by Dan Jones
The Arab poet Jamal ad-Din ibn Yahya ibn Matruh later wrote a celebratory ditty chiding the crusaders and their king:
You came to the East boasting of conquest, believing our martial drumroll to be a breath of wind... And your stupidity has brought to you a place where your eyes can no longer see any way of escape... of fifty thousand not one can be seen who is not dead or wounded and a prisoner.26
As the news filtered back to Christendom, it was met with deep gloom. ‘The French’, wrote Matthew Paris, ‘pined away more and more with internal grief, nor could their king console them.’27
He could not console them because, like the cream of the French nobility who had accompanied him on his Egyptian adventure, Louis IX of France had been taken prisoner. He was now at the mercy of the men he had come to destroy. Turanshah demanded the return of Damietta and a ransom payment of 800,000 gold bezants – roughly equivalent to 400,000 livres tournois or two years’ royal revenue. This would also cover the thousands of other prisoners who had not yet had their throats slit.
A wobble in negotiations occurred on 2 May 1250 when Turanshah was murdered in a Mamluk coup: the sultan was attacked with a cutlass, trapped in a burning tower and thrown into the Nile. His corpse was then fished out and for good measure his heart removed. A major upheaval in the leadership of the Islamic world had begun, which would end with the Mamluks of the Bahriyya seizing outright control of Egypt, overturning nearly eighty years of Ayyubid rule. More pressingly for the crusaders, King Louis was still a prisoner, as was another of his brothers, Alphonse, count of Poitiers. The ransom still had to be paid.
On Friday 6 May Louis was sent to his camp to count out the first instalment of his ransom: 400,000 bezants or 200,000 livres tournois. Alphonse was held back as security, as were the large stockpiles of weapons and provisions the crusaders had been forced to leave in Damietta when they relinquished the city. Neither would be released, nor would the king be allowed to leave the Nile delta, until the money had been received.
A king’s ransom was a vast sum, and weighing 200,000 livres out of the coin reserves Louis had brought to Egypt took nearly two days. By the evening of Sunday 8 May, 170,000 livres had been counted and the treasury was empty. The king was still 30,000 short of his target. An argument broke out about the best way to raise the outstanding sum.
John of Joinville, who was with the king, claimed that he advised Louis to borrow the 30,000 from the few surviving Templars. Their highest-ranking survivors were Stephen of Ostricourt, the order’s preceptor, and Louis’ old ally and fixer Reynald of Vichiers, the marshal.
If anyone were suited to meeting this sort of urgent demand for money, it was the Templars. Yet, as Joinville discovered, the brothers took their banking protocols seriously. Stephen of Ostricourt initially refused the request, arguing that the order’s integrity depended on every depositor trusting in the safety of the money they placed in the brothers’ hands. The Templars had received these deposits on oath, swearing that they would not release them except to the depositor. Even now they could not bend the rules.28
Stephen of Ostricourt was doing his diligent best to uphold Templar business practice under the most trying circumstances. But he was not being very helpful. Fortunately for Louis, Reynald of Vichiers was more resourceful. He had commissioned several ships in Marseilles on the king’s behalf in 1246, at the outset of the campaign; he had travelled from Cyprus to Egypt in the king’s entourage; he had fought in the thick of the dreadful Shrove Tuesday battle, and may well have felt more personally invested in helping Louis limp out of Damietta with whatever shreds of dignity he could salvage.29 The marshal countered that while it was true that the Templars could not release their clients’ wealth ‘without acting contrary to our oaths and being perjured’, if the king’s men were to take the money by force, then the Templars would be forced to take reparations when the royal party returned to Acre.
Grasping exactly what the marshal meant, John of Joinville turned to the king and asked if he should board the Templars’ galley in person, and take the 30,000 livres by force. The king nodded his assent. John and Reynald went together to the Templar treasury and played out a charade which Joinville described in his chronicle:
Seeing a coffer of which they refused to give me the keys, I was about to break it open with a wedge in the king’s name. But the marshal, observing I was in earnest, ordered the keys to be given me. I opened the coffer, took out the sum wanting and carried it to the king, who was much rejoiced by my return. Thus was the whole payment of the two hundred thousand livres completed.30
Louis was now free to leave Damietta, thanks to the man who had helped get him there in the first place. Neither, presumably, was very sorry to leave.
