like a very good arrangement. After all, Jerusalem was what they wanted. However, the legate Pelagius led a faction in favour of pushing on to take Damietta at all costs, arguing that since the Muslim occupiers of Jerusalem had destroyed the defences of the Holy City, it would be impossible to hold, and to retreat now would be to fall into a trap and risk ending up with nothing at all. This argument was backed by the Montaigu brothers, and in the short term at least it transpired that they were right. Despite rancorous disagreement among the crusade leaders, the siege continued, and by November 1219 the city’s defenders had weakened to the point of collapse. On 5 November an assault on the walls with ladders was successful, and the crusaders forced their way into the city, to find a ghastly sight: ‘streets strewn with the bodies of the dead, wasting away from pestilence and famine’.31 James of Vitry wrote that ‘the smell and the polluted air were too much for most people to bear’.32 Gold, silver, silks and slaves were plundered from shops and houses, while churchmen wandered the streets looking for surviving children, 500 of whom they forcibly baptized into Christianity.
With the fall of Damietta al-Kamil withdrew up the Nile, leaving the crusaders to enjoy themselves. On 23 November they took the nearby fort-town of Tanis, while the Templars set out to raid the coastal town of Burlus. According to Oliver of Paderborn a two-day march ‘brought back many spoils – about one hundred camels and the same number of captives, horses, mules, oxen, and asses and goats, clothing and much household furniture’, although it exhausted the Templars’ horses, many of whom died of dehydration.33 As they returned, members of the newer Teutonic Order rode out to meet them. The difference in military capability between the two orders was on sharp display, for the Teutonic knights set out without crossbowmen and archers to defend their lines: they were set upon by a Muslim ambush party, and their preceptor, marshal and many other brothers were taken prisoner.
By the middle of the year 1220 the Templars had been on the outskirts of Damietta for more than two years, and were knitted as tightly into the fabric of a crusade as they ever had been. Ever since Innocent III had proclaimed the Fifth Crusade, Templar brothers had helped to collect the papal tax known as a twentieth: sitting on commissions alongside Hospitallers and local clergy to account for the money collected throughout the realms of Christendom. This was distributed on a regional basis to enable as many people as possible to join the crusade.34
A letter written by Pope Honorius to the cardinal on 24 July of that year illustrates just how deeply involved the Templars and Hospitallers had become in the basic infrastructure of financial transfers. Honorius was concerned that none of the crusade tax required for the front line of the war effort should reach Egypt via Rome, so that there could be no suggestion of papal corruption or misappropriation of funds. This was a noble aim, but one that required a decentralized means of moving money, as well as trustworthy and godly men with a presence in every realm involved in the crusade and the practical ability to move large amounts of coin and treasure securely. The Templars and Hospitallers and the new Teutonic Order were the ideal agents.
Honorius acknowledged in his letter that the military orders were indeed able to move impressive sums. He then listed some of the recent Templar transfers from Europe to Damietta: 5,000 gold marks, paid directly from the papal chamber; 13,000 marks collected in England and conveyed by four Templars named as Hugh of Saint-George, John of Novill, Gerald of Soturririo and ‘Roger the Englishman from the village of Angles’; 1,711 marks raised in Hungary and delivered jointly with the Hungarian Hospitallers; another 5,000 marks raised in England and moved through the Templar treasurer in Paris, Brother Haimard; 6,000 ounces of gold collected in France and also routed via Haimard’s office in Paris; a huge weight of coin from Spain and Portugal, which amounted to more than 25,000 pieces of gold and more than 5,000 pounds in assorted silver currencies.
These were significant transfers and a testament to the pope’s faith in the
Templars’ probity and expertise. ‘Because we have been accustomed to send the tax and other money more frequently by means of the brothers of the Temple and the Hospital, we do not have other intermediaries in whom it might seem we could have greater trust,’ wrote Honorius (he nonetheless asked Pelagius to remain vigilant and inform him the moment he suspected any funds were leaking as they were transported to Egypt).35 In letters sent elsewhere during the Fifth Crusade, Honorius maintained a similar position, warning his correspondents that they should disregard rumours of corruption or impropriety levelled against the orders, since ‘if the Templars and Hospitallers did not daily spend money for their sergeants, their crossbowmen and other necessary combatants... the army would be totally incapable of remaining at Damietta’.36
The Templars were playing a vital role in funding the crusade and defending the newly captured city of Damietta, but their concentration of men and resources in Egypt was starting to cause them problems elsewhere, not least back at Château Pèlerin, which by the late summer of 1220 was under attack by forces led by the sultan of Damascus, al-Kamil’s brother al-Mu’azzam. Just as in the 1160s, the Templars were not able to fight successfully in Palestine and Egypt simultaneously.37 In September 1220 Peter of Montaigu was back in Acre and able to describe the familiar predicament in a letter to his friend Nicholas, bishop of Elne, far away in the Pyrenees. Al-Mu’azzam was emboldened, he wrote wearily: