The Templars
Page 32
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In 1268 Baybars made another thrust against the now heavily reduced Latin kingdom. In the spring he marched out of Egypt and attacked Jaffa, which fell in half a day on 17 March. The sultan marked his entry into Jerusalem’s port by confiscating the citizens’ treasured relic, the head of St George. His assault ended with the familiar sight of Christians leaping into boats scattering from the harbour, heading for safer havens in the north. There were precious few of these left. Once Jaffa had fallen, nothing below Acre remained in Christian hands, other than the Templars’ coastal castle of Château Pèlerin.
Deciding once again that Château Pèlerin could wait, Baybars set his sights on another Templar stronghold: the castle of Beaufort, east of Tyre in the county of Tripoli, built on a rocky outcrop behind a double ring of fortifications. The Templars had taken over Beaufort in 1260, adding to its defensive walls. In ordinary times they would have been able to hold it with ease. But in the spring of 1268 they were demoralized and greatly outnumbered. Within a fortnight of Baybars’ appearance the Templar garrison sued for peace, surrendering themselves into captivity on condition that the women and children from the nearby villages who had taken refuge there should be allowed to go freely and safely to Tyre. Baybars granted this, regarrisoned the castle with his own men, ripped down the Templars’ new walls and continued north to attack Bohemond VI in Antioch, who had been foolish enough to ally with the Mongols.
By this point, the sultan needed only to pass by a Christian town or castle to send its inhabitants scuttling out to beg for mercy. On hearing that Beaufort had fallen, the Templars of Tortosa and Château Blanc sent envoys asking the Mamluks not to destroy them too. Baybars agreed on condition that he be given the coastal settlement and stronghold of Jabala, in the principality of Antioch, without a fight. The Templar responsible for negotiating with the sultan was the preceptor of Tortosa, Matthew Sauvage, who over the previous three years had struck up as cordial a relationship as was possible with the sultan, albeit one based on appeasement and acquiescence. Sauvage handed over the Templars’ share of interests in Jabala, and the Hospitallers, with whom the order shared the town, soon followed suit.22
Resistance was melting. By early May Baybars had reached the great city of Antioch and laid it under siege. Its ruler Bohemond VI was in Tripoli, and without him the citizens of Antioch thought only of saving their lives. ‘[The citizens] put up scant defence,’ wrote the Templar of Tyre. Even so, they were shown no mercy. ‘When the city was taken, more than 17,000 people who were inside it were slain and more than one hundred thousand people, both religious and lay – men, women and children – were taken captive.’23 These figures were exaggerated, but the sense of grotesque cruelty was not. Antioch’s gates were locked by the Mamluks, who went on a murderous rampage through the streets, enslaving those whom they did not kill and capturing so much booty that it took two full days to divide it up. A fire lit in the citadel swept through the surrounding buildings and one of the great cities of eastern Christendom – the first in Syria to have been stormed by the original crusaders in 1098 – was reduced to a backwater.
Bohemond VI was in Tripoli as Baybars attacked, so he lost one of his titles from afar. Without Antioch there could be no principality, and the castles controlling the region swiftly became redundant. Several of these were held by the Templars, who had no choice but to evacuate. Since the 1130s the order had guarded the Amanus mountain passes joining Asia Minor with north-west Syria. Now, after more than a century, they quietly abandoned their positions, retreating from their castles of Roche de Roussel and Gaston (Baghras) with barely a whimper. Gaston had been memorably described by Imad al-Din as ‘towering on an impenetrable summit... shrouded in fog, inseparable from the clouds, suspended from the sun and moon... whoever coveted it had no means of getting there; whoever raised his eyes to it could not fix his gaze’.24 Not so for Baybars, who took it without a fight. He was handed the keys by a brother called Gins of Belin, who rode out on his own initiative to make peace with the sultan while the rest of his brothers were at dinner.
