The Templars

by Dan Jones

  Finding that the cities of Acre and Tyre were not sufficiently supplied with knights and soldiers to oppose him, [he] continually did serious injury to those places both secretly and openly; besides this he often came and pitched his camp before our camp which is called the Pilgrims [i.e. Château Pèlerin] doing us all kinds of injury; he also besieged and reduced the castle of Caesarea in Palestine, although numbers of Pilgrims were staying in Acre.38

  The situation in Damietta, on which Montaigu was also keeping a close eye, was growing increasingly confused, and major strategic disagreements were growing between the crusade leaders. Peter explained that higher up the Nile, al-Kamil was amassing a large army which they ignored at their peril:

  The legate and the clergy, desirous to advance the cause of the army of Christ, often and earnestly exhorted the people to make an attack on the infidels, but the nobles of the army, as well those of the transmarine provinces as those on our side of the water, thinking that the army was not sufficient for the defence of the aforesaid cities and castles... would not consent to this plan.

  Saracen ships cruised off the Egyptian coast. Resources were being stretched. Intelligence from the east said the dangerous al-Ashraf, brother of al-Kamil and al-Mu’azzam, was consolidating power. He might soon set sight on one or more of Acre, Antioch, Tripoli or Egypt. If he did so, thought the Templar master, each ‘would be in the greatest danger, and if he were to lay siege to any one of our castles, we should in no wise be able to drive him away’.39

  In 1221 Peter of Montaigu returned to Egypt. He was there in June when al-Kamil made another bid for a brokered peace with the Christians, along much the same lines as the truce he had offered two years previously. Having seen at first hand the dangerous state of affairs in Palestine, the Templar master now urged acceptance, but he was overruled. It was decided by Pelagius, John of Brienne and others that the time had come to move on the Egyptian army once and for all. Peter of Montaigu was voted down, so he agreed to support a drastic alternative: a march up the Nile to provoke the Egyptians into battle. This was a brave move but it was being made perilously late. While the crusaders had dithered the previous year, al-Kamil and his allies all over the region had been laying a trap. Now it was about to be sprung.

  In a letter to Alan Martel, the Templar preceptor in England, Peter of Montaigu later described the disastrous march on al-Kamil’s army.40 On 29 June 1221 the Christian army emerged from their tent city outside Damietta and began to move upriver, accompanied by galleys. Ahead of them al-Kamil’s army repeatedly fell back, abandoning their camp and refusing to engage. It seemed too good to be true. The crusaders pressed ahead eagerly, with the Templars riding rearguard, raiding villages as they went and aiming their crossbows at any Muslims who came into view. The chronicler Ibn al-Athir wrote that ‘they and everyone were convinced that they were going to conquer Egypt’.41 Yet some were beginning to have their doubts. John of Brienne was nervous that the army was advancing too deep into unfamiliar territory, and many of the men plainly agreed with him. According to Montaigu, around 10,000 abandoned the army without permission and disappeared.

  Behind the crusaders, reinforcements sent by al-Kamil’s brothers in Syria were shadowing the Christians’ march by foot and by boat. Worse than this, the Nile was starting to rise. Despite having been in the region for more than two years, the crusader army did not understand the complex network of natural and man-made water channels that fed into the river. Nor did they properly comprehend the variable seasonal rhythms of the waters, which rose sharply in late summer and generally overspilled their banks, but had only flooded weakly during their short time in Egypt. Al-Kamil knew the workings of the river all too well, and as the crusaders worked their way into increasingly perilous terrain in late July, his boats and soldiers continued to stalk them, blocking the river and barring the way back to Damietta.

  By 10 August the crusaders had stopped opposite the heavily fortified camp at al-Mansurah, where the large Damietta branch of the Nile diverged from another branch, known as the Tanis (the fort Tanis, near Lake Manzalah, took its name from this section of the river). They were penned in at the ‘V’ of the two waterways. They were also completely surrounded, for behind them the river was now blockaded, while Muslim troops had taken up positions barring all overland paths beside the river branches. Two weeks later, the Nile flooded and its waters washed away most of the crusaders’ baggage train. ‘The army of Christ lost its packhorses, equipment, saddlebags, carts and virtually all its essential supplies in the swamps,’ wrote Peter of Montaigu.

