The Templars: The Rise and Spectacular Fall of God's Holy Warriors

by Dan Jones

For example, Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, the great Kurdish sultan of Egypt and Syria and scourge of the Templars, is best known to most English and American readers by his crudely reduced crusader nickname of Saladin.

Cairo has been substituted for the archaic crusader term Babylon.

Templars could be found across a vast swath of the Mediterranean world and beyond: on the battlefields of the Near East and in towns and villages throughout Europe, where they managed extensive estates that funded their military adventures.

The word “Templars”—shorthand for “the Poor Knighthood of the Temple” or, less frequently, “the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Jerusalem”—advertised their origins on the Temple Mount in Christianity’s holiest city.

The Templars were founded in 1119 on the principles of chastity, obedience and poverty—the last of which was memorialized in the master’s official seal, showing two armed brothers sharing a single horse.

The order helped finance wars, loaned money to pay kings’ ransoms, subcontracted the financial management of royal governments, collected taxes, built castles, ran cities, raised armies, interfered in trade disputes, engaged in private wars against other military orders, carried out political assassinations and even helped make men kings. From meager beginnings they became as mighty an outfit as existed during the later Middle Ages. Yet—perhaps strangely—the Templars also had broad popular appeal.

Some of the order’s wealth came from the patronage of the pious nobility, but just as much grew from the small donations of ordinary men and women, who gave what little they had—a jacket here, a vegetable patch there—to their local branch to help fund the order’s militant mission in the East.

Nevertheless, the sudden dissolution of the order in the early fourteenth century, which involved mass arrests, persecution, torture, show trials, group burnings and the seizure of all the Templars’ assets, shocked the whole of Christendom.

Within a couple of decades the Templars were no longer nine penniless warriors in search of a cause: they were an ambitious organization with a clear purpose and the means to achieve it.

As the Templars discovered, raising and organizing war funds was one thing; fighting long campaigns on unfamiliar foreign terrain against an enemy far better schooled in the conditions was quite another.

In the Holy Land the increasing importance of the military orders combined with their growing diversity exacerbated factional conflict, and the Templars were dragged into wars between rival groups of Italian merchants and self-interested barons. Ultimately this damaged the political foundation of the crusader states so badly that when a new threat arose in the 1260s the Templars were as helpless as the rest of their Christian counterparts to resist.

Alternately abetted and resisted by a compromised Pope Clement V, Philip IV and his ministers turned a raid on Templar property into an all-out war on the order across the Christian world, using methods that had already been practiced on other vulnerable targets, including France’s Jewish population.

Philip’s motives in breaking the Templars with the dual rods of judicial inquiry and personal barbarity had very little to do with the real character or conduct of the members either on the front line of the war against Islam or in France, where their lives for the most part resembled those of monks. Philip’s actions derived from his political preoccupations and his extreme, cruel and callous personal pathology, but he hit the order at a moment when it was more susceptible than usual to attack and slander, and when public interest in crusading was, if not dead, then certainly vastly diminished.

I also hope that this book will encourage readers to explore the voluminous scholarly literature that exists on the military orders and on the Templars in particular, by distinguished and brilliant academics including Malcolm Barber, Helen Nicholson, Alan Forey, Jochen Burgtorf, Alain Demurger, Jonathan Riley-Smith, Judi Upton-Ward, Anthony Luttrell, Jonathan Phillips, Norman Housley, Jochen Schenk, Paul Crawford, Peter Edbury, Anne Gilmour-Bryson and many others, on which I have drawn here with the greatest respect and gratitude.

The dead would eventually number one thousand, and only seven ships would survive the storm unwrecked. “A greater misery on one day no eye ever saw,” the pilgrim wrote. It was Monday, October 13, 1102.

on July 13, a day he described as hora egyptiaca, as it had been thought since the age of the Pharaohs that this was an astrologically accursed date on which to begin an important task.

For a Christian like Saewulf, who piously described himself as “unworthy and sinful,” a visit to Jerusalem was a redemptive journey to the center of the world.

Maps produced in Europe at the time represented the Holy City as the kernel around which all of earth’s kingdoms, both Christian and pagan, grew.*

The most holy place of all, and the real object of every Christian pilgrimage, lay within Jerusalem. It was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which Saewulf called “more celebrated than any other church, and this is meet and right, since all the prophecies and foretellings in the whole world about our Saviour Jesus Christ were all truly fulfilled there.”

