The Tragedy of the Templars (18 page)

But chastity in relations with women might encourage homosexual activity, and this too was suppressed, through a series of oblique prohibitions. Pointed shoes and laces were ‘an abomination', as were ‘excess hair or immoderately long clothes' – that is, anything that might smack of femininity. The hair on their heads was to be cut short, but all Templar knights wore beards as they were not permitted to shave.

The knights were to dress in white, symbolising that they had put the dark life behind them and had entered a state of perpetual chastity. Foul language and displays of anger were forbidden, as were reminiscences about past sexual conquests. Property, casual discussion with outsiders, and letters and gifts given or received were subject to the approval of the master. Discipline was enforced by a system of penances, with expulsion the punishment in extreme cases.

In all this the Templars were regulated like monks, but when it came to guidance in military matters Bernard offered few practical injunctions, although he did understand that in creating ‘a new type of Order in the holy places', one that combined knighthood with religion, the Templars needed to possess land, buildings, serfs and tithes, and were entitled to legal protection against what the Latin Rule called ‘the innumerable persecutors of the holy Church'.
¹⁷

The endorsement of the Templars by the Council of Troyes was subsequently confirmed by Pope Honorius II. These successes had come largely through the efforts of Bernard of Clairvaux, who was now urged by Hugh of Payns to write a robust defence of the Templars for general distribution.

De Laude Novae Militae
was the name of Bernard's panegyric,
In Praise of the New Knighthood
, in which he announced the Templars as the champions of a higher struggle in which homicide, which was evil in Christian eyes, was really malicide – that is, the killing of evil itself – which was good. The Holy Land, wrote Bernard, bore the impress of Jesus' life – Bethlehem, Nazareth, the River Jordan, the Temple Mount, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which encompassed the places of Jesus' crucifixion, burial and resurrection. The Templars were the protectors of these holy sites and even acted as pilgrim guides, but by their proximity and daily familiarity with these footsteps in the life of Jesus, the Templars also had the advantage and the duty to search for the deeper truth, the inner spiritual meaning of the holy places. The implication of Bernard's
De Laude
was that by understanding the full meaning of their role the Templars would be fortified in their mission, which had gone beyond policing the pilgrimage routes and now embraced the defence of the Holy Land itself.

Following the death of Hugh of Payns in 1136, his successor Robert of Craon, the second Grand Master, consolidated the gains made at Troyes by securing for the Templars a string of papal bulls (from
bullum
, the Latin for ‘seal', and so meaning an official decree). In 1139 Pope Innocent II issued
Omne Datum Optimum
, which had the effect of establishing the Templars as an independent and permanent order within the Catholic Church answerable to no one but the pope and sanctioned their role as defenders of the Church and attackers of the enemies of Christ. The Grand Master was to be chosen from among the ranks of the Templar knights free from outside interference. The Templars were also given their own priesthood answerable to the Grand Master even though he was not ordained, which made the order independent of the diocesan bishops in Outremer and the West, and they were allowed their own oratories and cemeteries. The Templars were exempted from all tithes, but they were free to collect tithes on their own properties; all spoils of battle against the infidel were theirs by right; and donations made to the Templars were put under the protection of the Holy See.

These privileges were confirmed and extended by two further bulls:
Milites Templi
, issued by Pope Celestine II in 1144, and
Militia Dei
issued by Pope Eugenius III in 1145, which taken together with
Omne Datum Optimum
put the Templars beyond reproach and formed the foundation for their future wealth and success. It was also under Eugenius III that the Templars were granted the right to wear their famous habit of a red cross over a white tunic, symbolising their readiness to suffer martyrdom in the defence of the Holy Land.

The Knights Templar would in time become one of the wealthiest and most powerful financial and military organisations in the medieval world, yet there are holes in the historical record about their origins, and there are contradictions too. When were they founded? How many were there? Why do we hear so little about them during the first three decades of their existence? What accounts for their meteoric rise? Part of the problem in finding the answers to these questions lies in the nature of the sources themselves.

The earliest chronicler of Templar history was William, archbishop of Tyre. Born into a French or Italian family at Jerusalem in about 1130, he studied Latin, Greek and Arabic there before continuing his education at Paris and Bologna from about 1146 to 1165. After returning to Outremer he wrote, among other works, a twenty-three-volume history of the Middle East from the conquest of Jerusalem by Umar, based on Arabic sources. This
Historia Rerum in Partibus Transmarinis Gestarum
, or
History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea
, was begun around 1175 and remained unfinished at the time of William of Tyre's death in about 1186. Most of it concentrated on the First Crusade and subsequent political events within the kingdom of Jerusalem – events from which William was not entirely detached, for he was involved in the highest affairs of both the kingdom and the Church, and as archbishop and contender for the office of Patriarch of Jerusalem he was naturally jealous of any diminution of ecclesiastical authority – and therefore resentful of the Templars' independence and their rise to wealth and power.

