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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Dan Jones
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April 27 - April 30, 2020
When the army came to a halt and made camp outside Adalia, disease began to tear through the ranks, its progress undoubtedly hastened by the weakened state of the half-nourished troops, who found the citizens of Adalia charging extortionate prices for much-needed food.
Quite beside the blood that had been spilled and the many wounds to his pride, the financial costs the king had incurred on his long journey from Paris to Antioch had exhausted his budget for the glorious pilgrimage. His men had been milked by the Greeks of Constantinople and Adalia, who saw their desperation and sold them food and passage at exorbitant prices.
It was no secret that the Templars, although individually committed to a life of poverty, had already grown very rich. They knew the land and the people of the Latin East and were well placed to raise money either by drawing on their own resources or by cajoling others into supporting the cause. Perhaps most important, they had a sworn duty to protect pilgrims.
The urbane and erudite Ibn Munqidh, who lived to the age of ninety-three and had an unparalleled perspective on the turbulent first century of the crusades, regarded the Templars as his friends, despite their religious differences. He recorded that whenever he visited the al-Aqsa Mosque, the knights would be sure to clear their chapel so that he could pray facing Mecca.
The Great Mosque, founded under Umayyad rule in the seventh century, was an immense, lavishly decorated building, its walls covered in marble and gilded mosaics, which was reputed to have cost “eighteen mule loads of gold” to build.
Its defenses may have been largely composed of fruit trees rather than huge walls that required sapping, but it was no easy target. This had been proven as recently as 1129, when King Baldwin II had failed to take the city, a defeat greeted with contempt and indignation in the West.
For one thing, Zengi was dead. The old tyrant had been murdered in his bed in September 1146: attacked by an unhappy servant while he was passed out drunk and left to suffer a slow and painful end.
His name meant Light (Nur) of the Faith (al-Din). This was a more generous assessment than the crusaders would have allowed. Under Nur al-Din, Edessa had been subjected to another horrible massacre, in response to a failed liberation attempt by its ousted leader, Count Joscelin II.
According to one Muslim writer from the target city, their “malicious hearts were so confident of capturing it that they had already planned out the division of its estates and districts.” The conquest of Damascus would not prove quite so simple.
William of Tyre described the tense, claustrophobic approach to Damascus as the armies of the three Christian kings picked their way, often in single file, through the narrow orchard paths on the outskirts of the city. The tracks they used were “wide enough to allow gardeners and caretakers to pass through them with pack animals that carry the fruit to the city,” he wrote, but for a large body of troops dragging weapons and the machinery of war, leading oxen and camels hauling a huge baggage train, they were dangerously inadequate.
Conrad himself fought in the fray with noted success: it was said he savaged one Turkish knight so grievously that he cut off the man’s head, left shoulder, arm and part of his torso with a single blow.
The crusader armies had set out so confident of a swift triumph that they had not brought siege engines, or provisions to last more than a few days. It was calculated that fruit plundered from the orchards and water drawn from the river would sustain them, and that the maximum time needed to break the city would be a fortnight.
The three kings leading the siege were taking counsel, and coming to a bold and highly controversial decision. Abruptly, and to many perplexingly, it was decided to abandon the offensive on the western side of the city and to move instead to a new position in the southeast, where intelligence suggested that the orchards were thinner, the walls weaker and victory would be faster. Rumors of several large relieving forces seem to have spooked the Frankish leadership to the point of being willing to gamble heavily on a switch in strategy to force a rapid victory.
Somehow, the Franks had thrown away their most promising military position in years.
Men had traveled thousands of miles, enduring disease, starvation, shipwreck, ambush and poverty, in the hopes of following in the footsteps of the first crusaders and winning a string of magnificent victories in the name of the Lord. But in the end, the eastern thrust of the Second Crusade had turned out to be nothing more than a four-day hike through a booby-trapped fruit field, a few isolated skirmishes and an impotent retreat.
The consensus among the Frankish chroniclers was that their masters could not possibly have failed so roundly unless they had been in some way betrayed. It was a matter of accepted fact that someone had sabotaged the campaign—that was how Conrad III himself explained the disaster, although he could not pinpoint the source of the treachery.
An English polemicist and bureaucrat, John of Salisbury, who served as ambassador at the papal court, expressly blamed the order for its part in the debacle, although he could not quite say what it had done.
The Templars had done their job with as much diligence and devotion as anyone could reasonably have asked of them. Their purpose was to protect pilgrims—and their role in escorting, defending, training, financing, advising and fighting alongside the pilgrims of the Second Crusade represented the highest possible demonstration of duty.
But in 1149 only its natural wells and reservoirs remained to indicate that this was once a place where people of many religions had thrived. War had swept through the elegant streets and emptied Gaza, seemingly for good.