Most important and impressive of all, though, was the great rotunda at the western end of the church, for here lay the Sepulchre itself: the tomb of Christ. This was the cave in which Jesus had been buried following his Crucifixion, before the Resurrection. The shrine was surrounded by continuously burning oil lamps and paved with slabs of marble: a still, fragrant place for prayer and devotion.8 Nowhere on earth or in history was more sacred to Christians.

Pilgrimage was a centrally important part of Christian life in the early twelfth century, and had been for nearly one thousand years. People traveled incredible distances to visit saints’ shrines and the sites of famous Christian deeds.

From the seventh century until the end of the eleventh century, Jerusalem had been in Muslim hands. To the followers of Islam, it was the third-holiest city in the world, after Mecca and Medina.

Three years before Saewulf’s journey, a dramatic upheaval had torn through the city and the wider coastal region of Palestine and Syria, which had fundamentally changed the appeal and nature of pilgrimage for men and women of the Latin West. Following a bitter and sustained war that raged between 1096 and 1099, major parts of the Holy Land had been conquered by the armies of what would come to be known as the First Crusade.

(sometimes they called this “Outremer,” which translates simply as “overseas”).

Urban promised, alluringly, that going on crusade could be substituted for all penances the Church had imposed on individuals for their sins—an entire lifetime’s wrongdoing could theoretically be wiped out in a single journey.

Jerusalem and the surrounding area were politically and militarily divided between numerous mutually hostile factions of the Islamic world.

On one side were the Seljuqs, originally from central Asia, who had built an empire stretching from Asia Minor to the Hindu Kush, blending Turkic and Persian culture and observing religious loyalty to the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, the spiritual leader of Sunni Islam.

Pitted against the Seljuqs was the rump of the Fatimid caliphate, with its heartlands in Egypt, whose leaders claimed descent from Muhammad’s daughter Fatima. From the mid-tenth century the Fatimids ruled most of North Africa, Syria, Palestine, the Hijaz and even Sicily, loyal to their own Shi’a caliph in Cairo.

Sectarian and political rivalry between the Seljuqs and the Fatimids, as well as within the Seljuq empire itself, had caused a period of exceptional disunity within the Islamic world.

Jerusalem had fallen on July 15, 1099, an astonishing military coup that was accompanied by disgraceful plundering and massacres of the city’s Jewish and Muslim inhabitants, whose beheaded bodies were left lying in piles in the streets, many with their bellies slit open so that the Christian conquerors could retrieve gold coins their victims had swallowed in a bid to hide them from the marauding invaders.

A series of new Christian states was established along the Mediterranean coast: the county of Edessa and the principality of Antioch in the north were bordered to the south by the county of Tripoli and the kingdom of Jerusalem, which claimed theoretical feudal lordship over the whole region—although this was only ever very loosely enforced.

In the summer of 1102, Saewulf thus found himself in a new, small, occasionally beleaguered but aggressive Christian kingdom of the East, whose very existence was thought by the zealots who had established it to be evidence that God had “opened to us the abundance of His blessing and mercy.” The Muslims who had been displaced not surprisingly saw things otherwise.

The general instability of the crusader kingdom was evident all around. Muslim brigands—Saewulf called them “Saracens”—fanned out across the countryside, living in rocky caves, spooking pilgrims who believed that “they were awake day and night, always keeping a look-out for someone to attack.” From time to time Saewulf and his party would glimpse frightening figures ahead or behind them, menacing them from a distance before disappearing out of view.

Everywhere corpses lay rotting in the heat. Some were on the path itself, others just off it, a number of them “torn up by wild beasts.” (Cliff foxes, jackals and leopards were all native to the mountains of Palestine.) These Christians had been abandoned by their fellow travelers without any attempt to give them a decent burial, for in the sunbaked earth the task would have been impossible.

He returned to Jaffa and sought out a berth on a merchant ship heading west. Still his safety was not guaranteed. The open waters toward Cyprus were patrolled by enemy ships from Fatimid Egypt, which commanded enough coastal cities to keep their fleet active at sea, readily replenished with food and water.

