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

by Dan Jones

In 1188, having heard the news from Hattin, Henry tasked the Templars with helping to collect a levy known as the Saladin tithe: a tax to raise emergency funds for a new crusade. With their intimate ties to the cause and their infrastructure all over England, the Templars were perfectly placed to go about collecting this money, and Henry trusted them to do it.

Indeed, not only were they exempted from the Crown’s routine impositions on local communities to support law and order, or for the repair of roads and bridges, or for garrisoning royal castles; they were also awarded a special grant of a mark of silver (i.e., two thirds of a pound, or 160 pence) to be paid annually to the order by every sheriff in England.

But the cozy relationship between Templars and English kings would continue under Richard’s unlucky and generally despised brother and successor King John.

“Nowhere save in Jerusalem are they in poverty,” Map wrote. Perhaps he was thinking of the omnipresence of Templar officials across the Plantagenet lands, with regional commanders in the duchies of Aquitaine and Normandy whose authority superseded the notional boundaries between different lordships.

Not far from his birthplace in the Welsh borders stood the grand Templar house of Garway, built with a Holy Sepulchre–style round nave and sustained by two thousand acres of fertile Welsh farmland. 9 This was a very long way indeed from the ideal of Cistercian-style poverty that the order had once espoused.

At root, he simply loathed the idea that the Holy City of Jerusalem was defended by homicidal knights. “There Peter was taught to ensue peace by patience: who taught these [Templars] to overcome force by violence I know not.”10

“When they convene in their lairs late at night, after speaking of virtue by day they shake their hips in nocturnal folly and exertion,” he wrote.

Shakira was a Templar?

For this reason, Templar knights were to be found among the inner circle of every pope after the accession of Alexander III in 1159, serving the Holy Father in his private rooms as chamberlain.

In 1202 a Templar brother called Haimard, a resident of the Paris Temple, was appointed treasurer to the Crown, an arrangement that benefited both parties equally. The Templars gained enormous prestige and political influence from the beginning of a tradition that would last for more than a century. France gained the most modern accounting system in Europe, consolidating all royal income and expenditure through a single set of books, allowing careful scrutiny and management on a scale seen nowhere among its neighbors.

The Templars of Marseille were able to offer this valuable service because the order had started to commission and maintain its own vessels, rather than relying on the shipping magnates of Venice, Genoa and other Italian seafaring cities, who were traditionally dominant in maritime transport across the Mediterranean.

They took a slice of wool production and weaving; charged for mill use, oven space and permission to fish rivers; leased vineyards to winemakers and even owned a couple of fruit stalls in the town center. Their own, directly managed, lands yielded wine and cereal crops.

In Italy, the Templar presence had spread rapidly throughout the peninsula as far south as Sicily, where there were major preceptories in Messina and throughout the island.

In the invasion of Mallorca the Templars provided around one hundred knights, several transport boats and plenty of strategic advice, for which they were rewarded with a share in the island as it was divided up between the many groups who helped conquer it—although this was not equal to the one fifth of all lands they helped conquer that had been promised to them in 1143 when Alfonso I’s will was finally settled.

Encouragingly for the Christians, Saladin died at dawn on March 3, 1193, following a “bilious fever” that lasted for around a fortnight. He was fifty-five or fifty-six years old, and in his astonishing career he had changed the whole shape of politics in Syria and Egypt, establishing his Ayyubid dynasty and creating a legend that would live on for centuries.

Saladin’s eldest son, al-Afdal, managed the lands around Damascus; his second son, al-Aziz Uthman, held sway in Egypt; and his third son, Az-Zahir Ghazi, controlled Aleppo and northern Syria. The sultan’s brother al-Adil was based at Kerak in the Transjordan. On Saladin’s death this diffusion of power created a tussle for overall supremacy that would rumble on for many years to come.

Innocent III protected and patronized the order with great zeal. He used Templar brothers as tax collectors, granted the order new privileges and issued papal bulls reconfirming the general protections it had enjoyed for decades.

Few lived the life originally envisaged by Hugh of Payns and Saint Bernard. Nevertheless, all had a part to play in either funding or fighting in the crusades. While the Templars were diversifying out of military activity into banking, estate management and international diplomacy, the order had seldom been so central to the crusading movement as it would be in the years immediately following Innocent’s death.

