This is reflected in the number of times that an envoy included a Templar and a Hospitaller apparently as witnesses or perhaps even bodyguards. They are rarely named; they are simply seen as representatives of their orders. The popes, including Clement V, customarily had one Templar and one Hospitaller as chamberlains. The papacy used the brothers indiscriminately as messengers and relied on loans from both orders to shore up papal finances.20
Even negative remarks were aimed at the military orders as if they were all the same. Pierre Dubois, one of Philip the Fair’s employees, wrote that the Templars and the Hospitallers should be able to live off their lands in the Holy Land and Cyprus and donate the money they gained in the West to start schools for missionaries and pay for mercenaries to fight.21
It’s possible that in 1307 King Philip the Fair was interested in condemning the Hospitallers as well as the Templars, or it may be that the Templars were just more accessible. When Jacques de Molay was summoned to meet with Pope Clement V and the king, the master of the Hospitallers, Fulk de Villeret, was supposed to be there as well. But he was “stopped in his way at Rhodes by the Saracens . . . and could not come on the date set and was given a legitimate excuse by the messengers.”22 Whew!
So Fulk escaped the fate of Jacques de Molay and the Hospitallers actually gained something by the dissolution of the Templars at the Council of Vienne, since most of the Temple property eventually reverted to them, although they had to make deals with the various kings in order to get it.
At the same time that the Templar trials were going on, the Hospitallers were busy organizing the conquest of the island of Rhodes. On August 11, 1308, Pope Clement proclaimed a special crusade to be undertaken by the Hospitallers for the defense of Cyprus and Armenia. 23 He offered indulgences to those who gave to the cause and had boxes put in the churches particularly marked for the Hospital.24Fulk de Villeret thought Rhodes was a better goal and so took that island. He was right in that it was easier to hold on to. The Hospitallers would be based at Rhodes until 1522.
Now that they were headquartered on an island, the Hospitallers concentrated on sea power. They hired a fleet of pirate corsairs that were licensed to harry Moslem trading ships and those of the Italians who did business with Moslems. The booty made a welcome addition to their income.25
In the fifteenth century the arrival of the Ottoman Turks in the east put the Hospitallers on the front lines again. They had come to terms with the familiar enemies, like the Mamluks. Now they were faced with another batch of newly converted conquerors. Under the sultan, Selim, the Ottoman armies expanded into eastern Europe and attacked Rhodes. The last Hospitaller Grand Master on Rhodes was forced to surrender the island to Selim on January 1, 1523.26
The remnants of the Hospital had no base for seven years. In 1530, the Spanish Holy Roman Emperor gave the order the islands of Gazon, Camino, and Malta. From there, the Christians still had dreams of reconquering the Holy Land.27
The Hospitallers became known as the Knights of Malta, the name they bear to this day. The next time they were conquered, it would not be by the Moslems but by the natural force known as Napoleon Bonaparte.
For the next two hundred years and more after arriving in Malta, the Hospitallers continued their rear-guard crusade through piracy. Then the French Directorate, still finding its feet after the Revolution, learned that Malta might be taken over by its enemies, the Austrians and the Russians.28
They sent Napoleon to take care of matters. He took Malta without a fight. The master and the brothers left on June 17, 1798, taking some of their relics with them. Many other relics and all the records the Hospitallers had inherited from the Templars were among the loot taken by the French soldiers. Much of the loot was put aboard Napoleon’s ship l’Orient.29
Napoleon set off to take his army for a fun summer in Egypt. “On the evening of 1 August the British fleet under Nelson caught up with the French fleet in Aboukir Bay off the north Egyptian coast and defeated it in the battle of the Nile. L’Orient was blown up and sunk, with the Order’s relics on board.”30
Just think how many questions could be settled if that ship could be found.
The next years of the former Hospitallers were exceedingly strange and included having Paul I, the Russian tsar and son of Catherine the Great, as Grand Master. That experiment didn’t last long.
