The Templars (19 page)
Authors: Michael Haag
Such a blockade would not be possible, however, as long as Outremer depended on the ships of the Italian maritime republics, for these were the very same merchant marines who traded so profitably with Egypt. The Venetians, for example, supplied Baybars with the metal and timber that he needed for his arms and siege engines, and the Genoese even provided him with Mameluke slaves. Instead the Christians needed to gain the naval ascendancy in the Eastern Mediterranean. William’s advice was accepted and the council ordered the Templars and the Hospitallers to build their own fleets of warships.
William of Beaujeu had arrived at this plan not least because he recognised the contribution that was already being made by the French monarchy to sustaining the existence of Outremer. William’s own uncle had fought with Louis IX in Egypt, and through his paternal grandmother he was related to the Capets, the French royal family. The kings of France were already paying for a permanent force of knights and crossbowmen at Acre, and the ambitious Charles of Anjou, who was king of Sicily and the younger brother of Louis IX, was helping to extend French power throughout the Mediterranean. But William’s plans were overthrown by a popular uprising in 1282 known as the Sicilian Vespers, which sent Charles fleeing from the island to Naples.
Pope Martin IV, who was himself French, now declared a crusade against the Sicilian rebels and their supporters, the house of Aragon in Spain. Worse, he ordered funds held at the Paris Temple and intended for Outremer to be diverted to the house of Anjou in support of their war against fellow Christians to regain control over Sicily. Christians
throughout Europe and in particular the Templars were outraged, and a few years later, after the fall of Tripoli, one Templar told Martin’s successor Pope Nicholas IV, ‘You could have relieved the Holy Land with the power of kings and the strength of the other faithful of Christ…but you preferred to attack a Christian king and the Christian Sicilians, arming kings against a king to recover the island of Sicily’–another example of the growing trend to put secular interests over religious ideals.
Charles of Anjou’s ambitions to build a Mediterranean empire and to combine his Kingdom of Sicily with the Kingdom of Jerusalem had kept Baybar’s own ambitions somewhat in check. But in 1277 Baybars had died, and after a brief power struggle the most capable among the Mamelukes was elevated to the sultanate, Baybar’s brilliant commander Qalaun. The Sicilian Vespers, followed by Charles’ death in 1285, removed any Mameluke hesitation in pursuing the destruction of the Christian states in the East.
Lonely Outposts
The fall of the Crusader castles to the Mamelukes needs some explanation. How could such magnificent structures, built at such vast cost and effort, incorporating the latest military design of the age, and defended by men of undoubted courage, have so rapidly capitulated or been captured? There is no single answer. Several factors worked in combination.
The Templar castle of Beaufort, overlooking the southern end of the Bekaa valley in Lebanon, fell to Baybars in 1268 with the help of first-class military engineers. They assembled something like twenty-six siege engines, that is battering rams and siege towers as well as catapults, the wooden frames and metal parts bought from Venetian merchants sailing into Egyptian ports. In this case the Templars were overwhelmed by technology. But two years earlier when the Templar castle of Saphet (Safad) fell to Baybars it had been down to treason.
Saphet was the castle in northern Galilee which the Templars had spent a fortune rebuilding less than thirty years before, a worthwhile expense as it guarded against raids of Bedouins and Turks who would formerly
cross over the Jordan with impunity. Traders could safely conduct their pack animals and wagons between Acre and Galilee, farmers could cultivate their fields in security, and pilgrims could freely visit many sites associated with the ministry of Jesus. Muslim sources acknowledged its efficacy by describing Saphet as ‘an obstruction in the throat of Syria and a blockage in the chest of Islam’–that is until Baybars brought about its downfall in 1266. He did so not by attack–he tried three times that year and failed–but by sowing dissent between the small garrison of Templars and the much larger numbers of Syrian Christian servants and native troops inside. He promised the latter free passage and so many wanted to defect that the defence of the castle was called into question. The Templars agreed to negotiate and a safe conduct was arranged, for Templar knights and locals alike. But when the gates were opened, Baybars grabbed all the women and children and sold them into slavery and decapitated all the knights and other men.
