by Dan Jones
The compound was overrun and Acre’s capitulation was complete.
*
James of Molay, a Burgundian knight of about forty-seven years of age, was at Nicosia on Cyprus the year Acre fell. Like every other Templar of the Holy Land who was not sliced apart as the Mamluks swarmed through the streets, he would have heard first hand of the terrible aftermath from a stream of horrified survivors.7
Most of the boats that had evacuated Acre unloaded their passengers in Cyprus. The exiles were soon joined by others fleeing the last settlements on the Levantine coast. Almost as soon as he was elected, the new Templar master Theobald Gaudin abandoned his post and came to Cyprus, claiming that he was going to seek help. The rest of the brothers did not wait long to see if he would succeed, and left Sidon to its fate on 14 July.
North of Acre, the Mamluks had found Tyre all but deserted when they rode in; Beirut was given up around the same time. By the beginning of August all that remained in Christian hands were two Templar castles, and these could not last long on their own. On 3 August Tortosa surrendered, and eleven days later the garrison at Château Pèlerin also quit their resistance. ‘They perceived clearly that they no longer had the ability to defend the castle,’ wrote the Templar of Tyre, ‘so they abandoned it and went to the Isle of Cyprus and the Saracens completed their destruction of the land... Everything was lost, so that altogether the Christians held not so much as a palm’s breadth of land in Syria.’8
Observing all this must have been one of the most disheartening experiences in James of Molay’s career as a Templar, already a succession of frustrations and disappointments. James was a lifelong servant of the Temple, having joined the order in his early twenties in 1265, in a grand ceremony conducted by Aimery of La Roche, the most senior Templar in France, and attended by the master of the English Templars.9 The usual pattern of recruitment was to send its young and energetic entrants to the Holy Land, while old, less physically able members remained in the west. That was exactly what had happened to James, who had landed in the east at some point during the late 1270s.10
By the time of his arrival Baybars had inflicted fatal damage on the Latin states, although this was the period of the ten-year truce brokered by Edward I. James would later recall that he had found this truce hard to bear, and had ‘murmured’ against the master, resenting him for his willingness to observe a peace with an enemy of the church. Only later did he come to understand that ‘the said master could not have acted otherwise’.11 Like any young soldier of his age, James had joined the Templars to fight, not to sit on his hands as the Christian Holy Land was wrenched apart. Yet that was exactly what he had been forced to do, as talk of a new crusade came to nothing, and al-Ashraf finished the job Baybars had begun.
In 1292 James of Molay’s career was transformed with the demise of the short-lived master Theobald Gaudin.12 The pool of candidates to succeed him must have been small. Within four days, through a fast, smart (and later much criticized) campaign, James had managed to secure his own election over that of a rival candidate, Hugh of Piraud. It was later said that he did this by claiming he had no desire for the position, and offering to oversee the election process as an impartial and temporary interim leader, only to then use that position to lobby for the full mastership. James knew how to manipulate the order’s procedures and protocols. Certainly he knew how to make enemies; the Templar of Tyre, whose direct association with the order ended on the death of his employer William of Beaujeu, called him greedy, and ‘miserly beyond reason’.13
So much for elections. It was still an awful moment to take command. The order was broken, stripped of its castles and banished from the land it had been created to protect. Yet within the chaos, James of Molay spied an opportunity. He threw himself into the task of reconstructing the Templar membership in the east in preparation for what was to his mind an inevitable resurgence in the crusading movement.
He could hardly hope to spur this on from Cyprus, so shortly after his election, he made the long journey west, to tour the royal courts with a view to firing up enthusiasm for a new mission to liberate the Holy Land.
*
The terrible news of Acre’s loss reached Paris in early August. One of the first newsflashes came from the master of the Hospitallers, John of Villiers, who wrote a doleful note to a colleague in France reporting its ‘unfortunate and pitiful fall’.14 Bad tidings from the Holy Land were hardly rare, but this was a serious blow. On hearing the ‘very harsh and bitter’ news Pope Nicholas IV ordered provincial church councils to assemble across Christendom and report back to Rome with their best suggestions for how to recover what had been lost.15 In his letters mandating these meetings, Pope Nicholas demanded a clear plan of action, specific recommendations for how to pay for a new crusade and suggestions for the destination. He steered the councils towards an idea that had begun to circulate some years previously: a merger of the military orders in to a single, unified institution capable of winning back Jerusalem and holding it for good.
