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

by Dan Jones

Raymond had taken the defiant, near-senseless step of making a personal truce with Saladin, allowing him to carry out exploratory missions on his territory. It was under the terms of this agreement that Saladin was allowed to send 7,000 men marching past Nazareth on the last day of April 1187.

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, and Saladin had no intention of letting them fight another day. ‘They were the fiercest fighters of all the Franks,’

The Teutonic Order had their origins in Acre, where they were established as a German branch of the Hospitallers during the great siege of 1190–1.

The first was the Mamluks, who rose from the banks of the Nile to extend their power across the Muslim lands of the Levant, seeking to achieve what not even Saladin had managed before: the total obliteration of Christian presence in the east. The second was St Louis’ grandson, Philip IV, king of France.

This was not entirely fantastical: the Mongols were notably open-minded about religious conversions, often adopting the faith of the lands they conquered. Hülagü, the ruler of the Ilkhanate, which was expanding westwards from Persia towards the Holy Land, had a Nestorian Christian woman as his chief wife, and in 1162 he was indeed considering a similar alliance, dispatching his own letters to France to sound out Louis.6 Hülagü described himself to Louis as an ‘avid destroyer of the perfidious Saracen people, friend and supporter of the Christian religion, energetic fighter of enemies and faithful friend of friends’.7 The dream alliance never came about, but it remained a tantalizing possibility in the minds of some western princes and a vision of looming annihilation in those of the Ayyubids and their Mamluk successors.