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

by Dan Jones

But in the white heat of war in Syria and Palestine a restriction on Christians of any sort bearing arms was increasingly impractical. For a start, a significant factor behind the existence of the crusade movement was a widespread acceptance of the concept of Christian holy war, waged by secular men for spiritual reward.

Indeed, given the strain on resources in the crusader states in the 1120s, it was a matter of necessity to concede that a cleric could from time to time wield weapons without reproach—as Patriarch Bernard had done at Antioch.

The Council of Nablus produced twenty-five decrees, which touched initially on matters of jurisdiction between the secular and clerical authorities, and for the most part focused on sex.21 Declarations were made against sins including adultery, sodomy, bigamy, pimping, prostitution, theft and sexual relations with Muslims, for which the prescribed punishments ranged from penance and exile to castration and nose slicing.

The men who met in Nablus were not just working out a code of law and morality for the Holy Land. They were seeding in law a revolutionary idea, which would evolve before long into the notion—and fact—that religious men under arms might serve as a central plank in the defense of the crusader states.

It would seem that in the months preceding the Council of Nablus a handful of Jerusalem’s expatriate knights (later sources suggested it was initially between nine and thirty men) had formed a sort of loose brotherhood, or confraternity, of the sort that had cropped up in the West during the previous century for the purpose of defending churches and shrines from bandits.

The construction of Solomon’s Temple was described at length in the book of Kings. It was made of “costly stones,” paneled with delicately carved olive wood, cedarwood and gold and held up by countless pillars, concealing at its heart the Holy of Holies, a sacred room where God’s name “lived” and where the Ark of the Covenant—the repository of the original tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments—was stored.

Like Solomon’s original Temple, the Second Temple was destroyed by the wrath of an outside empire: wrecked by fire in A.D. 70 during the suppression of a Jewish revolt against the Roman emperor Titus. Sixty-five years later its ruins were demolished for good and pagan statues were erected on the site.

Two extraordinary buildings now dominated Jerusalem’s skyline. The Dome of the Rock’s huge golden roof shimmered like a fireball, visible for miles around. (“As soon as the beams of the sun strike the cupola and the drum radiates the light, then indeed is this marvelous to behold,” recorded one Muslim traveler and geographer of the tenth century.)29 At the other end of the Temple Mount complex was another imposing building: al-Aqsa Mosque, most recently refashioned in the 1030s.

Under crusader rule, both the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque were stripped of their Islamic sanctity: the Dome became a church, while the mosque was repurposed as a palace for the king of Jerusalem. The Christians called the Dome of the Rock the “Temple of the Lord” and they identified al-Aqsa with the Temple of Solomon, in tribute to its historic location.

Despite these lodgings, the Templars could hardly have been said to live in luxury. In their earliest years at the Holy Sepulchre, they were dependent on charity, including handouts from the Hospitallers, who donated them their leftover food.

During the Christian conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, this had been the venue of one of the worst massacres of Muslim women and children. Their blood had run ankle deep throughout its halls.

Bernard (known later as Bernard of Clairvaux, and later still simply as Saint Bernard) would grow up to be one of the greatest churchmen of his age: a champion of monastic reform, a renowned scholar, a bombastic and tireless letter writer, a brilliant preacher and an early patron and founding father of the Knights Templar.

The Cistercian Order had been formed in 1098, when a group of monks of the more popular Benedictine Order founded a new monastery at Cîteaux near Dijon to devote their lives to a purer form of religious life.

Cistercians contrasted sharply and deliberately with the black-clad brothers of a typical Benedictine monastery, who tended to indulge in fine food, preferred liturgical chanting to physical labor and filled their ornate chapels with fine art and artifacts.

The twelfth century was one of the richest times of Christian renewal in the whole Middle Ages. Monasticism was exploding in popularity, and flowering with a diversity unseen since the early days of the Church.

it has been estimated that between the middle of the eleventh and the middle of the twelfth centuries the number of religious houses in many parts of Europe had expanded by 1000 percent.

Besides the Cistercians, the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries saw the establishment of the Carthusians (an order of hermits founded by Saint Bruno in 1084); Grandmontines (an extremely strict and poor order founded near Limoges around 1100); Tironensians (gray-clad and severely penitential brothers following the example of Saint Bernard of Thiron, who founded an abbey in 1109); Premonstratensians (established by Saint Norbert around 1120 to preach and serve ordinary parishioners in the community as “canons regular”); and many other orders, some enduring and others fleeting.