*
On 13 May 1250 Louis IX arrived in Acre, chastened but not defeated. He had lost a brother, a battle and a certain degree of his royal dignity on the Nile. The cloak he was wearing when he was captured – a red woollen garment lined with ermine and fastened with a gold buckle – had found its way to Damascus, where an Ayyubid emir had taken to wearing it in public.31 But the king still had his life, and his wish to fight for the kingdom of Jerusalem burned as brightly as it had on the day he had recovered from his near-fatal attack of dysentery six years earlier. Louis remained in Acre for nearly four years, working to free the prisoners he had lost in Damietta and overseeing the government of the kingdom of Jerusalem with the diligence and rigour that such a challenging task required.
Frederick II died of dysentery on 13 December 1250, and was buried in a brilliant red sarcophagus in Palermo cathedral. He had spent most of his reign in a long and dizzyingly complex war with the pope and his enemies in Italy, but he had succeeded where everyone since the First Crusade failed: he had taken back the city of Jerusalem for the Latin Christians. He died having offended the church so consistently that he had been excommunicated four times and had led many churchmen to the conclusion that he was the devil incarnate. The sheer scale of Frederick’s territories meant that he exported his many feuds and wars across them, so that factional conflicts beginning in Sicily and northern Italy were transferred to Cyprus and the Latin states. He also left his wars to his son and successor Conrad, who kept up the Hohenstaufen war against the papacy, and took even less interest in the Latin states of the east than his father. Between Conrad’s accession as emperor in 1250 and his death in 1254 he never visited the Holy Land. Nor did his own son and heir, Conradin, who was beheaded at the age of sixteen in 1268 by his enemy Charles I of Naples, bringing the Hohenstaufen line to an end.
In 1250, therefore, Jerusalem was a vulnerable kingdom with an absentee king, and Louis IX’s arrival from Damietta was welcome. The French king approved much-needed upgrades to the Holy Land’s most important fortifications, and paid for improvements to the defences of coastal strongholds at Sidon, Acre, Caesarea and Jaffa. He did not manage to negotiate the return of Jerusalem itself, but he gave the depleted crusader states leadership and resources at a moment when these were badly lacking.
One of Louis’ first acts upon arriving in Acre was to support the election of Reynald of Vichiers to the position of master of the Templars, a promotion that was hard to gainsay in light of the services he had rendered, the battles he had fought and the sheer devastation wreaked on the order’s membership by the dual blows of La Forbie and al-Mansurah.
Their relationship remained close thereafter, and in an extraordinary display of fraternity between king and master in 1251 Louis’ fourth son, Peter, was born in the Templars’ fortress of Château Pèlerin. Louis’ intrepid wife Margaret had accompanied him throughout his crusade, staying at Damietta when he led the ill-starred march up the Nile, during which she had given birth to another boy, John Tristan. In terms of physical fortitude she was every bit as much a crusader as her husband. It showed considerable favour on the Templars’ part to permit a woman – queen or not – to give birth in one of their most prestigious (and supposedly male-only) castles. To crown the irregularity
of it all, Reynald stood as godfather to the little prince, directly disobeying the Templar Rule, which stated: ‘We forbid all brothers henceforth to dare to raise children over the font and none should be ashamed to refuse to be godfathers... this shame brings more glory than sin.’32
Reynald of Vichiers was a pragmatist and not a disciplinarian, as his relationship in the service of Louis IX had shown. Despite occasional flashpoints when the master irritated the king by pursuing the order’s interests contrary to royal policy, there were few more productive relationships between a western crusader and a Templar master. John of Joinville, who stayed in Outremer with his king, recorded plentiful examples of co-operation between crown and Temple, both on and off the battlefield. Certainly this was a marked improvement on the state of affairs under Frederick Hohenstaufen, when the order and the emperor fought one another more than their mutual enemy.
