The Tragedy of the Templars (30 page)

Returning to Egypt, Saladin continued as he had done since the death of the caliph al-Adid with his programme of extirpating the Ismaili faith, which had taken root during the two centuries of Fatimid rule. The great Azhar mosque founded by the Fatimids was closed down and left to ruin, and the preaching of Ismailism, a dualistic form of Shia Islam, was everywhere proscribed. In its place Saladin worked hard to impose Sunni orthodoxy on Egypt's Muslims. As an orthodox but esoteric alternative to Ismailism, Saladin encouraged Sufism and built khanqahs – that is, Sufi hostels – and he also introduced madrasas, theological colleges that promoted the acceptable version of the faith. Numerous khanqahs and madrasas were built throughout Cairo and Egypt in Saladin's effort to combat and suppress what he regarded as the Ismaili heresy. Just as Zengi had cleansed Aleppo of Shia and Nur al-Din had done the same for Damascus, so Saladin repeated the lesson in Cairo.

Saladin's drive to orthodox conformity also had its effect on Egypt's Christians, who were still a majority of the population,
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and also on its Jews. Notwithstanding the persecutions of al-Hakim, Jews and Christians held positions of high responsibility under the Fatimids; now, with the dismantling of the old regime, they were increasingly marginalised and beaten down.

In comparison with Saladin's Sunni regime in Cairo, Outremer was a remarkably tolerant place. At Gaza, for example, which was ruinous when Baldwin III gave it to the Templars in 1149, and where they rebuilt the fortress and brought the city back to life, the bishop was Greek Orthodox. The Templars were directly subject to the pope and might have been expected to want a Latin bishop, especially as Gaza stood at the kingdom of Jerusalem's southern frontier with Egypt and the city's security and loyalty were paramount. Yet even though Gaza was resettled by Franks as much as by native Orthodox Christians, the Templars were content to have an Orthodox bishop instead of a Frank. Possibly the Templars preferred this arrangement rather than risk friction with a cleric of their own church; the Templars valued their autonomy and did not always get on with the Latin church authorities in Outremer, as illustrated by the annoyance shown towards them by the chronicler and archbishop William of Tyre. But in fact, autonomy was a pattern in Outremer; religious and ethnic groups were left to their own devices to a very high degree. As Michael the Syrian, the late twelfth-century Jacobite patriarch of Antioch, said, ‘The Franks never raised any difficulty about matters of faith, or tried to reach an agreed statement of belief among Christians ethnically and linguistically separated. They regarded as Christian anybody who venerated the Cross, without further inquiry.'
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This spirit of tolerance in Outremer was in spite of the Great Schism of 1054 between the Eastern and Western Churches, which in any case was never a formal rupture and was brought about more by a personal clash between two high ecclesiastics of Rome and Constantinople. Nor had it been like this during the early centuries of Christianity, when successive Church councils agreed the theological positions that became the orthodoxy of Rome and Constantinople and denounced as heresies the variations of Christian belief practiced by the Jacobites and Nestorians in Syria and Palestine and by the Copts in Egypt. But now in Outremer pragmatism, co-operation and toleration came to the fore, and both individuals and whole sections of society found ways of working together.

Sometimes, however, East and West encountered one another in unsettling ways, as at the village of Bethany, just over the Mount of Olives from Jerusalem. Bethany was a famous pilgrimage centre already at the time of Constantine because of its associations with Lazarus, whom Jesus, according to the Gospel of John 11:38–44, raised from the dead. Jesus often stayed at the house of Lazarus and knew his sisters Mary and Martha; Simon the Leper lived in Bethany too, and in his house Jesus was anointed (Mark 14:3). To Bethany, Jesus returned after his triumphal entry into Jerusalem (Mark 11:11), and near Bethany he ascended into heaven (Luke 24:50). Egeria, who travelled from Gaul, or perhaps from Galicia in the northern Iberian peninsula, visited the tomb of Lazarus in 410 on the seventh Saturday of Lent and described the scene. ‘Just on one o'clock everyone arrives at the Lazarium, which is Bethany [. . .] by the time they arrive there, so many people have collected that they fill not only the Lazarium itself, but all the fields around.'
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At the end of the service the start of Easter was announced.

