The Tragedy of the Templars (25 page)

Despite the setback at Damascus and the threat of Nur al-Din, as Outremer entered its third generation the mood in Jerusalem was confident and expansive. The city walls were repaired, new markets were constructed and many small churches were built to replace those destroyed during Muslim rule. The population increased to about thirty thousand, comparable to Florence or London, and was remarkably diverse. John of Würzburg remarked that the city was filled with ‘Greeks, Bulgarians, Latins, Germans, Hungarians, Scots, Navarrese, Bretons, English, Franks, Ruthenians, Bohemians, Georgians, Armenians, Jacobites, Syrians, Nestorians, Indians, Egyptians, Copts, Capheturici, Maronites and very many others'.
⁴
The Franks were bare-headed and clean shaven, the Greeks wore their beards long and the Syrians trimmed theirs; the fashion was for pointed lace-up shoes, and in season men and women wore furs. The pilgrimage was the most important factor in the revitalisation of Jerusalem, a revival owed principally to the military orders, to the Hospitallers who provided care and lodging for travellers and to the Templars who made the roads safe for pilgrims. Their costumes contributed to the varied scene, the Templars wearing unadorned white-hooded mantles bearing a red cross at the left breast, while the Hospitallers' mantle was black and their cross white; both wore boots instead of fancy shoes. Nothing more expressed the energy and celebration of the times than the remarkable burst of architectural activity at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, at the Hospital of the Knights of St John and, above all, at the headquarters of the Templars atop the Temple Mount.

The vast Church of the Holy Sepulchre built by the emperor Constantine in the early fourth century had suffered numerous attacks, first by the Persians in 614 and later, several times, under Muslim rule. Each time the Rotunda rising above the tomb of Jesus was restored, and also the great basilica extending to the east, though in less imposing form. But when the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim ordered the total destruction of the church in 1009, the basilica was obliterated, the tomb of Jesus was hacked to smithereens, and the Rotunda was reduced to such a pile of rubble that any restoration was beyond the means of the impoverished and oppressed Christian community for many years. Christians had to count themselves fortunate, after al-Hakim's death, to be allowed to worship even among the ruins. But thanks to funds from the Byzantine emperor the rebuilding of the church commenced, though on a reduced scale, and was focused exclusively on the Rotunda, which was completed by 1047. And so in July 1099, when the crusaders went in thanksgiving to the spiritual heart of Christendom, they found the rebuilt Rotunda with several apses set about it, and across an open court to the east the chapel of Golgotha marking the site of Jesus' crucifixion, in all about a quarter in extent of Constantine's original church.

As a matter of prestige as well as needing to cater to the great flow of pilgrims to Jerusalem, the Franks desired to build a new fine church on the ruins of the old basilica, although several decades passed before they had the wherewithal to do so. The moment came during the reigns of King Fulk, Queen Melisende and their son Baldwin III, who were the primary patrons of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; this was the same moment as Zengi was destroying Edessa and Nur al-Din was menacing Antioch, yet Jerusalem felt secure. In 1149 the Franks dedicated new chapels decorated with mosaics on the fissured stone outcrop sanctified as Golgotha, and by 1153 they had built the new five-storey bell tower adjacent to the magnificent entrance façade, built in Romanesque style and decorated with local Eastern motifs. Also in Romanesque style similar to the great cathedrals built along the pilgrimage route across France and into Spain – Tours, Limoges, Conques, Toulouse and Santiago de Compostela itself – the Franks began their replacement for Constantine's basilica in the 1130s, finishing it in the 1160s.

But the limited space available between the Rotunda and the chapels to the east marking various holy sites meant building to a unique plan. The nave was dispensed with, and instead the choir was built almost immediately east of the Rotunda, the two separated by a broad-aisled transept which served as a substitute nave. An ambulatory encircled the choir and was marked by the numerous chapels all the way round, allowing pilgrims in great numbers to circulate freely through the church and pause at the chapels for their prayers. The penultimate stop was Golgotha, where pilgrims left the crosses they had carried with them throughout their pilgrimage from home; then finally they prayed at the empty tomb of Christ at the centre of the Rotunda, the most important shrine of the Christian faith. Except for some depredations by Saladin and his successors, this is essentially the church one sees today.

At the same time as work was under way on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre the Hospitallers were building their new Hospital directly opposite, immediately to the south. Moreover, according to William of Tyre, it was ‘far higher and more costly than the church which had been consecrated by the precious blood of our Saviour'. Like the Templars, the Hospitallers were answerable to no one but the pope, and at Jerusalem, although their Hospital was located in the Patriarch's Quarter, they maintained a strict autonomy which led to friction and eventually a rowdy dispute during which the Knights of St John rang all their bells to annoy the patriarch when he gave a sermon in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. ‘Whenever the lord patriarch went up to speak to the people, according to custom, from the place where the Saviour of mankind hung for our salvation', wrote William of Tyre, ‘they endeavoured to hinder the celebration of the office entrusted to him. With intentional malice they set their many great bells ringing so loudly and persistently that the voice of the patriarch could not rise above the din, nor could the people, in spite of all his efforts, hear him.'
⁵

Yet despite this behaviour the Hospitallers were well regarded – principally for their charitable works in the city. John of Würzburg, who visited Jerusalem in about 1165, described the Hospital ‘in which are gathered in various rooms a huge number of sick people, both men and women, who are cared for and refreshed daily at very great expense'. Two thousand people were looked after by the Hospital at the time of his visit, he said, and it ‘also sustains with its food as many people outside as inside', quite apart from manning castles ‘for the defence of the land of the Christians against the incursions of the Saracens'.
⁶

