The Tragedy of the Templars (32 page)

B
ALDWIN IV
was barely thirteen years old when he became king of Jerusalem in 1174; he had been nine when his father, Amalric, entrusted his education and care to William of Tyre, and it was William who discovered the symptoms of the boy's leprosy. ‘It so happened', William wrote, ‘that once when he was playing with some other noble boys who were with him, they began pinching one another with their fingernails on the hands and arms, as playful boys will do. The others evinced their pain with yells, but, although his playmates did not spare him, Baldwin bore the pain altogether too patiently, as if he did not feel it.' At first, William thought this pointed to the boy's endurance, but then he discovered that about half of Baldwin's right hand and arm was numb.

But Baldwin was still young and strong, he had a quick and inquiring mind, and he showed signs of having his father's abilities in the field. The secular and ecclesiastical powers in the kingdom agreed that they wanted Baldwin to succeed to the throne, and so he was ‘anointed and crowned solemnly and in the usual fashion in the Church of the Lord's Sepulchre on the fifteenth of July, four days after his father's death'.
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Baldwin proved himself three years later, in November 1177, when the sixteen-year-old king led his outnumbered Frankish force against the army of Saladin advancing out of Egypt. The Templars summoned all their available knights to defend Gaza, but Saladin bypassed them for Ascalon. Raising what men at arms he could, Baldwin rushed to block him, and together with the True Cross and the commander of his army, Raynald of Chatillon, he managed to get inside the walls of Ascalon before Saladin arrived. But instead of attacking, Saladin left a small force to besiege Ascalon and marched towards an undefended Jersualem with about twenty-five thousand men. Sending a message to the Templars, Baldwin told them to abandon Gaza and join him. When they came near, Baldwin broke out of Ascalon and chased after Saladin, marching north along the coast and then inland. The Frankish force comprised 450 knights, 85 of them Templars, and a few thousand infantry. On 25 November Saladin's army was crossing a ravine at Montgisard, near Ramla, close by the Jaffa–Jerusalem road, when Baldwin and the Templars fell upon them, taking them by surprise. The king himself was in the vanguard, and Raynald of Chatillon and Balian of Ibelin helped on the victory, and some saw St George himself, whose church was near by at Lydda, fighting by their side.

But the real damage to the enemy was done by the Templars. An eyewitness to the battle, apparently a pilgrim who returned to London, gave this account to Ralph of Diss, Dean of St Paul's.

In all the Franks lost about eleven hundred men. But they inflicted on Saladin's forces an overwhelming defeat, killing nine out of ten of his infantry and cavalry, about twenty-three thousand men in all. Saladin only narrowly managed to escape back to Egypt, where to cling to power he spread the lie that the Franks had lost the battle.

The battle of Montgisard was a great victory and a perfect illustration of Frankish fighting ability and the superiority they could achieve through rapid and offensive warfare, thanks especially to the Templars. But although Montgisard saved the kingdom of Jerusalem for the moment, it did not alter the fundamental situation. Had Baldwin the forces to pursue the enemy to Cairo or to make a sudden attack on Damascus, he might have destroyed Saladin with a crushing blow. For all the magnitude of his defeat, however, Saladin still had vast resources of wealth and manpower on which he could draw in Egypt, and that was only the beginning. As his adviser Al-Qadi al-Fadil observed, Saladin would use the wealth of Egypt for the conquest of Syria, the wealth of Syria for the conquest of Mesopotamia, and the wealth of Mesopotamia for the conquest of Outremer.
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As Saladin's wars against rival Muslims continued apace, his resources became virtually inexhaustible and his forces so overwhelming in number that in the decade after Montgisard the Franks were forced gradually to alter their strategy, at first mounting attacks on the Muslim frontier and building castles that would extend their frontier territory, but soon relying on castles for defensive purposes.