After this there was no hope. The brothers exited Gaston in such haste that they neglected to destroy all their equipment, a major breach of protocol for which the commander was later punished in Acre. Master Thomas Bérard took counsel with his senior officers and imposed a severe sentence on the deserters of penance for a year and a day, during which they were stripped of their habits and had to eat their meals on the floor with the dogs. Their case was written up and added to at least one edition of the Templars’ official Rule, on the grounds that their punishment was thought to be exceptionally lenient.25
*
By 1268 Baybars had wiped out the principality of Antioch and the kingdom of Jerusalem’s holdings in Palestine. Only the county of Tripoli remained, along with the Christian kingdom of Cyprus a short distance over the sea. The Latins of the east were wobbling on the brink of extermination. Without reinforcement from the west they would not survive another sustained Mamluk assault. Yet the appetite for crusading was barely flickering in the hearts of most princes of the west. The French poet known as Rutebeuf penned a work chastising his countrymen for their neglect of Jerusalem. This ‘Lament of the Holy Land’ bewailed the lack of modern heroes fit to emulate the heroes of the First Crusade. ‘Instead they will allow the Bedouins to hold the Holy Land, which has been taken from us through our failings,’ he wrote. ‘The Tartars are coming... to destroy everything: there will not be anybody to defend it... The world is coming to its end.’26
That end was delayed by the arrival of two small missions from the west. Louis IX’s promised second coming never arrived; instead the French king chose to attack Tunis in north Africa, where dysentery finally claimed his life in 1270. The first mission to reach Outremer was led by two bastard sons of James I, king of Aragon. They landed in Acre in October 1269 hoping to co-ordinate with a Mongol assault on Baybars, but on their first attempt to engage a Mamluk army in the field they were unceremoniously wiped out. The second, led by the Lord Edward, as the English king Henry III’s eldest son and heir was known, landed in 1271, made a few forays out towards Jerusalem accompanied by the military orders, but left the following year having won little more than a few skirmishes. Edward’s only lasting achievement was to broker a ten-year peace treaty designed to preserve Acre and the few coastal castles left until either a much larger crusading force could be sent, or the Latins of the east could somehow recover sufficiently to hold their own unaided. Neither seemed especially likely. Throughout this brief flurry, Baybars continued to make gains, taking the massive Hospitaller castle of Crac des Chevaliers in April 1270 and the Teutonic Order’s proud fortress of Montfort in June 1271.
The peace brokered by Edward was ratified eleven months after the fall of Montfort, in April 1272, and this at long last brought Baybars’ remorseless series of attacks on Frankish territories to an end. The sultan lived for another five years, dying a mysterious death, perhaps of poison, on 1 June 1277. His reign had transformed the entire complexion of the Holy Land. It had been a chastening, traumatizing time for all Franks, but particularly for the Templars, who had lost many men, some of their finest castles and much of their reputation for indomitability. They had been as helpless as their Hospitaller and Teutonic counterparts to resist the Mamluk surge – a failure with increasingly uncomfortable consequences as people began to search for reasons for Outremer’s decay and annihilation.
In 1273 Thomas of Bérard died and William of Beaujeu, the Templar preceptor of Sicily, was elected to lead the order in his place. William delayed his journey east to attend a large ecumenical council called by Pope Gregory X, known as the Second Council of Lyon, at which plans had been discussed for a western response to Baybars’ conquests. The council took place during the summer of 1274, after which William was free to travel to Acre, from where he reported on his first impressions. On 2 October 1275 he wrote to Edward, who had now succeeded his father as King Edward I of England.
We have found the state of the house of the Temple weaker and more fragile than it ever was in the past; food is lacking, there are many expenses, revenues are almost non-existent... all the brothers’ goods... have been pillaged by the powerful sultan. And revenues from beyond the sea cannot suffice to keep us alive; we have countless costs in defending the Holy Land and strengthening the castles that have remained.
All this, we fear, will cause us to fail in our duty and abandon the Holy Land in desolation. It is on this account in excuse for a failure of this sort that we ask your majesty to bring some suitable remedy, so that we cannot be blamed afterwards should something disastrous happen.27
Although he did not know it, Master William of Beaujeu was writing more than a letter of supplication to the king of England.
He was sending him a prophecy.
* The ‘Prester John’ legend of the mid-thirteenth century told of an exotic king of Nestorian faith whose participation in the wars against the Saracens was imminent.
