The Templars

by Michael Haag

  Four hundred years later, however, the Ottomans began rebuilding Acre, often reusing the fallen stones, and standing their new walls and buildings on the Crusaders’ foundations. This has given Acre a medieval atmosphere which, together with its striking situation looking out upon the sea, helps the visitor to imagine how the Crusader city used to be. Moreover, recent archaeological work has uncovered much of the Frankish past, in particular the Crusader Underground City and the Templar Tunnel.

  You can start by walking along the Sea Wall Promenade, which for the most part follows the line of the Crusader walls. At the southwest corner of the walls where they jut out into the sea is a lighthouse, and just north of it is an area of quarried rock, now underwater, which was the site of the Templar fortress. The fortress was destroyed by the Mamelukes in 1291 and what stone blocks remained were put towards building the eighteenth-century sea walls. Just opposite this spot is the entrance to the Templar Tunnel, discovered only in 1994. The bottom part of the tunnel is cut from the bedrock, while the upper part is a barrel vault built of hewn stone. The section of the tunnel that runs westwards under the sea to the Templar fortress is not accessible, but you can follow the tunnel for a thousand feet eastwards under the old Pisan quarter to where it emerges at the Khan al-Shuna, the Grain Inn, which stands on twelfth century foundations.

  Built against the northern land walls is the eighteenth-century Ottoman citadel, the largest building in Acre, which was built over the remains of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Hospitaller headquarters which have been excavated and cleared by archaeologists. What stands revealed is the Crusader Underground City, an immense and majestic complex of halls, storerooms, hospice and crypt arranged in four wings around a courtyard. Vast as the complex is, this is only a single level of what was once a four-storey building. It is the largest surviving Crusader structure in Israel, and yet according to contemporary accounts the now vanished Templar fortress was far grander.

  Syria

  Tortosa of the Crusaders, known today as Tartus, was an important pilgrimage port and a strategic gateway between the Mediterranean and the Syrian interior. Tartus stands at the seaward end of the Homs Gap, which cuts through the Jebel al-Sariya, the coastal mountain range, while at the eastern end of the gap lies the important city of Homs and beyond that Damascus, which together with Cairo in Egypt was the mustering place of Muslim forces directed against the Franks of Outremer. In defence against this threat the Templars fortified Tortosa, whose cathedral stands as the finest survival of Crusader religious architecture outside Jerusalem, and in the mountains they built Chastel Blanc, or Safita as it is known today, which together with the nearby Hospitaller castle of Krak des Chevaliers gave the Crusaders complete control over the one important route between the interior of Syria and the sea. In 1291, the year when Outremer was overwhelmed by the final Mameluke assault, the Templars at Tortosa hung on two months longer than the defenders at Acre, and they clung on to their offshore island of Arwad for yet eleven years more.

  TARTUS (TORTOSA)

  The old quarter of Tartus, Tortosa of the Templars, is built within the remains of the Crusader citadel. A good section of its sea wall runs along the Mediterranean, while on the landward sides the citadel is encircled by an inner and outer wall. Much of these land walls survive, though they can be difficult to follow because houses have been built into the arches and bastions and are fixed against the walls themselves. The citadel occupied less than a quarter of the Crusader city and that too was surrounded by a wall, almost entirely vanished now, its southern end marked by a free-standing square tower about 500 yards to the south of the citadel and just opposite the little harbour where you can catch a launch to the island of Arwad.

  Tortosa was originally in the hands of the Count of Tripoli (Trablus down the coast in northern Lebanon) who placed it in the care of the Templars following its brief occupation by Nur al-Din in 1152. The knights held out against Saladin’s siege in 1188 by bolting themselves inside the keep, which rises just behind the sea wall. Entering through an opening in the sea wall you thread your way through the tangle of streets and jumble of habitations that fill the citadel enclosure. A little square with a leafy café opens up immediately behind the remains of the Templars’ keep. On the north side of the square are the traces of a thirteenth-century Templar banqueting hall, while to the northeast are the remains of their chapel.

  But what is especially worth seeing is the Cathedral of Our Lady of Tortosa, which lies 300 yards to the southeast, beyond the citadel walls but within what was the line of the Templars’ city walls. If in doubt you can ask for the kanisa, church, or the mathaf, museum, which is what the cathedral has become, though during the centuries following the withdrawal of the Crusaders from the Holy Land it served as a mosque, a stables and an Ottoman barracks. A chapel, reputedly the first dedicated to the Virgin, is known to have been built here in the third century, long before the Roman Empire officially tolerated Christianity. When two centuries later the chapel was felled by an earthquake, the disaster was proclaimed a miracle, for the altar had survived. The Count of Tripoli built upon this history when he began construction of the cathedral in 1123 to house the miraculous altar and receive the prayers of pilgrims. But the church you see today was largely rebuilt by the Templars after they withstood Saladin’s attack on Tortosa in 1188 when he destroyed most of the city, including much of the cathedral.

