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

by Dan Jones

A small elite force of several hundred knights inhabited these fortifications, backed up by a larger number of sergeants, support staff, hired mercenaries, servants and slaves. All of them were ultimately supplied by the large and growing infrastructure of Templar houses in Europe, which by the 1170s was turning the Order of the Temple into a global organization.

The first castle the Templars held in Portugal was their fortress at Soure, which, as we have seen, the ambitious ruler had bestowed on them as early as 1128, in the first decade of their existence.

To assert his Christian credentials he created a bishopric in Lisbon, endowing it with the churches in Santarém that he had awarded to the Templars. This was not the slight it seemed: as compensation the new king gave the Portuguese Templars the fortress of Cera and the right to found the town of Tomar, to use as their religious headquarters.

Crusading in the Spanish peninsula was every bit as much a combined effort between military orders and kings as it was in the more famous outposts of the east. It had its own regional flavor and relations between individual rulers and masters varied according to politics, personality, and circumstances.

KING AMALRIC OF JERUSALEM was a struggler. He spoke with a stammer, which made eloquent conversation a chore. He ate sparingly yet still grew so fat that his blubbery pectorals hung down to his waist like an old woman’s pendulous breasts.1 He found it hard to charm his courtiers, who thought him taciturn and devoid of small talk, and consistently lost his pious battle to resist the sin of fornication, sharing his bed with married and unmarried women alike.

Amalric was a competent king: one Muslim writer admired his “bravery and subtle cunning, the likes of which the Franks had not seen since they appeared in Syria.”2 But during the decade he governed Jerusalem his kingdom grew steadily less stable, and at times this brought him into open conflict not only with the Muslim rulers of Syria and Egypt, but with his own men.

There was not much to dispute in Amalric’s succession. All the same, there were grumblings among the major lords of the realm about his fitness for the job. When the new king wrote to Louis VII seven weeks after his coronation, boasting that his accession had been tranquil and well supported, he was slightly glossing over the ambivalent reception he had received from some of his peers.

For the first time since the crusaders had arrived in the Holy Land, Syria was united, while Fatimid Egypt was nearly bankrupt. It had been paying tributes to the Christian kings of Jerusalem ever since the fall of Ascalon in 1153, and the randomness of dynastic succession meant that it was ruled by a series of weak, young caliphs. It was ripe for conquest.

Joining the two states would encircle the Christian coastal territories with a common enemy in the north, south and east. The fracture that had for decades pitted Sunni Seljuq Turks against Shi’ite Fatimid Egyptians was crucial to the crusaders’ ability to carve out and maintain their kingdom.

When the fighting was over and Matilda’s son had been crowned King Henry II, Gilbert had judged his political career to be complete. In 1158 he had resigned his lands to his son and joined the order.

Like Nur al-Din he recognized the Fatimids’ weakness and aimed to take advantage of a bitter power struggle taking place in Cairo between the vizier, known as Shawar, and a portly, flamboyant Kurdish general called Shirkuh, portly and flamboyant, with cataracts in his eyes, who was attempting to foment rebellion and overthrow the Egyptian government on behalf of Nur al-Din.

The Christian army was said to have included twelve thousand infantry and six hundred knights, of whom more than sixty were Templars, but this time Nur al-Din had the upper hand. He destroyed the crusaders’ army, killed a huge number of knights, took all of their leaders prisoner, then marched on through Antioch and seized the important coastal city of Banyas.

Bertrand demonstrated a stark understanding of the calculus of warfare in the East. It was largely about numbers. Nur al-Din had them. The Franks, for the most part, did not.

As vizier of Fatimid Egypt, Shawar served under the caliph al-Adid, a young man of about sixteen or seventeen who had endured a dreadfully turbulent childhood. His father had been murdered by Nasr al-Din and Abbas, and his older brother, al-Fa’iz, had ruled briefly before dying as a child.

The offer came: this time it was two million pieces of gold—a sum so vast it was almost laughable. Amalric withdrew his troops, put out his hand and waited for the money to start raining. It was a calamitous error.

By January 2, 1169, Amalric realized he had no choice but to break camp and return to Jerusalem. He had not collected two million gold pieces. He had not conquered Cairo. He had merely slaughtered the civilian inhabitants of a Nile Delta city, sat around for a few weeks and gone home.

