A History of the Crusades

by Jonathan Riley-Smith

  The Trial of the Templars

  While other orders were assuming new roles, the Temple was abolished. In October 1307—the order’s headquarters were then still in Cyprus—the Templars in France were suddenly arrested on the initiative of King Philip IV. It was claimed that during admission ceremonies recruits were forced to deny Christ, to spit on the cross, and to engage in indecent kissing; brethren were also accused of worshipping idols, and the order was said to encourage homosexual practices. Pope Clement V protested against Philip’s action, but after the Templar master, James of Molay, and numerous Templars had made confessions, he ordered all western rulers to arrest the Templars and seize their property. The only district where considerable difficulty was encountered in implementing the pope’s instructions was Aragon, where the Templars shut themselves up in their castles and resisted, in some cases for more than a year. In the early months of 1308 further investigation of the accusations was delayed by squabbles between Philip and the pope, but by 1311 inquiries had been conducted by inquisitors and prelates in all countries of the West. The results varied. Although in France and some parts of Italy most Templars admitted the more serious charges, no confessions on these issues were obtained in Cyprus, Aragon, Castile, or Portugal, while in England only three Templars admitted the truth of the main accusations. It was against this background that the Council of Vienne met late in 1311 to decide the fate of the order. A group of Templars who arrived to plead in the order’s defence were not heard, although the majority of the prelates present felt that they should be given a hearing; and on 22 March 1312, two days after Philip IV had arrived at Vienne, Clement pronounced the abolition of the order. Most of the surviving Templars were quickly pensioned off, but the fate of Templar property was an issue which was not so easily resolved.

  Since the time of the trial there have been two main topics of discussion concerning the suppression of the Templars. The first concerns their guilt or innocence, and the second the motives of Philip IV. It is difficult to believe that the Templars were guilty of the more serious offences of which they were accused. The absence of incriminating evidence, such as idols and copies of secret statutes, particularly in France, where the Templars were taken by surprise, is in itself significant. Furthermore, the testimonies of those who confessed to the more important charges are hardly convincing: they are not consistent, and no plausible explanations were advanced for the introduction of the practices mentioned in the articles of accusation, while even in France none sought to defend the alleged activities. The confessions convey the impression that large numbers of Templars were doing what none of them believed in; and some French Templars later retracted their confessions, a step that would have been of no benefit to the guilty. Nor is it likely that, if the practices had been of long duration, they would have escaped detection earlier, for in the Temple, as in other orders, there had been apostasies, and many brethren had made confessions before the trial to non-Templar priests. In this context, it is noteworthy that during the trial no witness who had heard Templar confessions before 1307 claimed to have encountered error. It should also be remembered that the accusations against the Templars were not new: precedents can be found in charges made earlier against alleged heretics or against Muslims. There remains the fact that many Templars did confess; but this result was achieved through persistent and skilful interrogation, deprivation, and torture: the innocent have often been found guilty by these means.

  It is more difficult to discern the motivation behind the arrest of the French Templars, partly because there has been uncertainty about the extent of the king’s own involvement in decision-making. It has commonly been argued that the French crown was in need of money and that the motive was financial. Certainly the French king, like all other rulers, did obtain short-term financial benefit while Templar property was under his control. But this is not necessarily an indication of the primary motive; and the French government does not seem to have pressed persistently for long-term financial advantages. The further argument has been advanced that the crown was seeking to extend its authority and could not tolerate an independent, military, and aristocratic organization within its kingdom. But in France the Temple was scarcely military in character; its membership was not primarily aristocratic; and its independence was in practice limited. The trial has also been interpreted as an affirmation of monarchical power over that of the papacy. Yet a case involving heresy and idolatry was hardly best suited for the purpose: the French government had to accept that passing judgement on the order was a matter for the pope, even if it was able to browbeat and influence him. Some contemporaries set the trial against the background of recent proposals which were partly designed to extend French influence in the Holy Land; but it is not clear that any of these emanated from the French government and it is difficult to relate them to the crown’s stance during the trial. It is possible, however, that Philip actually believed rumours which had been circulating about the Templars. He seems to have become increasingly preoccupied with matters of religion after the death of his wife in 1305, and he may have doubted whether the pope would take what he would have regarded as adequate action. But it is difficult to reach definitive conclusions.