  You enter Our Lady of Tortosa from the west, where the cathedral presents a blank wall pierced only by a small door, above which is a triangular arrangement of windows with slightly pointed arches marking the transition from the Romanesque to the Gothic. The impression is more of a fortress than a church, and you notice the vestiges of corner towers that would have served a defensive purpose. Not that it was of any help to eighteen-year-old Raymond, heir to the thrones of Antioch and Tripoli, who in 1213 was stabbed to death outside this door by two Assassins.

  When you step inside you discover a medieval French cathedral, the most graceful religious building of the Crusaders in Syria. It is bare of Christian ornament, and its empty volume swallows the whispers of occasional visitors. Undazzled by detail, your eyes follow the trajectories of massive arches which soar from acanthus capitals, and you are impressed with the sense that Our Lady of Tortosa was built by men who meant to stay in the Holy Land forever.

  SAFITA (CHASTEL BLANC)

  Safita is approached through ascending terraces of orchards and olive groves. The town of stone-built houses painted white and pink, now an attractive summer mountain resort, has grown up around the castle the Templars called Chastel Blanc, an outpost of Tortosa against Assassin territory to the northeast and contributing towards the defence of the Homs Gap. The encircling walls of the fortress are gone but their pattern remains evident in the layout of streets and houses; what remains is the massive hilltop keep, visible against the sky for miles in every direction.

  As Chastel Blanc was a Templar fortress it should come as no surprise that on entering the keep you discover that the ground floor was built as a church. Its high and dimly lit vaulted nave is rounded off by an apse at the east end with a sacristy on each side. The church was never turned into a mosque nor deconsecrated, and it now serves the Greek Orthodox community which moved here in the nineteenth century after being squeezed out of the Hauran in southern Syria by the Druze. A staircase to the right of the doorway takes you up to the first floor, which served as an armoury and housed the garrison. A further staircase leads to the open terrace at the top of the tower, in part still crenellated, with panoramic views of the town and the surrounding landscape, ranging as far as Krak des Chevaliers along the horizon to the southeast and a glimpse of the Mediterranean to the west.

  KRAK DES CHEVALIERS

  Krak des Chevaliers, known in Arabic as Qalaat al-Husn, was a Hospitaller castle, not a Templar one, but it is mentioned here because it was part of that network of defences in the southern Jebel al-Sariya and along the Syrian coast that was the shared
responsibility of the two military orders. Krak is also almost entirely undamaged and is a superb example of the concentric system, with one defensive wall set within the other, each one higher than the one before, which allowed for successive stages of retreat if need be, the defenders always having the advantage of dominating the attackers from a greater height. Situated on a mountain ridge within sight of Safita and overlooking the Homs Gap, the castle was built and expanded in phases by the Hospitallers from 1144 onwards. Its control of this strategic corridor and its forward position, so close to Homs and Hama and nearly intersecting the interior route between Damascus and Aleppo, caused one Saracen chronicler to describe it as ‘a bone stuck in the very throat of the Muslims’. Yet despite repeated attempts against it, Krak held firm, and even Saladin, after his great victory over the Kingdom of Jerusalem at Hattin in 1187, took one look at its defences and marched away.

  After climbing up a dark vaulted switchback ramp and passing through a portcullis you enter the court, a narrow and economical space faced on one side with an elegant loggia, where the light sifts through fine stone tracery reminiscent of Rheims. ‘Grace, wisdom and beauty you may enjoy’, runs the Latin inscription cut into the stone, ‘but beware pride which alone can tarnish all the rest.’ Beyond the loggia is a great dining hall and behind that a huge nave-like chamber, at one time filled with kitchens and bakeries, granaries and storage jars, for siege was always expected and the major castles were stocked with provisions to last up to five years. Opposite the loggia is a barrel-vaulted twelfth-century chapel built in the Romanesque style and later converted to a mosque.

  The best place to appreciate the magnificence of Krak’s position is from the Warden’s Tower where a spiral staircase rises to a graceful and voluminous chamber, the Grand Master’s apartment. Below you, like some giant nautilus, swirl the concentric circles of the castle’s defences, the vast structure seeming to sail like a battleship high above rolling waves of orchards and wheat fields, a bountiful landscape as familiar as Provence.

  Krak was not taken; it was given away. In the last years of Outremer, Krak and Safita and the other mountain castles became isolated, vulnerable and undermanned outposts facing the gathering storm of an overwhelming Mameluke enemy. Finally, after Krak had been in Christian hands for 161 years, and after a month’s siege, the Hospitaller knights accepted Sultan Baybars’ offer of safe passage and in 1271 rode to Tortosa of the Templars and the sea for the last time.

  ARWAD (RUAD)

  Known to the Templars as Ruad, Arwad lies two miles off the coast of Syria, opposite Tartus. A fishing town almost completely covers the little island. There are no streets, only twisting lanes with narrowing passages, and in their midst the Crusader castle from where the Templars from Tortosa clung to a view of Christendom’s lost prize for eleven years longer, until 1302.

  One of an endless series of launches from Tartus lands you at the island’s harbour where fishermen mend their nets near restaurants and cafés which serve the constant stream of daytrippers. Behind these are the walls of a small Muslim castle, and by this is the market, which twists back into the town. Follow this to higher ground towards the west side of the island and you come to the Crusader fortress, probably thirteenth century, with massive round corner towers. This was the last outpost of the Templars; now it is the local museum. Next to its gate is a carved relief of a lion chained to a palm, a declaration made in vain that the Crusaders were forever attached to Outremer.