Spades broke the earth to dig new foundations, and stonemasons cut blocks for new fortifications. The city—or a significant part of it—was rising once again. On a hill in the center of the broken town a new castle was being erected, “notable for its wall and towers.” This was not just an act of urban regeneration. It was part of an aggressive new military strategy being pursued in the far south of the crusader kingdom, with the Templars at its heart. For as the new castle was erected, the brothers were being earmarked to serve as both its guardians and its beneficiaries.
Andrew once likened his work to that of an ant, but his humility masked considerable military talent.
On June 29, a disastrous battle at Inab, near Antioch, saw an army under Prince Raymond of Antioch obliterated by forces led by Zengi’s son Nur al-Din, the atabeg of Aleppo. Raymond was a controversial character, to say the least. Since traveling from Poitiers to claim Antioch by marriage to its nine-year-old heiress, he had fallen out with the king of Sicily, the Byzantine emperor and Antioch’s patriarch. He was rumored to have seriously offended Louis VII by behaving rather too chivalrously toward Louis’s wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who happened to be his niece.
Andrew of Montbard’s letter gave a bleak picture of the military situation in Antioch as the Franks tried to resist a buoyant Nur al-Din. It also summed up much of the reality of life for the Templars in the kingdom of Jerusalem. They were expected to provide rapid-response military support wherever the enemy struck throughout the three remaining crusader states of Jerusalem, Tripoli and Antioch.
An erudite Latin scholar born in Jerusalem around 1130, and a second-generation crusader schooled within sight of the Templar palace at the cathedral school attached to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, William had finished his education in Paris and Bologna—the two leading universities in Europe—before returning to the East to pursue a career in the Church. He eventually rose to become archdeacon and finally archbishop of Tyre—a spiritual rank second only to the patriarch of Antioch.
The Templars’ presence in Gaza isolated Ascalon from Egypt, making the coast road unsafe and unsuitable for Fatimid troops. The only way the Shi’a caliph in Cairo could send reinforcements to the city was by sea: a serious inconvenience as the city did not have a protected harbor, but only a sandy beach that made landings difficult except in very calm weather.
The city was a formidable sight. Built in a natural basin on sandy ground planted with vines and fruit trees, its walls were lit by the winter’s sunshine during the day, while at night the masonry flickered by the flames of glass oil lamps, allowing watchful sentries to peer down at anyone who approached the four fortified gatehouses.
Bernard of Tremelay, who like so many early Templars was from Burgundy, near Dijon, was not a tested leader. When he brought his delegation of Templars to Ascalon at the end of January he had been master for less than a year. But what he lacked in experience he made up for in bravery and belligerence.
The citizens of Ascalon outnumbered the Franks outside by two to one. They were well trained, well stocked, and highly motivated to resist, for in William of Tyre’s words, “They were fighting for their wives and children, and what is more important, for liberty itself.”12 Yet while they could resist, they could not counterattack.
The sailors who heeded King Baldwin’s instructions to sail south might have expected to be ordered to join a naval blockade. Instead, when they arrived their ships were beached, the masts cut off and the hulls stripped down to the beams. They were paid a handsome fee for the loss of their vessels, and the timber was handed over to workmen who used it to build siege engines.
One weapon in particular would decide the fate of Ascalon for the next three decades. It was a giant structure, as tall as the walls, composed of long wooden beams supporting fighting platforms, all covered in a fireproof shell made of animal hides stretched over a wicker frame. Its purpose was to allow Frankish knights to climb up to the level of the battlements and kill defenders on an even plane.
The breeze that had carried the ships along the Levantine coast blew in toward Ascalon from the sea. Over the course of the night, however, it abruptly changed direction, and a brisk wind began to come in from the east, behind the Christian armies. For the people of Ascalon this was a disaster. The swift breeze fanned the flames at the base of Baldwin’s tower, causing them to leap hungrily upward. And as they grew, the flames blew against the city wall, superheating stones and mortar that had already been weakened by months of pelting from the Franks’ trebuchets.
The hot stone cracked, and as the first light of dawn crept up behind the besiegers, “an entire portion of the wall . . . crumbled entirely with a noise that roused the whole army.” The rubble roared as it collapsed, and men on both sides scrambled from sleep, grasping their weapons.
Bernard of Tremelay and his fellow Templars were either camped close to the tower, or more alert during the early dawn than their Christian comrades—or possibly both. As soon as they heard the sound of the wall crunching into the base of the tower they were up at arms, hurtling toward the breach in the wall. Bernard took personal command of his men.
As dust from the collapsed hole settled, some forty knights pushed past the siege tower, climbed over the stricken wall and headed into the city. Then, wrote Ibn al-Qalanisi, “they rushed into the town, and a great host were killed on both sides.”
