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

by Dan Jones

Omne Datum Optimum granted the Templars a range of extraordinary privileges. The pope praised the knights who had joined the order for transforming themselves from “children of wrath” into listeners who have abandoned worldly pomp and personal possessions.17 He then confirmed Knights of the Temple in their right to “always bear on your chest the sign of the life-giving cross”—a symbol that, when emblazoned in red on the Templar knights’ white mantles, came to be an iconic uniform.

The bull placed the Templars “under the protection and tutelage of the Holy See for all time to come.” Robert of Craon and his successors were to answer to no one but the pope: they were made explicitly independent across Christendom from the authority of kings and patriarchs, barons and bishops, and their customs were sweepingly declared to be free from the meddling of “any ecclesiastical or secular person.”

The Templars were guaranteed the right to be ruled by a master drawn from their own number and were exempted from paying tithes—the taxes routinely collected by the Church from its flock—while being permitted to take tithes from those who lived on land they owned.

Templar priests were answerable to their master—a highly unusual state of affairs, as their master, while sworn to obey the rule, did not himself have to be ordained.

The Templars were further protected by the ultimate papal sanction: anyone who harassed them would be excommunicated, forbidden “to partake of the most holy body and blood of our Lord, Jesus Christ,” and sentenced to “suffer severe punishment” at the Final Judgment.

Celestine II, who held office for six months between Innocent’s death in the autumn of 1143 and his own in March of the following year, issued on January 9, 1144, a bull entitled Milites Templi (Knights of the Temple), which granted all who joined them relief from penance and a guaranteed Christian burial.

Framed this way, it sounded as if Eugene’s purpose was to relieve the Templars from the burden of mixing with women and the grubby poor. But this masked a valuable financial privilege. Templar oratories were permitted to collect tithes and charge fees for burying the dead—even when these were established in the jurisdictions of other churchmen.

Yet, ironically, by committing to live in penury the Templars became rich.

But life in the saddle on the roads between Jerusalem and Jaffa was not possible or desirable for everyone. Some chose therefore to associate themselves with the order by offering gifts of their possessions.

Taken together, the things given by a generous West—money, horses, clothes, weapons—to support action in the East, provided what was known in Latin as the Templars’ responsio. One third of the profits made in each Templar house were sent to the front line, where the order needed them most.

Small grants of land would be parceled up into larger estates, overseen by a series of monastic-style houses known as preceptories or commanderies.* This land was either leased out, farmed for crops or grazed according to its location.

Templar houses in the Spanish kingdoms were particularly prone to bending their rules and allowing women to join the order as associates and even full sisters, perhaps because women had much greater freedom to dispose of their own property.22

The order made large gains in England in the 1130s, profiting from a bloody conflict (now known as the Anarchy) that engulfed the kingdom following the death of King Henry I in 1135.

Matilda was married to Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou, King Fulk of Jerusalem’s eldest son, while Stephen’s home county of Blois neighbored Champagne, the crucible of Templar recruitment and ideology. Stephen’s father had been a hero of the First Crusade, and his wife was a niece of Baldwin I.

The Templars built up vast networks of property in Champagne, Blois, Brittany, Aquitaine, Toulouse and Provence, establishing commanderies to fix their local presence. Dozens of Templar houses sprang up from the Gulf of Genoa to the new Atlantic kingdom of Portugal, which was also being clawed out of Islamic hands and resettled by Christians under the self-proclaimed first king of Portugal, Afonso I Henriques.

Knitting the Templars into the affairs of his new kingdom brought security and prestige. It was also a practical way of colonizing and garrisoning newly won land.

Although he may not have realized it, Alfonso the Battler, king of Aragón, had been a pioneer in a movement that would change the face of crusading.

By the 1130s the war on the Iberian Peninsula had gained the political and spiritual status of a crusade. It was perhaps only natural that it should resemble a crusade in organization, too.