Yet Louis could not stay forever. His mother, Blanche of Castile, had been serving as regent during his absence, but in November 1252 she died, leaving a chasm in French politics that only the king himself could fill. After listening to the advice of the barons of the kingdom of Jerusalem and spending three full days weeping, he left Acre in April 1254 and sailed for home. Louis’ life had been profoundly altered by his six years of crusading and on his return to France he adopted an austere, pious way of life that would later earn him sainthood.
No one knew it at the time, but Louis was the last of the great crusader kings. His reign would be seen as a model for all future French monarchs: a shining example of Christian kingship that beamed down the ages. It was also something of an apogee for relations between the French crown and the Order of the Temple. After Louis departed, the defence of the Holy Land was conducted by the men of the east and the military orders, with precious little help from the monarchs of western Christendom. And while the Order of the Temple continued to provide much-needed financial assistance to the wealthy and powerful, their fortunes and their reputation began slowly to wane as the Christian states in the Holy Land, which they had fought so valiantly to defend, were whittled steadily away. This was as much a mark of the times as the result of Louis’ leaving. All the same, once the French king disappeared beyond the horizon in 1254, things were never quite the same. A shift in attitudes, in European politics and in eastern empire-building was about to sweep through the Mediterranean world.
The Templars would find themselves right at the heart of these changes, fighting a desperate rearguard action as the crusading movement collapsed around them, while finding themselves increasingly under suspicion in the west. During the later decades of the thirteenth century the Templars found they had two deadly enemies ranged against them, both seeking their destruction. The first was the Mamluks, who rose from the banks of the Nile to extend their power across the Muslim lands of the Levant, seeking to achieve what not even Saladin had managed before: the total obliteration of Christian presence in the east.
The second was St Louis’ grandson, Philip IV, king of France.
* The concept of moveable possessions, central to taxation in Europe in the Middle Ages, was very literal. It assessed the value of property that could physically be moved from one place to another, so included foodstuffs, furniture and fabrics, but not buildings or land.
PART IV
Heretics
1260–1314
Principium fini solet impar sepe uidere
‘Often the end fails to equal the beginning’
Medieval proverb1
17
‘A Lump in the Throat’
Al-Malik al-Zahir Rukn al-Din Baybars al-Bunduqdari was tall and dark-skinned with stunning blue eyes, one of which was flecked arrestingly with white. He was a terrible figure to behold. As fierce as Zengi, as calculating as Nur al-Din and as charismatic as Saladin, Baybars’ personal secretary Ibn ‘Abd al-Zahir wrote of his ‘bravery, the like of which was never seen before’.2 His subjects called him ‘Father of Conquest’ and ‘the Lion of Egypt’. History knows him simply as Baybars.
Between 1260 and 1277 Baybars ruled over a resurgent Sunni empire in the eastern Mediterranean, which rose from the rubble of the collapsing Ayyubid empire in the decade following al-Salih’s death. This was a Mamluk state with a pitiless and frighteningly effective war machine at its core. As sultan, Baybars could draw on a permanent army of 40,000 intensively drilled slave soldiers, light cavalry trained to shoot arrows soused in Greek fire from the saddles of their horses, and the newest and most powerful siege artillery available. Presiding over this warrior caste allowed Baybars to propel himself and his successors to a position of absolute dominance in Syria and Egypt, with such success that even his own people were occasionally stunned. ‘They were shocked by the severity of the Bahriyya faction and their oppressive and tyrannical methods for dealing with others,’ wrote ‘Abd al-Zahir.3 He went on to explain that Baybars also appealed to the people of Egypt with tax cuts and a programme of school-building, and surrounded himself with scholars who ‘recited celebratory poems and were rewarded with robes of honour’. Nevertheless, Baybars’ success was founded on a philosophy of uncompromising force.