The notion of merging the orders was not new. It had been first floated as early as 1274 at the Second Council of Lyon, a general synod convened to discuss resistance in the wake of Baybars’ conquests. A proposal to merge the Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Order with the other, assorted bands that had sprung up in imitation had been vetoed by Spanish kings unwilling to let go of their own regional orders (such as the Castilian Order of Calatrava or the Léonese Order of Alcántara). In 1292 the idea was nonetheless revived. In Pope Nicholas’ words, this was because ‘worthy men’ and ‘the popular voice’ both clamoured for unification and reform.16
Whether or not this was true, the Templars and Hospitallers were vulnerable to criticism at a moment when the catastrophic losses to the Mamluks required a simple explanation. Ever since their clashes with the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Hohenstaufen in the 1220s, they had been a partisan element in the politics of the Holy Land. They had taken sides in the ruinous struggle to dominate trade in Acre fought between Genoan and Venetian merchants from 1258 until 1272, throwing their weight behind the Venetians while the Hospitallers had backed the Genoans. Both orders had engaged in running battles around town and in the waters outside the harbour, leaving hundreds of men dead when the crusader states were already short of manpower. News of this dispute had spread and at least one chronicler attributed the ‘sorrowful misfortune’ to ‘discord between the Hospitallers and the Templars’.17
The Templars had also involved themselves in a bitter tussle in the county of Tripoli, siding with the Gibelet family in choosing to resist the peaceful accession of Bohemond VI’s fourteen-year-old son, Bohemond VII, in 1275. Sieges and skirmishes had raged between Tripoli itself (where the Templar house was demolished by the angry count), Sidon and Tortosa. Even on Cyprus, where the Templars had military headquarters in Limassol and a second base in Nicosia, they had managed to upset their host.18 In 1278 a dispute for the crown of Jerusalem had blown up between Hugh III of Cyprus and Charles of Anjou, brother of Louis IX. The Templars supported the Anjou claim, drawing the extreme displeasure of Hugh, who took revenge by destroying the Templar house in Limassol and harassing the brothers to the point of drawing admonition from the pope.19 Although those who had died at Acre were routinely praised as martyrs, survivors were open to the accusation of cowardice, which was levelled at them by chroniclers such as Master Thaddeus of Naples.20 All this meant that as James of Molay prepared to travel home he was returning to a world in which the desire for crusading remained high, but the Templars were now faced with open criticism.
Among those to answer Pope Nicholas’ call for reform was the Fransciscan friar Ramon Lull, who had spent much of the three decades leading up to the fall of Acre wandering far from his home in Mallorca in an effort to convert infidels, all the while considering the best way to reconfigure the Christian approach to the Near East. Unsurprisingly for an itinerant preacher, he concentrated his thought on education and conversion. He advised the pope to establ
ish four world-class colleges to train fearless, bilingual missionaries who could inform Jews, Mongols, Greeks and Arabs about the iniquity of their beliefs and convince them to follow Christ in a fashion approved by Rome.
As Ramon was fond of pointing out, Christ himself had advocated a policy of two swords. As he developed his ideas over the following decade he became more militant, coming to the conclusion that ‘you should fight against the unbelievers both with preaching and with weapons’.21 Although he was not a fighter himself, Ramon Lull had no doubts as to the best way to organize a crusading army. ‘The lord pope and the cardinals should select and establish a single noble order, to be called the order of knighthood,’ he wrote:
The head of this order would be termed both master and warrior-king... if at all possible the kingdom of Jerusalem should be assigned to him... It follows that this warrior should be a king’s son, both because of the honour or the office which is given to him and in order that all the [religious] orders of knighthood should be the more willing to submit themselves to his order... Further: the lord pope... should decree that this single order [or] knighthood should be created from the union of the order of the Temple and the knighthood of the Hospital, the Teutons... and all the other orders of knights without exception, whoever and wherever they are.
