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

by Dan Jones

Together the four men led a targeted charge at the part of Saladin’s army commanded by Taqi al-Din. But instead of holding position to take the attack, Taqi al-Din instructed his men simply to part as the horsemen barreled toward them, allowing them to fly through the lines untouched. Once they had passed, his infantry closed ranks once more, blocking the route back. Four of the most senior Christian leaders on the battlefield were now cut off from the rest of the men whom they were supposed to be commanding.

The blood-streaked battlefield at Hattin was marked by two monuments: a dome erected on Saladin’s instructions, known as the Qubbat al-Nasr (Dome of Victory), and a widespread scattering of human bones, which were lying in fleshless piles all across the plain when Ibn al-Athir visited the site a year later.

Ibn Shaddad heard of one gleeful Muslim combatant leading away thirty Christian soldiers tied together with a tent rope.51 The price of slaves in the markets of Damascus plummeted due to oversupply.

Gerard of Ridefort and several hundred Templars and Hospitallers were among those taken alive from the battlefield, in an astonishing parade of illustrious prisoners that included King Guy, Reynald of Châtillon, Humphrey of Toron (his stepson) and many others. A newsletter sent to Archumbald, master of the Hospitallers in Italy, lamented that more than one thousand “of the better men were captured and killed, with the result that no more than two hundred of the knights or foot soldiers got away.”

When the grandstanding was over the sultan stood, drew his scimitar and brought it sweeping down into the gnarled veteran’s neck. His intention was to take Reynald’s head off, but in his excitement Saladin missed his mark, cutting one of his arms off at the shoulder.

The knights of the order, along with their Hospitaller counterparts, had fought with great distinction at Hattin, as was noted by more than one Muslim correspondent. Saladin had no intention of letting them fight another day.

When he assessed the human cost of the events that summer, he calculated that between the Springs of Cresson and the Horns of Hattin, two hundred and ninety knights had been lost: a huge swath of the Templars’ manpower in the East. This was only a fraction of the thousands of other men who had gone down with them, victims of the master’s thirst for martyrdom, which seemed to embrace everyone but himself.

By stripping the castles and towns of the Christian littoral of anyone who was capable of fighting and marching them into the hellmouth at Hattin, King Guy had left the realm horribly vulnerable to a rapid assault, which was what Saladin now immediately undertook.

Straightaway Saladin sent men up the great golden Dome. They tore down the cross that had been erected on it and, according to a letter sent to England by Terricus, dragged it around the city for two days, ceremonially beating it for the people of the city to see.

All this shit over how many chapters go into a book.

Fifty Templars who were evicted from their headquarters were allowed to form a guard to escort Christian refugees out of Jerusalem to settle wherever they could find a safe new home. Most made for the coastal city of Tyre, which was holding out as a bastion of Latin defiance.

It had taken Saladin less than fifteen weeks to massacre its members, imprison their master, seize their castles, overrun the holy sites they had sworn to protect and turn almost everything the order stood for into dust. It was hard to avoid the conclusion that God had abandoned his soldiers.

THE INTERNATIONAL HEADQUARTERS of the Order of the Temple, once a vast palace in Jerusalem, was now a tent on Mount Toron, surrounded by other tents billeting the great and good of the Christian Holy Land.

Acre was one of the largest ports in the Holy Land: the leading commercial harbor on the coast.

Although Ibn Jubayr deplored the stinking streets, filthy with rubbish and excrement, and railed against the conversion of ancient mosques into Christian places of worship, he went so far as to say that “in its greatness [it] resembles Constantinople.”

Gerard was quick to revert to his customary leadership style: belligerence whatever the cost.

Taken together, the brothers’ possessions in Acre were substantially larger than those in Jerusalem. Now all were in enemy hands. The lawyer Issa el-Hakkari had been given everything: their “houses, farms, land . . . crops and other property.”

From the first weeks of September the two sides skirmished with each other: Saladin’s men sought to maintain supply lines into Acre through weak spots in the Latins’ land blockade and ambushed foraging parties, while Guy’s men worked to keep them at bay. These were little more than exploratory jousts, but numbers on both sides were swelling, and all were well aware that they were moving toward a massive siege at Acre.

According to Ibn al-Athir’s chronicle, King Guy realized that although the sultan had a large force with him at Acre, many of his best troops were scattered in other important regions of his large dominions: some to the north in Antioch, others defending the Egyptian ports of Alexandria and Damietta, others watching carefully over the Christian city of Tyre to repel any possible attack on that front.