  This would have been bad enough, but al-Kamil now played his trump card. To regulate the Nile’s floodwaters, canals and channels had been dug by local farmers. The sultan ordered the sluice gates to be set so that as much water as possible would rush towards the crusader position. The land on which the army marched was turned into thick, soupy mud, bringing the troops to a standstill. Even the Templars could not cope with the panic that set in as frightened men tried to wade out of a great, slick, sucking mire. The crusaders were caught, wrote Peter of Montaigu, ‘like fish in a net’. Their march was over. On 28 August Pelagius realized there was nothing to do but surrender.

  The sultan’s generosity – apparently abundant in previous parlays – now evaporated. He summoned John of Brienne to his tent and informed the king of Jerusalem civilly but firmly that his men would all starve to death unless the Latins agreed to new peace terms: Damietta and the fort at Tanis were to be returned, and the armies occupying northern Egypt were to leave. Muslims enslaved in Acre and Tyre were to be freed. Eight years of peace was to be assured. It was an unconditional surrender. John had no choice but to agree.

  Montaigu heard all of this and understood it well: he was part of a delegation sent back to Damietta to recount the humiliating news. At first the defeat was greeted with amazement. Next a riot broke out in which houses were destroyed. Then, despondently, the men holding Damietta prepared to leave. Upriver the army was beginning to make its way back, muddy, wet and hungry. They were only saved from starvation during their slow and painful retreat because al-Kamil, with the magnanimity of a man who had secured total victory, agreed to provide fifteen days’ worth of bread to see them on their way, out of Egypt and back to the denuded kingdom of Jerusalem. As part of the protocol of surrender, John of Brienne and Pelagius submitted themselves to a short period of honourable captivity. This did not last long, and soon they were on their way back to Acre, trounced and spent. ‘Sympathize with us in our misfortune,’ wrote Montaigu to his Templar colleague Alan Martel back in England, as he described all this in gloomy detail. ‘And offer us whatever aid you can.’

  The abrupt and highly embarrassing failure of the Fifth Crusade reflected badly on everyone involved. Yet again, vast amounts of money had been expended on attacking enemy positions with no permanent gain. Jerusalem remained in Muslim hands. Christian writers fell back on the usual gloomy explanations for this lamentable outcome: Peter of Montaigu wrote of ‘the disasters that befell us in the land of Egypt because of our sins’.42 Pope Honorius, understandably dismayed, focused much of his blame on Frederick II Hohenstaufen, whom he had consecrated as Holy Roman Emperor in 1220 on the absolute assurance that Frederick would return the favour by finally joining the crusade. Instead, Frederick had stalled, evaded and dodged his obligation, preferring to concentrate on the complex political problems attending his office as the most powerful ruler in the west. Many more years would pass before he would finally arrive in the east. But when he did, it had dramatic consequences for the Templars.

  * John had taken a slightly complex path to kingship: he had married a granddaughter of Amalric I known as Maria of Jerusalem, who had died in 1212, shortly after giving birth to Isabella, leaving John as regent.

  † Two other Montaigu brothers also rose high in religious service, both based in Cyprus. Eustorg of Montaigu became Archbishop of Nicosia, and Fulk of Montaigu bishop of Limassol.

  ‡ In the late twelfth
century an Arab customs official writing a tax manual recorded the goods that flowed through Egypt’s port towns, noting that Damietta did a particularly good trade in poultry, grain and alum – an ingredient vital to textile production throughout western Christendom. Egypt was also a source of exotic treasure robbed from the tombs of its ancient kings: besides gold and precious stones it was one of the only places in the world where pharmaceutical traders could obtain ground mummy dust – a prized ingredient in certain medieval medicines. See Abulafia, D., The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (London: 2011) 297.

  § Assisi was the town of his birth; Francis a nickname supposedly given him in infancy by his father, meaning ‘Frenchman’.