Ramon had no doubt of the efficacy of his plan – and he was willing to bet that God felt the same way. ‘And should anyone oppose it,’ he wrote, ‘he would be seen to be neither faithful nor devout, and he should consider the judgement on the Last Day, when the Lord Jesus Christ says “Depart into the everlasting fire, you accursed ones.”’22
*
Fortunately for James of Molay, he was able to duck the issue of amalgamation for a time. In April 1292 Nicholas IV died, and the college of cardinals that was required to elect his successor fell into intractable rancour. It took them nearly two years to settle on the absurd candidacy of a seventy-nine-year-old hermit from Sicily called Peter of Morrone, who was crowned against his will as Pope Celestine V. (Celestine’s election as pope was the last to take place without a conclave, in which the electors are summoned and forbidden to leave until they have come to a decision.) His papacy was a four-month farce, and by December 1294 Celestine had resigned and run away.* James of Molay was in Rome to see all this, and on Christmas Eve he witnessed the election of the aggressive and lawyerly Italian cardinal Benedetto Caetani, who took the name Boniface VIII.
James’s visit to Rome was the first step in his programme to rebuild Templar strength in the east. He later said he found Boniface interested in but ultimately unconvinced by the idea of unification. ‘The Pope spoke of it several times,’ James would recall, ‘but all things considered he preferred to abandon the affair entirely.’23 This may well have been the result of direct lobbying by James himself. He stayed in Rome for the first six months of 1295 and his visit yielded tangible results in two areas. Drastic reorganization was avoided and he secured favourable tax relief on the exchange of goods between Templar estates in the east and west. In June Pope Boniface issued a papal bull which praised the Templars as ‘fearless warriors of Christ’ and implored them to ‘constantly pay attention to the guardianship of the kingdom of Cyprus’, to which end he granted them ‘the same liberties and immunities’ that they had enjoyed in the Holy Land.24
Boniface further commanded the king of England, Edward I, to allow exports bound for Cyprus to pass freely through English ports and granted the Templars of Cyprus freedom from making gifts to the church, on the grounds that their resources were bound to be badly stretched.25 Charles II, the king of Naples, was a staunch advocate of merging the military orders as a means to win back Jerusalem – to which he laid claim as titular king. But he did not press his case and agreed to suspend export duties on goods travelling from the Templar estates in his lands to Cyprus.
During the second half of 1295 James of Molay went to England and France. His journey must have required tact. Church councils in Canterbury and Reims had both concluded that the military orders should bear the brunt of the cost of reconquering the Holy Land, with the clear implication that they had lost it and could clean up their own mess. Another English council favoured merging the orders and giving them over to the command of Edward I, unique among the reigning kings of the day in having personally been on a crusade.26 James’ position in France, typically the centre of Templar recruitment and support, was even more delicate, as he sought to court both the French king and his southern rival across the Pyrenees, James II, king of Aragon. There was history here: ten years previously the French king had invaded Aragon and persuaded the French-born pope Martin IV to grant his war the status of a crusade. The Aragonese king at the time (Peter III) had called on the Templars to fight for him, asking them to join the royal army and deploy their galleys to defend his coastline from French shipping: a peculiar situation in which the Aragonese Templars found themselves taking up arms against Frenchmen and crusaders.27
By the end of the year James of Molay was ready to return to Cyprus. His tour had not been spectacular: he had not whipped up a storm of crusading fervour and he had certainly not killed off criticism of the military orders, who did nothing to help their cause by joining resurgent clashes between Genoa and Venice in the eastern Mediterranean, but he had tamped down the appetite for abolishing his order to the manageable level of churchmen tugging at their beards. In that sense the crisis of 1291 had been weathered and the regrouping process was underway. By the end of the decade confidence was sufficiently high for a new invasion of the lost lands in Syria and Palestine to be under consideration.