The willingness of the Templars garrison at Saphet to negotiate points to another factor at work: a sense of isolation and feeling overwhelmed, which seems to have played an important part in the fall of the Templar castle of Chastel Blanc (Safita) and the Hospitallers’ Krak des Chevaliers to Baybars within two months of one another in 1271. Both castles stood in the Jebel al-Sariya, that mountain range separating the interior from the sea; but both became increasingly isolated amidst the Muslim advance. Perhaps also the Templar master at Tortosa thought it wiser to concentrate his forces on the coast, but whatever the reason he ordered the evacuation of Chastel Blanc.
Likewise Krak des Chevaliers was not taken but given away. The Hospitallers could no longer raise sufficient manpower to garrison the castle and for its diminished complement of Hospitaller knights the waiting became a terrible immurement. After a month’s siege, Baybars delivered a forged note purportedly from their master at Tripoli, urging them to surrender. Their defences and supplies might have allowed them to hold out for years, but it must have seemed to them that Krak was drifting anchorless and rudderless upon an irresistible Muslim tide. Weary, dejected and demoralised, on 8 April 1271 the Hospitallers accepted Baybars’ offer of safe conduct to the sea.
Within twenty years the few Crusader possessions along the coast would also fall and the 200-year adventure in the Holy Land would end.
The truce with the Franks had allowed the Mamelukes to direct their energy towards renewed Mongol threats, but once that had been accomplished, and even before the truce had ended, Sultan Qalaun renewed Mameluke aggression against the Franks. Now the coastal cities and castles began to go the way of the inland defences; in 1285 Qalaun took the Hospitaller castle of Margat, perched on a salient of the Jebel al-Sariya overlooking the sea, and in 1287 he easily took the port city of Latakia after its walls were damaged in an earthquake.
Yet in 1286, in the midst of these campaigns and with extraordinary insouciance, the Franks celebrated the visit of King Henry II of Cyprus,
who had come to assume the crown of Jerusalem. The Templar of Tyre recorded the festivities at Acre, when the king ‘held a feast lasting fifteen days at the Auberge of the Hospital of Saint John. And it was the most splendid feast they had seen for a hundred years…They enacted the tales of the Round Table and the Queen of Femenie, which consisted of knights dressed as women jousting together. Then those who should have been dressed as monks dressed up as nuns, and they jousted together.’
Beyond the walls of Acre, however, the outlook was grim. In 1289 Qalaun overwhelmed Tripoli: ‘The population fell back to the port where some escaped on ships’, recorded the historian Abu al-Feda. ‘Of the rest, the men were all put to death and the women and children taken as slaves, and the Muslims amassed an immense booty. Just off the headland there was a small island with a church, and when the city was taken many Franks took refuge there with their families. But the Muslim troops swam across to the island, massacring the men and carrying off the women and children. I myself went out to the island on a boat after the carnage, but I was unable to stay, so strong was the stench
of corpses.’ When the killing and looting were finished, Qalaun razed the city to the ground.
Vowing not to leave a single Christian alive in the city, Qalaun set out from Cairo for Acre in November 1290, but he fell ill and died along the way. His son al-Ashraf Khalil pledged to continue the war against the Franks, and in early spring 1291 his armies from Syria and Egypt converged on Acre, together with over a hundred siege engines, including various kinds of catapults. On 5 April Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil himself arrived and the siege began. At most the Franks were able to muster about 1000 knights and 14,000 foot soldiers; the population of Acre was 40,000, and every able-bodied man took his place on the ramparts. On 15 April William of Beaujeu, the Templar Grand Master, led a night attack on a section of the Muslim lines. At first, surprise won them the advantage, but the Christians got caught up in the enemy’s tent ropes and were eventually beaten back. Under a hail of arrows and a bombardment of stones by the catapults, Mameluke engineers were able
to advance close against the walls and mine the defences, bringing down tower after tower over the following weeks.