In 1834 Pope Gregory XVI gave the Knights of Malta a hospital, where they returned to their original duty of taking care of poor and sick pilgrims. In this form the order has spread over the world, and even has Protestant affiliates.31
Why did the Hospitallers survive when the Templars didn’t? I believe that it was because of the things that made them different. They always said that the care of the poor and sick was their first responsibility. When times got tough, they had that to fall back on. While, like the Templars, they were involved in banking, they did not have such high-profile depositors. So the average person did not associate the Hospitallers with untold wealth.
Perhaps the Templars might have been saved if they’d simply founded a few hospitals. . . . Perhaps not.
1Helen Nicholson, The Knights Hospitaller (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2001) p. 3.
2William of Tyre, Chronicon, ed. R. B. C. Huygens (Turnholt, 1986) book 18, 4-5, pp. 814-17.
3Malcolm Barber, “The Charitable and Medical Activities of the Hospitallers and Templars, Eleventh to Fifteenth Centuries.” The Whichard Lecture, March 23, 2000, p. 6. Text at: www.ecu.edu/history/whichard/MBarberCharitable.htm
4Joshua Prawer, The Crusaders’ Kingdom: European Colonialism in the Middle Ages (London: Phoenix Press, 1972) p. 260.
5Quoted in Nicholson, p. 37 (Cartulaire 4, no. 4157) tr. Edwin James King, The Knights Hospitaller in the Holy Land (London, 1931) p. 301.
6The text of this charter is translated in Malcolm Barber and Keith Bate, The Templars: Selected Sources translated and annotated (Manchester University Press, 2002) pp. 161-62. See also chapter 8, Go Forth and Multiply.
7Nicholson, p. 6.
8Suger, abbot of St. Denis. Omnitt Opera, p. 27.
9Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium tr. Frederick Tupper and Marbury Ogle (London: Chatto and Windus, 1924) book xxiii, p. 44.
10Alan Forey, The Military Orders (London: McMillon, 1992) p. 199.
11Helen Nicholson tr., The Chronicle of the Third Crusade (Ashgate, Aldershot, 1997) pp. 240-62.
12J. M. Upton-Ward tr., The Rule of the Templars (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1992) p. 60.
13Malcolm Barber, The New Knighthood (Cambridge University Press, 1994) p. 155.
14Nicholson, p. 37. For more on Charles of Anjou please see The Templars and the Saint.
15Ibid., p. 20.
16Helen Nicholson tr., The Chronicle of the Third Crusade (Ashgate, Aldershot, 1997) p. 258.
17Ibid., p. 370.
18Peter W. Edbury tr., The Conquest of Jerusalem and the Third Crusade (Ashgate, Aldershot, 1998) p. 14.
19John Gillingham, Richard the Lionheart (New York: Times Books, 1978) p. 153.
20I. S. Robsindo, The Papacy 1037-1198 (Cambridge University Press 1990) p. 243.
21Forey, p. 218.
22Guillaume de Nangis, Chroniques capétiennes Tome II 1270-1328, tr. François Guizot (Paris: Paleo, 2002).
23Sylvia Menache, Clement V (Cambridge University Press, 1998) p. 105.
24Ibid., p. 109.
25Nicholson, p. 57.
26Ibid., p. 67.
27Ibid.
28Ibid., p. 135. The Austrians were especially angry because the French had decapitated Marie Antoinette, who had been born an Austrian princess.
29Ibid., p. 136.
30Ibid.
31Ibid., p. 144.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Grand Masters 1191-1292/93
ROBERT OF SABLÉ, 1191-1193/94
Robert of Sablé came from Anjou, the core of the lands that Richard the Lionheart controlled before he became king of England. Robert was a follower of the Lionheart who supported the revolt of Rich
ard and his elder brother Henry, “the Young King,” against their father, Henry II.1 He was in Richard’s entourage when the new king went on crusade and served both as treasurer of the king and as a messenger during the crusade.2
He must have been a very recent member of the Templars when he was elected to succeed Gerard of Ridefort, who was killed at the 1191 siege of Acre. The Eracles chronicler states, “Afterwards, the Templars elected a man of high birth who was in their house, named Brother Robert of Sablé as their master.”3 The way they express it, he may just have been visiting at the time.