Unwilling to stand in the way of barreling horsemen, the troops stationed in front of Saladin’s base camp fell back, leaving the way to the royal tent open. Saladin went with them, and the Franks immediately fell on the defenseless positions, slicing through guy ropes, plundering what they could and killing anyone who stood in their way. The dead included the Muslim governor of Jerusalem, Saladin’s chamberlain Khalil al-Hakkari, and a noted poet and scholar, Ibn Rawaha.

As Saladin’s army retreated and the Templars and their accompanying knights scooped up the booty left behind, no one noticed that a large party of armed citizens had crept out of an undefended gate in Acre and made their way around the back of battlefield, joining up with some of the sultan’s troops who had initially retreated from the camp.

This time there would be no prison, no ransom and no mercy. Gerard was summarily executed on the battlefield.

Good riddance.

But what the English king lacked in punctuality, he more than made up for with the sheer force of his personality. Ibn Shaddad lavished his highest praise on Richard, writing that he was “a mighty warrior of great courage and strong in purpose. He had much experience of fighting and was intrepid in battle.” He further noted that although he was, in the crusaders’ eyes, “below the king of France in royal status,” he was “richer and more renowned for martial skill and courage.”

One hundred and fifty ships set off from Portsmouth and sailed more than two thousand miles via Lisbon, Sicily and Cyprus, collecting Richard in southern Italy. Their progress had been a bloody spree. Lisbon was sacked and Sicily invaded. Cyprus was conquered and Richard had had the Byzantine governor, Isaac Comnenus, arrested and clapped in silver manacles for having the impertinence to oppose his landing.

There was such a dearth of senior brothers left in the East that the order’s central convent was either unable or unwilling to elect a suitable candidate to replace Gerard of Ridefort as master. For a few months command was assumed by a brother known in documents simply as “W.”

The Iberian Peninsula was still a live theater of war: in the mid-twelfth century an Islamic revolution in North Africa and southern Spain had seen the Almoravid dynasty replaced by a severe and murderous Sunni regime known as the Almohads, whose leaders declared themselves caliphs and sought to push back against Christian advances on the peninsula.

Richard landed at Acre several weeks later, on June 8, carried on a wave of exuberant belligerence that would call for the Templars’ full involvement. It was as well for Amio that he had left before the trouble began.

Co-opting the military orders by splicing their leadership into his own command structure was an important plank of Richard’s crusading strategy. The English king had also brought with him a new Hospitaller master, Garnier of Nablus, who was prior of the Hospital in England, and Robert Anglicanus, an Englishman who was appointed treasurer of the Hospital in 1192.

Philip Augustus possessed a particularly ingenious array of siege weapons, including a huge catapult he had nicknamed Malvoisine (“Bad Neighbor”) and several mobile engines that could be pushed up against the walls to allow hand-to-hand fighting on the battlements.

The crusaders numbered around twenty-five thousand and they had dug in their positions behind ditches and earthworks. When Saladin’s forces attempted to assault the Latin ranks, they were driven back by men—and women—wielding bows, swords, daggers, lances, double-headed axes and clubs studded with iron teeth.

Richard had remained defiant, and insisted on being carried out from his tent each day on a stretcher to shoot crossbow bolts at defenders patrolling the walls.

The battle of Acre marked the end of King Philip’s crusade: he considered that he had fulfilled his vows and set off for Paris, eager to escape the Lionheart, who had repeatedly belittled him during the crusade and broken an agreement to marry Philip’s sister.

The experience of the Second Crusade, with its awful slog through Asia Minor, suggested that the military orders would be essential to providing security and discipline on the move, so in the late summer and early autumn of 1191, they were asked to deploy in exactly that capacity. There was no time for the Templars to sit and enjoy their restoration.

On Tuesday, August 20, Richard summarily massacred around twenty-six hundred Muslim prisoners on the plain of Acre, citing Saladin’s failure to make good on his promise to return the True Cross and pay 100,000 dinars of the fee agreed at the city’s surrender.

Christ. These people are all monsters.

By night they lay in the dark listening to the crusaders chant pilgrim prayers into the blackness and enduring swarms of giant tarantulas that crawled into the camp and bit anyone not alert enough to scare them away.