In writing about the Hospitallers, John of Würzburg made a significant comparison between them and the Templars, who also gave ‘a considerable amount of alms to the poor in Christ, but not a tenth part of that which is done by the Hospitallers'.
⁷
A succinct explanation for this came from Jacques de Molay, the last Templar Grand Master, in a memorandum from 1305: ‘The Hospitallers were founded to care for the sick, and beyond that they bear arms [. . .] whereas the Templars were founded specifically for military service.'
⁸
Whereas the Hospitallers had grown out of a breakaway group of Benedictine monks and continued to include sisters in their ranks, the Templars began as a company of secular knights. Initiates to both orders swore to be ‘serf and slave', but for the Hospitallers that meant to the sick, while a Templar swore to be serf and slave to the order itself. For the Templars the defence of Outremer was their overriding priority, to which they gave their resources and their lives; for the Hospitallers warfare was an extension of their service to the sick and poor, and they correspondingly gave less of their resources to castle-building and military activities. As it happened, the Templars were much more representative of medieval society than the Hospitallers; membership of the Templars was open to everyone, from the richest noble to the poorest peasant, but they also drew a sharp distinction between their sergeants and their knights; unlike the Hospitallers, the Templars bestowed on their knights an elevated aura as a fighting elite, which set them apart. But the Hospitallers, in dividing their services between warfare and charitable services, kept one foot in the changing currents of medieval society, and that would help them to survive. The raison d'être for the Templars was to fight for the Holy Land, and if that battle was ever lost, the Templars too would fall.

Today nothing of the Hospital in Jerusalem survives – only the name, Muristan, meaning ‘hospital', which is now applied to the late nineteenth-century Ottoman market that fills its place. After Saladin's conquest of Jerusalem in 1187 various parts of the Hospital were converted into mosques and an Islamic college. By 1868 it was a heap of ruins. Nor does much evidence survive of the Templars after Saladin's ‘purification' of the Temple Mount – mostly fragments built into the Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock, testimony to a workshop that stood at the southern end of the Mount, where a large quantity of exceptionally beautiful architectural sculpture was produced in a unique synthesis of Byzantine, Western European and Levantine styles.

But in the decades following the Second Crusade visitors to the Temple Mount were impressed with how it was being developed by the Templars. After prayers at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, with its chapels associated with the crucifixion and burial of Jesus and the discovery of the True Cross, pilgrims walked to the Temple Mount, entering through the western gate near the south side of the Dome of the Rock, the Templum Domini, or Temple of the Lord, a church which, like the Holy Sepulchre, was under the guardianship of the Augustinian order. On the outer court the Augustinian canons and the Templars had built houses and planted gardens.

According to Theoderich, a German pilgrim who wrote about his visit to the Holy Land in 1172, the Temple of the Lord bore an inscription that read ‘The house of the Lord is well built upon a firm rock', but as pilgrims were in the habit of chipping away bits of the holy rock, its surface had to be paved with marble and it was cordoned off by a tall and beautifully worked wrought-iron screen which was put up between the encircling columns. By choosing to identify the Dome of the Rock and also the Aqsa mosque with Solomon's Temple and palace, the Franks incorporated them into the biblical heritage of Christianity; rather than destroy them, they preserved them by turning them to Christian use.

From the Temple of the Lord, continued Theoderich, the pilgrims made their way south to the Templar headquarters at the Aqsa mosque, or rather what he called the Palace of Solomon,

Clearly the Templars had considerably renovated what had been a truncated and dilapidated building. But they were doing far more.

The Templars had grandly transformed the southern part of the Temple Mount into the combined administrative, military and religious headquarters of their order, with a vast stable underneath. The Temple Mount was the nerve centre of the entire Templar order, not only for Outremer but for Europe too. France, England, Aragon, Poitou, Portugal, Apulia and Hungary each had a provincial master, who was responsible to the Grand Master. But the Grand Master, although he had considerable powers, did not rule as an autocrat. All major decisions taken by the Grand Master, such as whether to go to war, agree a truce, alienate lands or acquire a castle, required that he consult with the Grand Chapter, which was comprised of senior officials.

The Grand Master, who was elected by twelve senior members of the order, had his chambers here and was attended by his entourage, which included a chaplain, two knights, a clerk, a sergeant and a Muslim scribe to act as an interpreter, as well as servants and a cook. The Seneschal, the Marshal, the Draper and the Commander of the kingdom of Jerusalem were also here along with their attendants. The Seneschal was deputy and adviser to the Grand Master. The Draper was keeper of the robes; he also issued clothes and bed linen, removed items from knights who were thought to have too much and distributed gifts made to the order. The Marshal was responsible for military decisions, such as the purchase of equipment and horses, and he exercised authority over the regional commanders. These were the Commander of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, who acted as the order's treasurer and within the kingdom had the same powers as the Grand Master; the Commander of Jerusalem, who within the city had the same powers as the Grand Master; and the commanders of Acre, Tripoli and Antioch, each with the powers of the Grand Master within their domains. In addition there were about three hundred Templar knights and a thousand sergeants on active service in the kingdom of Jerusalem, as well as the native light cavalry, called Turcopoles, who were employed by the order, and numerous auxiliaries, including grooms, blacksmiths, armourers and stonemasons, and many of these would have been quartered on the Temple Mount.