Alfonso’s brother, a Benedictine monk, was taken out of holy orders and married to the sister of the Duke of Aquitaine; the resulting daughter was married as an infant to the Count of Barcelona, Ramon Berenguer IV; Alfonso’s brother, Ramiro, retired back to the cloister and Ramon Berenguer took control of Aragón, merging the kingdom permanently with his own territories.)

The sunbaked hilltop fortress at Monzón, proudly built by the eleventh-century Arab rulers of Saragossa to be all but siegeproof, was redeveloped under Templar ownership to include new defensive walls and towers, stables and barracks. It was one link in a chain of frontier castles—Mongay, Chalamera, Barbará, Remolins and Belchite—that were now placed into Templar hands to be managed, garrisoned and maintained.

Of course, the castles and income were not given simply to enrich the Order of the Temple. The responsibility of maintaining border fortresses meant that the Templars now had a direct stake in the Iberian crusades.

Although the Templars’ political influence waxed and waned according to their relationship with the king’s successors over the generations, they would be a prominent presence in Aragón for more than a century to come.

By the late 1140s, the Templars were famous all over the Christian world. But fame alone was not enough. The Templars were, after all, a band of holy knights. They were fighting men: warriors whose reason for being was to protect or to kill. And in 1147 the time for killing was upon them.

Yet even his admirers recognized that he was a vicious individual, whose military success sprang from a lifelong reputation as a butcher and brute of the most despicable severity. Zengi was casually inventive in the violence he directed toward enemies, subordinates and intimates alike. He crucified his own troops for marching out of line and trampling crops. If his military commanders irked him he either killed or banished them and castrated their children.

The city’s population was a cosmopolitan blend of Greek and Armenian Christians and a relatively small ruling class of Franks, whose homes, shops and bejeweled churches were “surrounded by a massive wall and protected by lofty towers.”

Less fortunately, Edessa was ruled by Count Joscelin II, a short, thickset, swarthy man with bulging eyes, a large nose and smallpox scars all over his face. Joscelin was a mediocre military campaigner, a drinker and womanizer. All the same, had he been in Edessa Zengi would most likely have left the city alone. But on December 23, 1144, Joscelin was out of town visiting his castle at Turbessel, several days’ ride west across the Euphrates, along with the majority of his mercenary troops.

The art of sapping was a specialist task, associated at one time with experts from Persia, who understood the specific requirements of bringing down heavy stone fortifications.

Zengi’s men concentrated on murdering Franks rather than Armenians, but otherwise made little distinction between their victims. “Neither age, condition, nor sex was spared,” wrote William of Tyre.9 Six thousand men, women and children were killed on the first day of the sack.

Like many of his noblemen, Louis saw plenty to admire in the Templars and regularly made gifts to the order. (In 1143 and 1144 he assigned them the proceeds of rents levied on Paris’s money changers.)

There would have been at least an equal number of dark-cloaked Templar sergeants and still more servants and support staff around them, giving the impression that a private army was in town, of a size that could ordinarily only have been raised by the greatest lords in Europe.

The crusading movement had not lacked for Western noblemen to join its ranks, whether as permanent leaders or warriors who lent their swords to the effort for a limited tour of duty, but no monarch had thus far been tempted to leave his kingdom to do the Lord’s work, with the exception of Sigurd of Norway, who had sailed to Jerusalem in 1107.

That Western Europe’s two foremost kings should decide to go on crusade was a mighty commitment of royal power. This more than answered Pope Eugene’s call to arms, issued in December 1145 (and reissued in March 1146) in the form of a bull known as Quantum Praedecessores.

Little by little, as Louis’s forces made their way east, it became clear that what was billed as an army was in fact little more than a very large, pious but incompetent rabble. Were it not for the Knights of the Temple, it is likely they would never have made it within sight of Syria at all.

