For a while the papal commission stalled King Philip’s momentum, but the weakening Clement was driven toward a definitive pronouncement at the Council of Vienne in March 1312. The arrival of King Philip and an armed force ensured that the pope made the “correct” statement. On March 22 Clement held a secret meeting at which it was decided to suppress the Order and on April 3 a formal announcement was read out in public. In language saturated with biblical texts Clement made his position known: “Not slight is the fornication of this house, immolating its sons, giving them up and consecrating them to demons and not to God, but to gods whom they do not know. Therefore this house will be desolate and in disgrace, cursed and uninhabited . . . let it not be lived in but reduced to a wilderness. Let everyone be astonished at it and hiss at all its wounds [Jeremiah 50:12–13].”15 The pope noted how, initially at least, he had been unwilling to believe the stories that circulated about the order. He then spoke of Philip’s “zeal for the orthodox faith,” and he was careful to distance the king from any hint of financial concerns. The absolution granted to the Templar leaders at Chinon was seemingly disregarded when Clement outlined the various confessions, including that of James of Molay, and he concluded that the brethren were guilty of apostasy, idolatry, sodomy, and various other heresies. He added that his own officers had made further enquiries and claimed that these had unearthed more incriminating information.
A majority of the council favored giving the Order a chance to defend itself, but Clement adjudged that “although legal process against the Order up to now does not permit its canonical condemnation as heretical . . . its good name has been largely taken away by the heresies attributed to it.” Because, he argued, so many individuals were guilty of heresy the order as a whole remained suspect and for that reason no one of any caliber would wish to join it in future, thus it was rendered worthless in the task of recovering the Holy Land. Clement felt that further delay would only mean the final dilapidation of Templar property—land given to them in good faith to aid Christ’s cause. “Therefore, with a sad heart . . . we suppress the Order of Templars, and its rule and habit and name, by an inviolable and perpetual decree and we entirely forbid that anyone from now on enter the Order, or receive its habit or presume to behave as a Templar.”16 Those brothers who had confessed and been absolved were to become Knights Hospitaller, while many of those who refused to recant were imprisoned. Templar lands were usually given over to other Military Orders, particularly the Hospitallers; within a couple of years, however, the rapacious King Philip had managed to acquire large amounts of this property in France.17
For the leading Templars, however, there was to be little mercy. They had languished in prison at Gisors since 1310 but were not brought to trial in Paris until December 1313.18 James was to be tried on the basis of his initial confession, which he had retracted once, but since returned to. At a public gathering in front of the church of Notre Dame he, along with three senior colleagues, was sentenced to life imprisonment. Two of the men remained silent, but James, along with Geoffrey of Charney, commander of the Templars in Normandy, stood up. Surely aware of the danger, once again they denied everything they had confessed, stubbornly refuted the charges against them, and affirmed that they were good Christians. They argued passionately that they had never turned aside from their task and had suffered for God and justice. The presiding cardinals were taken aback and ordered the men to be kept under guard until the matter could be debated further. Calamitously for the prisoners, however, their custodian was a royal official who told the king. Philip snapped into action: he quickly consulted his advisers and, without any reference to the Church authorities, he commanded the two men to be burned at the stake that very day. They were sent to the little island at the tip of the Île de la Cité, below the gardens of the king’s palace (today known as the place du Vert-Galant; a memorial plaque marks the place of this shameful episode) where the stake was set up. A royal cleric, Geoffrey of Paris, witnessed the scene and wrote a verse chronicle of the event. James’s serene bearing at this terrible moment profoundly moved those present:
The master, who saw the fire ready,
Stripped with no sign of fear.
And, as I myself saw, placed himself
Quite naked in his shirt
Freely and with good appearance;
Never did he tremble
No matter how much he was pulled and jostled.
They took him to tie him to the stake
And without fear he allowed them to tie him.
They bound his hands with a rope
But he said to them: “Gentlemen, at least
Let me join my hands a little
And make a prayer to God
For now the time is fitting.
Here I see my judgement
When death freely suits me;
God knows who is in the wrong and has sinned.
