by Dan Jones
For the Templars, Frederick’s sojourn had been unpleasant and difficult. There was nothing new in their deciding to pursue their own policies against the wishes of a secular king, or taking sides in the often bitter disputes that flared up within the Latin nobility. After all, the Templars had openly defied Amalric in the 1160s and had been drawn into a dispute over the succession of Antioch in the early years of the thirteenth century. Never before, though, had they actually gone to war against a crowned western king. They suffered accordingly. One of the drawbacks of being an international order was that offences given on one side of Christendom might be punished on another. When the emperor returned to Sicily he took severe action against the Templars there, ‘seizing and despoiling their moveable and immoveable property’, as it was later described.28 Frederick was not stupid. He knew exactly how to hurt the Templars best: by attacking their wealth.
Shortly after the emperor’s departure, around 1231 or 1232, Peter of Montaigu died. A new master was elected, Armand of Périgord, whose family was from the Dordogne region of France, but whose career in the order had taken him to the position of preceptor for Sicily and Calabria. A long-standing pattern was thus continued, by which the Templars reacted to a fractious period of rule under one master by electing (or accepting) a compromise candidate as his successor. In this instance reconciliation was not easy to achieve: in response to papal complaints that he would not relinquish confiscated Templar property, the emperor argued that it was entirely in his right to do so, and apparently refused to come to terms.
Outside the Hohenstaufen sphere the order continued to develop and even to thrive during the 1230s and early 1240s, not least in their commercial activities. Their fleet of ships, when not deployed in wartime, travelled back and forth across the Mediterranean, ferrying passengers to the holy sites. The Templars had a strong presence in Marseilles, a popular port of departure for pilgrims heading for Acre and Jaffa, where from 1216 they had been allowed to run merchant and pilgrim ships in and out of the city’s port without tariff. In 1233, perhaps in response to a boom in business that had accompanied the re-opening of Jerusalem to Christian pilgrims, the municipal government of Marseilles demanded a revision of terms, cutting down Templar and Hospitaller shipping runs to four a year, in order to protect private commercial activity. But out of Marseilles and Barcelona, Pisa, Genoa and Venice, Templar goods, manpower and supplies continued to flow, drawing on the apparently limitless supply provided by their property empire in the west.
Templar banking operations were also maturing rapidly in this period. By the 1240s the order was providing diverse financial services to some of the richest and most powerful figures across Christendom. In England and France they provided safe storage for sensitive diplomatic documents, looked after charters and guarded official seals while high-ranking government officials were out of the country. They also protected particularly valuable pieces of royal treasure and, in the case of France, acted as an official deposit-house for royal revenue.29
Templar houses provided numerous sensitive services: they were used to distribute pensions promised by monarchs to wartime allies, and were party to agreements in which they operated as a mutually respected third party between warring rivals.† They guaranteed debts, ransomed hostages and prisoners of war on credit, and could arrange very large loans, such as the one made in 1240 to Baldwin II, the emperor of Constantinople, secured by his very own fragment of the True Cross. They could be extremely effective in realms troubled by civil war: in England during the first decades of the thirteenth century senior Templar personnel had been very visible at the court of King John, who spent almost his entire reign either fighting or coming begrudgingly to terms with his own subjects. The Templars were one of the few groups whom John did not persecute, and in turn they stood by him while he was excommunicated by Pope Innocent III, protecting their position both as key creditors of the crown and ample beneficiaries of John’s largesse.30 By the 1230s John’s son Henry III had come of age, and the order made sure to maintain its cordial links with him, too.
Naturally, as kings and emperors turned to the Templars both to hold their valuables and to draw loans, the greater subjects began to mimic the practice. Like their royal overlords, noblemen, knights and rich townsmen saw the obvious advantage in storing their riches at Templar houses, which were not only physically secure but also protected by their status as religious institutions, which could not be raided without incurring the wrath of the church, and eternal damnation in the afterlife. Some men left their entire fortunes in trust with the Templars before departing on pilgrimage or crusade, issuing the brothers with instructions for disposing of their possessions if they did not come home.
