The Tragedy of the Templars (26 page)

The Temple Mount was a busy place. Yet at its heart it was as silent as any monastery, for the Templars followed the canonical hours like any Cistercian or Benedictine monk, and otherwise caring for their horses. The so-called Stables of Solomon were, in fact, a substructure of vaults and arches built by Herod to extend the platform of the Mount, and later reconstruction work was undertaken by the Umayyads and the Templars. The Templars indeed used this as a stable, but Theoderich's claim that ten thousand horses could be stabled beneath the Mount is an exaggeration; other travellers estimated the capacity at about two thousand horses, and allowing space for squires, grooms and perhaps even pilgrims sleeping there, the number of horses stabled at any one time was more like five hundred. A gate constructed by the Templars in the southern wall of the Temple Mount gave direct access to their headquarters and to the stables.

These warrior monks were a powerful force in the Holy Land, whose defence since the Second Crusade fell increasingly on their shoulders. Vassals under the feudal system produced no more than 1,000 knights throughout the whole of Outremer, although the king of Jerusalem did have sufficient resources to hire mercenaries. Nevertheless, by the 1170s the Templars alone had 300 knights and another 1,000 sergeants based at Jerusalem, and a similar number distributed among Tripoli, Antioch, Tortosa and Baghras: in other words 600 knights and 2,000 sergeants in all. When the Hospitallers were included, the military orders provided the greater part of the military prowess of the Frankish states in the East.
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Far from being fanatics forever in search of battle with the infidel, as sometimes they are portrayed, the Templars were pragmatic and conservative in their approach to politics and warfare – if anything, more so than the counts and kings of Outremer, who were driven by personal and dynastic ambitions in the here and now. In becoming a Knight Templar each man surrendered his will to the order, as in the words of one recruit: ‘I, renouncing secular life and its pomp, relinquishing everything, give myself to the Lord God and to the knighthood of the Temple of Solomon of Jerusalem, that, as long as I shall live, in accordance with my strength, I shall serve there a complete pauper for God.'
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Self-will was replaced with service to the order and its aims, and the Templars were playing a long game, dedicated to defending the Holy Land for all time. In any case, conflict in the Middle Ages tended to be more about sieges of cities and castles than battle in the open field, which was unpredictable and risky even under the most favourable circumstances. And in Outremer patience had its rewards, as it was usually only a matter of time before the uneasy Muslim coalitions against the Christians fell apart. And so it was with confidence that the Templars looked out from their headquarters atop the Temple Mount upon Jerusalem and the future that lay beyond.

S
INCE THE DEATH
of King Fulk in 1143, his wife and co-ruler, Melisende, had been ruling the kingdom of Jerusalem both in her own right and as regent for their son Baldwin III. In this she had the support of the Templars, owing to the boy's age, but in 1150, by when he had long since achieved his majority, Baldwin demanded the right to rule as joint monarch with his mother. Tensions grew during the next two years as factions of the nobility backed Baldwin or Melisende, and there were fears of civil war, but the matter was decided in 1152, when Baldwin made a convincing show of force and his mother was retired to Nablus. There is evidence that suggests the Templars may have supported Melisende to the last, but if so, they suffered no breach with Baldwin; although answerable to no one but the pope, the Templars were always strong supporters of whoever wore the crown at Jerusalem. In any case two years later, in 1152, Melisende and Baldwin were reconciled and, although still ensconced at Nablus, which she had been allowed to hold for life, Melisende continued to exercise influence at court, where her experience was valued and she also acted as Baldwin's regent when he was away on campaigns.

Baldwin III's first major campaign was against Ascalon, to which he laid siege in January 1153. Garrisoned by the Fatimids of Egypt, Ascalon was the last Muslim outpost along the Palestinian coast and had served as a base for raids against the kingdom of Jerusalem and acts of piracy at sea. But although Fatimid Egypt had been weakening, Ascalon was powerfully fortified, and the siege wore on well into the summer, the city finally falling only in August. The booty was enormous, and the Christian recovery of Palestine was complete. The Templars played a prominent part in this triumph, for they were first into the breach when a section of the walls came down, yet William of Tyre was predictable in turning this against them when he claimed in his chronicle that their eagerness was due to their greed for spoils, a theme he was to develop and which was taken up by others. William of Tyre's resentment towards the Templars arose from their independence, as an order responsible only to the pope and otherwise operating outside all jurisdiction of church or state. As a churchman himself, and frustrated in his ambition to become patriarch of Jerusalem, he rarely failed to find low motives underlying the Templars' successes, a view that in time would find broader support. In fact, at Ascalon there was no Templar greed, rather a great sacrifice; they lost forty or so knights in the attack, and their Grand Master lost his life.

