by Dan Jones
The Mongols directly, if inadvertently, provided Baybars with his route to power, as he played a leading part (later exaggerated into a central role) in a massive battle between Mamluk and Mongol armies which took place in 1260. Hülagü had spent the late 1250s smashing his way through Persia. A Mongol army sacked Baghdad in 1258, murdering the Abbasid caliph by rolling him up in a carpet and riding their horses over him. They also destroyed the city’s famous library: it was said that the Tigris ran black with the ink of the books thrown in its waters. This was greeted in Cairo and Damascus as a disaster of epic proportions that seemed to threaten the very existence of an Islamic Middle East.8 Two years later the Mongol horde had moved across the Euphrates and Hülagü’s armies were enjoying themselves in northern Syria, where they captured Aleppo and laid it waste. They seemed unstoppable. Desperate and seemingly staring at total eradication, Baybars and the Egyptian sultan Qutuz marched a huge army through Palestine to block their way. Such was the urgency of their mission that Latins of the kingdom of Jerusalem allowed them to pass unmolested through their lands. Bohemond VI, prince of Antioch and count of Tripoli, took a different tack and actively supported the Mongols, convincing himself that they were the lesser of two evils. He was joined by another northern Christian potentate, Hethum, king of Cilicia, who was his father-in-law.
The Mamluks made their stand against the Mongols at ‘Ayn Jalut (The Springs of Goliath) in Galilee on 3 September 1260, and won an almost miraculous victory, saving Muslim Syria from subjugation. ‘The Mongols were routed, put to the sword and taken prisoner,’ wrote the Egyptian scholar Shihab al-Din Al-Nuwayri.9 Their feared general Kitbugha was among the dead. Buoyed by his role in this incredible feat and always alert to an opportunity, Baybars returned to Egypt, taking the liberty of murdering Qutuz in cold blood on the way home. It was the second time Baybars had helped to kill a sultan, and he was determined that there should not be a third. He claimed the title for himself, established a new Abbasid caliphate based in Cairo rather than in the ruins of Baghdad, set up a caliph as his puppet, then embarked on several grandiose building projects and started a major programme of re-armament.
From that point on Baybars pursued two parallel goals. His first was to unite the Islamic peoples of Egypt and Syria to form a unified Mamluk state with the help of a large, well-trained, ultra-disciplined standing army capable of resisting the Mongols if and when they returned. The second was to rid Palestine and Syria of the Latin Christians.
Destroying the Franks was partly a matter of religious duty and partly of practical necessity. It was true that western appetite for crusades appeared to have dimmed following a century and a half of relentless and costly failure. Crusading enthusiasm was being turned towards heretics and unbelievers closer to home. The wars against the Almohads of southern Spain continued, but the European wars of religious conquest were also targeting Cathar heretics in southern France, pagans in the Balkans, northern European Slavs, Scandinavians, Livonians and Poles. It was also true that the eastern Franks were an increasingly pitiful bunch. In 1260 the king of Jerusalem, Frederick Hohenstaufen’s grandson Conradin, was eight years old and more than 2,000 miles (3,200 km) away in Bavaria. In his absence there was precious little political leadership and no serious armed capability, save for that of the Templars, Hospitallers and the Teutonic Order who between them garrisoned almost every important defensive outpost and controlled much of the dwindling territory still subject to Latin rule. Violent rivalries raged in Acre and Tyre between Genoan and Venetian merchants, who were backed respectively by the Hospitallers and the Templars, putting a damaging tear in the fabric of the Frankish world.† But so long as the Christians possessed coastal cities such as Jaffa, Caesarea, Acre and Tyre they would be a potential hazard. And so long as there remained the possibility that they might be bolstered by the arrival of some new crusader king looking to glorify his own name through the holy war, the nightmare scenario of a crusader–Mongol compact was alive.10
At the beginning of his reign Baybars had engaged fairly moderately with the Franks, threatening them with his armies, but also showing himself open to truces and bargaining with individual lords for access to trading ports like Jaffa. This occasional accommodation was made more difficult by the attitudes of the Templars and Hospitallers, who, despite their factional differences, both objected to treating with Baybars on the grounds that they would be forced to free large numbers of their Muslim slaves, who were skilled craftsmen and highly useful captives.11 A sign of the sultan’s growing intransigence came in 1263, when he ordered his men to burn to the ground the church of St Mary in Nazareth. He also took direct action against the Templars, mining and destroying a fortified mill at Doc, part of the ring of defences fanning out from Acre.