(Case studies of brothers imprisoned in chains at Château Pèlerin were preserved, relating misdemeanors ranging from brawling and dressing in secular clothing to illicit fondling at night.)

(John had taken a slightly complex path to kingship: he had married a granddaughter of Amalric known as Maria of Jerusalem, who had died in 1212, shortly after giving birth to Isabella, leaving John as regent.)

With this fleet was Peter of Montaigu, a long-serving Templar from a well-connected crusading family, who had risen through the ranks, serving as master for Spain and Provence, and latterly master in the West, making him the most senior brother outside the Holy Land.

The turn of the thirteenth century had seen a revival of Muslim fortunes in southern Spain, as the Almohads had sought to reconquer lands taken from them by the steadily encroaching Christian kingdoms.

The Templars had fought in the rear guard at the battle, and Peter of Montaigu had witnessed the carnage that ensued as the Christians tore into the Muslim forces, chasing Muhammad al-Nasir (who had succeeded al-Mansur in 1199) from the field, his bodyguard of chained black African slaves failing to protect him from the devastating cavalry charges.

Disappearing on the horizon was the shattered fortress of Alcácer do Sal (al-Qasr), some forty miles south of Lisbon, which had been placed under siege the previous autumn by a united force of Portuguese Christians and crusaders from Frisia and the Rhineland, who had battered it for months until its walls had finally come crashing down.

Yet Damietta was more than just the hub for riverside agriculture. It was one of the great port settlements of the region: convenient for traders from the flourishing Italian city-states of Genoa and Venice, and well connected to the coast towns of the Levant. With a fair wind a ship could travel from Acre to Damietta in less than a week.

Like Alexandria, across the delta, Damietta was an alluring prize, attacked with wearying regularity by the various imperial powers who had risen and fallen in the eastern Mediterranean during the previous five hundred years.

One thing Honorius did not do, however, was to involve himself in military strategy. He felt this duty belonged to the princes and potentates who had stepped forward to lead the mission. It was partly for this reason that a crusade originally called to restore Jerusalem to Christian rule ended up being diverted to a trading post at the mouth of the Nile, two hundred miles from the Holy City.

In the two decades following Saladin’s death power had consolidated and then fractured once again. In 1201 his brother al-Adil had managed to assert his authority as sultan of Egypt and Syria, subduing opposition from Saladin’s sons. But as al-Adil approached his death in 1218, the empire was split once again, this time between his own sons.

Like any valuable jewel, Damietta was well guarded, protected by three sets of turreted walls, each looming larger than the last.

One of their most potent weapons was Greek fire: a sticky, naphtha-based inflammatory resin, which could be sprayed from pipes or hurled, grenade style, in pots that shattered on impact.

In the meantime, work began on shore, under Oliver of Paderborn’s personal direction, to assemble an amphibious destroyer made from two ships lashed together, with four masts, a rotating bridge and a fireproof covering of animal hides. With this anchored in position, a second attempt to storm the tower began. Fierce fighting raged between the defenders of the chain tower and the soldiers stationed on what was effectively a floating fortress.

Both orders had been built on top of networks of highborn French-speaking families, but few things symbolized the essentially aristocratic nature of their membership quite so clearly as the appointment of the Montaigu brothers as masters at the same time.

Leadership was particularly weakened by the appearance of the influential but divisive fifty-three-year-old Pelagius, bishop of Albano, a cardinal and legate sent by Pope Honorius who fancied himself, not entirely accurately, to be a military tactician as well as a curate of souls.

Like the Templars, Francis and his fellows took vows of obedience, chastity and poverty. There, however, the similarities ended. Indeed, Saint Francis’s appearance at Damietta in 1219 was a reminder of just how far the brothers fighting there had come from the way of life their founders had envisaged.

Those one hundred years had seen the Templars transformed from indigent shepherds of the pilgrim roads, dependent on the charity of fellow pilgrims for their food and clothes, into a borderless, self-sustaining paramilitary group funded by large-scale estate management.

The sultan politely refused his offer to perform a miraculous walk through fire as proof of God’s favor, and sent the eccentric young man back to his own side. Only al-Kamil’s good humor saved Francis from summary beheading, a fate many Templar brothers had met over the years.