Soon misfortune will come
To those who have wrongly condemned us:
God will avenge our death.
Gentlemen,” he said, “make no mistake,
All those who are against us
Will have to suffer because of us.
In that belief I wish to die . . . ”
And so gently did death take him
That everyone marvelled.19
Through his intimidation of the papacy and by his brutal and relentless persecution of the Templars, King Philip achieved something beyond the powers of the Muslims of the Near East: the destruction of a Military Order. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that some of their difficulties were self-inflicted: for example, their reception ceremonies were arcane and secretive, yet in truth, they were a flawed, rather than a heretical, organization and had been the victims of a greedy and paranoid king. Nowhere other than France were they treated with such barbarity: elsewhere their membership simply dwindled and then expired; by the late fourteenth century the Templars were gone forever.20 By coincidence—or fate, if you believed the Templars’ supporters—James’s final curse came true: one month later Pope Clement died and in November of the same year King Philip was killed in a riding accident.
The problems endured by the Templars help to illustrate the crisis that faced the crusading movement after the fall of Acre—but it would be wrong to suggest that there was no hope of recovering the Holy Land. The Christians still held Cyprus as a base in the eastern Mediterranean and for a short time there seemed the possibility of an alliance with the Ilkhan Mongols of Persia, who, in 1299, had inflicted a heavy defeat on the Mamluks and then took Jerusalem. Rumors flashed across Europe that the Mongol khan Ghazan had handed over the Holy Sepulchre to local Christians. Pope Boniface VIII solemnly announced as much to Edward I of England in a letter of April 7, 1300, and the Christian West briefly regarded Ghazan as an instrument of divine will. The pope tried to fan enthusiasm for a new crusade but once the truth emerged this bubble of excitement quickly burst: Ghazan had not surrendered Jerusalem and it was soon under Mamluk rule again. Furthermore, the khan was not, as rumored, a Christian (he was a Muslim), although in 1302 he sent an embassy to Edward I that sought cooperation against the Mamluks.21
An intriguing feature of this period of crusading—and really over the two generations after the fall of Acre—was the production of a large number of elaborate plans designed to hold on to, or regain, the Holy Land.22 Often produced at papal request, these so-called “Recovery Treatises” took two basic forms: either a passagium generale, that is, a papally directed, pan-Christian enterprise—rather like the First Crusade—or the use of a far more focused, professional force that aimed to strike hard at a particular target. The latter would be prefaced by a blockade of the Mamluk ports (a reflection of Christian naval superiority) and, with calls for a general peace in Europe, was to be followed up by a larger, more traditionally constituted expedition. Perhaps the plan that came the closest to fruition was that of King Philip VI of France (1328–50), who in October 1332 announced his intentions to a splendid gathering of nobles in S
ainte-Chapelle, the wondrous creation of his crusading predecessor, King (and by now Saint) Louis IX. The papacy tried hard to encourage this venture through clerical taxation and offers of generous spiritual rewards, yet public enthusiasm for the expedition was mixed.
Twice in the fourteenth century (in 1309, known as the Crusade of the Poor and 1320, the Shepherds’ Crusade) there had been unauthorized popular movements in support of a new campaign to the Levant. Thousands of people—mainly from peasant stock—gathered in northern France and headed south to the Languedoc where they had massacred the Jewish populations and then hoped to set out for the Levant. Such anarchic bands posed an intolerable threat to civil order and the authorities had to suppress them, but anti-Semitism aside, they represented a fervent desire to recover the Holy Land.23 By the time of Philip’s planned crusade, however, a wider level of skepticism proved a serious barrier to recruitment. As one contemporary chronicler wrote of the royal project: “fewer people than expected took the cross, for they had had their fingers burnt too often, and they suspected that the sermons being delivered in the name of the cross were only being given to get money.”24 Outright resistance from the French towns brought Philip’s enterprise to a halt; a year later, the beginning of the Hundred Years War compounded this and delivered a severe blow to crusades to the Holy Land. Other factors soon made their mark as well: in 1343, the Italian bankers, whose financial backing was vital to any new campaign, went into crisis; shortly afterward the Black Death broke out, and thus crusading started to slip down the list of priorities of Christian Europe.
