The Templars (29 page)
Authors: Michael Haag
Al-Aqsa Mosque
After the Arab conquest of Jerusalem in 638 the Muslim commander, Umar, had a temporary mosque built at the southern end of the Temple Mount. Umar’s mosque was replaced sixty years later when work began on the mosque of al-Aqsa, which was completed in 715. Al-Aqsa means ‘the farthest’ and was originally applied to the entire Temple Mount, being that farthest place where Mohammed ascended into Paradise according to an interpretation of
Sura 17:1
in the Koran. Al-Aqsa, a basilica with a lead dome that shines silvery in the sun, became the great congregational mosque of Jerusalem, the place of Friday prayers and the midday sermon.
Fatimids, Ayyubids, Mamelukes, Ottomans and, since the 1920s, the Supreme Muslim Council have altered, extended or rebuilt the mosque, so that it is a palimpsest of thirteen centuries of architectural history. The Crusaders also played an important role. In 1099 it became the headquarters of the Crusader leader Godfrey of Bouillon, and for several years it served as a palace for Baldwin I, the first king of Jerusalem. The Crusaders called it the mosque of the
Templum Solomonis
because they believed that it stood on the site of Solomon’s Temple, so that when Baldwin gave the building to the new knighthood of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ in 1119 it was not long before they were
calling themselves the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon–or, simply, the Templars.
Al-Aqsa was the Templars’ administrative, military and religious headquarters for over sixty years. They made various structural alterations and extensions to provide chambers for the Grand Master and other officers of the order and their staff, living quarters for the knights, and storage rooms for food, clothing and arms, but they took care not to damage the fine Arab decorations. Some Templar work survives, most notably the annexe they built to the east of the mosque which is now incorporated in the Women’s Mosque and the Islamic Museum, and they also left their mark on Solomon’s Stables.
Solomon’s Stables
Solomon’s Stables were in fact vaulted cellars built by Herod the Great to support his immense platform of the Temple Mount when he extended and refurbished the Second Temple in the first century BC. The vast masonry underpinning raised the ground level at the southeast corner of the Temple Mount by 150 feet. There are thought to be four levels of vaulting, but only the topmost level is accessible, and at present this is closed to tourists. The Umayyads reused Herodian masonry to restore this topmost level in the late seventh and early eighth centuries, and later the Templars rebuilt the arches. In addition to offering structural support for the Temple Mount platform and later the al-Aqsa mosque built above this spot, the cellars may have served Herod’s Temple as storerooms. The Templars were probably the first to use them as stables, and there are still rings attached to many of the pillars which were used to tether their horses.
A tunnel runs from the southern retaining wall of the Temple Mount underneath Solomon’s Stables. At a distance of 100 feet the tunnel is blocked by pieces of stone and debris, and archaeologists have not been able to examine it further because of objections from the Muslim authorities. But from the way the tunnel was constructed, often using large blocks from the period of Herod’s Temple, archaeologists have concluded that it was built as a postern by the Templars. The entrance
would have been somewhere on the surface of the Temple Mount, and its exit in the southern wall would have allowed the Templars to emerge and make sudden surprise attacks against their enemies.
The Islamic Museum
Architectural fragments and other objects removed from the various structures on the Temple Mount during renovations have been put on display at the Islamic Museum. Among these are some items of Crusader workmanship. But the finest thing about the museum is the Templar vaulted hall, which serves as the chief exhibition space. The hall was built in the 1160s and was part of that magnificent complex described by Theoderich, a pilgrim who visited the Holy Land in 1172.
On another side of the [al-Aqsa] palace, that is to say, on the western side, the Templars have erected a new building. I could give the measurements of its height, length and breadth of its cellars, refectories, staircases and roof, rising with a high pitch, unlike the flat roofs of that country; but even if I did so, my hearers would hardly be able to believe me.
In fact what you are seeing is only the western half of the hall, which after Saladin captured Jerusalem in 1187 became the assembly hall of a madrassa. The eastern half of the Templar hall was converted into the Women’s Mosque of the al-Aqsa, which it remains to this day.