On the way to the Holy Land, Richard had taken a few days off to conquer the island of Cyprus. He really didn’t need another island and so he offered to sell it to his friend Robert and his Templars. He asked only one hundred thousand bezants for the whole thing, a real bargain. 4 The Templars didn’t have that much money so they gave the king a down payment of forty thousand bezants’ worth of property and sent some men to Cyprus to tell the natives about the deal and collect the taxes.
This turned out to be a big mistake.
[T]hey thought they could govern the people of the island in the same way they treated the rural population in the land of Jerusalem. They thought they could ill-treat, beat and misuse them and imagined they could control the island of Cyprus with a force of 20 brothers. The Greeks hated their rule and were oppressed by it. . . . They rose in rebellion and came to besiege them in the castle of Nicosia. When the Templars saw such a multitude of people coming to besiege them, they were greatly taken aback. They told them that they were Christians, just as they were, that they had not come there by their own strength, and that, if they would let them quit the island of Cyprus, they would go willingly.5
The Cypriots, still smarting from the injuries inflicted by Richard’s army, preferred to take revenge on the Templars. However, the twenty brothers managed to defeat the mob and get back to Acre, where it was decided that Cyprus wasn’t worth the manpower needed to tame it.
Robert of Sablé went to Richard and asked him to return the deposit and take his island back. Richard said he’d be happy to take back Cyprus but he had decided that the property the Templars had given him in payment wasn’t worth what they had said and so he wasn’t going to give it back.6In those days there was no grace period to rethink a purchase so the Templars just had to grin and bear it.
Richard then sold the island to Guy of Lusignan. Guy had been king of Jerusalem through his wife, Sybilla. Sybilla and their two daughters had died around 1190, presumably in an epidemic. The crown, such as it was, since Jerusalem had fallen to Saladin in 1187, passed to Sybilla’s sister, Isabelle.7Guy had never been all that popular with anyone but Sybilla. He went to Richard and offered to buy the island on the same terms as those given to the Templars. Guy then borrowed money from some merchants in Tripoli and paid Richard, who had now managed to sell the island twice.8
Guy remarried and his descendants ruled Cyprus for the next three hundred years.
I don’t know if the relationship between Richard and Robert of Sablé cooled after this. Kings can get away with a lot. In 1192, when Richard decided to return to England, he asked Robert for ten knights and four sergeants to guard him on the trip.9Forced to travel through the land of his enemy, Leopold of Austria, Richard was taken captive and held two years before his ransom could be paid.
Robert did not neglect the administrative side of his job. In 1191 he made sure that the new pope, Celestine III, confirmed all the rights that previous popes had granted the Templars.10Other than that, his time as Grand Master was one of the more tranquil ones.
Robert de Sablé died on September 28, in either 1193 or 1194.
GILBERT ERAIL, 1194-1200
Gilbert was another career Templar. He had served in Jerusalem, where he was grand commander of the city in 1183.11 He then went to Spain, where he was living when he learned of his election as Grand Master.
One of the first things Gilbert did in 1194 was to get a papal confirmation of the privileges of the order.12 This was something that no Templar master ever took for granted. Those privileges were the base of the Templar economy.
He was in Acre by March 5, 1198, perhaps before.13 During his tenure the Templars became involved in property disputes with the Hospitallers over rights in the town of Vilania. This became so intense that the matter had to be settled by the pope, Innocent III.14
When Gilbert was excommunicated by the bishop of Sidon, Innocent stepped in again, saying that only he could excommunicate Templars.15I haven’t been able to find out what Gilbert had done to offend the bishop but I’m sure he was glad that he had been to renew the regulation that only the pope could excommunicate a Templar.
Gilbert died on December 21, 1200. His time as Grand Master seems to have been one of consolidation after the loss of so much land to Saladin. The fleeting mentions of his arguments with others in Acre are tantalizing but they don’t seem to have been interesting enough for chroniclers to make much of them.
PHILIPOF PLESSIS, 1201-1209
Philip was another Angevin who came to the Holy Land with Richard I. He was a younger son who had already married and had sons of his own when he left on crusade. He encouraged fighting rather than making truces with the Moslems.16While Innocent III supported him, the pope also wrote that he had succumbed to the sin of pride and abuse of his privileges.17Philip died November 12, 1209.