Its annexation by Sunni Syria was under way and the days of the Fatimid caliphs, who had sat in their exotic palaces in Cairo for more than two hundred and fifty years, were about to draw abruptly to an end. The Templars’ worst fears had been realized. They faced encirclement by a unified and emboldened enemy.

In full flight it must have been a truly daunting sight: twelve thousand professional cavalrymen galloping ahead of three times as many volunteers. Saladin’s close associates boasted among themselves that when the Franks of Jerusalem (whom they regarded as a “pollution” and “the filth of the dregs of humanity”) received word that the horde was approaching, they would quake in terror and wish “that they had never been born.”

During the decade that followed the fall of Cairo, Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, a charismatic, politically agile, relentlessly ambitious and extraordinarily self-assured soldier, made himself the preeminent leader in the Islamic world and the founder of a dynasty of sultans known as the Ayyubids, after Saladin’s father.

Within a year of the city’s capitulation Shirkuh came down with a quinsy—a serious abscess in his throat brought on by an enthusiastic session of gorging on rich meats.

Through a combination of incisive military leadership, relentless campaigning, sheer personal charisma and a healthy dose of good fortune, between 1169 and 1177 Saladin expanded his range of influence out of Egypt to become the most important threat to other Muslim rulers in Aleppo, Damascus and Mosul. In 1171, on the death of al-Adid, the Fatimid caliphate was formally abolished. Saladin then set about consolidating Sunni rule under his own direction across Egypt.

A generous, pious, witty and (relatively) humane ruler, he was also an extraordinarily resourceful judge of men and their motivations, whose character as much as his deeds left a deep impression on those around him. His close followers Ibn Shaddad and Imad al-Din, who wrote detailed accounts of Saladin’s life and achievements, seldom had to strain their pens or their imaginations in search of encomia for their master.

Saladin’s greatest insight, which directed much of his career, was the understanding that fostering unity in the fragile Islamic world (and cementing his personal authority over it) could best be achieved by rallying his fellow Muslims under the banner of holy war against an unbelieving enemy.

Odo’s actions as leader suggested an aggressive, impulsive temperament, and he came quickly to value the independence of the order above any obligation to serve as Amalric’s puppet.

The first crisis of Odo’s leadership involved a mysterious splinter Shi’ite sect called the Assassins, whose members practiced the art of spectacular public murder. The Assassins’ headquarters were at Alamut Castle in Persia, but from the 1130s they also held pockets of territory in the mountains of Syria and occupied a number of castles between the county of Tripoli and principality of Antioch, high in the Nosairi Mountains.

In truth the Assassins were more concerned with other Muslim leaders, which was why Amalric sought a peaceful accommodation with them against their common Sunni enemies in Syria and Egypt.

But Abdallah’s eloquence was not at all to the liking of the Templars, as one of the deals he had been sent to propose would have ended a lucrative source of income to the order.

The Assassins and the Templars were near neighbors and knew each other well.

Also they sought alien technology wait wrong universe

the Assassins did not generally bother to target the order, as Templars were by their nature replaceable, and individual brothers mattered far less than the order as a whole.7 In fact, they paid the Templars some two thousand gold bezants every year to be left alone.

William of Tyre recorded what happened next. “Under the escort and the guide . . . provided by the king, Abdallah had already passed through Tripoli and was about to enter his own land,” he wrote. But as Abdallah approached the mountains, he was ambushed. Walter of Mesnil, a Templar knight recognizable by the fact that he had only one eye, along with other unnamed accomplices in Templar uniform, “rushed the party with drawn swords and killed the envoy.”

Unfortunately, Odo refused to cooperate. He claimed it was a matter of internal discipline, most likely pointing to the papal bulls granted in the 1140s, which placed the order outside royal jurisdiction and made it answerable only to the pope. Odo said he would impose penance on Walter and send him to Rome for judgment.

These must have been fairly full-blooded if William, who enjoyed sprinkling his chronicle with colorful anecdote wherever possible, deemed them unfit for public consumption.

Amalric eventually arrested Walter of Mesnil when he sent two knights to confront the master at Sidon: they pulled Walter out of the Templar house where he was being kept and dragged him in chains to Tyre, where he was left to rot in a royal dungeon. Yet that was as much as the king dared do.

The Templars remained committed to the defense of the Latin states, but it was a role they performed on their own terms, with a fierce sense of independence from royal oversight.

