The Tragedy of the Templars (24 page)

The army of the Second Crusade, the largest assembled in Outremer since 1099, some fifty thousand cavalry and infantry according to Ibn al-Qalanisi, an Arab chronicler who was an eyewitness,
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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 the siege dragged on as meanwhile Turkish cavalry and infantry from elsewhere in Syria made their way towards Damascus. ‘News reached the Franks from many sources that the Muslims were bearing down on them to attack them and wipe them out,' wrote Ibn al-Qalanisi, ‘and they felt that their defeat was certain. They consulted among themselves, and decided that the only escape from the trap or abyss that loomed ahead of them was to take flight.' At dawn after only four days they retreated in ‘miserable confusion and disorder', pursued by the Turks, who showered them with arrows and killed many of their rearguard and their horses and pack animals as well. ‘Innumerable corpses of men and their splendid mounts were found in their bivouacs and along the route of their flight, the bodies stinking so powerfully that the birds almost fell out of the sky.' Without even fighting a battle the Second Crusade was defeated, ending in a whimpering fiasco and adding to the Muslim conviction, arising after Edessa, that the Franks could be beaten. ‘This gracious sign of God's favour brought rejoicing to Muslim hearts, and they gave thanks to the Most High for hearing the prayers raised unceasingly to Him in the days of their distress. For which let God be praised and blessed!'
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Six years later Damascus fell to Nur al-Din, and the encirclement of Outremer by a united Muslim power began.

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 and turned large numbers of Western Europeans against the whole notion of crusading; both the papacy and the West as a whole had suffered a setback. In the event the Second Crusade was destined to be the last crusade in which the armies were accompanied by large groups of pilgrims and other non-combatants. In future the crusades would be more strictly military expeditions, like the successful campaigns in Portugal and Spain. The shock was all the greater because the crusade had been led by the powerful kings of Germany and France and had been preached by Bernard of Clairvaux, the outstanding spiritual figure of the age. Some blamed the Franks of the East, supposedly corrupted for previously having 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; indeed Conrad himself, without naming names, wrote that ‘from a source we did not suspect treachery arrived, for “they” assured us that that side of the city could not be taken. They purposely led us to another side where there was no water for the army and no obvious access';
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while the anonymous Würzburg chronicler wrote of Templar greed, and of betrayal by taking a massive bribe. The French blamed the Byzantines for letting down the crusaders as they crossed Asia Minor, and Louis felt ‘betrayed and deceived' at Damascus, wrote John of Salisbury, who may have heard the words at first hand; he was resident at the papal court when Louis visited the pope on his return from Outremer. ‘Some impute the treachery to the Templars, others to those who were moved by a desire to return home: certainly the king himself always endeavoured to exonerate the brothers of the Temple'
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– which stands to reason, as it was the Templars who had supported the French expedition throughout. As John of Salisbury makes clear after hearing Louis' account, it was Conrad himself who early on lent his weight to those who wanted to abandon the siege, and Louis went along with it only later and reluctantly. While there is a strong case for royal bumbling, there is no evidence at all of Templar treachery.

In reality the notion of treachery was born out of incomprehension. The crusade had been undertaken to achieve redemption; it had been guided by God, so how could it fail? No one was more disappointed than Bernard, who would be made a saint within twenty years of his death. The question that he and all Europe asked was, why? Why would God call his knights to the Holy Land to be butchered by the infidels? Why would he bring blame and dishonour on kings attempting to do his will? Bernard's answer was that the armies of Christendom had failed because of the sins of Europe. The fault was not his nor the pope's; rather, it was that of every man and woman in Europe who had to cleanse themselves of sin. If the crusades were to succeed, then Europe must purify itself.

The need for moral regeneration had been a theme of the papacy and monastic reformers since at least the mid-eleventh century, as well as proponents of the First and Second Crusades; it was also a chief attraction of the order of the Templars, which offered young knights the chance to seek salvation within a monastic order without turning their backs on a life of action. In this the Templars and the spiritual mood in Europe were at one.

W
HILE
T
HE KINGS
of Germany and France blamed others for their failure at Damascus, and St Bernard blamed Europe for its sins, the burden of dealing with the Turkish threat fell squarely on the Franks of Outremer, particularly on the military orders, and most especially on the Templars. From the 1160s onwards, when it became clear that Outremer could not fight wars on several fronts at once, the call went out again and again to Europe for support in the form of manpower, finance and supplies, made necessary to defend against the almost limitless resources of the Turks, which they were able to draw from the vast areas of their conquests
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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 defeat could mean a high price, not least in the morale of the West and the sense of having failed in God's eyes
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Bernard of Clairvaux described the Templars as men whose bodies were protected by iron and whose souls were clothed in the breastplate of faith. Certainly the moral and spiritual strength of the Templars, let alone their ferocity in battle, was tested to the extreme as the jihads of Nur al-Din and then Saladin closed the ring round Outremer
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But meanwhile in Jerusalem the Turks still seemed far off. Confidence and optimism were greater than any sense of threat or doom, and Jerusalem celebrated its rebirth as the great goal of Christian pilgrimage with a series of remarkable building works
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T
HE KINGS
of France and Germany had sailed for home, and the Second Crusade was over when, late in 1149, Andrew of Montbard, the seneschal of the Temple, wrote to Everard des Barres, who had been raised to Grand Master of the Templars earlier that year but had since travelled back to Europe with Louis to rouse fresh support for Outremer. ‘After you left us our sins were such that they caused us to lose the prince of Antioch, killed in a battle with all his barons and men'. Nur al-Din had laid siege to the fortress of Inab, north of Antioch, on 29 June 1149, and Prince Raymond, the uncle of Eleanor of Aquitaine, had ridden to its defence with a small mounted force of Franks and their allies the Assassins.