On 15 May, after six weeks of constant battering, the Accursed Tower commanding the vital northeast salient of the city’s walls was taken by the Mamelukes. William of Beaujeu was fatally wounded trying to force the enemy back. He was placed on a shield and carried to the Temple enclave where he was buried before the high altar while the desperate fighting continued outside. By now townspeople were pressing onto the quays to board whatever ships they could to escape from the doomed city. Merchant captains made fortunes extorting money from the rich desperate to escape, as did also, it is thought, Roger of Flor, captain of a Templar galley called
The Falcon
, who used his profits to found his later career as a pirate. As the Mamelukes stormed through the streets they killed everyone in sight, including women and children; those who hid indoors were taken captive and sold on the slave market of Damascus, where the glut of women and girls reduced their price to a single drachma.
By the evening of 18 May all Acre was in the hands of the Mamelukes except for the Templar fortress at the seaward extremity of the city. There they held out, commanded by their marshal, together with civilians who had sought protection within their walls, and were kept supplied by sea from Cyprus. On 25 May the Templar marshal agreed to surrender provided those inside were granted safe passage out of Acre, but as the Muslims entered they began to molest the women and boys, provoking the Templars to fight back. That night the Templar commander Theobald Gaudin was sent out of the fortress with the order’s treasure and sailed up the coast to Château de Mer, the Templars’ sea-castle just off the coast at Sidon. The Templar fortress in Acre fell three days later and at Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil’s command all those left alive were led outside the walls where their heads were cut off, and the city was smashed to pieces until almost nothing was left standing. Forty years later a German traveller came upon the spot and found only a few peasants living amidst the desolation of what had once been the splendid capital of Outremer.
From Sidon, Theobald Gaudin sailed to Cyprus with the Templar treasure. His intention was to bring back reinforcements. But Gaudin never returned. Instead a message came from the Templars in Cyprus urging their brethren in Sidon to abandon their castle there, and on the night of 14 July they put to sea. Cyprus had long been a Frankish kingdom. A century earlier Richard the Lionheart had seized it from the Byzantines, and after a brief period in Templar hands, Richard sold it on again to Guy of Lusignan, the former King of Jerusalem, whose dynasty would continue to rule Cyprus for nearly three hundred years. Meanwhile the Templars and the Hospitallers had built castles on Cyprus, and now as the Franks were being driven from the coast of Outremer the island became a refuge for both military orders.
In the Holy Land, after the fall of Acre and Sidon, only Tortosa and Athlit remained in Christian hands. Both were Templar strongholds, but as the Mamelukes gathered for the kill, the knights slipped away to Cyprus from Tortosa on 3 August 1291 and eleven days later from Athlit. ‘This time’, wrote the Templar of Tyre, ‘everything was lost, so that the Christians no longer held a palm of land in Syria.’ As the Templars looked back along the receding mainland, the devastation was already beginning. For some months after the fall of Tortosa in 1291, Mameluke troops laid waste to the coastal plain. Orchards were cut down and irrigation systems wrecked, while native Christians fled into the Jebel al-Sariya. The only castles left standing were those far back from the sea, and Margat, high upon its mountain. Anything that might be of value to the Crusaders should they ever attempt another landing was destroyed.
Even four centuries after the Franks were driven from this coast, the devastation wrought by the Mamelukes was still apparent, in 1697 the English traveller Henry Maundrell recording the ‘many ruins of castles and houses, which testify that this country, however it be neglected at present, was once in the hands of a people that knew how to value it, and thought it worth the defending’.
The Fall 1291–1314
Lost Souls
Though not unexpected, the fall of Acre came as a shock in the West. The sins of the inhabitants of Outremer were blamed, as was the failure of the leaders of European Christendom to provide ample and timely aid, and the Italian merchant states which had traded with Mameluke Egypt, and the military orders, Templars and Hospitallers alike. No one was exempt.