  15

  ‘Animosity and Hatred’

  Peter of Montaigu fell to the ground and kissed the emperor’s knees. Around him, soldiers and townspeople whooped in exaltation. It was September 1228 and the whole of Acre had come out to witness the arrival in the east of Frederick II Hohenstaufen, the most powerful prince of the west, backed by a fleet of seventy galleys and thousands of men.1 Even the Egyptian sultan marked the occasion by sending the great visitor gifts of gold and silver, silks and jewels and a whole host of rare animals including camels, elephants, bears and monkeys. The Holy Land had received many distinguished guests over the years, but few were so illustrious as Frederick, the Holy Roman Emperor, a man of such singular gravitas and intellectual range that his admirers called him stupor mundi: the wonder of the world.

  At first glance, admittedly, he did not look like much. Frederick was middlingly tall, balding, with a permanently ruddy face and poor eyesight. He was stocky-limbed and fit but lacked the thick beard that signalled unquestionable manhood, even though he arrived in Acre in September 1228 a few months short of his thirty-fourth birthday. He had been a king his whole life: crowned as ruler of Sicily when he was two years old, recognized as king of the Germans when he was twenty-one and formally elected Holy Roman Emperor in 1220, at the age of twenty-six. Now he was adding a final piece to his dominions. He had sailed to Acre via Cyprus to lay claim to the position of king of Jerusalem and launch a crusade against the sultan who held the Holy City.

  Collecting titles was one of Frederick’s specialities, and the crown of Jerusalem had come to him by way of a wedding. In 1225 he had married John of Brienne’s thirteen-year-old daughter Isabella, the rightful queen of Jerusalem, and as part of the deal Frederick had taken over her father’s rights to act as titular ruler of the Latin kingdom. Three years later Isabella bore a son, whom they named Conrad. Sadly for her, but somewhat fortuitously for Frederick, the girl promptly died of childbed fever, leaving Frederick holding a baby who was the heir to the Latin kingdom. His crusade in 1228 was therefore a mission with two motives: to regain Jerusalem and lay claim to the crown. In theory the kingdom was Conrad’s, but technicality did not count for much in Frederick’s opinion. He was determined to make himself the next Christian king of the Holy Land, and woe betide anyone who should stand in his way.

  What he lacked in physical stature, Frederick amply made up for by the force of his personality. One writer who knew him admitted that he was:

  An adroit man, cunning, greedy, wanton, malicious, bad-tempered. But at times he was a worthy man, when he wished to reveal his good and courtly qualities, consoling, witty, delightful, hard-working. He could read, write, and sing and he could compose music and songs... Also he could speak many different languages... If he had been a good catholic and loved God... he would have had few equals.2

  The accusation of godlessness was one that would dog him all his life, for he was said in private to scoff at all faiths, while in public he surrounded himself with exotic-looking servants drawn from the Muslim population of Sicily, as well as the more usual Christian retainers. Scepticism appears to have been one consequence of a curious and roving mind, which delighted in scientific discovery as much as artistic pleasure and the thrill of sports, particularly hunting with birds, about which he considered himself the foremost authority on earth.

  Such, then, was the man whose knees Peter of Montaigu had bent to kiss. But Montaigu did not bow down in acknowledgement of the emperor’s erudition. Rather, this was an act of cautious political accommodation between the Order of the Temple and the leader of the latest crusading mission to reach the east. Whatever Frederick’s motives, he was the most prestigious king to have visited since Richard the Lionheart thirty years earlier. The military orders had a duty to work with him as best they could, and had promised to keep the peace between Frederick and John of Ibelin, lord of Beirut, a powerful local lord who was extremely suspicious of the emperor’s arrival. Unfortunately for both the Templars and the emperor, Montaigu’s genuflection was a sham. Within weeks relations between them had dissolved to the point of violence.