The year before Montgisard the kingdom of Jerusalem lost all chance of continuing its valuable alliance with the Byzantine Empire. Thanks to the First Crusade, the Byzantines had been able to reverse much of the damage done by the disaster at Manzikert in 1071 and had restored their authority over a large part of Asia Minor. But that was undone in 1176, when the Byzantine emperor Manuel I Comnenus led an army east with the intention of capturing Konya (Iconium), the capital of the Seljuk sultanate of Rum. Waylaid in a mountain pass through the Sultan Dagi range near the fortress of Myriokephalon, north-east of Lake Egridir, the Byzantine army suffered a fearful defeat. The emperor himself compared the battle to Manzikert, but that had been fought 800 miles to the east; the disaster at Myriokephalon, only 200 miles from the Aegean, once again left the Byzantines clinging to no more than the coastal districts.

In the revived strength of the Seljuk sultanate of Rum, Saladin and the weakened Byzantine Empire discovered they had a common enemy, and in 1181 they entered into a peace treaty with each other. The Byzantines also adopted a policy of neutrality in the East, and their links with Outremer were dropped. The possibility of continuing the alliance against Egypt that King Amalric had enjoyed with the Byzantines was lost, leaving the Franks more exposed and more isolated than they had ever been before.

Meanwhile a century of fending off Turkish assaults had taken its toll on Byzantine trade and the state of its merchant marine, creating opportunities for Italian merchants and fleets from Pisa, Genoa, Amalfi and Venice to establish sizeable trading colonies in Constantinople. Greek resentment towards the prosperity and dominance of the Latins, who controlled almost the entire economy of the city, had been simmering for some time and came to a head after Manuel's death in 1180 introduced a period of instability at Constantinople marked by competing claims to the imperial throne. One of these claimants, Andronicus Comnenus, was known to have a hatred for the Latins, and when he entered Constantinople with his army in 1182, the Greek population turned against the foreigners. Many in the Latin community, which numbered about sixty thousand, managed to flee, but many thousands were massacred by the mob.

Greek and Arab and Frankish chroniclers described the slaughter, among them William of Tyre. ‘Regardless of treaties and the many services which our people had rendered to the empire', William wrote,

Apart from the effect this massacre of the Latins had on Western opinion of Byzantium, it also drove the Italian city-states, especially Genoa and Venice, to seek new markets in the East, and from this time they developed a busy trade with Egypt, so that ‘Egypt was at once the most dangerous enemy of the Crusaders and the source of the richest profits to the Christian commercial republics of the Mediterranean'.
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In a self-confident mood following the Christian victory over Saladin at Montgisard, Baldwin decided that the defences of his kingdom should be reinforced and extended along the Syrian frontier, and in October 1178, at the instigation of the Templars, he commenced building the castle of Chastellet. The castle, better known as Jacob's Ford, was deliberately built within the Muslim frontier area – ‘the Templars of the land of Jerusalem came to the king and told him that they should build a castle in Muslim territory', wrote the Frankish chronicler Ernoul
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– its purpose to control the only possible crossing of the River Jordan between the Sea of Galilee and its sources in the Golan Heights, at the spot where Jacob of the Old Testament was said to have wrestled with the angel (Genesis 32:24). But the castle was destroyed within ten months of its inception, in a disaster that has been called ‘the beginning of the end' for the Templars.
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Jacob's Ford stood high above the Jordan in the form of a vast rectangle constructed of 20,000 enormous blocks of stone each of which was 7 feet long, its walls over 20 feet thick. This was only the first phase; the plan was to enclose the inner structure within an outer rectangle, creating a concentric castle which would have been larger than anything in Europe and the largest in the East. Saladin was alarmed at so powerful a castle at this critical spot and offered 100,000 dinars for its demolition, but Baldwin refused. And so in August 1179, before the outer defences could be built, Saladin attacked. His soldiers forced their way up the slope, digging steps with their axes, and his sappers mined the walls. With a Frankish relief force gathering at Tiberias the sappers worked unceasingly day and night, until finally at dawn on the sixth day they brought down a section of the wall, the Muslim accounts recording with amazement that the Templar commander threw himself into the smoke and flames. The garrison asked for surrender terms, but Saladin refused; eight hundred of the defenders were killed, their bodies stripped of their armour, and their corpses thrown into a cistern. Not all these victims were killed in battle, however; Saladin personally interviewed many of the captives and executed a number in cold blood, including all archers, as they had inflicted the greatest losses on the besiegers, and all Muslims who had converted to Christianity, this in accordance with Islamic law. The castle was destroyed, and its surviving seven hundred defenders, eighty of them knights, were taken captive to Damascus, along with a thousand suits of armour belonging to knights and sergeants and a hundred thousand weapons.