In February 1265 Baybars’ real assault began. He marched into the kingdom of Jerusalem and attacked Caesarea, taking the inhabitants by surprise, seizing the town and smashing the citadel with a bombardment from five of his new trebuchets. Unable to defend themselves, the garrison abandoned Caesarea by sea on 5 March, heading for the safety of Acre. Baybars sent in engineers to tear the city’s defences to the ground, rendering it useless for any Christian army that might in future wish to retake it.
Seeing the example of Caesarea – fortified by Louis IX in granite, which was supposed to make it unbreachable – the garrison in nearby Haifa surrendered and sailed away. Next in line stood Château Pèlerin. Baybars was not yet ready to besiege the Templar stronghold, but he levelled a few settlements in the area as a warning. Then he hammered Arsuf in an engagement that lasted several weeks. A lacklustre attempt to relieve the siege was led by Hugh III of Cyprus, the nominal regent of the kingdom of Jerusalem. Hugh’s mission, lukewarm and undermanned, came to nothing; on 30 April Arsuf fell and, like Caesarea and Haifa, it was destroyed.
Baybars returned to Cairo, but the following spring and summer he was back in Christian territory. This time he headed for the county of Tripoli, sweeping through a series of smaller castles and terrorizing the peasants and farmers who lived around Acre, Tyre and Sidon. He sent an army north to attack Hethum, king of Cilicia, severely punishing him for aiding the Mongols at ‘Ayn Jalut: his cities were burned and 40,000 of his people taken prisoner.
From here Baybars turned his attention to the Templars in their castle at Safad. As one band of his men travelled north to mete out their vengeance on King Hethum, in June 1266 Baybars himself advanced to the Templar fortress.
Safad had been built by the Templars on the same scale as Château Pèlerin. In the words of one observer it was ‘inaccessible and impregnable’, protected by towers 50 metres (165 ft) high and controlled by 80 Templar knights and sergeants, 50 turcopoles and 300 crossbowmen.12 It had been commissioned in 1240 and its very existence told a story of shifting responsibility for the defence of the Holy Land. The site stood halfway between Christian Acre and Muslim Damascus and controlled a highly sensitive but lucrative stretch of border terrain that included numerous Christian pilgrim sites such as the well where Joseph was sold by his brothers, the place where Jesus performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes, and the birthplaces of several Apostles and Mary Magdalene. A smaller castle there had been damaged by Saladin, and the initial plan to rebuild it was made by Theobald of Champagne, king of Navarre, during his crusade of 1239. Yet for all Theobald’s talk, the 7,000 marks he had promised for the castle’s reconstruction never materialized and it had been left to the Templars to see through the project. The order shouldered the massive cost of a twenty-year building project, and of garrisoning and manning an outpost ‘useful and necessary... to the whole of the Christian lands and... harmful... to the infidels’.13 Ibn al-Furat, an Egyptian chronicler who wrote an admiring biography of Baybars, called Safad ‘a lump in the throat of Syria and an obstacle to breathing in the chest of Islam’.14
At once smartly situated and strongly built, Safad was staffed with ‘good soldiers, brethren and sergeants’. On arrival Baybars sent gifts to the castle
’s garrison as a sign that he would treat them in good faith if they handed over the castle without resitance. On 21 June his gifts were returned with emphasis: flung from the battlements of the castle by defensive catapults. Baybars was insulted, and swore by Muhammad that he would put the defenders to the sword. Then, according to a chronicler known as the Templar of Tyre,‡ ‘he prepared his siege engines and they attacked the castle’.15 His men dug mines and bombarded the walls with stones and Greek fire.