CHIVALRIC ADVENTURERS: CRUSADES TO EGYPT AND TO THE BALTIC
Even though major expeditions became less feasible, numerous manifestations of crusading, or an evolving form of the genre, were in evidence during the latter half of the fourteenth century. These were often channeled through, or alongside, notions of chivalry—in itself a theme that had become a dominant feature of European society; in fact, with its fusion of military, aristocratic, and Christian mores, there were times when the boundary between chivalry and crusading became almost imperceptible.25 Holy wars continued to take place in the eastern Mediterranean, the Baltic, and Iberia, and one—fictional—person who fought in all three of these arenas was the knight in the Prologue of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written c. 1384. As has been argued elsewhere, this figure probably formed an accurate template of the aspirations and attitudes of leading men of the day:
A knyght ther was, and that a worthy man,
That fro the tyme that he first bigan
To riden out, he loved chivalrie,
Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisie.
Ful worthy was he in his lordes werre,
And therto hadde he riden, no man ferre,
As wel in cristendom as in hethenesse,
And evere honoured for his worthynesse;
At Alisaundre [Alexandria] he was whan it was wonne.
Ful ofte tyme he hadde the bord bigonne
Aboven all nacions in Pruce [Prussia];
In Lettow [Lithuania] hadde he reysed and in Ruce [Russia],
No Cristen man so ofte of his degree.
In Gernade [Granada] at the seege eek hadde he be
Of Algezir [Algeciras], and riden in Belmarye [Morocco].
At Lyeys [Ayash] was he and at Satalye [Satalia],
When they were wonne, and in the Grete See [Mediterrarean]
At many a noble armee hadde he be.26
It seems likely that Chaucer’s knight was a conflation of the crusading feats of the Scrope clan of Yorkshire, a family represented at all the episodes described above. But the Scropes were no aberration and their exploits were paralleled by numerous men from senior families across northern Europe (including royalty), as well as esquires and men of fortune.27 This is not to say that military activity elsewhere, such as the recurrent conflicts of the Hundred Years War, was not the dominant concern of these people, but the point remains that all of these crusading outlets were deemed worthy of the risk and the expense. For the higher echelons of society the primary attraction of such escapades was simple: to gain an honorable reputation through great feats in battle, and the fact that this service was in the armies of God—the ultimate Lord—gave it particular prestige. For men-at-arms, unemployed during periods of peace between the major European wars, more basic motives operated and the lure of wages was paramount, but in the case of the nobility (who had to finance their own campaigns), repeated experience would have shown that most of these adventures—especially those in northern Europe—were physically arduous and rarely profitable. Yet that was not the point: the material outlay and personal hardship were more than compensated for by the boost to one’s good name and the sense of belonging to an exclusive club, an elite group with shared values and experiences; the very pinnacle of chivalry. The escapades of two Englishmen can offer us a glimpse of this mentality: Sir Richard Waldegrave (an acquaintance of Chaucer), a well-to-do Suffolk knight from Bures Saint Mary, and Henry Bolingbroke, earl of Derby, later King Henry IV of England (1399–1413).
Over a five-year period, Richard took part in a trio of crusading enterprises: in southern Turkey in 1361, Prussia in 1363, and Egypt in 1365.28 The first and third of these campaigns were under the leadership of King Peter I of Cyprus (1359–69), a man canny enough to note this contemporary enthusiasm for individuals to venture to the eastern Mediterranean. In 1361 Waldegrave, aged twenty-three, followed the trend when he fought in the capture of the southern Turkish port of Satalia. Peter’s motives were not simply to defeat the Mamluks but also to protect Cyprus from Turkish invasion and to boost his own economy. The presence at Satalia of westerners such as Richard encouraged the king to seek further help and in 1363, aided by a period of peace between England and France, he began a two-year tour of the West. Guillaume de Machaut’s sympathetic account portrayed the king as a dynamic, persuasive leader determined to regain Jerusalem, but as we have just seen, other ideas were also in play.29 Edward III of England was adamant that he would not join the crusade, although his subjects were free to do so. King John II of France was keen to follow in the crusading footsteps of Saint Louis but his death in 1364 left the crusade’s leadership to King Peter. While much of the early preaching for the expedition was framed in terms of a broader recovery of the Holy Land, the target of the campaign was eventually revealed as the prosperous Mamluk port of Alexandria.