Acre, or Akko in Hebrew, is on a low promontory about twelve miles north of Haifa. As the maritime gateway to Outremer throughout the Crusader period, Acre was the chief port of trade and the principal landing point for pilgrims. In 1191, four years after Jerusalem was lost to Saladin, Acre also became the capital of the truncated Kingdom of Jerusalem, and both the Templars and the Hospitallers established their headquarters here. Acre was the most powerfully defended city in Outremer, and the Templar fortress by the sea was the strongest place
in the city. But in 1291, after a long siege, Acre fell to the overwhelming Mameluke forces, which effectively marked the end of the crusading venture in the Holy Land. On the orders of the victorious Mameluke Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil, everyone remaining alive within the town was brought outside the walls and decapitated, and Acre was levelled to the ground.
Four hundred years later, however, the Ottomans began rebuilding Acre, often reusing the fallen stones, and standing their new walls and buildings on the Crusaders’ foundations. This has given Acre a medieval atmosphere which, together with its striking situation looking out upon the sea, helps the visitor to imagine how the Crusader city used to be. Moreover, recent archaeological work has uncovered much of the
Frankish past, in particular the Crusader Underground City and the Templar Tunnel.
You can start by walking along the Sea Wall Promenade, which for the most part follows the line of the Crusader walls. At the southwest corner of the walls where they jut out into the sea is a lighthouse, and just north of it is an area of quarried rock, now underwater, which was the site of the Templar fortress. The fortress was destroyed by the Mamelukes in 1291 and what stone blocks remained were put towards building the eighteenth-century sea walls. Just opposite this spot is the entrance to the Templar Tunnel, discovered only in 1994. The bottom part of the tunnel is cut from the bedrock, while the upper part is a barrel vault built of hewn stone. The section of the tunnel that runs westwards under the sea to the Templar fortress is not accessible, but you can follow the tunnel for a thousand feet eastwards under the old Pisan quarter to where it emerges at the Khan al-Shuna, the Grain Inn, which stands on twelfth century foundations.
Built against the northern land walls is the eighteenth-century Ottoman citadel, the largest building in Acre, which was built over the remains of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Hospitaller headquarters which have been excavated and cleared by archaeologists. What stands revealed is the Crusader Underground City, an immense and majestic complex of halls, storerooms, hospice and crypt arranged in four wings around a courtyard. Vast as the complex is, this is only a single level of what was once a four-storey building. It is the largest surviving Crusader structure in Israel, and yet according to contemporary accounts the now vanished Templar fortress was far grander.
Tortosa of the Crusaders, known today as Tartus, was an important pilgrimage port and a strategic gateway between the Mediterranean and the Syrian interior. Tartus stands at the seaward end of the Homs Gap, which cuts through the Jebel al-Sariya, the coastal mountain range, while at the eastern end of the gap lies the important city of Homs
and beyond that Damascus, which together with Cairo in Egypt was the mustering place of Muslim forces directed against the Franks of Outremer. In defence against this threat the Templars fortified Tortosa, whose cathedral stands as the finest survival of Crusader religious architecture outside Jerusalem, and in the mountains they built Chastel Blanc, or Safita as it is known today, which together with the nearby Hospitaller castle of Krak des Chevaliers gave the Crusaders complete control over the one important route between the interior of Syria and the sea. In 1291, the year when Outremer was overwhelmed by the final Mameluke assault, the Templars at Tortosa hung on two months longer than the defenders at Acre, and they clung on to their offshore island of Arwad for yet eleven years more.
The old quarter of Tartus, Tortosa of the Templars, is built within the remains of the Crusader citadel. A good section of its sea wall runs along the Mediterranean, while on the landward sides the citadel is encircled by an inner and outer wall. Much of these land walls survive, though they can be difficult to follow because houses have been built into the arches and bastions and are fixed against the walls themselves. The citadel occupied less than a quarter of the Crusader city and that too was surrounded by a wall, almost entirely vanished now, its southern end marked by a free-standing square tower about 500 yards to the south of the citadel and just opposite the little harbour where you can catch a launch to the island of Arwad.
Tortosa was originally in the hands of the Count of Tripoli (Trablus down the coast in northern Lebanon) who placed it in the care of the Templars following its brief occupation by Nur al-Din in 1152. The knights held out against Saladin’s siege in 1188 by bolting themselves inside the keep, which rises just behind the sea wall. Entering through an opening in the sea wall you thread your way through the tangle of streets and jumble of habitations that fill the citadel enclosure. A little square with a leafy café opens up immediately behind the remains of the Templars’ keep. On the north side of the square are the traces of a
thirteenth-century Templar banqueting hall, while to the northeast are the remains of their chapel.
