The Templars (11 page)

The Templars’ Role in the Crusade

The growing importance of the Templars 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.

Here, it was agreed that the Templars would accompany the French army to the East, and it was probably on this occasion that the Pope conferred on the Templars the right to emblazon their white robes with the red cross, symbolising their willingness to die in defence of the Holy Land. The Pope also appointed the Templar treasurer to receive the tax that had been imposed on all Church goods to finance the crusade. It was the start of a fateful relationship, that would last for over a century and a half, with the Paris Temple serving in effect as the treasury of France.

Everard des Barres, the master of the Temple in France, was sent ahead to Constantinople by the king to negotiate with the Byzantine Emperor Manuel I Comnenus for the passage of the French and German armies; this time they had not been invited, and in Constantinople the prospect of their approach was regarded with some scepticism and alarm. Moreover, the Byzantines were at war with Roger II, the Norman king of Sicily, and to cover their backs had recently agreed a treaty with the Seljuks. To the minds of those in the West this accommodation with the infidel seemed treacherous, an attitude that deepened suspicions on both sides.

Nevertheless, everything seemed set fair in September 1147 when Conrad’s army arrived in Constantinople and was ferried across the Bosphorus, to be followed by Louis’ army a month later. The Second Crusade had two armies marching through Byzantine territory, and a large northern European fleet was heading into the Mediterranean after capturing Lisbon from the Muslims.

The first disaster struck in late October. Conrad led his army on the direct route across Asia Minor and straight up against the border of
Seljuk territory where at Dorylaeum on 25 October the Germans were heavily defeated by the Turks. The survivors, including Conrad himself, retreated to Nicaea where they joined the French who were following the safer coastal route. At Ephesus Conrad fell ill and returned with his forces to Constantinople, while the French, inadequately provisioned by the Byzantines, marched up the Maeander valley and eastwards against the advancing winter. Toiling through the narrow defiles of the Cadmus mountains in early January 1148 the heavily armoured French knights were easy prey for the Seljuks’ light cavalry with their talent for firing off arrows at full gallop.

With his army on the verge of disintegration, King Louis surrendered his responsibilities to Everard des Barres, the Templar master, who divided the force into units, each under the command of a Templar knight whom they swore to obey absolutely. Thanks to the boldness and organisational skills of the Templars, the army was led to safety at Attalia (modern Antalya) on the Mediterranean. But their ordeal was not yet over, for the expected Byzantine fleet was too small to take them all to the Holy Land, so only Louis and part of his army sailed east. The rest attempted to march overland through Seljuk lands, and most of them died on the way.

By the time Louis arrived at Antioch early in March the cost of supplies and shipping had been so great that he needed to borrow if he was to continue with the crusade. Abandoning his intention of retaking Edessa, Louis instead led his army southwards via Tripoli to Jerusalem where he fulfiled his pilgrim’s vow, meanwhile despatching Everard des Barres to Acre where he raised enough money from Templar resources to cover the cost of the French expedition–a sum that was more than half the annual tax revenue of the French state.

Fiasco at Damascus

Despite the French losses in Asia Minor, the crusading forces that finally arrived in the Holy Land were far from negligible, and added to these were the survivors of the German army which had arrived by sea from Constantinople with Conrad. On 24 June 1148 the lords and military
leaders then in Outremer attended a great council at Acre; Baldwin III, the seventeen-year-old King of Jerusalem presided over the gathering, which included the Hospitallers and the Templars and the kings of Germany and France.

Zengi was dead but his son Nur al-Din controlled Aleppo in northern Syria astride the route to Edessa, and Raymond of Antioch wanted to strike in that direction. Others spoke of Egypt, but the road south was blocked by Ascalon, a powerfully fortfied city still in the hands of the Fatimids. The third possibility was Damascus, the one Muslim power in the region willing to ally with the Franks against Nur al-Din, a fact that might have deterred some in Outremer but meant nothing to the new arrivals from the West. In any case, for the Frankish states of Outremer, perilously clinging to the Mediterranean seaboard, it was always a strategic necessity to extend their depth, to conquer Aleppo, Damascus or Cairo. Damascus was a venerable and wealthy city whose capture would give the Franks control over the crossroads of commerce and communications in the East. After vigorous discussion of these various plans of action the assembly finally decided to concentrate all the available forces of the crusade against Damascus.

The Second Crusade marched out from Galilee for Damascus in late July 1148. The army camped in a well-supplied position amid orchards and fresh-flowing water in front of the western walls and prepared for the
siege. But the orchards also served detachments of Damascenes who used their cover to make repeated sorties against the Crusaders. Louis and Conrad responded by switching their attack to the eastern walls where there was open ground and they could deploy their heavy cavalry to greater effect. But the city walls were higher on this waterless desert side, and when the siege dragged on the Crusaders had no choice but to withdraw. Without even fighting a battle the Second Crusade was defeated, ending in a whimpering fiasco. Six years later Damascus fell to Nur al-Din, and the encirclement of Outremer by a united Muslim power began.