*
For nearly two years at the start of the fourteenth century, the Templars reoccupied part of the Holy Land. It was a sliver – but for a time it was enough to suggest that more was possible. Under James of Molay they had been slowly expanding their naval capability, ordering new galleys from Venice in preparation for a war that would have to be fought as much at sea as on dusty land. On 20 July 1300 a fleet of sixteen galleys carried a high-profile raiding force out of Famagusta in Cyprus heading for the enemy coastline. The master was on board, along with King Henry II of Cyprus, his brother Amalric of Tyre, and William of Villiers, master of the Hospital. This was not a fully fledged crusade, but it was a fleet capable of causing serious damage as it cruised the shore raiding settlements around Acre.
There was good reason to think a resurgence in Christian fortunes lay ahead. Several hundred miles to the east, Ghazan, leader of the Il-Khan Mongols, was busily plotting against the Mamluks. Regular envoys continued to go back and forth between the Mongols and the Christians on Cyprus, with promises of mutual assistance. After the summer raids of 1300 a plan was concocted for a joint assault focusing on Tortosa, where the Templars’ former castle had not yet been demolished. Later in the year around 300 Templars and Hospitallers joined a royal party that sailed to the tiny island of Ru’ad, which lay a couple of miles off Tortosa. They disembarked, secured Ru’ad as a forward base and then set off again to take the fortress on the mainland and meet up with Ghazan’s formidable troops.
Unfortunately, the Mongols did not turn up on time. The Christians fought their way into Tortosa but could not hold it, and within a month they had been forced back to Ru’ad, and most of their troops then returned to Cyprus. The Templars agreed to garrison the little island with a force of around 120 knights, 400 sergeants and 500 archers, all commanded by their marshal, Bartholomew of Quincy. The thunderclap of the Lord’s judgement had not quite sounded over the Mamluk kingdom, but it was at least a start.
By 1302 everything had been lost once more. Around 150 miles (240 km) of the eastern Mediterranean separated Ru’ad’s garrison from Cyprus, presenting a supply line that was vulnerable to blockade or even bad weather. In the autumn of 1301 a Mamluk fleet appeared, commanded by a Muslim convert from Christian Georgia by the name of Sandamour. He and his men attacked the island and began a siege that lasted nearly a year, until in 1302 the garrison sued for p
eace, severely worn down by attritional fighting that had reduced them from nearly 1,000 to just 280 men. A deal was struck whereby the Templars agreed to surrender on condition of safe conduct off the island. Had any of these men been veterans of Acre they would have known better. As the Templar of Tyre reported, ‘the Saracens had the heads of all the Syrian foot soldiers cut off, because they had put up such a stiff defence... and the brethren of the Temple were dishonourably conducted to Babylon’. A life of slavery beckoned.
Once again the Templars had been wrenched out of a stronghold on the promise of safe passage and betrayed. Until a serious expedition could be mounted it would be desperately difficult for the order to extend much beyond Cyprus. James of Molay’s tenure as master had been a struggle from the beginning – and despite regular talk of a new crusade it showed little sign of getting any better. He was now stuck on Cyprus, able neither to retreat nor advance.
Then, in 1306 James was summoned by a new pope. At first this seemed promising; it turned out to be anything but. In fact, this was the moment when darkness began to fall on the Templars.
* Celestine wished to return to his life as a hermit, but was prevented from doing so for fear that he would be raised up as an antipope by enemies of the new pontiff, Boniface VIII. He was instead imprisoned by his successor, in a cell not of his choosing, where he died in 1296.
19
‘At the Devil’s Prompting’
On 15 November 1305 half of Christendom seemed to have descended on the city of Lyon. Princes and dukes, counts and cardinals, abbots and archbishops: the city heaved with dignitaries and townspeople eager to see a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle. Ambassadors in brightly coloured bishops’ robes had arrived from England and Aragon bearing gifts worth hundreds of pounds. The king of France and his two brothers had come accompanied by their extensive household staffs. A babble of languages filled the air. All were gathering in the grand basilica of Saint-Just to witness the coronation of Bertrand of Got, archbishop of Bordeaux, as Pope Clement V.