In spite of the enthusiastic advocacy of Pope Urban V, no crowned heads from the West took part, although a number of English and French nobles, including Richard Waldegrave, saw it as a worthy cause. Peter also employed European mercenaries (the notorious Free Companies), a measure supported by the pope, who offered indulgences to these men as a means of steering their unruly presence away from France and Italy. Spiritual rewards for hired thugs might seem a little out of tune with Pope Urban II’s original crusading ideas, but stipendiary troops had been employed on crusades for much of the thirteenth century, and, in one sense, this echoed Urban’s desire to export the lawless nobility of western Europe back in the eleventh century. Peter’s crusade was also joined by the Knights Hospitaller, who had been based on Rhodes since the fall of the Holy Land. The Hospitallers had developed an important naval function and Christian fleets worked hard to keep the seas free from Muslim raiders and to promote trade and pilgrimage. Thus—as with so many previous crusading expeditions—participants in this campaign had a plethora of interlocking, possibly contradictory, motives, and while it was endorsed by the papacy, European knights fought in a personal, rather than a national, capacity.
On Rhodes the legate “piously preached to the king’s little army on the mystery of the cross and the Lord’s Passion and gave the venerable sign of the cross to all who were setting out.”30 On October 4, 1365, the fleet departed for Alexandria—a formidable target and one that brought trepidation to the hearts of many. Peter encouraged them to be brave and he chose to blend a message of determination with the prospect of gaining fame and repu
te: “you will defeat these men, you’ll see it happen and you’ll live to talk of it!” The shallow waters outside Alexandria made for a difficult landing because the galleys needed to hold just offshore. This meant the crusaders had to jump down from their ships and wade up the beach in the face of stern enemy resistance. Peter proved his courage—“he excels them all” reported Machaut—and the king urged the troops forward: “Those are God’s enemies. . . . Forward my lords, let each man amaze his neighbour.” After successfully forcing their way onto dry land the Christians paused to consider their next move—again, expressed in terms suggestive of a spiritual and chivalric blend: “Think of our Lord helping us to win such fame against the pagans.”
After a vigorous effort the crusaders managed to set fire to one of the gates and then burst inside to take control of the city on October 10, 1365. Overnight, however, poor discipline briefly enabled the enemy to recover a gate before Peter rallied and drove the Muslims out. The visiting crusaders began to reflect on just how large a task they faced holding on to Alexandria and they started to comprehend the sheer scale of resources the Egyptians possessed. They became overwhelmed by fear of the Muslim response and demanded to depart, although Peter wanted to stay and secure the prosperity of his kingdom. He proclaimed his faith in God’s support, the strong walls of Alexandria, and the flood of people he believed would arrive from the West, inspired by his success. The legate pleaded with the Europeans to remain, couching his argument in spiritual terms: “He [the legate] showed clearly how God’s honour, the good of Christendom, and the acquisition of the city of Jerusalem hung on the retention of Alexandria . . . but by the Devil’s work, the majority stood in his way . . . they had no trust in God . . . and entirely forgot His incredible victories.”31 Machaut gave Peter’s pleas a more chivalric spin: “Honour, ladies and love, what are you going to say when you see these crowding to run away? They’ll never win glory and honour, all are marked in shame!”32 Yet the crusaders were adamant—they would leave. As they began to reembark, the Muslims poured back into the city and, for the second time in just under two hundred years (remembering Amalric of Jerusalem’s brief tenure of the city in 1167), the Christian hold on Alexandria was over within a couple of days.
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