The Tragedy of the Templars (23 page)

In Paris 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. 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 King Louis to arrange with the Byzantine emperor Manuel I Comnenus for the passage of the French and German armies. 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 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 attacked by the Turks. Unlike the First Crusade, which had won a victory over the Seljuks at this same spot, the Germans were almost completely wiped out. The survivors, including Conrad himself, retreated to Nicaea, where they awaited the French and joined them in following the safer coastal route via Smyrna and Ephesus on the Aegean.

But the crusade had no sooner reached Ephesus than Conrad fell ill and returned with the remnants of 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. Rumours spread among the French that Manuel was deliberately trying to weaken the crusade, fed by the knowledge that the Byzantines, who were at war with Roger II, the Norman king of Sicily, had recently agreed a treaty with the Seljuks to cover their backs. To the minds of many of those on the crusade this accommodation with the infidel seemed treacherous, and Louis himself sent letters back to France blaming the Byzantines for many of his problems.

With his army on the verge of disintegration, Louis surrendered his responsibilities to Everard des Barres, who divided the French forces into units of fifty, each under the command of a Templar knight whom they swore to obey absolutely. The Templars arranged the army into an organised formation which reined in knightly impetuosity and protected against Turkish attacks. To keep order in the ranks and not waste energy on fruitless pursuits, the army was taught to attack only when ordered to do so and to return from pursuits the moment the signal was given; also they were taught to maintain an order of march in which each man kept the position given him. The archers on foot were drawn up at the rear to combat the Turkish bowmen, and nobles who had lost their horses and equipment joined this group. On this march through Asia Minor the Templars established the pattern that was to characterise the order's approach to battle; theirs would become the first institutionalised army in Western Christendom, permanent and disciplined in a way known until then only in the monasteries.

Thanks to the boldness and organisational skills of the Templars, towards the end of January the army was led to safety at Attalia (present-day Antalya) on the Mediterranean. But the Templars could only do so much; the ordeal of the French army was far from over, for the expected Byzantine fleet was too small to take them all to the Holy Land, and storms prevented the arrival of further vessels. Attalia was in Byzantine possession, but the Turks stood beyond its gates; the French were unable to obtain new horses or to pasture the ones they had. The town was crowded with the army; food became short, prices rose, disease set in. Finally Louis decided to embark with his barons on what ships were available, leaving the greater number of his army behind. There the French succumbed to plague or were killed when they tried to break out and march overland to Antioch.

When Louis arrived at St Simeon, the port for Antioch, early in March 1148, he and Eleanor of Aquitaine were warmly and grandly received by Prince Raymond of Antioch, who was Eleanor's uncle. Raymond had been one of the earliest to send messages to the West calling for aid against the mounting menace from the Turks, and for three years now he had been looking forward to the arrival of Louis' army. But Raymond's plan was not to recover Edessa, which had been thoroughly destroyed; rather, he counted on French support for a campaign against Nur al-Din's strongholds of Aleppo and Shaizar. If these cities could be taken, it would alleviate the Turkish pressure against the northern boundaries of the crusader states. But Louis was not enthusiastic. His forces were depleted, and the cost of supplies and shipping had been so great that he needed to borrow if he was to continue with the crusade. 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 – Louis had no immediate thought other than to journey as a pilgrim to Jerusalem.

Finances and piety may have been sufficient for Louis to turn his back on Raymond's plans and hasten to Jerusalem. But Eleanor of Aquitaine may have been another reason. Raymond had been entertaining his lively young niece with the pleasures and diversions of Antioch. Flamboyant, handsome and cosmopolitan, Raymond was everything that Eleanor's husband Louis was not. Casting a willing spell upon her, Raymond drew her into his schemes for capturing Aleppo and Shaizar, and also, so the rumours grew, drew her into a passionate and incestuous affair. When Louis rejected Raymond's Aleppo campaign and announced he would go to Jerusalem instead, Eleanor refused to go and said she would have their marriage annulled on the grounds of consanguinity, of all things (she and Louis were fourth cousins, once removed), to which Louis replied by seizing his wife at her uncle's palace and taking her by force to Jerusalem.

William of Tyre called Eleanor of Aquitaine a fatuous woman – not that he ever met her when she came to Outremer, as he was studying at Paris and Bologna at the time. Other accounts suggest she was strong-willed and outspoken, and more intelligent than her husband, and that her argument with Louis at Antioch had as much to do with politics and strategy as with a dalliance with her uncle. Eleanor did eventually divorce Louis when the crusade was over and married Henry Plantagenet, duke of Normandy and count of Anjou, her cousin in the third degree and nine years younger. He soon became Henry II, king of England, and to him she bore five sons, three of them future kings of England, among them Richard the Lionheart, the great challenger of Saladin during the Third Crusade. As duchess of Aquitaine in her own right, she was one of the wealthiest and most influential women in Europe; as queen first of France and then of England, she acted as the patron of troubadours and poets. The earliest epic poetry centring on King Arthur and his Round Table emerged at Eleanor's court. An exciting and passionate woman, her presence lies behind two of the greatest stories to come out of the Middle Ages: the legend of the Holy Grail and the romance of the Knights Templar.