Baldwin's siege of Ascalon would prove to have a price. Almost immediately after the failed siege of Damascus by the Second Crusade, its atabeg, Muin al-Din Unur, renewed his old alliance with Jerusalem; it was a matter of practical politics in the face of his greater enemy Nur al-Din. But in 1149 Muin al-Din Unur died; under his successor Mujin al-Din Ibn al-Sufi, Damascus suffered several attacks and sieges by Nur al-Din. In a desperate effort to maintain the independence of the city, Mujin al-Din on the one hand recognised the suzerainty of Nur al-Din but on the other hand maintained the alliance with Jerusalem. Meanwhile Nur al-Din's jihad propaganda was having an effect on the Muslims of the city. Christians had remained the majority at Damascus until at least the tenth century and maybe into the eleventh,
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and even now in the mid-twelfth century their numbers approached half the population. But faced with Nur al-Din's incessant intimidation coupled with his propaganda – and with Baldwin's forces recently tied up at Ascalon and the kingdom of Jerusalem lacking the resources to come to the aid of Damascus – in April 1154 an element of the Muslim population opened the city's gates to Nur al-Din.

Immediately after his occupation of Damascus, Nur al-Din applied the same programme of exciting popular religious feeling as he had done at Aleppo, founding new madrasas and mosques to preach jihad – and just as at Aleppo, he directed the energy of its people not against the Franks but against Muslim states elsewhere in Syria and beyond which still resisted submission to his authority. In fact, he renewed the peace treaty with Jerusalem and even agreed to pay a tribute to the Franks, meanwhile subjugating Muslim-held Baalbek and snatching lands from the Seljuks in Asia Minor. Never for the rest of his life did Nur al-Din pursue jihad against the Franks. But he did now possess Syria's greatest city, and beyond it to the south lay Egypt.

Baldwin III fell ill and died in February 1163; he had no children and before his death he named his younger brother Amalric his successor. But there were some among the nobility and the Church who objected to Amalric taking the throne on the grounds of incest – arguing that he and his wife, Agnes of Courtenay, were third cousins (they shared the same great great grandfather) and were therefore too closely related. Agnes was the daughter of Joscelin II of Edessa, but after the destruction of the city of her birth she came to Jerusalem; there she married Amalric and bore him three children. But now in order to assume the throne Amalric agreed to an annulment of his marriage provided his children were considered legitimate; two would eventually rule, his son as Baldwin IV, the ‘leper king', and his daughter Sibylla becoming queen on her brother's death. During his reign Amalric commissioned William of Tyre, who became a close friend, to write a history of Outremer.

Within months of becoming king, Amalric was challenged by the deteriorating situation in Egypt. The Fatimid regime in Cairo had grown weak and unstable, with two viziers vying with one another for control over the enfeebled caliphate. Each of the viziers reached outside Egypt for support, drawing Amalric at Jerusalem and Nur al-Din at Damascus into their quarrel. For the Franks the prize was potentially enormous: by installing a friendly government in Cairo the kingdom of Jerusalem would not only gain access to the vast resources of Egypt but would also protect its southern flank. But the prize was no less great for Nur al-Din: not only would his acquisition of Egypt give him control over the trade route from Damascus that terminated in Cairo, but he would entirely surround the Christian states. The Fatimid garrison at Ascalon had stood astride the route into the Nile Delta and to Cairo, the same line of attack taken by the Arabs when they invaded Egypt in 640 after their conquest of Syria and Palestine. Baldwin's capture of Ascalon with Templar help in 1153 likewise opened the door to Egypt for the Franks, and now in 1164, and later in 1167 and again in 1168, Amalric entered Egypt to prevent it falling to Nur al-Din.

