The Tragedy of the Templars (22 page)

Michael Rabo estimated that in the two Turkish occupations of Edessa, in 1144 and 1146, some 30,000 of its people were slaughtered and 16,000 were taken captive, while only 1,000 men made it to safety. No women or children remained; some were killed, and the rest were driven to Aleppo, where they were sold into slavery and scattered throughout the lands of the East. It was Ani all over again.

M
USLIM CHRONICLERS
later looked back on the destruction of Edessa as the start of the jihad that would drive the Franks from the East. In the West the loss of Edessa touched off the Second Crusade, a huge campaign by sea and land, this time led by two European kings. But the crusade might never have reached the Holy Land at all had it not been for the Templars, which did not stop them being made scapegoats when the expedition unexpectedly failed. Yet against the gathering forces of the Muslim jihad Outremer could not have survived, as it did, for another hundred and fifty years without the conviction, sacrifice and military prowess of the Knights Templar.

All through 1145 pilgrims had been returning from the East with news of the fall of Edessa, and emissaries had been sent to the West from Armenia, Antioch and Jerusalem. Pope Eugenius III was moved by the terrible events and on 1 December issued a call to arms in the form of a papal bull known from its opening words as
Quantum Praedecessores:
‘How much our predecessors the Roman pontiffs did labour for the deliverance of the oriental church . . .'.
¹
The bull went on to grant the remission of sins to all who took part in the crusade. Yet there is no record of a response to it from any quarter; the pope's call seems to have fallen on deaf ears.

Whether King Louis VII of France knew of the bull is not clear, but he too would have had news from the East, and at Christmas 1145 he summoned his barons and told them of his desire to go to the aid of the Christians in the East. But he made no reference to the pope nor to a crusade with its various inducements, including the remission of sins; instead Louis was saying nothing more than had been said sixteen years earlier, when the first Grand Master of the Templars, Hugh of Payns, came to France to raise fighting men for the attack on Damascus. In the event Louis' barons were indifferent to his call, and Abbot Suger of St Denis, the senior statesman in Louis' court, opposed the venture outright, arguing that the king's business was at home.

Louis hardly had the makings of a war leader. Following the death of his older brother, he had come unexpectedly to the throne seven years earlier, when he was only seventeen. As the younger son of Louis VI he had been intended for the Church; he was austere and pious, and the high-spirited Eleanor of Aquitaine, whom he married when she was fifteen, complained that she had expected to marry a king but found she was married to a monk. Louis and his barons agreed to put the matter to Bernard of Clairvaux and then convene again at Easter 1146 at Vézelay in Burgundy.

Bernard refused to decide for Louis and his nobles, saying that it was a matter for the pope, and so Louis sent an embassy to Eugenius, who gladly enlisted the young king in the papal crusade. Eugenius authorised Bernard to preach the crusade in his place, but at the same time, on 1 March 1146, the pope underlined the papal role by reissuing
Quantum Praedecessores
, repeating what it had said before.

In summoning the memory of Urban, the bull deliberately looked back for inspiration to the First Crusade.

Meanwhile Eugenius and Louis arranged that Bernard of Clairvaux should speak at the great abbey church of Vézelay, powerful for harbouring the bones of Mary Magdalene. The abbey, refounded in the ninth century after an Arab raid had destroyed an earlier convent on the spot, stood astride a major pilgrimage route across France to Santiago de Compostela in north-western Spain, a forward station in the war against the Muslim occupation of the Iberian peninsula. Not only was Bernard the friend of popes and kings (Eugenius had been a monk at Clairvaux, and the king's brother had recently joined the Cistercians there), but his asceticism, conviction and eloquence combined to make him the most formidable spiritual figure of the age. At word that Bernard would speak, such a crowd of aristocrats and admirers from all over France was drawn to Vézelay that, as at Clermont when Pope Urban had called for the First Crusade, the vast basilica of St Mary Magdalene was not big enough to contain the throng and a platform was erected in the fields outside the town.

Bernard's speech has not been handed down, but his letters, which he circulated immediately afterwards, undoubtedly catch the passion and repeat the themes of what he said that day. This was an age like no other, Bernard told the crowd. God had found new ways to save the faithful. The fall of Edessa was a gift from God. It was an opportunity created by God to save men's souls. ‘Look at the skill he is using to save you. Consider the depth of his love and be astonished, sinners. [. . .] This is a plan not made by man, but coming from heaven and proceeding from the heart of divine love.'
³
Amid the roars of ‘Deus le volt!' so many came forward to take the cross that Bernard had to tear his own habit into strips. King Louis, who was beside him as he spoke, was the first among them, followed by his barons, many of whom were the sons and grandsons of original crusaders. Bernard was able to write a few days later to the pope: ‘You ordered; I obeyed. I opened my mouth; I spoke; and at once the crusaders have multiplied to infinity. Villages and towns are now deserted. You will scarcely find one man for every seven women. Everywhere you see widows whose husbands are still alive.'
⁴

Bernard broadcast his message farther, travelling into the north of France and to Flanders, and addressing a letter to the people of England, explaining that Jesus, the Son of God, was losing the land in which he had walked among men for more than thirty years. ‘Your land', Bernard told the English, ‘is well known to be rich in young and vigorous men. The world is full of their praises, and the renown of their courage is on the lips of all.' Do not miss this opportunity, he implored. ‘Take up the sign of the Cross and you will find indulgence for all the sins which you humbly confess. The cost is small; the reward is great. Venture with devotion and the gain will be God's kingdom.'
⁵

Among those who pledged themselves to the crusade were Louis' own wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine (whose uncle was Raymond of Antioch), several bishops and numerous nobles and knights from France, Flanders and England, and also a group of Templars led by Everard des Barres, master of the Knights Templar in France and future Grand Master. A year was then allowed for preparations and for advising foreign rulers of the approach of the crusade.