Two other early chroniclers were Michael the Syrian, Jacobite Patriarch of Antioch, who died in 1199, and Walter Map, archdeacon of Oxford, who died in about 1209. But Michael was weak on matters outside his own experience and times, while Walter preferred a good story to sound historical inquiry, and moreover his prejudice against the Templars was fundamental, for he objected to the entire concept of an order of fighting monks. Despite his own bias against the Templars, William of Tyre is considered the most reliable of the three; he diligently sifted through sources to glean the facts about events that occurred before his time, and he made a point of interviewing surviving first-hand witnesses.

All the same, William of Tyre did not even begin writing his history until the mid-1170s – that is, fifty-five years after the founding of the Templars – and there is no earlier source. The chroniclers of the First Crusade – men such as Fulcher of Chartres, Baldric of Dol, Robert the Monk and Guibert de Nogent – had all completed their works within a decade of the reconquest of Jerusalem in 1099 and long before the foundation of the Templars in 1119 – or was it 1118? According to William of Tyre, it was the latter, but he was notoriously poor on dates even if careful in other things, and the balance of scholarly opinion has the Templars established in 1119. In whatever year it was, it does not seem to have occurred to anyone to write a first-hand account of the founding ceremony of the Templars in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Christmas Day – at the time it did not register as a significant event.

We do not even know how many founding members there really were. William of Tyre says that there were nine and names the two most prominent as Hugh of Payns and Godfrey of Saint-Omer. Other sources also name Archambaud of Saint-Aignan, Payen of Montdidier, André of Montbard, Geoffrey Bissot, a knight called Rossal or possibly Roland, another called Gondemar, and two more whose names have not survived. Moreover, William of Tyre maintains that even as late as the Council of Troyes in 1129 there were still only nine Knights Templar. But why would only nine men command such attention from the Council and the pope, and why would Bernard of Clairvaux devote so much effort to praising their worth and propagating their fame? Indeed in this case Michael the Syrian seems to be more reliable, for he says there were thirty founding Templar knights, and most likely there were very many more a decade later.

Nevertheless the notion that the Templars began with nine members and continued at that strength for a decade may have less to do with factual accuracy than with medieval number symbolism. Nine was considered an incorruptible number because no matter how many times it is multiplied it continues to reproduce itself in the sum of its digits. This symbolism would have enshrined nine in the founding myth of the Templars, a myth that was repeated by later generations from whom William of Tyre collected his information.

Just as we owe it to William of Tyre that the Templars comprised only nine members right up to 1129, so we also owe to him the claim that they were a poor and simple order throughout the early decades of their foundation. Certainly the Templars looked back on themselves in this idealistic way, so that in 1167, when they were very rich indeed, they adopted as their seal the two knights astride one horse, a self-image perhaps also derived from their ascetic Cistercian promoter in the West, Bernard of Clairvaux. Yet however humble the lives of the individual knights, the order itself was never indigent, not even at the start when already it was receiving an income from the canons of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre as well as significant donations from powerful French barons.

But to portray the Templars as poor and humble and few in numbers in their early years gave William of Tyre a handy stick with which to beat them in his critical history. By the 1170s, according to William of Tyre, the Templars ‘are said to have immense possessions both here and overseas, so that there is now not a province in the Christian world which has not bestowed upon the aforesaid brothers a portion of its goods. It is said today that their wealth is equal to the treasures of kings.' William contrasts this state of affairs with the Templars' earlier simplicity, suggesting they have somehow betrayed themselves. But it seems that his real complaint is that their support in the West made them independent of any power in Outremer, particularly that of the Church as represented by William, the archbishop of Tyre and would-be patriarch of Jerusalem:

This was the beginning of the criticism the Templars would receive from sources whose interests they crossed. Some would call them saviours of the East and defenders of all Christendom; others would find them ‘troublesome' and accuse them of arrogance, greed, secrecy and deceit. Their destruction lay in their beginning; when there was no more East to save, the Templars would be doomed.

F
ULCHER OF CHARTRES
, who chronicled Pope Urban's speech at Clermont in 1095 and travelled east with the First Crusade, eventually became canon of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and remained in Jerusalem for the rest of his life. Before he died in 1127
¹
Fulcher recorded the great changes he had witnessed in Outremer, years when soldiers, traders, settlers and pilgrims mingled and intermarried with the indigenous inhabitants to form a revitalised society and culture in the East.

It is noteworthy that Fulcher of Chartres specifically mentions that the Franks were engaged in rural activities such as cultivating vines and fields. This is testimony to the settled conditions in Outremer and to the way Franks lived and worked among the indigenous population. It also contradicts the assertions of certain present-day historians that the Franks enjoyed no security and kept themselves apart, for example Jonathan Riley-Smith, who has written: ‘In the kingdom of Jerusalem, most of the immigrant Frankish population lived in towns or castles; the countryside was populated and worked almost exclusively by native Syrians, both Christians and Muslims.'
⁴
As we shall see there is plenty of solid evidence, quite apart from Fulcher of Chartres, to demonstrate that this view is wrong.

Fulcher also mentions that the Franks learned the local languages, which meant Greek, Armenian, Syriac and Arabic; this stood in contrast to the Arabs and the Turks, for whom there is very little evidence that they could speak the others' language or troubled to learn the languages of the people they had conquered and oppressed.