  Frederick had not had much to do with the Templars of the Holy Land before his encounter with their master in Acre, but there was much in his personality and policies that augured badly. For a start, it was hard to avoid the notion that Frederick was at heart unenthusiastic about the whole business of crusading, and perhaps with good reason. The task of managing so enormous and complex a political inheritance as the Holy Roman Empire did not allow much space for delving deeply into the affairs of the east, and what relatively slight experience the Hohenstaufen dynasty did have of the eastern wars was unpromising. Frederick’s grandfather, Frederick I Barbarossa, had drowned in Asia Minor on his way to the Third Crusade, and his father, Emperor Henry VI, had made his most notable contribution by holding Richard the Lionheart hostage on his way home from Acre. Henry VI had ransomed Richard back to the English for 100,000 marks and promptly spent the majority of that gargantuan sum on conquering the kingdom of Sicily.3

  Frederick II’s own reign had also thrown up a number of reasons to warrant distrust. Templars and Hospitallers had a long-established presence on the island of Sicily, but during Frederick’s minority they had been muscled aside by the recently formed Teutonic Order, which strove aggressively to gain pre-eminence over their longer-established counterparts. Some felt this to be actively dangerous, and a number of Sicilian knights had come to the east to join the Order of the Temple specifically to escape the emperor’s ill-will.4

  One of Frederick’s chief advisors was the master of the Teutonic Order, Hermann of Salza, an extremely capable politician who was highly respected by his men. Under Hermann’s influence Frederick had granted the Teutonic Order in Sicily tax exemptions on all their Sicilian imports and exports, and formally approved their request for the same ‘liberties, customs and all the rights’ as were enjoyed by the Templars and Hospitallers. In 1221 Frederick successfully petitioned Pope Honorius III to secure the German brothers freedom from religious tax and oversight. And when he married Isabella II in 1225, becoming king of Jerusalem, he used his new powers to grant the Teutonic Order total immunity from all secular powers in the east.5 All of this was bound to concern the Templars, whose whole model for success relied on the highest favour of western kings and on their special status.

  Finally, there was the fact of Frederick’s notorious slipperiness. He had twice taken a vow to go on crusade: once in 1215, when he was crowned king of the Germans, and again in 1220, when he was crowned emperor. It had taken him more than a decade to finally make his way to the Holy Land, and even then he came a full year late, claiming he had been ill. Eventually papal patience had snapped and, somewhat ironically, when Frederick finally arrived in Acre in September 1228 as a crusader, he did so with the full wrath of the papacy blowing against him.

  The chief reason for this change of attitude was that there had been a change of pope. Honorius III had died in March 1227 and been replaced by an elderly but strident Italian known as Pope Gregory IX. Crotchety but acute, Gregory’s displeasure was easily aroused, and during the course of his papacy he aimed it at heretical students in Paris, pagans in the Baltic and even cats, whom he suspected of being incarnations of Satan. He established the Inquisiti
on to root out heresy across Europe and enacted very severe measures to persecute Jews, ordering mass public burnings of the Talmud.

  Before he got around to cats, heretics and Jews, however, Gregory turned his attention to the Holy Roman Emperor. His first significant act as pope was to excommunicate Frederick as punishment for his constant procrastination. In a papal bull announcing his decision, he lambasted the emperor for ‘casting aside all fear of God, paying no reverence to Jesus Christ, and heeding little the censure of the Church’, and railed against a man who had ‘abandoned the Christian army, left the Holy Land exposed to the infidels, despised the devotion of the people of Christ, and, to the disgrace of himself and Christianity, was enticed away to the usual pleasures of his kingdom’.6 The bull of excommunication arrived in Acre very shortly after the emperor did and its appearance shattered all pretence of good faith between Frederick and the Templars, as did the emperor’s habit of launching into bitter diatribes about the unjust pope. The result was that within weeks of Peter of Montaigu’s theatrical leg-nuzzling, the order was at loggerheads with the most powerful secular ruler in the west, who was leading what came to be known as the Sixth Crusade.

  The feud began in earnest with the emperor’s decision to march south from Acre to Jaffa on 15 November, so that he could parlay with the sultan of Egypt. Power in the Ayyubid world was tangled after al-Mu’azzam, the ruler of Damascus, died of dysentery on 12 November 1227, to be succeeded by his twenty-year-old son al-Nasir.7 Preferring political consolidation to a happy family, al-Kamil attempted to overthrow his nephew and seize Damascus for himself. The trouble drew in a third family member, al-Ashraf, ruler of the Jazira, with the result that the Ayyubid empire of Egypt and Syria entered another difficult period of internal unrest.