In 1143 Queen Melisende and her husband, King Fulk, rebuilt the old church at Bethany and rededicated it to Sts Mary and Martha, and they also built the church of St Lazarus above the tomb; and most splendidly they built a Benedictine convent here, also dedicated to Sts Mary and Martha, endowed it with large estates near Jericho and fortified it with a great stone tower. Not long afterwards Ioveta, the youngest sister of Melisende, was elected abbess, making her at the age of twenty-four the head of one of the richest convents in the kingdom of Jerusalem and one of the most famous in the world.

Much of Bethany's potency for Western pilgrims was its association with Mary Magdalene, who according to tradition had fled Palestine after the crucifixion and lived and died in France. Her relics were brought to the great abbey church of St Mary Magdalene at Vézelay in Burgundy, where Bernard of Clairvaux had launched the Second Crusade.

Mary Magdalene's appearances in the Gospels are brief but telling. She is present at the most important moments of the Jesus story – his death and his resurrection. At the crucifixion of Jesus his disciples have gone into fearful hiding, but Mary Magdalene is at both the Cross and the tomb, and it is she who carries the news to the disbelieving disciples that Jesus has risen (Matthew 27:56, 28:1; Mark 15:40; John 19:25, 20:1). The heirs of this great story of life and death and resurrection were the nuns of Bethany. Western pilgrims arriving at Bethany had the satisfaction of entering the very landscape of the drama that led to the salvation of mankind. Pilgrims knew this to be true because it had been part of the tradition of the Roman Church since the time of Pope Gregory the Great, whose Homily XXXIII, in 591, stated that Mary Magdalene, from whom Jesus had cast out demons (Luke 8:2–3), was not only the Mary who was the disciple of Jesus who witnessed his crucifixion and visited the empty tomb, but was also the anonymous woman caught in adultery and brought before Jesus by the Pharisees (John 8:3–12). Mary Magdalene, said the pope, was ‘she whom Luke calls the sinful woman, whom John calls Mary', and whom ‘we believe to be the Mary from whom seven devils were ejected according to Mark. And what did these seven devils signify, if not all the vices?' Mary Magdalene, the pope made clear, had been a prostitute who had previously used the oils she applied to Jesus ‘to perfume her flesh in forbidden acts'.
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To which the Venerable Bede added in the next century that the sinful woman whom Jesus healed of demonic possession was one and the same as the sister of Martha and Lazarus with whom Jesus was staying in Bethany when he raised Lazarus from the dead and who also poured precious ointments over Jesus' feet and then washed them with her hair (Matthew 26:6; Mark 14:3; Luke 10:39; John 12:3) – which in turn associated Mary Magdalene with the unnamed woman who poured oil over Jesus' head in the house of Simon the Leper in Bethany. The density of associations made Bethany a prime pilgrimage site, confirmed by the naming of the church and the abbey after St Martha and after St Mary Magdalene.

But pilgrims arriving in Outremer met Jacobites and Greek Orthodox Christians who told them the story was not like that at all. All these various Marys and unnamed women were quite separate people and, apart from Mary, sister of Lazarus, and the unnamed woman at the house of Simon the Leper, had no association with Bethany. John of Würzburg was one Western pilgrim who encountered these conflicting stories when he reached Bethany and Jerusalem, and he went away entirely confused. ‘If anyone wishes to know more about these things, let him come himself, and ask the more intelligent subjects of this land the sequence and truth of this story. As for me, I have not found quite enough to explain it in any of the Scriptures.'
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So unsettling was this confusion to pilgrims that Gerard of Nazareth, a Benedictine monk who was bishop of Latakia, on the Syrian coast, determined to put the matter straight. In his treatise written in the 1160s against the tradition of the Eastern churches he reasserted the position of the Church at Rome that Mary Magdalene was the same person as the other Marys mentioned in the Gospels, and in particular she was the same woman as Mary, the sister of Martha. This was not a trivial issue of misidentification; great matters were at stake. Most obviously, if Mary Magdalene could no longer be associated with Bethany, then much of the appeal of its abbey would be lost and it would face financial collapse. Even worse, pilgrimages could expose people to rival views and undermine the traditions of the Roman Church – and undermine its authority in the East. If the Latin Church could get Mary Magdalene wrong, its interpretations of the Bible were open to doubt, as were the bases for so many of its rituals and practices, not to mention its arguments that had led to the Great Schism or were used to claim primacy for Rome. What authority, what ascendancy, would the Latins have left to them in the East?