Although the first mention of the Templars in literature came in about 1220, in
Parzival
, by the German knight and poet Wolfram von Eschenbach, its origins can be traced back to Eleanor of Aquitaine. Eschenbach based his work on Chrétien des Troyes' romance
Perceval, The Story of the Grail
, begun in 1181 and left unfinished at his death in 1190. Chrétien's association with Troyes is significant: it was the capital of the counts of Champagne who played an important role in the founding of the Templars and also in promoting their great champion Bernard of Clairvaux. Certainly Troyes represented a link with the East through Chrétien's patroness, the countess Marie of Champagne, who was the daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine, the adventurous queen who had risked the hazards of travelling to the East with the Second Crusade and had stories to tell.

Bernard of Clairvaux, like William of Tyre, did not much approve of the free-spirited Eleanor, whom he found flighty and indecorous. But for a poet she made good copy, and it is not hard to imagine her inspiring Chrétien when he invented the character of Guinevere in his earlier work
Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart
, which he wrote specifically at Marie's request.

The Grail was invented in the late twelfth century by Chrétien de Troyes: no mention of a Grail had ever been made before. Curiously, there was nothing explicitly religious about Chrétien's Grail; he did not write about it as the cup or chalice at the Last Supper. For that matter he did not describe it as a cup or chalice at all, but rather as a serving dish, which is the usual and original meaning of the Old French word
graal
. But there is something wonderful about the Grail's first appearance in the pages of Chrétien's story at the beginning of a rich man's feast, and all the more wonderful and strange because Chrétien never finished his story. This is how it makes its first appearance on the page.

What is tantalising about this appearance of the Grail is that Perceval, the hero of the romance, knows exactly what it is, but he fails to tell us before the story breaks off (when Chrétien dies). Is the story allegorical? People have argued over that point for more than eight hundred years. And if allegorical, is the allegory religious? That too has never been resolved. But this haunting image was soon inspiring writers to complete the tale – among them Wolfram von Eschenbach, who in
Parzival
, his thirteenth-century German adaptation, introduced the Knights Templar to literature by making them guardians of the Grail.

Chrétien de Troyes was writing when medieval Western society was opening onto a wider world, the world of the Mediterranean, the world of the East, to worlds of ideas and beliefs that it was discovering or rediscovering, not least on account of the crusades. Writing about the Grail meant writing about this cultural and spiritual quest, and yet, strangely, it has been a genre, regardless of its religious overtones, that has always belonged to secular writers, never to the Church. William of Tyre and Bernard of Clairvaux would most certainly have disapproved – as they disapproved of Eleanor of Aquitaine. But free from doctrine and canon, the Grail and the story of Guinevere, her lovers and her knights, have been endlessly reinvented down to the present time.

Despite the French losses in Asia Minor, the crusading forces that finally assembled in Outremer were far from negligible. The French forces were augmented by the late arrival of crusaders from Provence; the crusading fleet that had helped take Lisbon had also arrived, and added to these were the survivors of the German army, which had arrived by sea from Constantinople with Conrad. In fact, this was the largest army deployed by the Franks in the East since the First Crusade.

On 24 June 1148 the lords and military leaders then in Outremer attended a great council at Acre. King Fulk had died in a hunting accident in 1143, and Baldwin III, his seventeen-year-old son by Melisende, presided over the gathering, which included the kings of France and England, the Hospitallers and the Templars, and the barons and leading clergy of the kingdom of Jerusalem. Not surprisingly Melisende, with her Armenian ancestry and sympathies, supported Raymond of Antioch's plan to strike at Aleppo, Nur al-Din's base in northern Syria astride the route to Edessa, and her general Mannassas agreed. Nor was it a matter of sentiment; despite William of Tyre's dismissal of the fighting abilities of Edessa's merchant class, the Armenian population of the county of Edessa had provided many of the best auxiliaries to the Frankish forces, and the loss of this recruiting ground was serious; and although Edessa itself was now ruinous, the capture of Aleppo would extend the north-eastern borders of Outremer against the Turks, perhaps holding them back beyond the Euphrates. But Louis remained adamantly opposed to Raymond's plan.

Others spoke of Egypt as an objective, but the road south was blocked by Ascalon, still in the hands of the Fatimids and powerfully fortified. The third possibility was Damascus, which, though a sometime ally of the Franks, had long before King Baldwin II's expedition of 1129 attracted the attention of the Franks. For the 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, and would separate the Muslim forces in northern Syria and Iraq from those in Egypt, while the vastness of the desert opening up eastwards beyond Damascus would provide the Frankish states with a natural frontier. The capture of either Damascus or Aleppo offered similar strategic advantages, but Damascus was nearer, provided greater defence for Jerusalem, would be easier to hold – and in having biblical associations, which Aleppo did not, Damascus was a more appealing cause for the crusaders from the West. As William of Tyre wrote, quoting Isaiah 7:8: ‘Damascus is the largest city of lesser Syria and is its metropolis, for as it is said, “Damascus is the head of Syria”.'
¹⁰
If there was an argument that going to war against Damascus would drive it into the arms of Nur al-Din, the answer was that Damascus was already moving in that direction without Frankish help. Since Zengi had demonstrated his destructive powers at Edessa, Muin al-Din Unur, the atabeg of Damascus, had warmed to Nur al-Din, to whom he had married off his daughter; the growing might of Zengi and Nur al-Din and the propaganda of jihad ensured that Damascus was no longer the ally of the Franks it had once been. After vigorous discussion of the various plans of action the assembly came to ‘a unanimous decision'.
¹¹
King Louis was in favour, Conrad was in favour, Baldwin was in favour, the barony of Outremer was in favour, and the Templars were in favour of an expedition against Damascus.