Although the armies of the faithful set out confidently and cheerfully, their experience on the road quickly soured their spirits. Both Louis VII and Conrad III chose to march to Edessa overland, along the route followed by the first crusaders: a march through Bulgaria and across Greek lands, stopping at Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, regarded by its inhabitants and many others besides as the greatest city in the world.

Both romantic and practical considerations influenced the French and German kings’ decision to take the land route: there was a wish to walk in the footsteps of the first crusaders, and ships were expensive. But ultimately it proved calamitous.

Perhaps inevitably, since Conrad was effectively leading a mass migration consisting of some thirty-five thousand fighting men and a very large number of noncombatant pilgrims, trouble dogged him.16 Feeding so many mouths was extremely challenging; maintaining order as the Germans encountered foreigners who were not thrilled at their presence was even harder.

Fifty years previously the armies of the First Crusade had arrived in response to a plea for help from Manuel’s grandfather, Alexius I Comnenus, who had begged the Latin West to help him in his war against the Seljuqs. There had been no such request on this occasion. Indeed, the Byzantine emperor was positively irked by the thought of the Latin crusaders making further gains in Syria, not least around Antioch, which he thought was rightfully part of his own empire.

Attempting to cross the high, arid plains around Dorylaeum, where Byzantine territory gave way to hostile Seljuq country, the crusaders had been set upon by fast, lightly armed and lethal horsemen-archers firing arrows from the saddle.

The Greeks were disgusted by the rude barbarians from the West; the Franks despised the spineless obsequies of their hosts.

Petty crime and scrapping were almost impossible to prevent. “The king frequently punished offenders by cutting off their ears, hands and feet, but he could not check the folly of the whole group,” lamented Odo of Deuil.

When weak and hungry packhorses lost their footing they fell hundreds of feet to be dashed to pieces, dragging to their deaths anyone they hit on the way. Worse still, Turkish outriders had been spotted ahead.

Trying to guide a vast rabble over a mountain range was a task quite beyond Louis VII’s capabilities as a commander. Disastrously, he allowed his army to separate and cross the peak of Mount Cadmus in three staggered groups. It was a gift to his enemies.

Out of sight and poorly defended, the large baggage train containing food, tents and other essentials, accompanied by pilgrims, servants and attendants, was left to make the mountain crossing entirely on its own.

The Templars marching with Louis, far better trained for the reality of combat in the East than their comrades, came through the debacle on Mount Cadmus in remarkably good shape. While most of Louis’s troops and horses were starving in the absence of their plundered baggage train and its vital provisions, the Templars had conserved their possessions.

King Louis did something quite astonishing: he signed over effective command of the entire mission to the Templar knights, allowing them to reorganize the military structure, take control of training and tactics and—most extraordinary of all—to temporarily enlist into the order every person in the vast royal following, from the meanest pilgrim to the mightiest knight.

Holding formation was—and always has been—a first principle of competent military conduct, but in the panic on Mount Cadmus, what poor orders had been given were ignored, and many soldiers had run or fought as they saw fit. That had to change. In taking an oath of fraternity to the Templars, each of Louis’s pilgrim warriors now accepted that it was his sworn duty to obey Gilbert and his deputies: to stand firm or take cover as they were told.

Mounted archers were deadly but predictable: their methods had been refined with great success over thousands of years, and they relied on the swift ambush raids that Odo of Deuil had seen firsthand and recorded in awestruck detail.

The horsemen were astonishingly skilled, capable of controlling with one or no hands beautifully trained steeds weighing eight or nine hundred pounds, stringing and drawing a heavy bow at a gallop and firing with mortal accuracy from over and around their horse’s neck, head and flanks.28 They worked in small, mobile groups, arriving one after the other and maintaining constant pressure.

The key was to maintain discipline in the face of ambush for long enough to organize a counterattack.

Indeed, the fact that basic troop positioning and adherence to officers’ orders had to be taught to Louis’s followers as though they were green youths being instructed in the first principles of combat illustrates just how woefully unprepared the crusaders had been to begin with.