In 1179 there was an attempt, at a general synod of the Western Church in Rome known as the Third Lateran Council, to put checks on the military orders’ freedom from authority and oversight, in the religious sphere if not the military and diplomatic. (It is possible, although not proven, that William of Tyre himself led this effort; he attended the council as archbishop of Tyre and representative of the Eastern states.)

In December 1177 a messenger staggered north from Jerusalem heading to the castle of Harim, near Aleppo. He was “mutilated and lacerated,” bloodied, weak and barely alive, but he clutched a precious cargo: an open letter to all the Christian faithful, describing events that had taken place a few weeks previously, between Ramla and Ibelin at a place called Mont Gisard (Tell al-Safiya).

The Hospital was as palatial as the Temple: situated directly opposite the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, it had eleven wards and between one and two thousand beds for the sick and wounded.11 It took a major crisis to overwhelm this institution—and that was exactly what Raymond’s letter described.

“Marvelous are the works of the Lord,” wrote the Hospitaller. “Blessed is he who is not shocked by them.”

The battle of Mont Gisard was the first major armed showdown between Saladin and a Christian army and its timing was no accident. The kingdom of Jerusalem had been weakened in 1174 by the sudden death of King Amalric from dysentery he contracted during a siege at Banyas. The jolt caused by Amalric’s death was made very much more serious by his succession. His son, Baldwin, was thirteen years old. He was also suffering from leprosy—a grim, devastating disease that began with numbness in his limbs as a child and which would advance to cause him great pain, grotesque disfigurement, blindness and long periods of incapacity.

For three years Saladin watched the leper king Baldwin IV struggle to take control of his kingdom, while he himself secured his position as sultan of Syria and Egypt and maneuvered against Nur al-Din’s partisans in Aleppo and Mosul. By 1177 he was ready to test the strength of the crusader states.

King Baldwin IV, sick and scarcely able to lead in person, was supported by a number of high-ranking Christian lords, including the pugnacious former Prince of Antioch, Reynald of Châtillon, whose decade and a half of captivity in Aleppo had only fostered an unbreakable desire to make war on the forces of Islam.

Templar hierarchy was strictly defined, with the master supported by officers including the seneschal, who was his second-in-command, the marshal, who played a leading role when the Templars rode in the field, and regional commanders, the preceptors, with responsibility in individual cities or lands. The turcopolier was responsible for recruiting and organizing Syrian-born light cavalry. The draper was a quartermaster, ensuring that the knights and sergeants were properly equipped with the weapons, armor, uniforms, bedding, camping equipment and everything else they needed in the field.

Templars were bound by their vow of obedience: to God, to the rule and to their military superiors.

On night marches the whole column proceeded in near-total silence, and even during daylight hours only very necessary discussions were permitted. Leaving one’s place in the column was discouraged.

The brothers rode wordlessly and determinedly onto the battlefield, breaking their silence only when the trumpet blast ordering a charge was sounded: then they would ride together while singing Psalm 115.13 Not to us, Lord, not to us, But to your name be the glory, Because of your love and faithfulness.

This willingness to be the last men standing was what made the Templars such a valuable component in any army assembled by the kings of Jerusalem. It was why the late Amalric had allowed them such latitude, despite the order’s defiance of his authority and policy. And it was why Amalric’s son, the leper king Baldwin IV, and Reynald of Châtillon took eighty of the Gaza Templars to Mont Gisard when Saladin’s armies were spotted there in the winter of 1177.

Judging by an account written by the thirteenth-century scholar and chronicler Abu Shama, Saladin’s army was not expecting much resistance from the Franks.

Abu Shama waxed poetic in his account of the Frankish charge: “Agile as wolves, barking like dogs . . . they attacked en masse, like the burning of the flame.”15 They picked their moment beautifully, waiting for Saladin to attempt a tactical rearrangement of the troops he had close to hand: attacking with purpose at a moment of confusion.

Like the Templars, these men were defined by their dedication to self-sacrifice, supreme martial training and refusal to leave the battlefield, even when faced with overwhelming defeat. “It often happens that while the rest make good their escape by flight, nearly all the Mamluks fall.”19

Saladin escaped death but he was humiliated and suffered a miserable journey back to his base in Egypt, battered by vile winter weather, his men pining for their lost friends and abandoned food and drink, and his caravans robbed by Bedouin tribesmen on the road to Cairo.