Blocked into a hostile city with no chance of retreat or rescue, the Templars were massacred. None was taken for ransom—not even their master. This was unusual for such high-value prisoners. It spoke to the fearsome reputation the Templars held among their enemies and the pent-up fear and desperation of citizens who had been pinned down under enemy assault for half the year. No amount of wealth or booty was worth the lives of forty of the ablest Christian soldiers in the region, who had presented themselves unsupported for the taking.
Templars owed allegiance to no one but God, the master and the pope. Neither kings nor patriarchs had any formal command over them, and though their able services were sought and willingly given, in the end the Templars were ultimately free from any effective oversight. They defended the idea of Christendom and the honor of Christ, but how they did so was technically a matter for their own instinct and judgment.18 For the most part, this made them an extremely agile and useful elite fighting force. At times, however, their independence made them dangerous, and they came to be suspected as much
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The vizier’s son was called Nasr al-Din. He and his father, known as Abbas, had good reason to run. Behind them they left Cairo spattered in blood. Days earlier the two men had successfully conspired to kill the Fatimid caliph, al-Zafir, as revenge for his attempt to remove Abbas from his post. The assassination had triggered the violent deaths of several of the caliph’s brothers, a steward of the royal household, at least one manservant and a substantial number of Egyptian soldiers.
The killing of the caliph had been arranged in order to extend the father’s power and erase the son’s mounting notoriety as a sodomite. In the end it achieved neither.
The following day the palace was gorily purged—but even by the Fatimids’ bloody standards, this was a step too far. Al-Zafir was the supreme spiritual and political leader of the dynasty to which every Ismaeli Shi’ite in the world owed their allegiance: a man, in the words of William of Tyre, whom “the Egyptians are accustomed to cherish and revere as a supreme divinity.”
Nasr al-Din’s horse was beautifully tacked, with a valuable quilted saddlecloth embroidered with nearly a pound of gold thread.4 These were not just important Muslims, they were juicy prey, loaded down with booty, and the Christian patrolmen fell upon them with glee.
Nasr al-Din’s encounter with the Templars was sensational enough to be spoken about in England, where the acidic court chronicler and archdeacon of Oxford Walter Map recorded a lively account of the young man’s scandalous adventures.6 Map took special interest in the Templars’ role, as did William of Tyre. Both men heard and recorded versions of the same story: having been ambushed and then imprisoned by the Templars, Nasr al-Din responded not by resenting his captors, but by seeking to impress them.
(A Templar brother known as Roger the German who was captured fighting near Gaza around this time was forced by his Muslim captors to raise his finger and recite the shahada, “There is no god but God, Muhammad is his prophet.” On his release Roger was expelled from the order.)
So after holding Nasr al-Din for “a long time,” they opened negotiations to sell him back to his enemies.9 A price of sixty thousand pieces of gold was agreed and after only a short delay Nasr al-Din was collected by Ibn Ruzzik’s agents and taken back to the scene of his crimes, shackled and caged and carried through the desert by camel.
By the middle of the 1150s the Templars had spread far and wide across the Latin Christian states in the Holy Land. They were a relatively small force—perhaps fewer than one thousand knights in the three remaining crusader states, although their numbers were multiplied by several times as many sergeants and auxiliary troops in the form of Syrian light horsemen, or turcopoles, whom the order hired as mercenaries in time of need.
A letter written in 1157 to Pope Adrian IV was typical. After a passage bemoaning the capture of a number of knights, including the master, Bertrand of Blancfort, the letter went on to describe in cheerful terms a raid that the Templars had conducted on a Muslim wedding party. Two hundred and thirty “pagans” had been put to flight, the pope was proudly told. He was assured that every one of them was either taken prisoner or “slain by the sword.”
One of the very first things pilgrims saw on arriving in the Holy Land were the Templar castles on the road from Jaffa to Jerusalem. Two of the most prominent among them were Castel Arnald, constructed by the patriarch and citizens of Jerusalem in the early 1130s (during the reign of King Fulk) and handed over to the Templars shortly afterward, which protected a point where the road narrowed as it entered the mountains; and Toron des Chevaliers (also called Latrun), which guarded another mountain pass.
Particularly notable on this highway was a tiny but striking tower, about thirty feet on each side, known as Maldoim, or “the Red Cistern.”
La Fève, taken over around 1172, was one of the biggest castles raised in the twelfth century. At a hundred yards by one hundred and thirty yards, it could hold hundreds of troops and horses: an ideal place to gather men ahead of battles and to police a road that ran off to four major crusader-held cities.
In the county of Tripoli, the Templars manned one of their mightiest castles anywhere in the world, directly abutting the shore and the town wall in the small coastal settlement of Tortosa.
As Edessa had fallen before the Second Crusade and had not been recovered, the crusaders’ northernmost possessions were in Antioch, itself under regular attack.