Others used the Templars’ institutional wealth and massive geographical network to arrange money transfers, leaving sums of hundreds and even thousands of marks at a Templar house in one city and redeeming it in another country or even on another continent. In 1240 Pope Gregory IX employed a particularly complex version of this, enjoining the French Temple to help him settle his debts: papal revenue collected in Scotland, Ireland and England was routed through the Templar house in Paris; the pope’s creditors could then present themselves before the Parisian brothers bearing letters of credit and redeem these for outstanding payments owed to them from Rome. Blanche of Castile, mother of the French king Louis IX, who came to the throne in 1226, employed the Templars to handle all of her private financial affairs, including controlling payments of thousands of livres connected to building work on the abbey she founded and funded at Maubuisson. Men like Louis IX’s brother Alphonse, count of Poitiers, used the Templars for his personal financial management, and from the 1240s it became fashionable and even common for noblemen and women across western Christendom to do the same.
As the middle of the thirteenth century approached, then, the Templars had reached extraordinary maturity as an organization. In the Holy Land they were an increasingly autonomous military entity, occupying large numbers of castles and pursuing policies best suited to themselves, even when these cut across the wishes and interests of the highest secular authorities. In the west, where outside the Spanish peninsula the day-to-day activity of Templar brothers involved no fighting and was very little different from the monastic orders, business was booming. The infrastructure the order had originally developed to fund its crusading mission was now exploited for many other purposes. The Order of the Temple was in reality far more than a fighting force: it was an international business network as useful to pilgrims seeking a safe passage to Jerusalem as it was to kings, queens and nobles looking for a comprehensive financial service to run their accounts, keep an eye on their valuables and raise loans when they got into trouble. For better or worse, the Poor Fellow Knights of the Temple of Solomon were no longer of the Temple, and no longer poor.
This is not to say that the Templars’ crusading mission had been abandoned. Far from it. The one thing the Templars could never escape was their intimate connection with Christian fortunes in the Holy Land, and although the 1230s and early 1240s were a time of relative calm, one last burst of crusading activity would soon beckon. The enemy was evolving, but the root calling was the same: to defend the kingdom of Jerusalem at any cost.
* Garin of Montaigu died before 1 March 1228, at Sidon.
† This was the case during the wars of the early thirteenth century between John, king of England and Philip II Augustus of France: John’s allies around La Rochelle were not prepared to trust the king to pay them the fees he had promised in return for wartime loyalty; the deal was brokered by depositing the monies in question in trust with the Templar house at La Rochelle for independent distribution. King John also borrowed large sums of money in coin from the Templars throughout his reign, secured on gold treasure equivalent to the loan. Effectively he pawned his crown jewels.
16
‘Unfurl and Raise Our Banner!’
The Syrian scholar and chronicler known as Ibn Wasil was on his way to Ca
iro in 1244 when he passed through Jerusalem. The city was still in Christian hands, and he was depressed by what he saw. Although Muslims were allowed into the city and on to the Haram al-Sharif, or Temple Mount, what greeted him there was a scene of sacrilege. Christian clerics conducted services within the Dome of the Rock, incanting the name of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit – the Holy Trinity, which the Muslims saw as polytheistic. Worse than this, wine bottles rested on top of the Rock from which Muhammad had ascended on the Night Journey. The al-Aqsa mosque had also been desecrated and hung with bells.1
Ibn Wasil had long been sceptical of the deal struck between al-Kamil and Frederick II in 1229. He had preached against it at the Great Mosque in Damascus as soon as it was announced, lamenting that ‘The road to Jerusalem is now closed to pious visitors!’ and crying ‘Shame on the Muslim rulers!’ Now, seeing the effects that fifteen years of Frankish occupation had brought, he was no less disheartened. The arrangement in Jerusalem clearly benefited the crusaders. But what had it done for Islam?
