The Tragedy of the Templars (29 page)

In 1191, after the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin, Acre became the capital of the kingdom and the Templars' new headquarters in the Holy Land. According to the thirteenth-century chronicler known as the Templar of Tyre, ‘The Temple was the strongest place of the city, largely situated along the seashore, like a castle. At its entrance it had a high and strong tower, the wall of which was 28 feet thick.' He also mentioned another tower built so close to the sea that the waves washed up against it, ‘in which the Temple kept its treasure'.
²

After 1218 the Templars supplemented their facilities at Acre with a new fortress of their own 30 miles to the south; known today as Atlit, the Templars called it Chastel Pelerin, because it was built on a rocky promontory with the help of pilgrims (
pèlerin
in French). This castle, said a German pilgrim who visited in the early 1280s, ‘is sited in the heart of the sea, fortified with walls and ramparts and barbicans so strong and castellated, that the whole world should not be able to conquer it'.
³

From their ports in Outremer the Templars' ships sailed to the West. Their major port of call in France was Marseille, from where they shipped pilgrims and merchants to the East. Italy's Adriatic ports were also important, especially Brindisi, which had the added advantage of being near Rome. Bari and Brindisi were sources of wheat and horses, armaments and cloth, olive oil and wine, as well as pilgrims. Messina in Sicily acted both as a channel for exports from the island and as an entrepôt for shipping arriving from Catalonia and Provence. The Templars also built ships in European ports, everywhere between Spain and the Dalmatian coast.

Another Templar cargo was white slaves. They were transported in considerable numbers from East to West, where they were put to work helping to run Templar houses, especially in southern Italy and Aragon. The Hospitallers also engaged in the trade and the use of slaves; indeed the trade in white slaves was a flourishing business for everyone, including the Italian maritime powers, especially Genoa, but most of all for the Muslim states in the East. In the last decades of Outremer, as town after town fell to the Turks, the men would usually be slaughtered but their women and children would be taken to the slave markets of Aleppo or Damascus. Many thousands of Frankish women, girls and boys must have suffered this fate, as well as great numbers of native Christians.

But otherwise the great centre of the slave trade in the late thirteenth century was the Mediterranean port of Ayas, in the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia. Marco Polo disembarked at Ayas in 1271 to begin his trip to China at about the same time that the Templars opened a wharf there. The slaves, who were Turkish, Greek, Russian and Circassian, had been acquired as a result of intertribal warfare, or because impoverished parents decided to sell their children, or because they were kidnapped, and they were brought to Ayas by Turkish and Mongol slavers.

The pick of young strong males from the south Russian steppes or the Caucasus generally went to Egypt, where they were converted to Islam and served as elite slave soldiers known as Mamelukes. In 1250 the Mamelukes seized power in Egypt for themselves – and led the final jihad that drove the Franks out of Outremer.

The Paris Temple was the Templar headquarters in France. 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. Nothing of the Temple survives today, and it is remembered only by a street name in the Quartier du Temple, the northern part of the area known as the Marais, which is on the Right Bank just west of the Bastille. But from the twelfth to the fourteenth century it was one of the key financial centres of north-west Europe.

The Temple was fortified with a perimeter wall and towers. Inside there was an impressive array of buildings, and in the late thirteenth century the Templars added a powerful keep about 165 feet high – nearly twice as high as the White Tower, the keep at the centre of the Tower of London. The Templar keep in Paris was the main strong-room for the Templar bank, and it was also, in effect, the treasury of the kings of France.

Half a century after the abolition of the Templars, Paris had expanded, and a new wall 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.

The London Temple, or the New Temple as it was called, would have been comparable to that of Paris, but only Temple Church, consecrated in 1185, remains today, amid the Inns of Court off the south side of Fleet Street. The nave of Temple Church is round, as was typical with Templar churches, its plan following that of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. King John was actually resident at the New Temple at the time of Magna Carta in 1215 and was accompanied to his famous meeting with the barons at Runnymede by the master of the London Temple. But while the kings of England entrusted Templars with military, diplomatic and financial commissions, they were always careful to keep the royal treasury as part of the royal household, where it was run by royal officials, so that at most the New Temple merely served to provide additional safe-deposit space.

The Templars' experience made them useful to the French monarchy and to the papacy, both of which wanted to maximise their revenues from taxation and reform the managing of their finances. For example, during the thirty-three-year reign of Philip II, which extended from the late twelfth century well into the thirteenth, the king's revenues were increased by 120 per cent thanks to Templar management.

But Templar holdings were never entirely secure. Only the Paris Temple presented a truly formidable obstacle to a raid; Templar houses elsewhere in France were raided by the king; the London Temple was raided by kings of England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries when in desperate need; and in Spain the kings of Aragon did the same. But these were passing events in desperate times of need, and restitution was made. Ultimately the Templars' best protection was not the stone walls of their treasure houses but practical and moral constraints. The kings needed the Templars and their services too much to alienate them, nor could they afford to put themselves on the wrong side of a spiritual cause.

Yet in the Templars' success as bankers and financiers lay a chief cause of their fall. The Templars, like the Church and like the crusades, were international in conception, but the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were a time when national states were being constructed by European kings, especially by the kings of France. Just as the Templars raised money to defend the Holy Land with their arms, so they also provided money for the new nationalism arising in the West. But in 1307 the nation-state of France would in turn ‘nationalise' the Templars and destroy them.