For the first time Muslim sappers had shown their effectiveness against a major Frankish fortification, albeit one still under construction and incomplete; until now the Franks had always enjoyed a technological edge, but this Muslim advance in the arts of siege warfare was an ominous sign of things to come.

The story of the castle and its siege has been revealed by recent excavations conducted by Professor Ronnie Ellenblum of The Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
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‘We are literally uncovering the beginning of the end for the Knights Templar', Ellenblum has said.

Saladin's victory at Jacob's Ford undermined Frankish self-confidence. All of Galilee and Trans-Jordan became a frontier area within range of Muslim attacks, while the Franks increasingly avoided frontal military encounters with the enemy. From the mobile and offensive strategy of the battle of Montgisard the Franks more and more retreated into a siege mentality.

Faced with an extreme drought that was threatening harvests throughout Syria and Outremer, in May 1180 Baldwin and Saladin agreed a two-year truce. But the truce did not apply to the county of Tripoli, which Saladin invaded that summer, ravaging the bountiful agricultural land known to the Franks as La Bocquée – those rolling waves of wheat and maize, figs and prickly pears, vines and sunflowers that fill the Homs Gap, for all the world like Provence or Languedoc, and surveyed by the great Hospitaller fortress of Krak des Chevaliers and the Templars' Chastel Blanc. Saladin moved through the fields, wrote William of Tyre, ‘and especially through the cultivated places and, with nobody to oppose him, wandering freely everywhere, set fire to the harvest, some of which was already gathered in for threshing, some of which was already collected in the fields in sheaves, and some of which was still standing, stole cattle as booty, and depopulated the entire region'. But the knights did not venture from their castles, not daring ‘rashly to commit themselves to attacks'.
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For Saladin the prime value of the truce with the kingdom of Jerusalem was that it allowed him to pursue his siege of Aleppo, which was in the hands of Nur al-Din's son. For Baldwin it bought time. And for Christian and Muslim traders the truce meant that they could pass freely through each other's territory. But the treaty was broken the following year by Raynald of Chatillon, a bold and able soldier who was lord of Oultrejourdain, which lay astride Saladin's line of communication between Cairo and Damascus. From his castle of Kerak he could see the rich Muslim caravans travelling to Medina and Mecca, and falling upon one of these, he made off with all its goods. Saladin complained to Baldwin and demanded compensation, but Raynald refused to make restitution. In 1182 Raynald took matters further when he launched a fleet of ships into the Gulf of Aqaba and down the Red Sea, where they raided Egyptian and Arabian ports, including those serving Mecca and Medina, until they were driven back by a naval force under the command of Saladin's brother al-Adil. Although some Franks surrendered to al-Adil on condition that their lives were spared, Saladin insisted, over the objections of his brother, that they be executed. The cold-blooded killing of prisoners increasingly became a policy of Saladin's, and the act was carried out by men of religion who travelled in his train. These beheadings, as the killings usually were, had the calculated purpose of publicising his jihad against the Franks, even as his primary war was against his fellow Muslims; also blood sacrifice accorded with jihad ideology, ‘which maintained that the lands were made impure by the presence of the Franks and that the aim of the Holy War was to reconquer and purify these lands'.
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