The Templars (30 page)
Authors: Michael Haag
After climbing up a dark vaulted switchback ramp and passing through a portcullis you enter the court, a narrow and economical space faced on one side with an elegant loggia, where the light sifts through fine stone tracery reminiscent of Rheims. ‘Grace, wisdom and beauty you may enjoy’, runs the Latin inscription cut into the stone, ‘but beware pride which alone can tarnish all the rest.’ Beyond the loggia is a great dining hall and behind that a huge nave-like chamber, at one time filled with kitchens and bakeries, granaries and storage jars, for siege was always expected and the major castles were stocked with provisions to last up to five years. Opposite the loggia is a barrel-vaulted twelfth-century chapel built in the Romanesque style and later converted to a mosque.
The best place to appreciate the magnificence of Krak’s position is from the Warden’s Tower where a spiral staircase rises to a graceful and voluminous chamber, the Grand Master’s apartment. Below you, like
some giant nautilus, swirl the concentric circles of the castle’s defences, the vast structure seeming to sail like a battleship high above rolling waves of orchards and wheat fields, a bountiful landscape as familiar as Provence.
Krak was not taken; it was given away. In the last years of Outremer, Krak and Safita and the other mountain castles became isolated, vulnerable and undermanned outposts facing the gathering storm of an overwhelming Mameluke enemy. Finally, after Krak had been in Christian hands for 161 years, and after a month’s siege, the Hospitaller knights accepted Sultan Baybars’ offer of safe passage and in 1271 rode to Tortosa of the Templars and the sea for the last time.
Known to the Templars as Ruad, Arwad lies two miles off the coast of Syria, opposite Tartus. A fishing town almost completely covers the little island. There are no streets, only twisting lanes with narrowing passages, and in their midst the Crusader castle from where the Templars from Tortosa clung to a view of Christendom’s lost prize for eleven years longer, until 1302.
One of an endless series of launches from Tartus lands you at the island’s harbour where fishermen mend their nets near restaurants and cafés which serve the constant stream of daytrippers. Behind these are the walls of a small Muslim castle, and by this is the market, which twists back into the town. Follow this to higher ground towards the west side of the island and you come to the Crusader fortress, probably thirteenth century, with massive round corner towers. This was the last outpost of the Templars; now it is the local museum. Next to its gate is a carved relief of a lion chained to a palm, a declaration made in vain that the Crusaders were forever attached to Outremer.
The Templars in the West
By the time of their downfall in 1307 the Templars had built up a network of at least 870 castles and preceptories (that is houses and estates) throughout almost every European country which adhered to the Roman Catholic faith. But overwhelmingly their principal properties were in France, with lesser numbers in the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal) and Britain. Today the situation is reversed. The most numerous Templar survivals are in Britain, Spain and Portugal, but owing to the destruction of the Templars by King Philip IV there is almost nothing to see in France.
Nevertheless it is still possible to follow the drama of events in France. Wandering round the Temple quarter in Paris, where the Templar leaders were arrested at dawn, and going to the spot along the Seine where the last Grand Master, James of Molay, was bound to a stake and burnt to death, works powerfully on the imagination and helps bring the climactic history of the order alive. In Spain and Portugal, countries which the Templars helped liberate from Muslim occupation, the order
was protected and continued in new guises. For this reason several magnificent Templar castles and churches have survived there more or less intact. Much can be seen in Britain, too, where Templars were treated lightly and their properties largely returned to the noble families which had donated them to the order.
Perhaps no country in the West is more associated with the Templars than France. Their dramatic rise and fall was played out in such places as Troyes, Paris and Chinon. But the assault on the Templars by the French crown was so vicious and complete that very little remains to be seen. The ghosts of the Templars still inhabit certain quarters of Paris, however, and you can walk in their footsteps today.
The Paris Temple was in the area known today as the Marais, which is on the Right Bank just west of the Bastille. The Marais is one of the most atmospheric parts of Paris; it was left largely untouched by Baron Haussmann, the nineteenth-century planner whose love of the straight line and the grand vista led him to demolish great swathes of the old city to create the long broad boulevards lined by six- to seven-storey buildings with uniform grey facades and mansard roofs that are the architectural hallmark of Paris today. Instead the Marais is a warren of enchanting narrow streets which preserve magnificent Renaissance mansions built round intimate courtyards and humbler but no less appealing seventeenth- and eighteenth-century streets of stucco facades and slatted shutters. Yet the area was nothing more than a riverside swamp (
marais
) until the Knights Templar drained the land in the 1140s and built their headquarters in its northern part, then outside the city walls, in what is now called the Quartier du Temple.