  Europe

  The Templars in the West

  By the time of their downfall in 1307 the Templars had built up a network of at least 870 castles and preceptories (that is houses and estates) throughout almost every European country which adhered to the Roman Catholic faith. But overwhelmingly their principal properties were in France, with lesser numbers in the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal) and Britain. Today the situation is reversed. The most numerous Templar survivals are in Britain, Spain and Portugal, but owing to the destruction of the Templars by King Philip IV there is almost nothing to see in France.

  Nevertheless it is still possible to follow the drama of events in France. Wandering round the Temple quarter in Paris, where the Templar leaders were arrested at dawn, and going to the spot along the Seine where the last Grand Master, James of Molay, was bound to a stake and burnt to death, works powerfully on the imagination and helps bring the climactic history of the order alive. In Spain and Portugal, countries which the Templars helped liberate from Muslim occupation, the order was protected and continued in new guises. For this reason several magnificent Templar castles and churches have survived there more or less intact. Much can be seen in Britain, too, where Templars were treated lightly and their properties largely returned to the noble families which had donated them to the order.

  France

  Perhaps no country in the West is more associated with the Templars than France. Their dramatic rise and fall was played out in such places as Troyes, Paris and Chinon. But the assault on the Templars by the French crown was so vicious and complete that very little remains to be seen. The ghosts of the Templars still inhabit certain quarters of Paris, however, and you can walk in their footsteps today.

  PARIS: THE TEMPLE

  The Paris Temple was in the area known today as the Marais, which is on the Right Bank just west of the Bastille. The Marais is one of the most atmospheric parts of Paris; it was left largely untouched by Baron Haussmann, the nineteenth-century planner whose love of the straight line and the grand vista led him to demolish great swathes of the old city to create the long broad boulevards lined by six- to seven-storey buildings with uniform grey facades and mansard roofs that are the architectural hallmark of Paris today. Instead the Marais is a warren of enchanting narrow streets which preserve magnificent Renaissance mansions built round intimate courtyards and humbler but no less appealing seventeenth- and eighteenth-century streets of stucco facades and slatted shutters. Yet the area was nothing more than a riverside swamp (marais) until the Knights Templar drained the land in the 1140s and built their headquarters in its northern part, then outside the city walls, in what is now called the Quartier du Temple.

  Now nothing remains of the Paris Temple except the name itself. But the rues du Temple, Bretagne, Picardie and Beranger more or less define the place occupied by the Templars’ French headquarters, which was a considerable compound fortified with walls and towers to which they added, in the late thirteenth century, a powerfully built keep which was nearly twice as high as the White Tower, the keep at the heart of the Tower of London. The Templar keep in Paris was the main strongroom for the Templar bank, which was also, in effect, the treasury of the kings of France.

  The close relationship between the French crown and the Templars probably explains why King Philip IV’s officials were able to walk right in to the Temple at dawn on Friday 13 October 1307. Their action was so sudden, and the shock and surprise so complete, that there was no resistance. The keep, which had been the Templars’ stronghold, immediately became their prison, and the two thousand or so Templars arrested simultaneously throughout France were also brought here for incarceration, examination and torture.

  After the abolition of the Templars, the Paris Temple became the abode of artisans and debtors eager to avoid official regulations by living outside the city walls. But a new wall built in 1357 brought the Temple within the embrace of the growing city where it remained standing for four and a half centuries more. During the French Revolution King Louis XVI was imprisoned in the Templar keep and it was from there in January 1793 that he was led out to the guillotine in what is now the Place de la Concorde. In 1808 the keep was demolished by Napoleon, who was eager to eradicate anything that might become a focus of sympathy for the royal family.

  * * *

  Ile des Javiaux: the Burning of the Last Templars

  On the evening of 18 March 1314 James of Molay, the Templar Grand Master, and Geoffrey of Charney, the Templar’s master of Normandy, were burnt at the s
take on the Ile de Javiaux in the Seine. It is said that as James of Molay was bound to the stake he asked to be allowed to face the Cathedral of Notre Dame. You can revisit the scene, but you must make allowances for changes in the river. Medieval maps of Paris show four islands in the Seine. The westernmost is the Ile de la Cité with the Cathedral of Notre Dame. The next two islands to the east are shown as uninhabited; they have since joined together to form the Ile St Louis. The easternmost island of the four, which is also shown as uninhabited, is the Ile des Javiaux–but there is no island there today. Instead the island has become attached to the north bank of the Seine, and what was once the river channel to the north is now the Boulevard Morland. Along the Quai Henri IV, which follows the outline of what was the southern side of the Ile des Javiaux, there is a plaque which reads: A cet endroit Jacques de Molay dernier grand maitre de l’ordre du Temple été brulé le 18 Mars 1314–‘On this spot James of Molay, the last Grand Master of the Order of the Temple, was burned on 18 March 1314’. The Cathedral of Notre Dame still forms part of the view.