  The early fourteenth century in many ways marks the end of the first stage of the history of the military orders. Yet, although the Temple was abolished and all orders criticized, the institution was still seen to be of value, even though in the fourteenth century the orders’ roles were being modified.

  10

  Islam and the Crusades

  1096–1699

  ROBERT IRWIN

  Expectations of the Day

  DETAILS of how the world would end were so well known to medieval Muslims that the fourteenth-century Arab chronicler, Ibn Kathir, felt able to round off his chronicle of Islamic history, The Beginning and the End, with a circumstantial account of the expected sequence of events. Many Muslims in the crusading period believed that the Last Days would be inaugurated by a dark sun rising in the west, followed by the appearance of the barbarous hordes of Gog and Magog. Then the hordes of Gog and Magog would disappear (and, according to one account written in twelfth-century Syria, they would drink Lake Tiberias dry before heading off east). The appearance of Gog and Magog would be followed by that of the one-eyed Antichrist, Dajjal, who would ride through Palestine on an ass, followed by a retinue of 70,000 Jews. Dajjal would perform false miracles in parody of Jesus. But after forty days Jesus would descend from the heavens and slay the Antichrist, before destroying the cross and calling on all people to follow the religion of Islam. Finally the sun would set in the east, the first blast of the trumpet would sound and with it all living things would die. At the second blast every man and woman who had ever lived would be resurrected and brought to Jerusalem to be judged. Other accounts gave slightly differing chronologies and some stressed the role of the Mahdi, a divinely guided figure who would appear in the Last Days, prior to the appearance of the Antichrist, and who would bring victory and justice to the Muslims.

  Speculations about the Last Days and the role of the Mahdi in them were frequently intertwined with prophecies about Islam’s triumph over Christianity and about the future fates of Jerusalem, Constantinople, and Rome. According to a hadith, or saying, attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, which was already circulating before the coming of the First Crusade, ‘The Hour will not come until God gives my community victory over Constantinople.’ Apart from hadiths, much apocalyptic material was spuriously attributed to Ka‘b ibn al-Akhbar, a seventh-century companion of the Prophet. A literary genre of malahim (literally ‘slaughterings’), writings dealing with the fierce wars of the Last Days, was spuriously attributed to the biblical prophet Daniel, or, later, the thirteenth-century Andalusian Sufi mystic, Ibn al-Arabi. Much of the early malahim literature was produced at a time when Muslims were struggling to defend their Syrian territory from Byzantine attempts to retake it. The prophecies tended to stress that the Muslims would face many hardships
and setbacks—they might even lose Jerusalem to the Christians for a while—before ultimately triumphing. There were tales of a talismanic statue standing in the centre of Constantinople, which used to hold a sphere, on which were written the words ‘I will reign over the world as long as this sphere is in my hands’, but Arab sources reported that the sphere was no longer in the statue’s hand. According to some Muslim legends it was the Mahdi who would conquer Constantinople, after first having taken Rome. In the period just prior to the coming of the First Crusade, Muslim (and Jewish) expectations were particularly focused on the imminence of the Muslim year 500 AH (corresponding to ad 1106–7).

  For Muslims, Christians, and Jews the late eleventh-century Near East was a time of acute insecurity. While some expected the revival of the Islamic faith at the end of the fifth Islamic century, others fearfully awaited the appearance of the Mahdi and the End of the World. At a more mundane level, many Muslims hoped for a decisive victory in the long-drawn-out struggle for control of Syria between the Fatimid caliphs of Egypt and the Seljuk sultans in the eastern Islamic lands. Whatever people were expecting it certainly was not a religiously inspired invasion of peoples from western Europe.