In hundreds of letters over the course of his long career, written in florid Latin and frequently at very great length, he flattered, supplicated, bullied and berated everyone from popes, kings, archbishops and abbots to runaway novices and would-be nuns doubting their vocation.

There were similarities between the still-developing Templar ideal and the Cistercian movement into which Bernard had thrown himself as a young man. Both were new spiritual organizations that placed poverty and obedience at their heart, rejecting earthly vanities in favor of hard physical work in the service of the Lord. And the Order of the Temple had close links, through its first members, to Champagne, the region of France that housed Clairvaux Abbey and where Bernard had spent most of his adult life.

Nevertheless, securing his agreement to become Baldwin’s heir was a delicate political operation. It required Fulk to turn over his lands to his son, travel one thousand miles to meet a woman he had never set eyes on and take her as his wife, and embrace the most challenging military post in the Christian world. To sweeten the deal, William had brought with him some truly magnificent gifts, including a fragment of the True Cross and a decorated sword, which were to be presented to the cathedral in Le Mans, at the heart of Fulk’s territories.12

While William sought to cajole a single man into taking a crown, Hugh was tasked with encouraging hundreds to part with their possessions and possibly even their lives in exchange for a far more uncertain reward.

The claim made in later years that there were only nine Templars during the first nine years of the order’s existence was romantic and numerologically pleasing, but false.

It is worth noting that Hugh was not yet attempting to set up a Western branch of the fledgling order. His military concerns lay in the East yet his chief goal lay in building a network of patronage, capital and personal interest that would bridge the two thousand miles between the wealthy estates of central France and the dangerous plains and mountains of Syria and Palestine.

By the end of the council, Jean Michel had drafted in Latin a sixty-eight-point code of Templar conduct, later known as the Primitive (or Latin) Rule.

The Templars’ new code bore the unmistakable stamp of his personal belief that knighthood could and should be reformed, Christianized, stripped of its earthly vanity and transformed into a calling of dignity, duty and godly purpose.

The rule started by addressing the practical issues of how a Templar brother could hope to square the prayer-bound life of a religious devotee with the rough-and-tumble life of a soldier in the saddle.

This stripped-back version of the daily routine of monastic worship was designed to be achievable by noneducated laymen. Everyone, even the most illiterate peasant in France, knew his paternoster; by reducing holy duties to the most mundane repetition of the best-known prayer in Christendom, the Templars opened their pool of potential recruits to dedicated and talented men of any rank, and not just the rich and well schooled.

Templar knights were to wear habits of all white,* “which signifies purity and complete chastity.”26 Black or brown habits were prescribed for the lesser rank of Templar sergeants and squires—brothers who were sworn members of the order but did not carry the full rank or training of the Templar knight.

To emphasize the point, many marks of conventional knighthood were explicitly banned. “Robes should be without finery and without any show of pride,” read the rule. “And if any brother out of a feeling of pride or arrogance wishes to have as his due a better and finer habit, let him be given the worst.”

A particularly violent proscription was made against trendy footwear, which in the early twelfth century could be quite flamboyant. “We prohibit pointed shoes and shoelaces and forbid any brother to wear them . . . for it is manifest and well known that these abominable things belong to pagans.”

“This armed company of knights may kill the enemies of the cross without sinning,” stated the rule, neatly summing up the conclusion of centuries of experimental Christian philosophy, which had concluded that slaying humans who happened to be “unbelieving pagans” and “the enemies of the son of the Virgin Mary” was an act worthy of divine praise and not damnation.

The only beasts Templars were permitted to kill were the mountain lions of the Holy Land.

Although married men were permitted to join the order, they were not allowed to wear the white cloak and wives were not supposed to join their husbands in Templar houses.

“The book to the Knights of the Temple, in praise of the new knighthood” (Liber ad milites templi de laude novae militia—now usually referred to as De Laude) was written at some point between the founding of the order and 1136. Its content suggests that Bernard began work on it around the time of the Council of Troyes in 1129.

Bernard emphasized the profound difference between homicide—the sin of killing a man—and malecide—the act of killing evil itself, which God would consider a noble deed. Armed with this ingenious (if somewhat shaky) theological distinction, the Knights of the Temple could take on the very highest duty: more than simply being bodyguards for pilgrims, they were the defenders of the Holy Land itself.

This paean to the character and purpose of the Templars occupied the first four chapters of De Laude. The remainder—a further nine chapters—was a guided tour of the sites of the Holy Land that the Templars had been assembled to defend.