Since neither head-on assault nor the pleadings of a righteous friar had managed to reduce Damietta, the only thing for the crusading army to do was wait until the garrison inside the city was on the brink of starvation. This moment did not arrive until September 1219, by which time the siege had been under way for eighteen months.

the legate Pelagius led a faction in favor of pushing on to take Damietta at all costs, arguing that since the Muslim occupiers of Jerusalem had destroyed the defenses of the Holy City, it would be impossible to hold, and to retreat now would be to fall into a trap and risk ending up with nothing at all. This argument was backed by the Montaigu brothers, and in the short term at least it transpired that they were right.

Gold, silver, silks and slaves were plundered from shops and houses, while churchmen wandered the streets looking for surviving children, five hundred of whom they forcibly baptized into Christianity.

horses, many of whom died of dehydration.33 As they returned, members of the newer Teutonic Order rode out to meet them. The difference in military capability between the two orders was on sharp display, for the Teutonic knights set out without crossbowmen and archers to defend their lines: they were set upon by a Muslim ambush party, and their preceptor, marshal and many other brothers were taken prisoner.

Ever since Innocent III had proclaimed the Fifth Crusade, Templar brothers had helped to collect the papal tax known as a twentieth. They sat on commissions alongside Hospitallers and local clergy to account for the money collected throughout the realms of Christendom, which was distributed on a regional basis to enable as many people as possible to join the crusade.

Honorius was concerned that none of the crusade tax required for the front line of the war effort should reach Egypt via the Lateran, so that there could be no suggestion of papal corruption or misappropriation of funds. This was a noble aim, but one that required a decentralized means of moving money, as well as trustworthy and godly men with a presence in every realm involved in the crusade and the practical ability to move large amounts of coin and treasure securely. The Templars and Hospitallers and the new Teutonic Order were the ideal agents.

Just as in the 1160s, the Templars were not able to fight successfully in Palestine and Egypt simultaneously.

Peter of Montaigu was voted down, so he agreed to support a drastic alternative: a march up the Nile to provoke the Egyptians into battle. This was a brave move but it was being made perilously late. While the crusaders had dithered the previous year, al-Kamil and his allies all over the region had been laying a trap. Now it was about to be sprung.

Behind the crusaders, reinforcements sent by al-Kamil’s brothers in Syria were shadowing the Christians’ march by foot and by boat. Worse than this, the Nile was starting to rise. Despite having been in the region for more than two years, the crusader army did not understand the complex network of natural and man-made water channels that fed into the river.

Al-Kamil knew the workings of the river all too well, and as the crusaders worked their way into increasingly perilous terrain in late July, his boats and soldiers continued to stalk them, blocking the river and barring the way back to Damietta.

They were penned in at the V of the two waterways. They were also completely surrounded, for behind them the river was now blockaded, while Muslim troops had taken up positions barring all overland paths beside and around the river branches. Two weeks later, the Nile flooded and its waters washed away most of the crusaders’ baggage train.

This would have been bad enough, but al-Kamil now played his trump card. To regulate the Nile’s floodwaters, canals and channels had been built by local farmers. The sultan ordered the sluice gates to be set so that as much water as possible would rush toward the crusader position.

He summoned John of Brienne to his tent and informed the king of Jerusalem civilly but firmly that his men would all starve to death unless the Latins agreed to new peace terms: Damietta and the fort at Tanis were to be returned, and the armies occupying northern Egypt were to leave. Muslims enslaved in Acre and Tyre were to be freed. Eight years of peace was to be assured. It was an unconditional surrender.

The abrupt and highly embarrassing failure of the Fifth Crusade reflected badly on everyone involved. Yet again, vast amounts of money had been expended on attacking enemy positions with no permanent gain. Jerusalem remained in Muslim hands. Christian writers fell back on the usual gloomy explanations for this lamentable outcome: Peter of Montaigu wrote of “the disasters that befell us in the land of Egypt because of our sins.”

Even the Egyptian sultan marked the occasion by sending the great visitor gifts of gold and silver, silks and jewels and a whole host of rare animals including camels, elephants, bears and monkeys. The Holy Land had received many distinguished guests over the years, but few were so illustrious as Frederick, the Holy Roman Emperor, a man of such singular gravitas and intellectual range that his admirers called him stupor mundi: the wonder of the world.