  A Middle Eastern Mosaic

  The success of the First Crusade and the establishment of Christian principalities in the Near East was one of the relatively minor consequences of the disintegration of the Seljuk sultanate after the death of the Sultan Malik-Shah in 1092. The tribal traditions of the Seljuk Turks favoured the sharing of rule amongst the family and, after Malik-Shah’s death, his kinsmen fought over his empire, in Iran, Transoxania, Caucasus, Iraq, and Syria. Turkish generals and client warlords in Syria and elsewhere supported rival princes and pursued increasingly independent local policies. At the same time, generals in the service of the Egyptian Fatimids took advantage of Seljuk disarray to make gains at their expense in Palestine and Syria. Barkayaruq, the eldest son of Malik-Shah, struggled to establish a precarious suzerainty over the heartlands of the empire, but he was still only the senior figure in a territorial confederation when he died in 1105.

  From 1038 onwards, the Seljuk sultans had pretended to rule as the servants of the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad and as the defenders of the Sunni Islamic faith. In practice, the eleventh-century Abbasids had little effective political authority, even within the city of Baghdad, and the Caliph al-Mustazhir (1094–1118) had plenty of time to pursue his enthusiasm for poetry and calligraphy. Even so, the Abbasid caliph was, formally at least, recognized as the political and religious head of the Islamic world by most Sunni Muslims. Sunni Muslims took their name from the Sunna, or words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad and his Companions, a body of orally transmitted traditions which helped shape both Islamic law (the Sharia) and the conduct of individual Muslims. Sunni Muslims recognized the supreme political authority of the caliphs, even though this authority was by now a legalistic fiction.

  In this they differed from Shi‘i Muslims who held that ultimate religious and political authority could only be held by ‘Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law, and then by the imams who were his descendants and spiritual successors. Shi‘a ‘Ali meant the party of Ali. One major group of Shi‘is held that after the disappearance, or occultation, of the twelfth imam in 878, ultimate spiritual authority was in abeyance. Twelver Shi‘is waited for the return of the Hidden Imam and with his coming the imposition of Islamic justice on the whole world. However, another group of Shi‘is, the Isma‘ilis, held that it was after the disappearance in 760 of Isma‘il, whom they regarded as the rightful seventh imam, that the imamate had gone into occultation. In the course of the eleventh century there were further schisms, as first the Druze and then the Nizari Isma‘ilis, or Assassins, broke away from and opposed the pretensions of the Isma‘ili Fatimid caliphate in Cairo.

  Although it is impossible to be dogmatic on such a matter, it seems probable that most Muslims in Greater Syria (that is Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine) in the eleventh and twelfth centuries were Sunnis who professed allegiance to the Abbasid caliphs. However, the distinctions between Sunni and Shi‘i doctrines and rituals were not always very clear and many Sunnis had Shi‘i leanings, while there were many Shi‘is who had no compunctions about taking service with the Abbasid caliphs and the Seljuk sultans. Sunnis and Shi‘is lived cheek by jowl in the big Muslim cities. Although the Sunnis were in the majority, the Shi‘i minority was very large and in some parts of Syria the Shi‘is were in the majority. Most Syrian Shi‘is were probably Twelvers, but supporters of the Assassin version of Isma‘ilism made repeated attempts to take over in Aleppo and other big Syrian towns in the early twelfth century, before finally electing to create a small territorial principality centred around the fortress of Masyaf in the Syrian highlands.

  Outside the territories of the Fatimid caliph, in most other regions of the Islamic world Shi‘is found themselves in an adversarial position. Although modern Iran is overwhelmingly Shi‘i, in the medieval period it was a bastion of Sunnism. However, Hasan-i Sabah, who was born in Iran, but of Arab descent, established an Isma‘ili Assassin enclave in the highlands south of the Caspian Sea. His followers seized the castle of Alamut in 1090 and subsequently other castles in the region fell under Isma‘ili control.