Nur al-Din moved first when he sent his Kurdish general Shirkuh into Egypt to install the vizier Shawar in power. But Shawar soon resented Shirkuh's heavy hand, and with the prospect of open warfare breaking out between the two, Shawar sent to Amalric for help. In 1164 Amalric led a Frankish army, including a large contingent of Templars, into Egypt, besieging Shirkuh at Bilbeis in the eastern Delta. After three months, with Bilbeis about to fall, Shirkuh's desperate situation was relieved by Nur al-Din, who laid siege to Harim, between Antioch and Aleppo; when Harim fell in August, the heads of its defending Christians were sent to Bilbeis with instructions to Shirkuh to display them on the walls to frighten his besiegers. The worst of it was that, in attempting to relieve Harim, a Frankish army was defeated by Nur al-Din, and its leaders, Bohemond III of Antioch and Raymond III of Tripoli, as well as several others, were captured and held for ransom; Bohemond was released a year later, Raymond not until 1173. To meet the emergency in the north of Outremer, Amalric agreed to withdraw from Egypt if Shirkuh would do the same, leaving the question of the failing Fatimid caliphate unresolved.

But as the Templars immediately understood, the adventure had exposed the vulnerability of Outremer. Bertrand of Blancfort, the Grand Master of the Temple, addressing himself in November 1164 to King Louis VII of France, wrote:

By sheer force of numbers the Turks threatened to overwhelm Outremer.

Nor were the Turks fighting alone. Under Nur al-Din their numbers were augmented by the Kurds, a mountain people inhabiting parts of the Caucasus, Mesopotamia, Persia and eastern Asia Minor; Nur al-Din's generals Shirkuh and his brother Ayyub were Kurds, and their prominence in Nur al-Din's army attracted large numbers of their fellow-countrymen. In contrast, Arabs played little or no role in Nur al-Din's campaigns; instead, for fear that they would revolt against their Turkish overlords, they were actively suppressed. The Kurds were Sunni Muslims, like the Turks, and fitted in well with Nur al-Din's object of conquering Fatimid Egypt. The Fatimids were not only Arabs but also Ismailis, an offshoot of Shia Islam, a heresy as far as the Sunni were concerned, and their rivals for universal domination. Although two centuries of Fatimid rule meant that Shia influences were strong among the Muslims of Egypt, Nur al-Din was determined to use the argument of jihad to bring Egypt to orthodoxy and under his control.

The rivalry between Sunni and Shia was to Amalric's advantage; the Shia had brought him into Egypt in defence against the Sunni. But Amalric had another advantage too. The Muslim ruling elite was concentrated in Cairo and the port city of Alexandria; ‘elsewhere, Egypt's indigenous Coptic Christian population predominated'
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– five hundred years after the Arab conquest Egypt was still a substantially Christian country. Indeed Christians still formed an absolute majority in Egypt, as recent research by the Egyptian historian Tamer el Leithy ‘discredits the notion of large-scale conversion before the thirteenth century'.
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For five years the contest to control Egypt was waged between Amalric and Nur al-Din's general Shirkuh. As each side understood, Egypt's geography, resources and manpower would prove decisive for whoever gained control.

Again Nur al-Din was the first to act; in 1167 he sent Shirkuh into Egypt, and Amalric once again went to the assistance of Shawar. This time the vizier paid handsomely for the king's services; in a treaty probably drafted by Geoffrey Fulcher, a senior Templar, Shawar agreed to pay an annual tribute in addition to 400,000 gold bezants, half of it at once, on the Frankish pledge that they would destroy Shirkuh and his army or drive them out of Egypt. With Amalric standing in Cairo, Shirkuh withdrew southwards towards Minya, where the Franks, in a desert battle at al-Babayn, cost the Turks fifteen hundred lives against a hundred of their own. Nur al-Din's forces made a last attempt to hold on, barricading themselves within the walls of Alexandria; their commander was a young Kurd, Shirkuh's nephew Salah al-Din, better known in the West as Saladin, who, after two or three months of mounting hunger in the town, surrendered to the Franks, who escorted them out of the city for their own safety as the population would have torn Saladin and his men to pieces for the misery they had made them endure. As the army of Amalric, together with the Templars, marched through the streets of the city of St Mark, their triumph meant the liberation of the last of the great patriarchal sees; and from the top of what remained of the Pharos, the ancient lighthouse that had been a wonder of the world when Alexandria had been the cultural capital of Western civilisation, they flew the banner of Jerusalem. To ensure that Nur al-Din's forces would not return, Amalric installed a garrison in Cairo and Frankish commissioners in the caliphal palace itself. Effectively Egypt was now a protectorate. And then Amalric and his army returned home.