Now nothing remains of the Paris Temple except the name itself. But the rues du Temple, Bretagne, Picardie and Beranger more or less define
the place occupied by the Templars’ French headquarters, which was a considerable compound fortified with walls and towers to which they added, in the late thirteenth century, a powerfully built keep which was nearly twice as high as the White Tower, the keep at the heart of the Tower of London. The Templar keep in Paris was the main strongroom for the Templar bank, which was also, in effect, the treasury of the kings of France.
The close relationship between the French crown and the Templars probably explains why King Philip IV’s officials were able to walk right
in to the Temple at dawn on Friday 13 October 1307. Their action was so sudden, and the shock and surprise so complete, that there was no resistance. The keep, which had been the Templars’ stronghold, immediately became their prison, and the two thousand or so Templars arrested simultaneously throughout France were also brought here for incarceration, examination and torture.
After the abolition of the Templars, the Paris Temple became the abode of artisans and debtors eager to avoid official regulations by living outside the city walls. But a new wall built in 1357 brought the Temple within the embrace of the growing city where it remained standing for four and a half centuries more. During the French Revolution King Louis XVI was imprisoned in the Templar keep and it was from
there in January 1793 that he was led out to the guillotine in what is now the Place de la Concorde. In 1808 the keep was demolished by Napoleon, who was eager to eradicate anything that might become a focus of sympathy for the royal family.
Ile des Javiaux: the Burning of the Last Templars
On the evening of 18 March 1314 James of Molay, the Templar Grand Master, and Geoffrey of Charney, the Templar’s master of Normandy, were burnt at the stake on the Ile de Javiaux in the Seine. It is said that as James of Molay was bound to the stake he asked to be allowed to face the Cathedral of Notre Dame. You can revisit the scene, but you must make allowances for changes in the river. Medieval maps of Paris show four islands in the Seine. The westernmost is the Ile de la Cité with the Cathedral of Notre Dame. The next two islands to the east are shown as uninhabited; they have since joined together to form the Ile St Louis. The easternmost island of the four, which is also shown as uninhabited, is the Ile des Javiaux–but there is no island there today. Instead the island has become attached to the north bank of the Seine, and what was once the river channel to the north is now the Boulevard Morland. Along the Quai Henri IV, which follows the outline of what was the southern side of the Ile des Javiaux, there is a plaque which reads:
A cet endroit Jacques de Molay dernier grand maitre de l’ordre du Temple été brulé le 18 Mars 1314
–‘On this spot James of Molay, the last Grand Master of the Order of the Temple, was burned on 18 March 1314’. The Cathedral of Notre Dame still forms part of the view.
In Spain, as discussed earlier, the Templars were protected by King Jaime II of Aragon and reformed as the Order of Montessa, retaining most of their former properties and playing a role in defending the frontier against the remaining Muslim kingdoms of Andalusia.
There are, therefore, a number of well-preserved Templar sites in Spain, including the castles at Peñíscola near Valencia and Miravet in Catalonia. However, it is the Templars’ church at Segovia and their castle at Ponferrada that perhaps best illustrate the order’s presence and their architecture in Spain.
Segovia, about fifty miles north of Madrid, is a small medieval city built on a rocky ridge. It is famous for its Roman aqueduct, its late Gothic cathedral and the Alcazar, a fortified palace of the Spanish kings which was built upon the remains of an earlier Arab fortress. But across the river in a striking position in open countryside and looking back at the walled medieval city and its Alcazar is Segovia’s finest ancient church, the Iglesia Vera Cruz, the Church of the True Cross. Patterned on the Rotunda of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, it was built
by the Templars in the early thirteenth century and is still impressive despite the alteration of its appearance caused by the addition of a later tower. On the outside the church is twelve-sided but the nave within is circular, and at its centre is a two-storey chamber where a chapel on its upper floor contained a piece of the True Cross (now removed to the nearby village church at Zamarramala).
During the twelfth century the Christian rulers of the various Spanish kingdoms made extremely generous donations to the military orders. The Templars and the Hospitallers received estates in the north and castles in central Spain with the intention that they should defend the invasion routes used by the Muslim armies. One of these kingdoms was Leon, which later divided, one part joining Castile, the other joining Portugal. As part of this policy of bestowing lands on the military orders, in 1178 Ferdinand II of Leon donated Ponferrada to the Templars so that they could protect the pilgrimage route across northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela.