Born about 1220 on the steppe north of the Black Sea, Baybars was ethnically a Kipchak Turk, who had been sold into slavery at about the age of fourteen and taken to Egypt to train as a warrior. He joined the elite Bahriyya, the Mamluk corps that dominated sultan al-Salih’s court and fought Louis IX’s army at the battle of al-Mansurah. A few months later he took part in the assassination of al-Salih’s son and successor Tarunshah. Exiled from Egypt for his treachery, he travelled Syria, working as a mercenary in the service of various hapless Ayyubid emirs squabbling over their splintering territories. In 1259 he returned to Egypt to join forces with a rival Mamluk, Qutuz, who had seized power in Cairo and was ruling as sultan. Qutuz was from a faction hostile to Baybars and the Bahriyya, but peace was convenient to both parties, as they braced to confront an even more dreadful menace looming in the east: the Mongols.
Ever since the earliest years of the thirteenth century, the whole world had trembled at the name of the Mongols. Their story began when an orphaned warlord by the name of Temüjin rallied together the nomadic tribes of the north-east Asian steppe and began to strike out at the ruling dynasties all around him. After a series of initial successes Temüjin took the name Genghis Khan (sometimes rendered as Chinggis Khan, and loosely meaning Great Ruler). He and his descendants built the largest land empire in history, stretching from the East China Sea to Poland, uniting millions of people under a rule that was in many ways enlightened and tolerant, but was founded on the principles of total warfare. After Genghis’ death, his sons and grandsons continued his conquests. In 1259 they split the empire into four enormous blocs known as khanates: the Yuan dynasty in the east, containing China and Mongolia; the Chagatai in central Asia around Transoxania; the Golden Horde in the northwest, stretching from Siberia to eastern Europe; and the Ilkhanate, spilling out from Persia. What all the Mongol Khans shared was their basic method of conquest: massacres and the wholesale destruction of populations who defied them, with unconditional submission expected from all their enemies. Their warriors were expert horsemen and their military engineers highly skilled in reducing cities and fortifications to rubble. Yet for all of this, the Mongols’ greatest strength was their ability to spread panic and terror before them, as they deliberately targeted civilians and garnered a reputation for matchless brutality towards anyone foolish enough to resist them. In 1244 the patriarch of Jerusalem called the Mongols ‘an unknown people’ who ‘persecuted all alike, making no distinction between Christians and infidels’.4
It had been known for some time that the Mongols were bearing down on the Holy Land. In 1260 the Templar master Thomas Bérard, who had taken over leadership of the order in 1256 after Reynald of Vichiers’ death, sent dire letters from Acre to England and France warning of the Mongol advance. To Henry III of England and Brother Amadeus, the English Templar master, he wrote:
&
nbsp; The Tartars, advancing with an innumerable force, [have] already occupied and devastated the Holy Land almost up to Acre... nor will Christendom be able to resist them unless supported by the powerful hand of God... unless help is brought quickly, God forbid, a horrible annihilation will swiftly be visited upon the world.5
These and other such baleful warnings met with an uneven response. Some in the west actively welcomed the Mongols, seeing them as their saviours from the threat posed by the Saracens. Popular Christian prophecies had long predicted the arrival of a great king from the east who would help restore the glory of Christ on earth. Many in Europe considered that the Mongols (whom they called the Tartars) fitted the bill.* Prior to the Damietta campaign of 1249–50, Louis IX entertained the idea of converting the pagan khans to Christianity and combining forces to squeeze the sultans of Egypt and Damascus into submission. This was not entirely fantastical: the Mongols were notably open-minded about religious conversions, often adopting the faith of the lands they conquered. Hülagü, the ruler of the Ilkhanate, which was expanding westwards from Persia towards the Holy Land, had a Nestorian Christian woman as his chief wife, and in 1162 he was indeed considering a similar alliance, dispatching his own letters to France to sound out Louis.6 Hülagü described himself to Louis as an ‘avid destroyer of the perfidious Saracen people, friend and supporter of the Christian religion, energetic fighter of enemies and faithful friend of friends’.7 The dream alliance never came about, but it remained a tantalizing possibility in the minds of some western princes and a vision of looming annihilation in those of the Ayyubids and their Mamluk successors.