Raymond's boldness almost worked; believing that they were part of a much larger army, Nur al-Din at first retreated, but when he realised the truth he attacked. Greatly outnumbered, Raymond's force was destroyed, Raymond himself was killed, and Antioch lay open to capture by the Turks. The situation was only saved, as Andrew of Montbard explained, by the rapid action of the Templars. ‘Our brothers joined up with the King of Jerusalem to go to the immediate help of Antioch, forming an army of 120 knights and up to a thousand well-armed squires and sergeants', and now they were holding the city against the enemy, but ‘many of those who were in our army are dead [. . .] No matter how quickly you come we do not think you will find us alive, but come without delay; that is our wish, our message and our request.' Calling on Everard des Barres to return to Outremer with knights, sergeants, arms and money, Andrew of Montbard concluded, ‘Although we understand that you will not arrive very soon, come nevertheless. It is time for us to honour our vows to God, that is sacrifice our souls for our brothers and for the defence of the Eastern Church and the Holy Sepulchre.'
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In the event the bravery and tenacity of the Templars saved Antioch from Nur al-Din, and in 1153 the Templars played a leading role in taking Ascalon from the Fatimids. There were voices in the West who said that without the Templars Jerusalem and all Palestine might have fallen to the Turks. Where kings and nobles gave uncertain leadership, the Templars were disciplined, experienced and determined; and they were ready to shed the last drop of their blood for the defence of the Holy Land. As it was, until the 1160s the inhabitants of the kingdom of Jerusalem were far distant from the war with the Turks. But the crisis remained as Nur al-Din continued to harass and penetrate the northern parts of Outremer, hacking away at the principality of Antioch and even making raids into the county of Tripoli.

Like his father, Zengi, before him, Nur al-Din armed himself with the cry of jihad. His triumph over the Franks at Inab, complete with the death of Prince Raymond of Antioch on the field of battle, was pumped for all it was worth. Throughout his domains Nur al-Din encouraged the founding of new mosques and madrasas where preachers, poets and teachers whipped up popular feeling and gave it unity and direction – but although the poet Ibn Munir urged Nur al-Din to fight against the Franks ‘until you see Jesus fleeing Jerusalem',
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the force of Nur al-Din's jihad was not so much against the Franks as against Shia Muslims in Aleppo, whose co-religionists, in the form of the Assassins, had sided with Raymond against the Turks; conformity in the form of Sunni Islam was imposed. But Nur al-Din also directed his jihad against Sunni Damascus, denouncing it for the injury it had done to the cause of Islam through its alliances with the Franks. In time Nur al-Din would turn his jihad propaganda against the Fatimids in Egypt too; like the Assassins, they were Ismailis, a dualist branch of Shia Islam, but most importantly, and like Damascus, their crime was that they stood in the way of his determination to make the Muslims of the Middle East subject to his rule. Whatever the degree of personal ambition and political cynicism behind Nur al-Din's cry of jihad, over the years to come it would be used to create a growing sense of unity and even exaltation among Muslims and would justify in their eyes their attempt to impose themselves once again on the unwilling and overwhelmingly Christian population of Outremer.
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Meanwhile Nur al-Din was content with a symbolic gesture against the Franks; he sent the skull of Prince Raymond of Antioch set in a silver case to his impotent religious overlord the caliph at Baghdad.

The conflict had now reached a new stage. Unlike the Muslim conquests, the crusades were not a drive for world mastery but a limited endeavour with specific objectives. The Franks had pushed the Turks back, had liberated the Christians of the East from an alien yoke, had recovered the holy places and had created self-ruling Christian states. The kings of Jerusalem, the counts of Edessa and Tripoli, the princes of Antioch were not attempting to implement a universal vision; rather, they were typical feudal lords, eager to protect and develop their possessions in alliance with native Christians for whom the Turks were the common enemy. There was no grand plan, nor after the Second Crusade was there much zeal for holy war. The Turks, on the other hand, were transforming the Franco-Turkish conflict into a clash of civilisations, a war of Islam against Christianity. By uniting the Muslim world under their control the Turks were not only applying increased pressure against the Christian East; they were also turning the conflict into what it had been, under the Arabs, a renewed venture of Islamic imperialism. Throughout the twelfth century the Turks continued to press against the newly recovered Christian lands with all the gathering force of their great migration; again and again the Frankish chroniclers described the limitless hordes the enemy had at their disposal. Eventually the bewildering Turkish numbers would overwhelm the Frankish settlers in Outremer and all but destroy native Christian society as the Turks had begun doing in Asia Minor. But that time had not yet come.