The cathedral at Compostela was said to hold the remains of Jesus’ cousin, Saint James the Apostle, a belief that sprang up not long after the Great Mosque at Cordoba in southern Spain was said to hold a bone from the body of the Prophet Mohammed. Soon Saint James was being identified with the Reconquista and was seen fighting alongside the Christians at forty battles against the occupying Arabs. The pilgrimage to the saint’s relics at Compostela quickly caught the imagination of Christian Europe, and at the height of its popularity in the eleventh and twelfth centuries the city was receiving over half a million pilgrims a year. After Jerusalem and Rome, Compostela was regarded as the third holiest site in Christendom, and completion of a pilgrimage to the relics ensured the remission of half one’s time in Purgatory.
The Castillo de los Templarios is one of the most beautiful examples of military architecture in Spain. It had been a mud and pebble Roman castro which the Templars built up into an enormous castle built on an irregular square plan with powerful stone walls and crenellated
ramparts linking twelve large towers. By guaranteeing the security of pilgrims against local brigands and Muslim incursions, the Templars ensured that Ponferrada and the region enjoyed the benefits of the passing trade, including commercial development and population growth. The castle rises above the river Sil and dominates the city’s historic quarter. The approach is over a drawbridge spanning a moat; you then enter through a double arch flanked by two towers. A vast courtyard lies within, off which are various chambers including an armoury and stables, and on the far side a massive keep where the Templar master of Castille had his quarters. Recently restored, the castle has been declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.
Portugal came into existence as a separate kingdom during the centuries of Christian resistance against the Muslim forces that had occupied the Iberian peninsula, a resistance in which the Templars played an important part. As in Spain, the Portuguese monarchy refused to turn against the Templars when the French king Philip IV found it politically and financially convenient to destroy them, and instead the new Order of Christ was founded. The finest Templar monuments are found in central Portugal, close to one another at Tomar and Almourol. There are, in addition and outside the direct orbit of this book, superb monuments from the Order of Christ at Sagres, where Henry the Navigator made his base, and at Belém, outside of Lisbon.
After the Christian reconquest of central Portugal from the Muslims, a vast part of the frontier region was given to the Knights Templar by the Portuguese king. Tomar, to the northeast of present-day Lisbon, was founded in 1160 on the site of an ancient Roman city when the Templar Grand Master of Portugal, Gualdim Pais, laid the first stone of the castle and monastery that would become the headquarters of the order
in the country. The Templar presence at Tomar protected Christian settlers from the north against Arab incursions, and in 1190 they saved the entire country from being overrun by Abu Yusef al-Mansur, the Almohad caliph of Morocco. Al-Mansur had already ravaged southern Portugal by the time he laid siege to Tomar where he faced a vastly outnumbered garrison of Templars, yet they broke the back of al-Mansur’s attack and drove him back to Morocco.
Thankful to the Templars for helping to establish and defend the new kingdom of Portugal, King Diniz resisted French and Papal pressure to suppress the order and hand over its possessions to the Church. Instead, in 1319 he transferred Templar property and personnel to the newly created Order of Christ, which for a while was centred at Castro Marim in the Algarve but after 1356 returned to Tomar. Prince Henry the Navigator, who was made Grand Master of the Order of Christ in 1418, renovated and enlarged the Convento do Cristo (as the Templars’ castle with its round church was called) and designed the geometrical pattern of streets seen in Tomar today, even as he was using Templar resources to send his ships on bold voyages into the Atlantic and down the coast of Africa, his caravels powered before the winds by sails painted with the Templar cross.
Convento do Cristo
Built as a Templar stronghold in 1160, the Convento do Cristo sits impressively on a hill overlooking the river Nabão and the town. The castle has an outer wall and a citadel with a keep inside. The keep is one of the oldest in Portugal; the idea was introduced to the country by the Templars, as was the use of round
towers in the outer walls, which were less susceptible to mining than square towers and improved the defensive lines of fire. When Tomar was founded, most of its inhabitants lived in houses enclosed within the protective outer walls of the castle. As Grand Master of the Order of Christ, Prince Henry the Navigator had his palace here; its remains can be seen immediately to the right when entering the castle walls.
The famous round church within the castle was built in the second half of the twelfth century and like several other Templar churches across Europe it was modelled after the Rotunda of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. From the outside it is a sixteen–sided structure, with strong buttresses, round windows and a bell tower. Inside the church is circular and has a central octagonal structure, connected by arches to a surrounding ambulatory. After Prince Henry the Navigator became Grand Master of the Order of Christ he had a Gothic nave added to the round church, so that the rotunda became the apse of the enlarged church. The Convent of Christ of Tomar is one of Portugal’s most important historical and artistic monuments and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