I
N
1171,
AS
T
HE FATIMID CALIPH AL
-
ADID
lay dying, Saladin ordered prayers to be said in the mosques of Cairo, but not for the last of Egypt's Shia rulers; instead they were for Nur al-Din's puppet, the Sunni caliph in Baghdad. Al-Adid was the last Arab ruler in the Middle East; the once imperial Arabs were now everywhere governed by Turks
.

Saladin was a Turkified Kurd; he was born in Tikrit, in northern Iraq, where his father, Ayyub, was appointed governor by the Seljuk sultan. Both Ayyub and his brother Shirkuh had cut themselves off from their Kurdish environment and wholeheartedly served as generals under Zengi and Nur al-Din. Ayyub had been put in charge of the citadel of Baalbek by Zengi and was later involved in the surrender of Damascus to Nur al-Din. Saladin grew up in Baalbek and Damascus, where, apart from studying the Koran, he is said to have learned by heart the
Hamasa
of Abu Tammam, an anthology of Arabic poetry conveying the values and attitudes of the heroic age of the tribes when they first poured out of the Arabian peninsula and conquered Persia, the Middle East and Egypt
.

But although Saladin knew Arabic, his language of command was Turkish. His army, like those of Zengi and Nur al-Din, included Kurds but was overwhelmingly Turkish; his personal bodyguard was an elite corps of Turkish Mameluke slave soldiers. On occasion he used mercenaries of other ethnic groups, and these sometimes included Arab Bedouins,
¹
but that was the extent of local recruitment. As The Cambridge History of Islam explains, Saladin's army ‘was as alien as the Turkish, Berber, Sudanese and other forces of his predecessors. Himself a Kurd, he established a regime and an army of the Turkish type, along the lines laid down by the Seljuks and atabegs in the East.'
²
In capturing Egypt, and in all his wars against the Muslims of Syria and the Franks of Outremer, Saladin was not a liberator; like the Seljuks and like Zengi and Nur al-Din, he was an alien leading an alien army of conquest and occupation
.

A
FTER THE DEATH
of the Fatimid caliph Al-Adid, Saladin continued in the office of vizier, supposedly ruling Egypt on behalf of Nur al-Din, but in effect ruling Egypt for himself. To consolidate his position, he began constructing the Citadel of Cairo and extended the city walls, measures taken to protect himself against his overlord, who suspected that Saladin was slipping from his control, as well as against a possible invasion by the Franks and not least against the local population; in 1169 an uprising of Nubian soldiers had been joined by both Egyptian emirs and common people, and in 1172 there was widespread rioting in Cairo against the abusive Turks. ‘When a Turk saw an Egyptian he took his clothes', wrote Ibn Abi Tayy, a chronicler from Aleppo, adding ‘things went so far that any Turk who liked a house would drive out its owner and settle there.'
¹
Saladin drove the Nubian soldiery of the Fatimid army into Upper Egypt and then sent his older brother Turanshah against them. The Nubians were Christians, as were the majority of Egyptians, and to intimidate the native population and deny the Nubians succour or refuge along the upper Nile, Turanshah tortured clergymen and destroyed the Christians' livestock, taking a religious satisfaction in killing large numbers of pigs, and destroyed churches and monasteries, among them the monastery of St Simeon at Aswan, built in the seventh century, just before the Arab invasion, and one of the most beautiful in Egypt. An attempt at another uprising in 1174 was poised to receive help from Amalric and a fleet from the Norman kingdom of Sicily sailing off Alexandria, but Saladin discovered the plot and crucified the leaders, and the venture collapsed. Crucifixion was also Saladin's punishment for his own soldiers if they disobeyed him.

Meanwhile, although Saladin continued the fiction that he was Nur al-Din's vassal in Egypt, tensions between the two men continued to grow – but then suddenly came the news in May 1174 that Nur al-Din had died. His realm, extending over Mesopotamia and Syria, immediately disintegrated. Nur al-Din's son, facing plots against his life, fled Damascus for Aleppo, where a Turkish eunuch, acting ostensibly as the boy's guardian, put himself in charge; Nur al-Din's nephew seized Mosul and made himself independent; while Damascus itself took advantage of its sudden freedom to agree a truce with Jerusalem. Saladin's response was to declare himself sultan in Egypt and then rush to take Damascus, but when he advanced north to take Homs, Hama and Aleppo, he was resisted by the local emirs, who called on the Assassins to murder Saladin. The emirs were not impressed by Saladin's propaganda of jihad, which he now deployed; in their eyes he was simply one of them, motivated by self-interest and a lust for power. Saladin's reply, after capturing Homs, was, ‘Our move was not made in order to snatch a kingdom for ourselves but to set up the standard of jihad. These men had become enemies, preventing the accomplishment of our purpose with regard to this war.'
²
In other words, Saladin justified his wars against his fellow Muslims because they were content to live in peace with Outremer. The attempted assassination had failed, but early in 1175 Saladin abandoned his attack on Aleppo and withdrew from northern Syria, thankful to be alive and to have taken Hama and Homs and to hold Damascus and Cairo.

In theory Islam was a single religious community, the umma, a theocracy guided by the successor to the Prophet, the caliph. In reality almost since the inception of Islam the faith had been divided; there was no single umma, nor a single overarching caliphate. Instead, organisation was provided by clan or family dynasties, but dynastic legitimacy depended on identification with some fundamental aspect of Islam. Zengi showed the way when he declared jihad and his son Nur al-Din followed suit; now Saladin, who was filling the most important positions in Egypt with members of his family, also needed his religious justification and, like his predecessors, took up the banner of Holy War against his fellow Muslims.