The Bitter Aftertaste

The withdrawal from Damascus caused a bitterness in relations between Outremer and the West that lasted for a generation. Seen from the perspective of the East, Kings Louis and Conrad had neither recovered
Edessa nor offset its loss by taking Damascus or anything else; indeed their bungling placed Outremer in greater peril than before the crusade began.

In the West the failure of the crusade came as a shock because it had been led by the powerful kings of Germany and France and had been preached by Bernard of Clairvaux, the greatest spiritual figure of the age. Some blamed the Franks of the East, who had previously been in alliance with the ruler of Damascus; some German chroniclers, anxious to protect Conrad, blamed the Templars, saying that they had deliberately engineered the retreat; the anonymous Wurzburg chronicler wrote of Templar greed, and of betrayal by taking a massive bribe. The French did not make the same accusations, having been supported by the Templars throughout. And in fact there is no evidence of Templar treachery, but it is significant that they were blamed–it was the first indication that the long history of ambiguous feelings about the foundation of an order of monks who also fought for God might be translated into open and specific complaints.

The problem was that the more the Franks of Outremer relied on Western subsidy and military aid, the more critical the West became if things went wrong; the enthusiasm was there, but only for victories that came easily and cheap. From now on, the defence of the Holy Land would depend on its network of castles, largely built and commanded by the knights of the military orders.

The Defence of the Holy Land

From the moment that the First Crusade arrived in the Middle East, the Crusaders started building castles. As in Europe, they served as residences and administrative centres, as well as having a military function. But after the Second Crusade the Franks in Outremer found themselves on the defensive and the military nature of castles became more important. Often large and elaborate, and continuously improved by the latest innovations in military science, the Franks built over fifty castles in Outremer. Geography, manpower and the feudal system all explain this considerable investment in stone.

The Crusader states were long and narrow, lacking defence in depth. The Principality of Antioch, the County of Tripoli and the Kingdom of Jerusalem stretched 450 miles from north to south, yet rarely were they more than 50 to 75 miles broad, the County of Tripoli perilously constricting to the width of the coastal plain, only a few miles broad, between Tortosa (present-day Tartus) and Jeble. The inland cities of Aleppo, Hama, Homs and Damascus all remained in Muslim hands,
while Mesopotamia and Egypt were recruiting grounds for any Muslim counterthrust, as the campaigns of Saladin and the Mamelukes would show. For the Crusaders the natural defensive line was the mountains, and they built castles to secure the passes.

Stones more than soldiers were pressed to this purpose as Outremer was chronically short of men. After the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 most of the Crusaders returned to Europe; the Kingdom of Jerusalem was thereafter defended by 300 mounted knights. Despite successive crusades, at no time during the entire history of the Crusader states were they able to put more than 2600 horse in the field. Moreover, though there was still a large local Christian population, these were Orthodox while the Crusaders were a Latin minority.

Outnumbered and insecure, the Franks of necessity housed themselves in fortified towns or in castles. Nevertheless, if the Crusader states were to survive they had to be a going concern, and the Franks set about organising their possessions along familiar European feudal lines. Castles were as much centres of production and administration as they were military outposts–battlemented country houses, containing corn mills and olive presses, and surrounded by gardens, vineyards, orchards and fields. Their lands in some cases encompassed hundreds of villages and a peasantry numbering tens of thousands. Wood to Egypt, herbs, spices and sugar to Europe, were important exports; indeed throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Europe’s entire supply of sugar came from the Latin East.

But in times of war, agriculture was always the first victim. Were it not for Western subvention and the taxes imposed on trade between the Muslim East and Europe as it passed through the Crusader states, they would have collapsed sooner than they did. The Latin rulers were always strapped for cash, the bulk of their revenues going towards the upkeep of mercenaries, knights and castles. It was a vicious circle; insufficient land and manpower making castles a necessity; the cost of knights and castles greater than the productivity of the land could justify.

In this situation the military orders came into their own. They had the resources, the independence, the dedication–the elements of their growing power.

A Power Unto Themselves

After the Second Crusade both the Hospitallers and the Templars came to provide the backbone of resistance to the Muslims, but the military impetus came from the Templars. The Hospitallers were still an entirely pacific order when the armed order of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ came into being. But sometime in the 1120s the Hospitallers extended their role from caring for pilgrims to protecting them by force of arms if need be, becoming known as the Knights of the Hospital of Saint John, or Knights Hospitaller, with Saint John no longer the Almsgiver but replaced by the more imposing figure of Saint John the Baptist. The first recorded instance of Hospitallers in combat dates from 1128, eight years or so after the founding of the Templars; it was the example of the Templars that helped turn the Hospitallers into a military order.