  Evidently it would be a mistake to think of Greater Syria prior to the coming of the First Crusade as monolithically Muslim. Not only were there religious schisms among the Muslims, but, as has been described in Chapter 6, there were still significant communities of native Christians in both the cities and the countryside. One group of Christians, the Melkites (or Orthodox), looked to the Byzantine emperor for leadership and protection, but other Christian sects—among them the Jacobites, Nestorians, and Maronites—may well have preferred to practise their faith freely under Muslim overlords. Many found advancement under Muslim rulers, and native Christians were particularly prominent in the urban bureaucracies and in medicine. The prominence of Christians was even more marked in Egypt, where Copts (Egyptian Monophysites) dominated the fiscal bureaucracy, while some army officers were Armenian Christians.

  The political situation of the Near East on the eve of the First Crusade was, if anything, more complex than the religious one; and indeed religious and political issues are often not easy to separate in an Islamic context. The most significant feature of Islamic history in the late eleventh and early twelfth century was the break-up of the empire of the greater Seljuks. After the death of Malik-Shah, the Caliph al-Mustazhir tried alternately to mediate between warring Seljuk siblings and to profit from their conflict by increasing his independent authority in Baghdad. Similarly, elsewhere in the disintegrating Seljuk empire, governors and soldiers appointed to rule over Seljuk towns and provinces took advantage of dynastic strife to establish themselves as independent rulers. Some of those who did so used their formal tenure of the office of atabak (literally ‘fatherprince’) to conceal the fact of their usurpation of independent power. An atabak was a sort of military nanny who was deputed to protect and advise an under-age scion of the Seljuk dynasty who had been sent out as a provincial governor. However, as one might expect, in one province after another the atabaks set the princes aside and effectively took independent power for themselves. Thus, for example, Mosul in the 1090s had come under the control of Karbuqa, its atabak. Elsewhere in Iraq, western Iran, and Syria, independent Turkish warlords and ambitious mercenaries, as well as usurping atabaks, sought to increase their territories at each other’s expense.

  In the late eleventh century Greater Syria was a vast war zone fought over by generals and former clients of the Seljuks on the one hand and armies in the service of the Fatimid caliphs in Egypt on the other. From 1064 onwards Turkomans, nomadic Turkish tribal forces, entered Syria. These Turkomans were not under the control of the Seljuk Sultan, but a few years later regular Seljuk troops occupied a large part of Syria, including the axis of large Muslim towns in the Syrian interior, running from Aleppo in the north, via Hama and Homs, to Damascus in the south. Howeve
r the Seljuks and their allies were less successful in taking coastal towns and the Fatimids still retained a presence on the coast and in Palestine.

  On the eve of the First Crusade, Aleppo and most of northern Syria was ruled, or if not ruled at least claimed, by Ridwan, a nephew of Malik-Shah. Ridwan was later to come under the influence of Assassin agents and was always unpopular in Aleppo. Not only was he unpopular in that city, but his ambitions in Syria were also opposed by his younger brother Duqaq, who was nominal ruler of Damascus. Moreover the city of Antioch to the west of Aleppo governed by the emir Yaghi Siyan was allied with Damascus against Aleppo. Antioch’s Muslim population was probably small, for until 1084 it had been a Byzantine city. Ridwan’s territory was also threatened from the east by the ambitions of Karbuqa, the atabak of Mosul.

  Almost every town in Syria seemed to have its own ruler. Many of those rulers were Turks and soldiers. Thus Homs was under the control of Janah al-Dawla, another Turkish atabak. It is worth noting here that although most of Syria’s population was Arab, most of the military élite in the region was of Turkish and, to a lesser extent, Kurdish stock. However, from 1086 onwards, the town and fortress of Shayzar in northern Syria were ruled by the Banu Munqidh, an Arab clan of Twelver Shi‘ites. The city port of Tripoli had successfully rebelled against the Fatimids in 1070 and was governed by a dynasty of qadis (judges) until its capture by the crusaders in 1109. It had a predominantly Shi‘ite population. The port of Jabala was also an independent republic. The port of Beirut was governed by the Fatimids and supplied by their fleets. Tyre, Sidon, and Acre were also under Fatimid control, but only since 1089 and only precariously so and there were repeated revolts against Egyptian rule.