All this came to nothing and by mid-July the sultan had grown frustrated, temporarily imprisoning several dozen of his emirs on the grounds that they were not trying hard enough to bring the castle down. A resultant surge in activity secured, on 20 July, Safad’s barbican – the fortified gatehouse on the castle’s outer perimeter – but even in the course of this small success the Mamluk army sustained very heavy casualties. ‘The sultan feared he would be unable to take [Safad] by force without losing [too many of] his men,’ wrote the Templar of Tyre. He called off the assault and came up with another plan.16
No Templar castle housed only members of the order, and in Safad the white-mantled knight-brothers and black-clad sergeants made up only a minority of the inhabitants. There were a large number of servants, mercenary crossbowmen, Syrian turcopole light cavalry and civilians who had fled from nearby towns and villages and sought refuge on Baybars’ approach. This was a varied group, and the sultan decided to exploit their potential differences, adopting the timeless strategy of attacking morale rather than walls. Having first ensured that Safad was cut off from reinforcement or relief, he instructed public criers to stand within earshot of the castle compound and announce that he was prepared to offer safe conduct for all Syrians – an offer that was gratefully taken up by a large number of the turcopoles and mercenaries. The sultan wanted to sow discord inside the fortress, and he did. Soon many had deserted. Now, with the barbican still occupied, the Templars were ‘badly weakened’ and in ‘considerable disunity’.17
Inside the castle the brothers called a council. After some deliberation they decided to send out a sergeant named Leon Cazalier (known as Brother Leo) who spoke Baybars’ native Turkish language, to demand the same rights for Frankish Christians as had been offered the Syrians. The sultan heard this request politely and gave a non-committal response. Later he took Brother Leo aside for a private meeting in which he informed the sergeant that he was mortally offended by the Templars’ rejection of his gifts, that he intended to have every member of the garrison put to death, and that this would certainly include Brother Leo, who would suffer the most agonizing end of all if he did not return to the castle and deliver a specific message to his comrades.
Weak, scared and unwilling to sample the inventiveness of Baybars’ cruelty, Brother Leo hurried back to his Templar brothers with a fresh mouthful of lies. ‘He returned to the castle and told them that the sultan had authorized a safe conduct for everyone, and that the sultan himself would swear to it in their sight,’ wrote the Templar of Tyre.18 He was sending them all to their doom.
The following morning Baybars appeared before Safad and announced that if the Templars would lay down their arms and hand over the castle he would escort them safely to Acre, which was fast becoming the only safe spot on the littoral for Frankish Christians. The deal was accepted and the brothers and their dependents made preparations to depart.
Unfortunately for the Templars, Baybars was not Baybars. The sultan had selected one of his emirs who most looked like him, dressed him in royal finery and sent him out to sell a phoney deal. Anyone who knew the sultan by sight might have recognized the difference by looking for the white-flecked brilliant blue of his eyes, but from high up on the battlements of their castle, the Templars were fooled.
On 24 July fighting halted and the gates of Safad were opened. Out poured its inhabitants: Templar knights and sergeants together with more than 1,000 others who had been sheltering behind the fortress walls for nearly two months. They set off with their escort in the direction of Acre, but had scarcely gone half a mile when they were stopped and corralled near a small hillock that the Templars themselves had used as an execution spot. One by one they were all beheaded. This was justified on the grounds that several of the Templars had brought weapons out of the castle, and that there had been an attempt to bring Muslims out under the guise of Syrian Christians. This may or may not have been true. In any case, whatever safe conduct the Templars thought they had been promised was flimsy enough to be disregarded. Baybars had shown himself to be inventive and totally ruthless. He killed all but two of as many as 1,500 captives from Safad, piling up their bodies and building a small wall around them to preserve for posterity a well of bones and skulls.
Brother Leo was spared, taken to the sultan’s tent and given a cup of mare’s milk to drink, whereupon he apostasized and became a Muslim. Another Christian, selected at random, was sent to Acre to tell his tale and give his fellow Christians a taste of what lay ahead. Unlike Caesarea, Arsuf and Haifa, Safad was not destroyed: Baybars installed a Muslim garrison and transformed the fortress into hub of Mamluk power in Galilee.