Each chapter was effectively a short sermon.32 Had it been read aloud or recited from memory at the relevant holy site, it would have provided inspiration, encouragement and insight to those who found themselves there.

No one had thought harder about the Templars’ curious fusion of the roles of monk and knight, and no one was better suited to putting into words the spirit of this potent new order. But Bernard was not the only one thinking seriously about the Templars. Far away from the Holy Land another patron was thinking about how he could help support the newly founded order. His name was Alfonso, king of Aragón, and he was at the forefront of the struggle against Islam—not battling Seljuqs and Fatimids in the Holy Land, but fighting the Moors of southern Spain, in the war known as the Reconquista.

Over the course of a long and colorful career the sixty-one-year-old king had acquired fragments of the bodies or belongings of the Virgin Mary, several apostles, a few early Christian martyrs and assorted other saints, all of which were housed in small ivory boxes leafed with gold or silver and studded with precious gems.

Fraga lay on the banks of the river Cinca. This was frontier land, where Christian Europe butted up against al-Andalus, the Muslim states that had occupied most of southern Spain ever since the armies of the Umayyad caliphate had crossed the Strait of Gibraltar in the eighth century.

Since the late tenth century, however, there had been a hardening of religious differences on the peninsula, and the wars between the various kingdoms had taken on an increasingly sectarian nature, in which the Christian rulers of the north saw it as their common duty to push the forces of Islam back toward North Africa.

it was heavily reinforced with men, animals and provisions sent from the Almoravid empire in North Africa—the real center of power in the Western Islamic world, with its capital in Marrakesh. The Almoravids were an exotic and dangerous enemy, their military leaders famed for the desert veil they wore at all times, covering their noses and mouths and leaving only their eyes on show.

The men massacred the noncombatant Christians, while the women led a general plunder, robbing the tents of food, equipment, weapons and siege engines.8 Most humiliating, the Muslim plunderers stripped bare Alfonso’s chapel, stealing his golden ark and leaving the holy tent “torn completely to the ground.”

Several bishops and abbots were killed, along with dozens of the best knights in Aragón and most of the army’s leaders. Virtually all the members of Alfonso’s household were captured and his entire infantry bodyguard of seven hundred soldiers was slain. In all his decades of warfare, during which Alfonso had fought battles and sieges from Bayonne to Granada, he had never suffered such a devastating defeat. He slashed and hacked away fiercely on the edge of the battlefield, but the effort was futile, and he was eventually persuaded to escape with a small cadre of knights.

Alfonso died as he had lived, austere in spirit and narrowly focused on deeds of war. As befitted a man who slept on his shield every night and believed “it is proper for a fighting man to associate with men and not with women,” he never fathered a child.

Just five years after the Council of Troyes had given them a formal rule, the Templars had been granted a third part of an entire kingdom. This was quite a coup. It also set a course for their future. First, it meant that for the next two centuries the Templars would have a part in the Reconquista. Second, it demonstrated the spirit of ostentatious generosity toward crusading and crusaders that was growing across Europe—without which the whole concept of the military orders would have failed.

The Templars’ involvement in the attack on Damascus of 1129—an assault he had heavily advertised on his recruitment tour—was hardly promising. According to one account, the Christian forces conducted themselves “very imprudently and . . . beyond the bounds of military discipline.”

Over the next ten years the Templars appear to have taken part in just two other significant actions. In 1137 eighteen of their knights were among those besieged alongside Fulk of Anjou in the castle of Montferrand, near Homs in the county of Tripoli. (By this time Fulk was king of Jerusalem, having succeeded Baldwin II on his death in 1131.) Two years later another ignominious engagement took place, this time in the kingdom of Jerusalem, near Hebron. Several Templars had joined a Christian army that engaged a large band of “wicked robbers and bandits.”

The Templars at this stage were seen as best suited to the important duty of castle guard. In 1136 they were awarded the job of garrisoning fortresses overlooking the dangerous passes in the Amanus Mountains, near Antioch. This was a major strategic responsibility: the Amanus passes were the key routes into Syria from Asia Minor, and controlling them was vital to the security of the county of Edessa and principality of Antioch, as well as the safety of pilgrims coming to Jerusalem overland.

Hugh’s successor was Robert of Craon (also known as Robert Burgundio), a shrewd nobleman from Poitou who enjoyed close links to the new king Fulk of Jerusalem.