Heresies have been born from less and been visited with fierce correction. But not in Outremer, where Gerard framed his argument mildly: ‘There is no greatly pernicious error in this, and one can believe one or another without grave danger. But it is good, if possible, to hold to what is more truthful, not only this but in all controversy.'
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Behind this atmosphere of toleration was the reality that Eastern Christians felt closer ties to their fellow Christians from the West than to either the Muslim Arabs or the Turks. By the twelfth century most of the local population spoke Arabic but were not yet culturally arabised; Greek, Armenian and Syriac all survived not only as liturgical languages but also in day-to-day use. Moreover the Turks and their Kurdish allies generally did not speak Arabic, or Syriac, Armenian or Greek, whereas the Franks, who shared a common faith with the local population, also made an effort to learn the local languages. But probably the biggest factor that encouraged the Franks and the native inhabitants of Outremer to get along was that they shared a common enemy – the Turks.
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Nor was it only Christians for whom the Turks were the enemy; they were the enemy for most Muslims too.

Ibn Jubayr, a Spanish Muslim who had been on a pilgrimage to Mecca, wrote of his journey through Outremer in 1184 as he travelled between Damascus and Acre.

Clearly Muslim farmers had not been dispossessed of their lands by the Franks, while the tax and payment in kind were in line with amounts paid by Christian farmers too. In fact, Muslims were better off than Christians, who in addition to the payments due to their overlords were required to pay a tithe to the churches from which Muslims were exempt.

Ibn Jubayr's account is all the more striking as he was otherwise resolutely opposed to the Franks. But he could not deny the respect with which the Franks treated his fellow Muslims, as when he approached Acre and found Muslims entrusted with the local administration. ‘On the same Monday, we alighted at a farmstead a parasang distant from Acre. Its headman is a Muslim, appointed by the Franks to oversee the Muslim workers in it. He gave generous hospitality to all members of the caravan.'
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In Acre itself he discovered that although two mosques had been converted to churches, Muslims were nevertheless free to use them as meeting places and to pray in them, facing towards Mecca. There was nothing unusual about this; Usamah ibn Munqidh had mentioned the hospitality he received from the Templars, who welcomed him to pray in their chapel within what had been the Aqsa mosque on Jerusalem's Temple Mount.

Although Ibn Jubayr, a Sunni Muslim himself, was full of praise for Saladin's Sunni regime in Cairo, he admitted that the majority of Muslims in Outremer and Syria were heterodox in their beliefs. ‘Dissident Muslim elements, comprising Shiites, Ismailites and Nusayriyah [Alawites] [. . .] according to Ibn Jubayr, outnumbered the Sunnites', and also there were the Druze, an historical offshoot of the Ismailis who had separated themselves from Islam altogether, none of whom welcomed the prospect of being forced by Saladin into the Sunni mould and who therefore allied themselves as necessary with the Franks.
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The Ismailis, Alawites and Druze were all dualists: that is, they believed that the universe contains both good and evil because God himself is made up of good and evil. They saw evil not as the absence of good but as part of the essence of both the world and its creator, who in turn may have been an emanation of an ultimate and unknowable God. Dualism was deeply rooted in the East and penetrated Islam via Mani, a third-century Persian, who drew on Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Babylonian Mandaeism and Christianity. In fact the term ‘Manichaean', the name some medieval French chroniclers gave to the Cathars, was used by the Byzantines to describe the dualist ideas of Mani. But the Ismailis, Alawis and Druze went beyond religious belief; they were also initiatory secret societies with political aims tending towards the apocalyptic. In rejecting Islamic orthodoxy, which teaches that God is the sole principle and is good, their enemy were the Sunnis, who under Zengi, Nur al-Din and now Saladin were determined to eradicate them; the stronghold of dualist resistance was the less accessible regions of the East, particularly the coastal mountains.