But it was the Templars who felt the loss most intensely. The defence of the Holy Land and the protection of pilgrims was their
raison d’être
. For the Hospitallers the ethos of their charitable work took precedence; they had never abandoned their original function of caring for the sick. But the Templars were founded as a knighthood, their role to fight against the infidel, and in that cause to service crusades and direct the finances of Popes and kings. Now cast out from the Holy Land, the Templars found themselves in limbo.
Of course, the dream of recovering the Holy Land was not yet over, certainly not in the mind of James of Molay who in 1293 became the Templars’ new Grand Master. He had spent thirty years in the order, much of it in Outremer, and his vision for the Templars was that they should take the lead in a new crusade. The fall of Acre did not seem like the decisive end of things, more an interlude, and there were expectations that the mainland would be regained. The Templars had established their new headquarters on Cyprus, and they still held the tiny island of Ruad (Arwad) just two miles off the coast of Syria opposite Tortosa, and from these places James of Molay envisioned that the counterattack against the Mamelukes would begin.
Meanwhile on the mainland there were numerous local insurrections against Mameluke rule, which was brutal and repressive. Already in 1291, while Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil was busy fighting the Crusaders at Acre and elsewhere along the coast, Shia Muslims living in the northern part of the Bekaa valley and in the mountains northeast of Beirut had joined with Druze in an uprising against the Sunni Mamelukes which was finally crushed only in 1308.
Across Palestine, Syria and Lebanon, the Christian denominations survived but were greatly diminished. Muslims taunted the native Christians, saying that the failure of Christ to save them against the Mameluke onslaught proved that he was just a man; so demoralised were many Christians in the East that they converted to Islam. Things were particularly difficult for the Maronites. They had been condemned by the Church as heretics in the seventh century for their belief not in the single nature of Christ, Monophysitism, but in the single will of Christ, Monothelitism, but in 1182 the Crusaders helped bring them into communion with the Catholic Church at Rome. Over fifty thousand Maronites were said to have died fighting alongside the Crusaders during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to defend Outremer against the Muslims. When the Crusaders left, some Maronites went with them to Cyprus, but those who remained never surrendered their connection with Rome, despite persecution by the Mameluke jihad. Instead they escaped into the mountains of northern Lebanon where surnames such as Franjieh, meaning Frank, and Salibi, meaning Crusader, are current to this day.
Nor had the Mongols gone away. Since their defeat at the hands of the Mamelukes in 1260 they had shown an interest in forming an alliance with the Christians in the West, and indeed the conversion of two Mongol emissaries at the Council of Lyons in 1274 had raised hopes that the Mongols might convert wholesale to Christianity. Twice, in 1281 and 1299, the Mongols advanced into northern Syria, and when news came from the West in 1300 of a new crusade, the Mongols offered the Christians the Holy Land if they would help them beat the Mamelukes.
Eager to take the initiative in recovering the Holy Land, in 1294 James of Molay travelled from Cyprus to the West to promote the Templars as the vanguard of a new crusade. He received encouragement from Pope Boniface VIII in Rome and King Edward I in London and practical assistance too, with both Pope and king making it easier for the Templars to raise new funds in Europe in order to rebuild their forces after their terrible recent losses at Acre and elsewhere in Outremer. Foodstuffs and treasure were shipped from European ports to the Templars in Cyprus and galleys were bought from Venice, part of the war fleet that the Templars would need to lead the attacks against the Syrian and Egyptian coasts.