*
Losing Safad shook the Templars to their core. They still manned many castles in the steadily eroding crusader states, but only a very few were equal to Safad, which Baybars had managed to reduce in less than two months. It was hard to be optimistic. The Hospitallers sent a craven embassy to Baybars begging him to leave alone a pair of their most valuable castles, Margat and Crac des Chevaliers in the county of Tripoli. Baybars agreed to a ten-year non-aggression deal, but only on condition that the Hospitallers transferred to him the proceeds of tributes taken in from the surrounding districts.
Shortly after the fall of Safad a Templar knight called Ricaut Bonomel wrote a poem reflecting bitterly on the losses the order had suffered, spilling out his feelings with extraordinary candour. Bonomel cursed the pope for allowing western Christians who had taken the cross to fight the Hohenstaufen in Sicily instead of insisting that they fulfil their vows in Acre resisting Baybars. Then he suggested that perhaps Christ no longer cared about the crusaders.
‘Anger and grief are entrenched in my heart,’ he wrote:
So that I am almost ready to kill myself, or abandon the cross that I had taken in honour of the One who was put on the cross. For neither cross nor faith bring me succour or protection against those felon Turks, God curse them! On the contrary, from what one can see, God wants to support them to our detriment... Since God who used to be vigilant is asleep, Muhammad is operating with all his might, and inciting [Baybars] to do the same.19
It was striking that Bonomel expressed his hatred for the Mamluks in terms that echoed those used by Muslims to describe the Franks. The phrase ‘God curse them!’ had tumbled from the lips and pens of countless Islamic poets, chroniclers, administrators and scribes over the decades. In fact, the Mamluks and Templars were very much alike and all the more hateful to one another for their excellence. Both were elite warrior castes and outsiders in the Near East. The Templars were self-selected and drawn by a religious calling, mostly travelling to Outremer from France, Spain and England; the Mamluks had been forcibly taken as slaves from the steppe to Egypt. Although they could have children – which the Templars, having taken an oath of chastity, could not – Mamluk status was not hereditary and the wellbeing and survival of the individual was far less important than that of the organization. The Mamluks prided themselves on their exceptional martial abilities, with horsemanship valued above all. Just as the Templar Rule functioned in part as a military manual, preserving the essential aspects of field strategy, so there was an extensive Mamluk literature on furusiyya: the techniques, training and lifestyle that an accomplished Mamluk horseman was expected to master. Both had elaborate rituals of investiture: Mamluks were gifted with ceremonial trousers after they completed their training, much as respected warriors in the west were girded with the belt of knighthood.20 Finally, both groups placed a high value on martyrdom. The essence
of the calling was to be willing to die in the service of God and the holy war.
The great difference was that the Templars had not become the state. Once a royal bodyguard, the Mamluks now commanded the machinery of government from Cairo to Damascus, directed their own military operations and made policy. The Abbasid caliph in Cairo was now a puppet of the Mamluk sultan. The military elite had taken full control.
The Templars, by contrast, shared with the Hospitallers and Teutonic Order the increasingly heavy burden of the defence of the Christian Latin states in Outremer: manning castles, fighting battles, absorbing heavy losses and financing the war effort from their estates and houses in the west. This was an ever harder task. Support for a new western crusade had dried up, the absentee Hohenstaufen kingship had set eastern nobles against one another and the ever-shrinking pool of land from which to draw tax revenue made the defence of castles and cities less and less affordable. The safety of the Latin states fell at their door, yet at root the military orders remained servants, answerable to a politicized papacy and shackled to the high politics of western Christendom. Up to a point they could and did pursue policies and alliances of their choosing, whether or not these met with royal favour. Ultimately, though, they were vulnerable, as Pope Clement IV had pointed out to the master Thomas Bérard in a letter of 1265. A dispute concerning the behaviour of the order’s marshal, Stephen of Sissy, had led Clement to impress upon Thomas the natural order of things: ‘if the church removed for a short while the hand of its protection from you... you would not in any way subsist against the assaults of the prelates or the force of the princes’.21 The order was rich, independent and self-confident, but it was not truly autonomous. Far away in the Baltic region of north-east Europe, the Teutonic Order had begun carving out a state of their own stretching from Prussia to Estonia, thanks to the patronage of the Hohenstaufen princes. There was no such Templar state and never would be.