Saewulf was just one among thousands of pilgrims to make this similar journey to the Holy Land in the aftermath of the First Crusade. They came from all over the Christian world: accounts of the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem, new and fragile in its first decades, survive from men who traveled from Portugal, Flanders, Germany, Russia and even Iceland.

As the Holy Land was in effect a war zone, many found it a hair-raising place.

Pilgrims in any age expect a certain degree of danger from brigands and robbers. But the hostility of the Muslims who lived in and around the new crusader states was more than merely opportunistic. The losses their people had suffered from the first appearance of the Franks in 1096 were considered shameful and perplexing—a sign of God’s displeasure at divisions in the Muslim world and a call to all the faithful to rise in arms to fight back against the invaders.

The jihadist counterattack al-Sulami had hoped for did not occur—at least, not in the years immediately following the establishment of the Christian kingdom. Bitter divisions continued, making a serious, sustained and effective response to occupation impossible.

Jerusalem was, as one writer noted, quoting the Torah, “a golden basin filled with scorpions.”28 The desire to brave these dangers added to the allure of a pilgrimage, as discomfort and suffering were thought to be necessary for the redemption of the soul and remission of sins sought by every pilgrim.

THE KNIGHTS OF THE TEMPLE were founded in Jerusalem in 1119 and officially recognized at some point between January 14 and September 13 of the year 1120.1 Barely anyone noticed.

No surviving chronicles of the immediate time, either Christian or Muslim, paid any attention to the first stirrings of the order—indeed, it was only several generations later that the story of the Templars’ earliest origins was written down, by which time it was colored by what the order had become.

The crusaders who stayed to rule in the Holy Land were foreign invaders, trying to establish their command over a mixed population of Sunni and Shi’a Muslims, Jews, Greek and Syrian Orthodox Christians, Samaritans and poor settlers from all over Europe. This was a society naturally divided by language, religion, culture and loyalty, contending with an environment that sometimes seemed naturally hostile to settlement.

seven hundred ecstatic pilgrims ran out of the church and streamed into the desert in the direction of the river Jordan, intending to bathe in its waters and thank God. The river was about twenty miles from the eastern walls of Jerusalem and the pilgrims never made it to their destination. The chronicler Albert of Aachen recorded that once they had descended from the mountains to “a place of solitude” near the river, all of a sudden “there appeared Saracens from Tyre and Ascalon [two cities still in Muslim hands], armed and very fierce.”

On June 28, 1119, at Sarmada in northwest Syria, a very large force of Christians who were occupying Antioch went into battle against an army led by an Artuqid ruler known as Il-ghazi,* a drunkard but a dangerous general who occupied nearby Aleppo.

After the battle, several hundred Christian captives were bound together by their necks and marched through the blistering heat of the day, tortured by the sight of a water barrel from which they were not allowed to drink. Some were beaten. Some were flayed. Some were stoned to death. Others were beheaded.8 Fulcher of Chartres estimated that, in all, seven thousand Christians were killed, taking with them just twenty of Il-ghazi’s men.

As Il-ghazi mustered his troops, inside Antioch the patriarch took supreme military command. He ordered a nightly curfew and decreed that no one was to carry arms within the city except for the Franks. Then he ensured that every tower along Antioch’s defenses was “garrisoned at once with monks and clerics,” supported by what suitable Christian laymen they could find to assist them. Bernard arranged for constant prayers to be said “for the safety and defense of the Christian people,” and while these took place he “did not cease . . . to visit in turn, night and day, with his armed clergy and knights, in the manner of warriors, the gates, ramparts and towers and walls.”

The notion that churchmen might go into battle armed not only with prayer but with deadly weapons was hardly new. It spoke to a tension at the heart of Christian thought for a thousand years, as the pacifism suggested by the example of Christ’s life rubbed against a martial mentality embedded in the language of Christian rhetoric and Scripture.

The warfare Paul advocated was spiritual rather than physical, but the terms of Christian ideology drew directly from the language of war.

Christian societies in Europe were structured around the existence of a warrior caste—knights—and churchmen had occasionally begun to engage more directly in warfare, no longer contenting themselves with the struggles of the soul. Rudolf I, bishop of Würzburg, died fighting the Magyars in 908. An English record known as the Abingdon Chronicle, compiled shortly before the First Crusade, describes how the abbot of Abingdon commanded a retinue of knights.