A wave of excited anticipation swept across Europe in 1300 at the prospect of this new expedition to the East. The mood was reminiscent of those days when Pope Urban II had preached the First Crusade. The Mongols had invaded deep into Syria the year before and the Mamelukes had withdrawn, and there were rumours that Jerusalem had fallen into Mongol hands. Being the 1300th anniversary of the birth of Christ, the Pope declared this to be a jubilee year, promising full remission of sins to those who visited the Basilica of Saint Peter in Rome. Two hundred thousand pilgrims answered his call and were welcomed by a triumphant Pope Boniface sitting on the throne of Constantine the Great and holding the symbols of temporal dominion, the sword, the sceptre and the crown, and bellowing to the crowd, ‘I am Caesar!’ In the familiar battle between the Church and the secular claims of kings, no one could be left in doubt that the Pope was proclaiming the universal jurisdiction of the Church over the monarchs of the West and celebrating the victory yet to come over the infidels in the East.
In the summer of 1300 the Templars, together with the Hospitallers and the king of Cyprus, launched a series of probing attacks against Alexandria and Rosetta, and at Acre, Tortosa and Maraclea. These were preliminaries to a planned joint operation with the Mongols, and they were followed up in November by a combined Templar, Hospitaller and Lusignan force from Cyprus, about 600 knights in all, which was landed on the island of Ruad opposite Tortosa; this, together with Athlit, had been the last stronghold abandoned by the Templars in 1291. From there they made further raids against Tortosa, waiting for the Mongols to appear; instead in the face of a Mameluke threat the Crusaders withdrew to Cyprus, and when the Mongols finally did appear in February 1301 it was too late.
Nevertheless, later in that year the Templars returned to Ruad, this time establishing a considerable force on the island and rebuilding its defences. In preparation for a serious assault on the Syrian mainland, they garrisoned Ruad with 120 knights, 500 archers and 400 servants, almost half the number of Templar knights and auxiliaries as would normally have defended the entire Kingdom of Jerusalem in the twelfth century. Possibly they were waiting for the Mongols to return; instead
they found themselves isolated on their tiny island against which the Mamelukes sent a fleet of sixteen ships in 1302. A prolonged siege and repeated attacks finally wore down the starving Templars, who surrendered on condition of safe conduct, a promise that was betrayed, the Templars being slaughtered or sold into slavery.
Philip IV, the Most Christian King
Despite this setback in the East, Pope Boniface VIII was no less adamant about his claims of Papal supremacy in the West, which he reinforced with a bull in 1303 called
Unam Sanctam
. This asserted that there was only one holy (
unam sanctam
) Catholic Church, and that to attain salvation it was necessary to submit to the Pope in all matters both spiritual and material. The bull was in response to various trespasses against the authority of the Church that had been committed by King Philip IV of France, often known as Philip the Fair for his golden locks if nothing else, who was forever in need of money to finance the expansion of his kingdom and make war against Flanders and England, and
so imposed taxes against the clergy. To Philip this was no different to raising taxes for a crusade, for he ruled with a divine mission; in 1297 he had obtained a sainthood for his grandfather, the crusading Louis IX, and was convinced that France was the chosen kingdom of God. In effect the conflict was between the universalist claims of the Church and the new phenomenon of nationalism as asserted by the king of France, both claiming to have God on their side. The Pope might be the Vicar of God, but Philip, according to his admirers, was ‘more than a man, wholly divine’, and ‘the most Christian king of France’.
When Philip still showed no sign of repentance nor of bowing to the Pope’s will, Boniface prepared a bull of excommunication against the king and his minister William of Nogaret. But before it could be published a force of French soldiers led by William of Nogaret himself burst into the Pope’s summer palace at Agnani in the hills southeast of Rome with the aim of taking Boniface as prisoner back to France to stand trial on charges of heresy, sodomy and the murder of the previous Pope. Boniface, who was guarded by only a handful of Templars and Hospitallers, challenged his enemies to kill him, saying, ‘Here is my neck, here is my head.’ But Boniface had been born at Agnani and the townsfolk rallied to him; and before his captors could do more than slap him around and beat him up, they rushed to his defence and drove the French out. He was a broken man, however, and a month later when he died in Rome any serious pretension of the Catholic Church to universal dominion over spiritual and material affairs died with him. The age had truly begun of European nation states led, whatever their religious claims, by secular leaders with secular aims.