† The so-called War of Saint Sabas gripped Acre and the surrounding land and seas for fourteen years between 1256 and 1270.
‡ The so-called Templar of Tyre, whose chronicle is a valuable and favourable account of the last years of the order in the east, was not himself a professed brother, but a scribe in the service of the order.
18
‘The City Will Fall’
When William of Beaujeu heard the Saracen drums beating he leapt into action with such haste that he scarcely had time to buckle on his armour. The master was in the Templar house in Montmusard, a large northern suburb of Acre zoned off from the old town but still within its double ring of outer walls. The pounding came from near St Anthony’s gate, on the east side, a section of the walls normally given over to the Hospitallers to defend.1 It was loud and close enough for William to know that the worst had happened. After six weeks and one day of unyielding bombardment, on Friday 18 May 1291 the Mamluk army had finally forced its way into Acre. If they could not be driven back immediately, a battle for the streets would begin and the imbalance in numbers alone would mean the Christians were done for. The Mamluk army was estimated to be hundreds of thousands strong; Acre’s defenders were outnumbered by perhaps ten to one.
Already an evacuation of women and children was being attempted at the docks, though rough seas were making it difficult to get relief vessels out of the harbour. No one who remained inside the city could expect mercy. The besieging army was commanded by the new Mamluk sultan al-Ashraf Khalil, who became sultan in 1290. He had recently written to William of Beaujeu, introducing himself immodestly but not altogether inaccurately as:
The Sultan of Sultans, King of Kings, Lord of Lords... the powerful, the dreadful, the scourge of rebels, hunter of Franks and Tartars and Armenians, Snatcher of Castles from the Hands of Miscreants, Lord of the Two Seas, Guardian of the Two Pilgrim Sites.2
This was a man who gave the catapults in his heavy artillery nicknames like ‘Furious’ and ‘Victory’. He did not deal in lenience or grace.
As William of Beaujeu scrambled into action he gathered with him as many able men as he could find. Most of Acre’s Templars were based in the old city at the fortress by the docks, but William had ten or twelve brothers with him in Montmusard, along with his personal bodyguard of two knights, a sergeant, a turcopole, a squire and a pair of foot soldiers. It was not much, but it was the best he could do. The little squadron galloped through Montmusard’s streets towards St Anthony’s gate, gathering up on their way the master of the Hospitallers, John of Villiers, who had his own entourage of a similar size and composition.3 They all reached the gate in time to see Mamluk soldiers piling through a breach in the walls, and threw themselves into the fray.
‘It seemed’, wrote the Templar of Tyre:
As if they hurled themselves at a stone wall. Those of the enemy who were hurling Greek fire hurled it so often and so thickly that there was so much smoke that one man could scarcely see another. Amongst the smoke archers shot feathered arrows so densely that our men and mounts were terribly hurt.4
One English squire, fighting on foot after his horse was killed under him, was hit directly with a burning missile which set alight his surcoat, the flames searing his face and then his whole body, ‘as if he had been a cauldron of pitch’. The Mamluks held their ranks behind a wall of shields, fighting with spears, arrows and incendiaries and slowly pressing their way in. For several hours the Templars and Hospitallers launched cavalry charges at the shield wall, but on each occasion they were beaten back with a hail of projectiles. By mid-morning morale was sinking. As the Mamluk troops inched forward behind their barricade, more invaders filled the gap behind them.
William of Beaujeu was fighting on horseback among his men, brandishing a lance in his right hand. As he raised his left arm, perhaps to signal another charge at the enemy line, a javelin hurled from the direction of the gate hit him directly under the left armpit, at a point where the plates of his light armour were unjoined. ‘The shaft sank into his body a palm’s length,’ wrote the Templar of Tyre, who, as part of William’s household staff, was watching the battle unfold.
William was not knocked from his saddle, but he knew his wound was fatal. He turned his horse and made as if to leave. Out of habit his personal retinue followed him, including the sergeant carrying his black-and-white standard. A band of Italian crusaders who had joined the battle saw him move away and assumed that the Templars had lost heart. ‘For God’s sake, sir, don’t leave, or the city will fall at once!’ they cried.