As news of the crusade spread among the populace of northern France and Germany, it touched off anti-Semitic pogroms, but nothing on the scale of the First Crusade, thanks largely to the efforts of Bernard, who hastened through France and along the Rhine to condemn the atrocities on the spot. ‘The Jews', he said, ‘are not to be persecuted, killed or even put to flight.' His reason for protecting Jews, however, was to throw into relief the triumph of Christian salvation. The Jews ‘are living signs to us, representing the Lord's passion. For this reason they are dispersed into all regions, that now they may pay the just penalty of so great a crime, and that they may be witnesses of our redemption.'
⁶

Redemption was the key to the Second Crusade. The First Crusade had successfully liberated great numbers of Christians in the East as well as the holy places from Muslim occupation. For all the emotional response to the fall of Edessa, the city was not a particularly holy spot in Western eyes, and all the rest of the Holy Land was still safely in the hands of the Franks. And so the purpose of the Second Crusade, from the very beginning, was not so much liberation of lands across the sea as redemption of Christians' souls. As Bernard himself expressed it, ‘I call blessed the generation that can seize an opportunity of such rich indulgence as this, blessed to be alive in this year of jubilee, this year of God's choice. The blessing is spread throughout the whole world, and all the world is flocking to receive this badge of immortality.'
⁷
There was no doubt in Bernard's mind that the expedition would succeed, that God would perform miracles for its soldiers just as he had done for the heroes of the First Crusade. But this emphasis on redemption would mean that when the incomprehensible happened, when the Second Crusade failed, the fault could only be explained as a punishment from God for man's spiritual poverty and his sins.

To control and give direction to popular feeling along the Rhine, Bernard made a point of preaching the crusade to the reluctant King Conrad III of Germany himself. Bernard had already asked the king in November 1146, but Conrad had flatly refused. Yet now a month later, on 27 December, Bernard was at the king's court, where during daily Mass he unexpectedly insisted on delivering a sermon, directing its final words to Conrad not as a king but as a man. Dramatically he presented Conrad standing in judgement before Christ, who enumerates all the king's pieces of good fortune: his wealth, wisdom, courage, his bodily vigour, and the kingship itself. And then Christ says to Conrad, ‘O man, what is there that I should have done for you and did not do?' Shamed at his own ingratitude, Conrad cried out, ‘I am ready to serve Him', and those with him cried out the same, whereupon Bernard gave the king the banner from the altar to lead his army to the Holy Land.
⁸
But Conrad's conversion to the crusade may not have been as sudden as it seemed. Diplomatic exchanges between Germany and Constantinople had been going on throughout 1146, ever since Manuel I Comnenus, the Byzantine emperor, had sent an emissary to Conrad imploring his help against the revived Turkish threat in the East. By the same route Conrad may also have received news of the second fall of Edessa on 3 November, confirming Bernard's warning that this was just a prelude to an attack on Jerusalem.

But the East was not the only objective of the crusade. In the spring of 1147 Eugenius gave his blessing to the campaign of Alfonso VII of Castile against the Muslim occupation of Spain, declaring it a crusade. In May crusaders from Flanders, Normandy and Germany joined Scottish and English crusaders at Dartmouth, from where they made for the Mediterranean, but during stormy weather they put in at Oporto, where they were told that the king of Portugal was warring against the Almoravids, a fundamentalist Berber dynasty that occupied all of southern Portugal and Spain, and that he had just laid siege to Lisbon farther down the coast. On 1 July the northerners joined the siege and on 24 October the city fell. Some of the crusaders remained in Portugal, but the others, after wintering there, continued their voyage to the East. The Second Crusade had rapidly become an international campaign against the forces of Islam on both the eastern and western fronts.

Owing to the destruction of the Templars' archives their earliest activities in Outremer are only very sketchily known, but perhaps that reflects a truth – that until the resurgent Turkish threat the Templars in the East were hardly more than a mounted police force for the protection of pilgrims and others on the roads. But the Templars had been fighting in the Iberian peninsula, and their numbers were strong in the adjacent recruiting ground of France. Certainly the importance of the Templars in the West can be measured by the fact that on 27 April 1147 King Louis VII and Pope Eugenius III came to the Paris Temple – which had become the European headquarters of the order – to discuss plans for the Second Crusade. Also in attendance were four archbishops and 130 Templar knights, with at least as many sergeants and squires.

This was in contrast to Templar numbers in the East. Between 1129, when Hugh of Payns returned from France to Jerusalem, and 1148, when the Second Crusade arrived in Outremer, only nine Templars are mentioned in the surviving charters of the crusader states: Robert of Craon, Grand Master of the order, and William, the order's senechal, and the brothers William Falco, Geoffrey Fulcher, Osto of St Omer and Ralph of Patingy, all based at Jerusalem, and Goscelin and Drogo at Antioch and Ralph Caslan at Tripoli. Another two can perhaps be added to this list: Odo of Montfaucon, whom William of Tyre recorded as dying in the skirmish near Hebron in 1139, and Andrew of Montbard, probably an uncle of Bernard of Clairvaux, who mentions him in his letters. Set against these few, 210 Templars can be identified in the West during the same period. Possibly more written evidence of the Templars was lost in the East than in the West, but it is also true that the need for warrior Templars was greater in Spain and Portugal than in those early years of peace in Outremer. The Templars' power base was also in the West, the source of their wealth coming from tithes and grants of land and other donations, especially in Spain, France and England. Now the Templars were called on to project their energy and resources against the renewed Turkish aggression by joining the Second Crusade.