Al-Kamil was no longer available to contemplate such questions. The sultan had died in 1238 and his death had been followed by the customary period of jockeying for power. Within two years al-Kamil’s son al-Salih Ayyub (or simply al-Salih) had emerged as his father’s heir as sultan, with theoretical supremacy over his other ambitious relatives. But his rule was far from unchallenged. He was particularly troubled by the intrigues of his rebellious uncle, al-Salih Isma’il, lord of Damascus, who had made an alliance with the Franks of the kingdom of Jerusalem, guaranteeing their rights in the Holy City and handing over various castles, including Safad on the River Jordan, just above the Sea of Galilee, which the Templars were now rebuilding in imposing fashion. To al-Salih this was more than just political expediency. His uncle had crossed the line between accommodation and full-on alliance. As a new sultan, he could not sit by and let this happen.
His uncle might now count Franks as his allies, but al-Salih was turning to something bigger and much more dangerous. In Mesopotamia and northern Syria a new group was gathering strength: the Khwarizmian Turks, Sunni tribesmen originally from Persia and central Asia, who had been displaced when their homelands had been conquered by Mongols and who were now moving to the west looking for territories in which to settle. They were tough warriors and expert horsemen – unpredictable and fiendishly difficult to work with but deadly in the field. Al-Salih forged a military partnership with them, and in 1244 he was ready to put it to use against his uncle of Damascus and the perfidious Christians of Jerusalem.
On 11 July, just months after Ibn Wasil’s visit, the Khwarizmians stormed the Holy City. Under the terms by which the Franks had been given Jerusalem its walls had not been rebuilt, so riding in was easy. Evicting the Christian rulers and occupants was even easier and the Khwarizmians ran amok: decapitating priests, disembowelling pilgrims seeking sanctuary in churches, smashing the marble decoration around the Lord’s shrine at the Holy Sepulchre, destroying the tombs of Frankish kings and sending columns of refugees pouring out of the city with nothing to cling to but their lives. The military orders tried to protect the fleeing citizens as they headed for Jaffa, but there were far too many. Gerald of Newcastle, a Hospitaller, described the citizens’ fate as they were set upon by bandits and Khwarizmian outriders:
The enemy... surrounding them on all sides, attacked them with swords, arrows, stones and other weapons, slew and cut [to] pieces... around seven thousand men and women and caused such a massacre that the blood of those of the faith... ran down the sides of the mountains like water.
Inside Jerusalem, wrote Gerald, they had ‘cut the throats of nuns and aged and infirm men like sheep’.2 They smashed the city and spent a month plundering the surrounding area, then headed en masse for Gaza, to meet with al-Salih’s army and prepare for the next assault.
With Jerusalem lost again and a new enemy riding at will through their territories, the Christians had no choice but to fight. With their allies from Damascus they gathered an army of around 10,000 men and prepared for battle.
On 17 October the Christian–Damascene army confronted the Khwarizmian–Egyptians at La Forbie (al-Harbiyya), a village not far from Gaza. The Christians fought bravely: ‘like athletes of God’, according to one of the few survivors. They held off the much larger enemy army for an entire day, but when they rose the following morning to start again their Damascene allies had lost heart.3 They fled the battlefield, and without them the Latin army, now cripplingly outnumbered, was obliterated.
The Templars threw every man they could into the battle at La Forbie, alongside hundreds of Hospitallers and Teutonic knights.4 Of the nearly 350 Templar knights into the field, only 36 survived. Their master, Armand of Périgord, disappeared and was never seen again. The master of the Hospital, William of Châteauneuf, was carried off to Cairo where he was held captive for six years. The archbishop of Tyre was mortally wounded, along with several other eminent churchmen. Count Walter of Brienne, a prominent figure among the noble leadership, was carried off to Jaffa where he was tortured (although not killed) by being crucified for a time on the city walls. The surviving rank and file of the Latin army were sold as slaves. The catapult operators and foot soldiers were victims of an ‘incalculable slaughter’.5 As a military disaster La Forbie was almost the equal of Hattin.