Two days after this they fended off a full-blooded assault during which the Templars lost a large number of horses as their tormentors rode behind them raining down javelins and arrows. After the attackers had been beaten back, a huge pile of dead horses was made and “the common people made a great commotion as they struggled greedily to buy the meat, which was not cheap.”

Rather than attacking the Templars in the vanguard, Saladin’s men flanked the crusader army and concentrated on fighting the Hospitallers at the rear. Protected by a thick cascade of arrow shot, they hurtled into the Christian lines, swinging swords and jagged cudgels. Richard’s instructions were for the whole army to remain firm and withstand the waves of attack, waiting for a prearranged signal of six trumpet blasts to start their own cavalry surge.

As the crusaders pushed steadily south, the sultan sent word ahead to Ascalon, instructing its Muslim population to destroy the city’s defenses, burn their houses, shops and granaries, pack up their homes and leave. He preferred to ruin the great coastal city himself than allow it to fall as Acre had and risk its being used once again as a Christian base from which to threaten Egyptian shipping and launch raids on the roads to Cairo.

Saladin retorted by reminding him that the Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock were the places where Muhammad had encountered angels. He said his inclination was to destroy the Cross, an act that would be pleasing to God, but that he was holding on to it for a while in case it proved useful in some way in the future.

Conrad had had himself elected as the nominal king of Jerusalem, only to be murdered by Assassins at Acre on April 28, 1192, three short days after his formal acceptance of the crown.

Richard’s journey home was almost as eventful as his crusade. He had made several dangerous enemies during his time in the East, among them Duke Leopold V of Austria, whom he had insulted and humiliated during the division of spoils after the fall of Acre. A white-mantled Templar disguise was not sufficient to keep the Lionheart from falling into Leopold’s hands when he was shipwrecked in the Adriatic several weeks after leaving Acre.

Saladin, nearing the end of his life, was deeply struck by his opponent’s chivalry and military skill, and with good reason. Brutal as Richard could be, he was an inspirational commander who valued martial skill, religious zeal and discipline, and knew how to deploy them to best effect.

And really with brutality it's pot and kettle.

There was one more, very tangible way in which Richard had altered the world in which the Templars operated. During the king’s final year in the Holy Land, he and his protégé Robert of Sablé struck a short-lived deal that would have long and quite unforeseen consequences for the order. It centered upon the island of Cyprus, which Richard had conquered from the Byzantine governor Isaac Comnenus shortly before he sailed into Acre in 1191. Having taken the island, Richard needed some way to run it. He alighted on the idea of selling it to the Templars.

Bochart found on Cyprus a population that was unwilling to be ruled. One chronicle recorded that the order ruled as though all the island’s inhabitants were serfs, and that they in turn “could not bear the indignities the Templars inflicted on them.” Most likely this meant that the order attempted to levy stiff taxes to raise the sixty thousand bezants they still owed the king of England.

His solution was to transfer the island to Guy of Lusignan. In exchange he asked Guy to compensate the Templars for their losses and to assume the remainder of their debt. Guy was adrift following the death of Sibylla and the subsequent loss of his crown. Marginalized by Conrad of Montferrat in a poisonous factional conflict, there was a certain attraction in removing him from the Latin mainland.

Besides being the master of the Templars in England, Fitz Stephen was a well-connected aristocratic figure of high social standing who counted among his friends bishops and abbots, princes and kings.

Under Fitz Stephen, however, the English Templars had cemented their special status as a favored order whose services were seen as indispensable by the Crown.

During the Anarchy, both sides had sought Templar favor. In 1153, when the Anarchy was resolved by a treaty granting the English Crown to the future Henry II, a Templar knight by the name of Oto (probably the master) was an official witness.

England’s Templar masters—men like Richard of Hastings and Geoffrey Fitz Stephen—were drawn from well-to-do dynasties whose sons were used to going into ministerial service for the Crown. The work they did on the king’s behalf made the order a visible and reliable part of public life.

Finally, in 1185 Henry II had begun to use the New Temple as a treasury, effectively relying on the order as a bank of deposit. Coin, jewels and valuable trinkets were held at Fleet Street, making the New Temple a strongbox facility that complemented other nearby royal fortresses such as the Tower of London, a few miles to the east.

Throughout his reign Henry II paid close attention to centralizing mechanisms in government, using his royal sheriffs to project the will and financial policies of his government into the farthest localities.