The Tragedy of the Templars (40 page)

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 in 1289, one Templar told Martin's successor Pope Nicholas IV, ‘You could have succoured the Holy Land with the power of kings and the strength of the other faithful of Christ but you have armed kings against a king, intending to attack a Christian king and the Christian Sicilians to recover the island of Sicily which, kicking against the pricks, took up just arms'
⁹
– 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 Baybars' own ambitions somewhat in check. But in 1277 Baybars died, and after a brief power struggle the most capable among the Mamelukes was elevated to the sultanate, Baybars' 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.

Within six years the few crusader possessions along the coast would fall and the two-hundred-year struggle to defend Christianity in the East would end.

Medieval Christians believed that God's judgement was revealed through history, and that he often declared his will by determining the outcome of a battle. As St Bernard had written in his panegyric
In Praise of the New Knighthood
, a Templar was a knight of Christ and ‘the instrument of God for the punishment of malefactors and for the defence of the just'. A defeat in battle could mean that the Christians were paying the price for some sin. Confession, prayers and penance would cleanse their souls and lead to ultimate victory. But what were Christians now to make of the repeated defeats in the Holy Land? After Baybars captured Caesarea and Haifa in 1265, a Provençal troubadour called Bonomel, who may have been a Templar, sang that given this, ‘Then it is really foolish to fight the Turks, now that Jesus Christ no longer opposes them [. . .] Daily they impose new defeats on us: for God, who used to watch on our behalf, is now asleep, and Bafometz [Mohammed] puts forth his power to support the sultan.'
¹⁰
Another Provençal poet wrote that because God and Our Lady wanted Christian troops to be killed he would become a Muslim. As defeats continued, it became impossible to attribute Muslim victories to the sins of the generality of Christians, and increasingly the military orders, and especially the Templars, attracted the suspicion and resentment of a disillusioned Christian world.

A
T ACRE
the old merchant communities of Genoa, Pisa, Venice, Amalfi and Marseille were joined by new trading colonies from Florence, Lucca and Ancona in Italy, by bankers from Siena, merchants from Montpellier and Barcelona, and by English merchants too. In turn traders from Acre were found in Egypt, Asia Minor, Constantinople, Kiev and at the great fairs of Champagne in France. The commercial interests of the city so far outweighed the religious that its coins were struck in Arabic for circulation in the surrounding Arabic-speaking countries.

According to Ludolph of Suchem, who visited Acre long after its fall but had reports from people who remembered how life had been there,

Ludolph, as he listened to those memories, was overcome with the sensation of a long lost world where ‘all the inhabitants of the city deemed themselves like the Romans of old and carried themselves like noble lords, as indeed they were'.
¹

The ten-year truce agreed in 1272 between Baybars and the Franks had allowed the Mamelukes to direct their energy towards renewed Mongol threats, in this case directed by Baybars' successor Qalaun, who came to power in 1279. Qalaun then made fresh agreements with the Franks, in 1282 a ten-year truce with the Templars at Tortosa, and in 1283 a truce with Acre, also for ten years. Almost immediately, however, Qalaun resumed Mameluke aggression against parts of Outremer not covered in the agreements, starting with the Maronite Christian community in the Lebanese highlands, which was ravaged by a Muslim army in 1283; soon enough he found excuses to break his agreements with the Templars and Acre too. 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, the Muslims celebrating the event from the heights of the citadel with the call to prayer which ‘resounded with praise and thanks to God for having cast down the adorers of the Messiah';
²
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

Beyond the walls of Acre, however, the outlook was grim. In 1289 Qalaun overwhelmed Tripoli. ‘The Muslim troops forced their way in and the citizens fled to the harbour. A few got to safety on ships', recorded the chronicler Abu al-Feda, who was an eyewitness to the events, ‘but most of the men were killed and the children taken captive.' When the killing and looting were finished, Qalaun razed the city to the ground. But that still left a small island across the harbour, and on it the church of St Thomas. ‘When Tripoli was taken a great many Franks fled with their women to the island and the church. The Muslim troops flung themselves into the sea and swam with their horses to the island, where they killed all the men and took the women, children and possessions. After the looting I went by boat to the island, and found it heaped with putrefying corpses; it was impossible to land there because of the stench.'
⁴

Finally turning his attention to Acre, and vowing not to leave a single Christian alive in the city, Qalaun set out from Cairo in November 1290, but he fell ill and died along the way. His son Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil pledged to continue the war against the Franks, and in early spring 1291 his immense forces, gathered from Syria and Egypt, converged on Acre, ‘cutting down and wasting all the vineyards and fruit trees and all the gardens and orchards, which are most lovely thereabout',
⁵
instead planting the environs with over a hundred siege engines, including various kinds of catapults. On 5 April al-Ashraf Khalil himself arrived, and the siege began. At most the Franks were able to muster about a thousand knights or mounted sergeants and fourteen thousand foot soldiers; the civilian population of Acre was thirty to forty thousand, and every able-bodied man took his place on the ramparts. Although the Mamelukes could not blockade the town by sea, they had complete control of the land, and their numbers grew with a continuous number of recruits and volunteers who joined the regulars, so that eventually al-Ashraf Khalil's troops outnumbered the defenders by at least ten to one.

But the defenders were prepared and, confident in the strength of their fortifications and supplied by sea, they put up the most determined resistance. 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. In the second month of the siege breaches appeared, and fighting became incessant. On 16 May the Mamelukes pressed so heavily on St Anthony's Gate at the angle where the city walls joined those of Montmusard that the defenders made a desperate attempt to put their women and children aboard ships to safety. Ludolph of Suchem recorded how ‘they fled to the sea, desiring to sail to Cyprus, and whereas at first there was no wind at all at sea, of a sudden so great a storm arose that no other ship, either great or small, could come near the shore, and many who essayed to swim off to the ships were drowned'.
⁶

On 15 May, after six weeks of constant battering, the Tower of Henry II commanding the vital north-east 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. But there were also noble acts.

On 18 May a general assault forced first St Anthony's Gate and then the Accursed Tower, the Pilgrims' Gate and finally the other gates along the eastern front of the inner wall. The survivors of the fighting and the non-combatant population were now trapped in the various strong buildings about the town. As the Mamelukes stormed through the streets, they killed everyone in sight, including women and children. ‘So many men perished on either side that they walked over their corpses as it were over a bridge.'
⁸
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 that evening all Acre was in the hands of the Mamelukes except for the Templar fortress built against the sea-waves at the south-western extremity of the city. Fleeing through the streets or racing through the secret Templar tunnel that ran beneath the town from the Pisan quarter, the last knights and civilians sought protection within the Templar walls. There they held out, commanded by the marshal, and were kept supplied by sea from Cyprus.

On 25 May, Peter of Sevrey, marshal of the Templars, 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 their city was smashed to pieces until almost nothing was left standing.

Forty years later Ludolph of Suchem came upon the spot and found only a few peasants living amid the desolation of what had once been the splendid capital of Outremer.