The patriarch of Jerusalem, Robert of Nantes, who was at the battle but managed to take refuge in Ascalon, was utterly depressed by what he had seen. ‘Having lost everything in the battle there is nothing to console us,’ he wailed in a letter to every leading churchman he could think of between England and the Holy Land. ‘If help is not forthcoming, the ruin and loss of the land will be quick.’ 6
In Robert of Nantes’ view, the defeat at La Forbie was a defeat for all of Christendom. Not everyone saw things that way. From his perch in Foggia, in Apulia, Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor and absentee king of Jerusalem, offered up a characteristically trenchant view of the battle’s outcome, blaming a faction led by the Templars for ignoring orders to keep the peace with Egypt. Writing contemptuously of a battle he believed should never have been fought, he railed against ‘the effervescence of the religious pride of the Templars, nourished on the delicacies of the native barons of the land’.7
It was easy for Frederick, from the safety of Foggia, to focus his ire on the Templars, all the more so because he had no intention of travelling back to Jerusalem to restore the kingdom himself. The man who would eventually come to the aid of the crusader states was a king of a rather different sensibility far more amenable to the Order of the Temple.
*
In mid-December 1244 Louis IX lay on his deathbed. Pale and thin, the thirty-year-old king of France was literally wasting away. He had dysentery, a wretched and painful ailment that could grip even the strongest soldier by the gut and drag him rapidly to the grave. Louis had been suffering on and off for two years, since he had contracted the disease during a military campaign against the English, but the attack that overtook him now appeared fatal. His mother, Blanche of Castile, had come to his bedside in Pontoise to touch her son’s fingertips with the holiest relics of the royal chapel. By royal decree the whole kingdom of France was praying for his recovery, but even this had not worked. It seemed that by Christmas the king would be dead and his infant son and namesake, not yet a year old, would succeed him.
As the hours passed and the king drifted deeper into his sickness, two ladies stood by his bedside, keeping a vigil over his motionless body. They were looking on when Louis appeared to stop breathing. The final moment seemed to have arrived, and one of the ladies reached for the king’s sheet and began to pull it up to cover his eyes.
But was he really dead? Her colleague on the other side of the bed thought not. He was mute and unconscious and not visibly breathing, but she insisted that the king’s soul was still in his body and prevented the sheet from being drawn up. The women began debating the issue in earnest, only to be interrupted when, beneath
them, King Louis opened his eyes, then his mouth, and asked them to bring him a crusader’s cross.8
Louis IX had been crowned king of France in 1226 at the age of twelve. He had spent much of his reign stamping his royal authority over areas of France that had been subject to English rule in the twelfth century, reforming the law, and cultivating an image of royal magnificence that would seldom be equalled in the Middle Ages. Louis was a striking figure, with a thin straight nose and high cheekbones, and he took care to project his majesty at all times, whether apparelled in the colourful finery of his courtly dress or in the muted tones of dark silk trimmed with cheap squirrel fur which he took to wearing as a crusader. He was a great builder, collector and patron of the arts, whose crowning achievement was the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris: a soaring Gothic masterpiece of vertical filigreed stonework and stained glass, which was nearing completion in 1244. It was being built to house Christ’s crown of thorns, purchased from the Latin emperor of Constantinople in 1238.9 Louis also owned a fragment of the True Cross, the holy sponge from which Jesus drank vinegar during his crucifixion and the iron head of the lance which a Roman soldier had plunged into Christ’s side. Yet architecture, splendour and relic-accumulation alone was not the measure of a great Christian monarch. Louis’ recovery was a personal miracle, and it convinced him that his mission as an adult king was to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather, Philip II Augustus, and great-grandfather, Louis VII. He would leave France to lead a crusade to the Holy Land.
The Parisian Templars were closely connected with the French crown and the king’s deathbed revival would directly and deeply affect the order. Their first task was to help the king pay for his adventure. For forty years French kings had outsourced treasury functions from the royal palace on Paris’s Île de la Cité a mile or so north to where the Templars’ lavish complex stood. The Paris Temple had been extensively refurbished since the land was first granted by Louis VII and was considered fit to house visiting royal courts, as it would when Henry III of England visited Paris in 1265.10 At the time Louis IX decided to take up the cross, the treasurer was one Brother Gilles, and he was assigned to receive the receipts of a heavy crusading tax levied on the French church at the rate of a tenth of moveable possessions (doubled from the standard rate of a twentieth).*