WILLIAM OF CHARTRES, 1210-1219
William of Chartres is also known as William of Puiset. He was from a family that had a tradition of supporting the crusading movement. Before becoming Grand Master he was wounded in an ambush by the Armenians under Leo, Roupenid prince of Cilicia.18In 1215 William was one of the signers of an agreement concerning property rights among the Templars, Hospitallers, and the Order of Santiago, brokered by Pope Alexander III.19He was also the Grand Master during the first part of the Fifth Crusade in which the Christian armies under Andrew of Hungary and the excommunicated Frederick II attempted to defeat Egypt.20William’s father, Count Milo of Bar-sur-Seine, and his brother, Walter, both fought and died on that same crusade.21 William became ill while with the crusaders in Damietta and died August 26, 1219.
PETER OF MONTAIGU, 1219-1231
Peter of Montaigu was probably elected in an emergency meeting of the order at Damietta, following the death of William of Chartres. Like William, Peter’s family was very much involved in the religious life of the East. Peter’s brother, Guérin, was Grand Master of the Hospital, giving a whole new meaning to the fraternal rivalry between the two orders. One of his uncles was Eustorge, archbishop of Nicosia. 22 Another uncle, Bernard, was bishop of Puy, in the French Alps. Peter also had a cousin who didn’t enter the religious life but married on Cyprus and died there, fighting imperial troops.23
Although his family was from the Auvergne region of France, Peter spent his early career in Spain and Provence, becoming master of the Templars of the region in 1206.24He distinguished himself in battle in Spain, especially at the battle of al-Aqsa, where he and his Templars arrived in time to save the day.25
The Fifth Crusade was another resounding defeat and Peter was one of those who had to mop up. He wrote a letter of frustration to the preceptor in England, Alan Martel. In it he describes the misery of the army when the Egyptians opened the sluice gates in the Nile Delta, cutting off the supply routes. “Destitute of provisions, the army of Christ could neither proceed further nor retreat nor flee anywhere, . . . It was trapped like a fish in a net.”26
The letter ends like most from the crusades, with a plea for more funds.
Peter was also caught up in the struggle between the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, and the popes. This was the old battle between the temporal and spiritual powers. Italy was part of Frederick’s inheritance, which brought him into conflict with the Papal States. Then he married Isabelle, the heiress to the throne of Jerusalem, which gave him some interest in retaking the city. Frederick managed to be excommunicated by a number of popes, dyin
g unrepentant in 1250.
When Frederick arrived in Acre, after the defeat of the army at Damietta, the Templars and the Hospitallers refused to follow him, since he was shunned by the Church. This eventually led to a nasty scene in which, according to some, Frederick accused the Templars of trying to murder him.27 They accused him of treachery.28
Although Frederick soon left Acre, he got his revenge on the Templars and the Hospitallers by confiscating all their property in Italy and imprisoning many of the brothers there. The property still hadn’t been returned when Peter died in 1231. The treaty of reconciliation between Frederick and the pope wasn’t made until 1239, when Armand of Périgord was Grand Master. As we shall see, this may not have been accidental.
ARMAND OF PÉRIGORD, C. 1231-1244
Armand of Périgord probably came from Guienne, in the south of France. He had been Templar preceptor in Sicily and Calabria before becoming Grand Master and it was widely believed that his election was influenced by the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, who controlled Sicily at that time.29However, there seems to be no proof of that.
Most of Armand’s career as Grand Master was spent in skirmishes with both Moslem and imperial forces. Frederick had arranged through negotiations for the Christians to have most of Jerusalem back, as well as signing an eight-year truce with the sultan of Cairo.
Armand did nothing to uphold the truce. The most notable of his actions resulted in another Templar slaughter. In 1237, against the advice of Walter, count of Jaffa, he led a band of knights against Moslem troops who were “foraging in the region between Atlit and Acre.” The Templars were badly defeated. Only the Grand Master and nine of his men escaped.30
The Real History Behind the Templars Page 18