Alert to the danger of mass panic, William called back as loudly as he could ‘My lords, I can do no more, for I am killed; see the wound here!’ He pointed to where the javelin was still sticking out of his armpit, but as he raised his arm to display the damage, he was overcome. The master dropped his lance, his head slumped and he began to slip from his mount. Around him, his servants scampered to bring him down gently, and, using a discarded shield as a stretcher, they carried him to a safe house and laid him down to assess his injuries. They managed to cut the straps of his breastplate but could not remove the armour at his shoulders, so they loaded him half-undressed on to a blanket and carried him down to the beach to try and get him out of the city by boat. Behind them, the sultan’s banners were being raised on Acre’s walls.
Escape from the beach was impossible. Huge waves drove William’s companions back, so they continued with their master, now prone and silent, to the Templar compound in the far south-west of the city, entering by a side gate and carrying him through a stable courtyard where horse dung stood in great piles. Once inside the main house, Master William lay unspeaking for the rest of the day. Towards the evening he heard a commotion outside and gestured to his attendants to tell him what was happening. ‘They told him that men were fighting’, recalled the Templar of Tyre, ‘and he commanded them that they should leave him in peace’.
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William of Beaujeu died that evening. The city of Acre fell. The Mamluks poured in at three points in the walls, tearing through the streets, killing as they pleased. The Templar of Tyre saw noblewomen and nuns bolting for the docks, some of the ladies pregnant or clutching babies to their breasts. Those who could not escape were separated from their children and either taken as slaves or trampled beneath the invaders’ horses. Infants were disembowelled and crushed. Evacuations continued from the stormy beach, with Genoese galleys ferrying civilians to larger boats offshore, waiting to travel to Cyprus. The king of Cyprus, Hugh III, escaped to his kingdom, as did a number of western grandees, but the patriarch of Jerusalem, Nicholas of Hanapes, drowned when he tried to board a crowded boat and slipped into the water. A group of Templars under the veteran preceptor Theobald Gaudin escaped to Sidon, where, holed up in the Templar castle, they elected Theobald as the order’s new master. Those who could not find a berth on a ship headed for the only secure
place left in the city, the Templar fortress, a defiant beacon on the seafront, its towers topped with golden lions each the size of a donkey.
With their master dead, the Templars of Acre fell under the command of Peter of Sevrey, the marshal, who herded as many civilians as he could into the Templar compound and barred the gates. After several days, al-Ashraf sent an envoy to the Templars, offering to escort non-combatants out of the city. Peter of Sevrey agreed, but when the safe conduct party was allowed into the compound, it was composed of 400 ill-disciplined horsemen who began assaulting women and children before they were even out of the gates.5
The marshal refused to stand for this. He ordered the gates of the compound to be swung shut again, trapping the 400 Muslims inside. A battle in the courtyard began. For once the Christians had the advantage, and they slew their prisoners almost to a man, cutting off their heads. The Templar of Tyre wrote that ‘none escaped alive’. This was not quite true: one of al-Ashraf’s men later wrote that he had fought for an hour before fleeing with nine others into one of the fortress’s seaward towers, and jumping from there into the waves. ‘Some died, some were crippled, and some were spared for a time,’ he wrote.6 The fighting was fierce and unrelenting for one simple reason: everyone knew that this was not just Acre’s last stand. It was the endgame for the crusader states.
When the battle had ended, Peter of Sevrey received another message from the sultan. He said that he understood that his men had brought about their own deaths, and asked the marshal to come out and treat with him. For Peter this must have been an agonizing decision. If he left the fortress he would be putting himself and his men at the sultan’s mercy. If he stayed, there was no hope of reinforcement or relief. Everyone who could leave Acre had now done so. Those who had been left were now on their own. Still hoping to save the lives of the civilians under his guard, Peter emerged with a delegation of Templar brothers behind him, but as soon as they reached the enemy camp they were beheaded. Mamluk engineers began digging tunnels to bring down one of the fortress’s towers. Within three days, on Monday 28 May, the tower collapsed and troops rushed in.