Pope Clement’s New Crusade, King Philip’s New Order
After the death of Boniface, the College of Cardinals elected a new Pope, but he died within a year. After long deliberation and pressure from Philip IV, the College produced a Frenchman who came to the Papal throne in 1305 as Clement V. Never throughout his Papacy did Clement set foot in Rome nor indeed Italy; instead he moved between Lyons and Poitiers until March 1309 when he set up court at Avignon in Provence,
which at that time technically lay outside the jurisdiction of the kings of France. Clement then went on to pack the College of Cardinals with Frenchmen; not surprisingly the next six Popes all resided at Avignon, and all were French.
This did not mean that Clement V was a puppet of Philip IV, rather the new Pope understood that if he was to achieve his Papal ambitions it would not be, as Boniface had insisted in
Unam Sanctam
, by trying to make Philip submit to his authority but by cultivating their relationship and securing Philip’s cooperation. Clement’s great ambition was a new crusade, but it would need the collaboration and leadership of the French king. The proposed venture had its difficulties, however, not least because since the fall of Ruad the Mongols had converted en masse to Islam, not to Christianity as had been hoped.
Another difficulty was presented by Philip himself. Clement succeeded in persuading the king to take the cross at the end of December 1305; he freed Philip from the distraction of local conflict by negotiating a peace between the French king and King Edward I of England; and he diverted 10 per cent of the Church’s income in France to Philip’s coffers to finance the new crusade. But in Philip’s view a prerequisite for a successful crusade was the merging of the two military orders, the Templars and the Hospitallers. Moreover, Philip would command the new order; it would become an instrument of France, for Philip’s propagandists also insisted that eventually his command should pass to one of his sons who likewise should succeed him as king of Jerusalem.
Then again, there was a large element of hypocrisy in these French plans; recovering the Holy Land was not really Philip’s priority, rather his ambition was to conquer the Christian Byzantine Empire and to establish himself on the ancient imperial throne at Constantinople.
In May 1307 Pope Clement met with the Templar and Hospitaller Grand Masters at his court in France where they submitted their own views on the proposed crusade and the unification of the orders. The comments made by the Grand Master of the Hospitallers, Fulk of
Villaret, about the merging of the orders do not survive, but it seems that he was opposed as his proposal for the crusade assumed that the Hospitallers and the Templars would operate independently. Fulk favoured a small initial expedition to the East, a policy the Hospitallers in fact pursued in June of that very same year when they seized the island of Rhodes, which had been a Byzantine possession, an enterprise that gave them a well-fortified and independent state of their own. A large crusade, went Fulk’s argument, should follow only after forward bases had been secured.
But after the Templars’ experience of the failure at Ruad, James of Molay opposed a small-scale expedition and wanted an all-out crusade. This meant calling on the kings of England, Germany, Sicily, Spain and France to raise an army of between 12,000 and 15,000 knights and 5000 soldiers on foot. This enormous force was to be raised secretly and transported on Venetian, Genoese and other Italian ships to Cyprus, from where it was to be launched against the coast of Palestine. James of Molay’s plan was based on a serious and realistic assessment of the military problems facing a crusade aimed at the recovery of the Holy Land, though he knew that this was not in line with popular opinion, which wanted the rhetoric of crusade without the effort or commitment, and moreover it flew in the face of Philip’s hypocritical intentions.
On the matter of uniting the two orders, James of Molay was also unaccommodating. He admitted that there could be some advantages in the merger, principally that a united order would be stronger. But he also pointed out that the question had been raised before, only to be
rejected. Competition between the Templars and the Hospitallers made the orders more effective, he said, as it provided the stimulus for each to outdo the other; nor did one duplicate the functions of the other, rather they were complementaries, placing different emphases on providing alms, transporting men and supplies across the sea, protecting pilgrims and Crusaders, and making war against the infidel.