But what is especially worth seeing is the Cathedral of Our Lady of Tortosa, which lies 300 yards to the southeast, beyond the citadel walls but within what was the line of the Templars’ city walls. If in doubt you can ask for the
kanisa
, church, or the
mathaf
, museum, which is what the cathedral has become, though during the centuries following the withdrawal of the Crusaders from the Holy Land it served as a mosque, a stables and an Ottoman barracks. A chapel, reputedly the first dedicated to the Virgin, is known to have been built here in the third century, long before the Roman Empire officially tolerated Christianity. When two
centuries later the chapel was felled by an earthquake, the disaster was proclaimed a miracle, for the altar had survived. The Count of Tripoli built upon this history when he began construction of the cathedral in 1123 to house the miraculous altar and receive the prayers of pilgrims. But the church you see today was largely rebuilt by the Templars after they withstood Saladin’s attack on Tortosa in 1188 when he destroyed most of the city, including much of the cathedral.
You enter Our Lady of Tortosa from the west, where the cathedral presents a blank wall pierced only by a small door, above which is a triangular arrangement of windows with slightly pointed arches marking the transition from the Romanesque to the Gothic. The impression is more of a fortress than a church, and you notice the vestiges of corner towers that would have served a defensive purpose. Not that it was of any help to eighteen-year-old Raymond, heir to the thrones of Antioch and Tripoli, who in 1213 was stabbed to death outside this door by two Assassins.
When you step inside you discover a medieval French cathedral, the most graceful religious building of the Crusaders in Syria. It is bare of Christian ornament, and its empty volume swallows the whispers of occasional visitors. Undazzled by detail, your eyes follow the trajectories of massive arches which soar from acanthus capitals, and you are impressed with the sense that Our Lady of Tortosa was built by men who meant to stay in the Holy Land forever.
Safita is approached through ascending terraces of orchards and olive groves. The town of stone-built houses painted white and pink, now an attractive summer mountain resort, has grown up around the castle the Templars called Chastel Blanc, an outpost of Tortosa against Assassin territory to the northeast and contributing towards the defence of the Homs Gap. The encircling walls of the fortress are gone but their pattern remains evident in the layout of streets and houses; what remains is the massive hilltop keep, visible against the sky for miles in every direction.
As Chastel Blanc was a Templar fortress it should come as no surprise that on entering the keep you discover that the ground floor was built as a church. Its high and dimly lit vaulted nave is rounded off by an apse at the east end with a sacristy on each side. The church was never turned into a mosque nor deconsecrated, and it now serves the Greek Orthodox community which moved here in the nineteenth century after being squeezed out of the Hauran in southern Syria by the Druze. A staircase to the right of the doorway takes you up to the first floor, which served as an armoury and housed the garrison. A further staircase leads to the open terrace at the top of the tower, in part still crenellated, with panoramic views of the town and the surrounding landscape, ranging as far as Krak des Chevaliers along the horizon to the southeast and a glimpse of the Mediterranean to the west.
Krak des Chevaliers, known in Arabic as Qalaat al-Husn, was a Hospitaller castle, not a Templar one, but it is mentioned here because it was part of that network of defences in the southern Jebel al-Sariya and along the Syrian coast that was the shared responsibility of the two military orders. Krak is also almost entirely undamaged and is a superb example of the concentric system, with one defensive wall set within the other, each one higher than the one before, which allowed for successive stages of retreat if need be, the defenders always having the advantage of dominating the attackers from a greater height. Situated on a mountain ridge within sight of Safita and overlooking the Homs Gap, the castle was built and expanded in phases by the Hospitallers from 1144 onwards. Its control of this strategic corridor and its forward position, so close to Homs and Hama and nearly intersecting the interior route between Damascus and Aleppo, caused one Saracen chronicler to describe it as ‘a bone stuck in the very throat of the Muslims’. Yet despite repeated attempts against it, Krak held firm, and even Saladin, after his great victory over the Kingdom of Jerusalem at Hattin in 1187, took one look at its defences and marched away.
