The Shield and The Sword

by Ernle Bradford

  The decline of the Christian cause, always abetted by the rivalry and dissension between the Hospitallers and the Templars, was even further accentuated by the added peril of the Tartar invasions from the north and the steadily increasing militancy of Egypt to the south. Jerusalem fell to the Tartars in 1244 and in the same year the entire Christian forces were overwhelmed at Gaza. The Grand Master of the Order together with the Master of the Templars were both captured and taken into captivity in Egypt. This was the worst single disaster since the Horns of Hattin. General ruin threatened the whole Latin cause amid the smoke of burning cities and the surrender of castles and garrisons. The great Hospitaller fortress at Ascalon continued to hold out, until it too fell to the enemy in 1247. Two years later the Hospitallers were among those who took part in the Crusade led by St Louis of France which was designed to break the Moslem power in Egypt. This ended in disaster, with King Louis himself taken prisoner at Mansourah—only to be released for an immense ransom along with some twenty-five Hospitallers (among others) and the Grand Master of the Order.

  The Christians with their constant quarrels had largely encompassed their own ruin during these centuries. Similarly the Moslems. It had already been proved in the days of Saladin that the latter must surely succeed in driving out these foreign interlopers if only they would unite. But like their enemies they were riven by dissensions, both religious, political, and racial. Saladin’s successor came in the person of Rukn-ad-Din Baybers, a Turk by birth, who was ultimately to become Sultan of Egypt and of Damascus. Baybers in the course of his violent life, a life marked if ever one was by ‘battle, murder and sudden death’, not only managed to drive the Latins out of Egypt but set in train the series of campaigns that were to drive the Latins out of the Levant. As Sir John Glubb writes,

  Although essentially a soldier, Baybers was interested in the administration. In time of famine, he obliged the rich to feed the poor… Whether for religious or political reasons, he sought the role of the defender of Islam. Stringent orders were issued against the use of alcohol, against cabaret entertainments and other forms of immorality… Above all, Baybers was a soldier. He frequently rode down from the citadel of Cairo to the parade ground to watch the troops exercising. He himself often took a turn and few, if any, of the troopers could handle his lance or shoot his arrows at full gallop with more skill than the sultan himself.

  Neither the Hospitallers nor the Templars come at all well out of this chaotic period of history. As a contemporary wrote: ‘Oh ancient treachery of the Temple! Oh long-standing sedition of the Hospitallers!’ At one moment in the years following the failure of the Seventh Crusade the Hospitallers and the Templars even fought on opposite sides. Baybers was not the man to fail to take advantage of the lunatic dissensions of his enemies. In 1265, having reinforced all the Moslem castles in Syria, he led his army into Palestine, giving as his pretext that he was anticipating a further Tartar invasion. Instead of pressing on to the north, however, he turned aside and fell upon the fortress of Caesarea. All the defenders were put to the sword and the city was levelled to the ground. A similar fate befell Arsoof, and in the following year he laid waste the coastal plain from Jaffa to Sidon, capturing the important fortress of Safad. The garrison surrendered on the condition that they might be allowed to depart unarmed and without any possessions. As soon as they had marched out they were set upon and massacred. Baybers’ aims were the same as his great predecessor’s, but he was no Saladin.

  In the spring of 1268 this avenging sword of the Prophet again swept out of Egypt. The great city of Jaffa was captured and razed to the ground. Those inhabitants who were neither killed nor enslaved were expelled and a Turkish colony was planted on the site. Swirling past Tripoli (which he would have been wiser to besiege) Baybers laid waste all the area around, killing the inhabitants, destroying the churches, and leaving that rich and fruitful land looking as though a swarm of locusts had passed through. Worse was to follow. In May of the same year he suddenly moved his army northward upon the ancient city of Antioch. The former Roman capital of the East, Antioch had long been the most prosperous of the Latin possessions, being an important centre for oriental trade. Within only four days of his arrival Baybers’ men had scaled the formidable walls. Every man in the city was butchered, and the women and children were all sold off as slaves. Baybers handed over Antioch to his troops to loot, and all its riches and incomparable works of art were dispersed among the ignorant Turkish Mameluke soldiery. Determined that Antioch should never again be restored as a Christian enclave in the East the conquerer razed it to the ground. To this day the proud capital where Antony and Cleopatra had once spent the winter together has never recovered from the visitation of Sultan Baybers and his army.

  The only reason it seems that Baybers did not take all the remaining Latin castles and fortified places was that he had other preoccupations, among them the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia which, in accordance with his usual policy, he laid waste, killing in the process some 60,000 Christians and enslaving thousands more. A further distraction was the arrival of a small force of crusaders led by Prince Edward of England (which Baybers may have imagined was the spearhead of a large Crusade that St Louis was said to be preparing). The latter, however, attacked distant Tunis and not Egypt. By that time Baybers had concluded a ten-year truce with Tripoli. In 1271 the great Hospitaller castle of Krak des Chevaliers, sadly undergarrisoned, had fallen to the victorious Sultan. The capture of this superb fortress sounded the death knell of the Order of St John in the Holy Land and the Levant. When Baybers died at the age of fifty-five in 1277 he had effectively set the seal upon the Moslem reconquest of Outremer. It was not only the Christians who had felt the wind of his sword, for he had also successfully thrown back the Tartars and driven them out of the whole area.

  The successors of Baybers carried on his policy of total extermination of the Christian settlements. The great Hospitaller fortress of Margat fell in 1285. The knights had been relying upon the fact that a ten-year truce had been agreed upon with the Sultan, but Baybers’ successor was no more to be relied upon than Baybers himself had been. The knights and their followers were, however, permitted to leave the fortress for Tripoli, this time without any treachery on the part of their enemy. Four years later Tripoli with its great harbor—one of the chief commercial ports in the Mediterranean of that time—was besieged by an immense army numbering, if we are to believe the Latin reports, 100,000 foot soldiers and 40,000 cavalry. After a month’s siege the city was carried, and this time no mercy was shown. The city was put to the sword as Antioch had been and afterwards it too, along with its port, was utterly destroyed.

  Nothing was now left but Acre. This ancient harbour town in Palestine was the last hope of the Christians in the Holy Land. Situated on the main military highway along the coast, Acre had had the unenviable fate of having been besieged time and time again ever since 1500 B.C. when its name occurs among the conquest lists of the Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmose III. It was destined to fall yet again in A.D. 1291—to yet another army coming out of Egypt. Acre was defended by 800 knights and 14,000 foot soldiers, against whom the Sultan brought an army at least five times the size—some chroniclers maintain ten times.

  The city was defended by a double line of walls, the Templars holding the northern sector and the Hospitallers just to their right on the south. To the right of the Hospitallers the walls were defended by the knights of Cyprus and Syria, and next came the Teutonic Order. The southern line of the walls was held by a French detachment, then an English one, and finally Pisans and Venetians holding the area just above the port. On April 11th, 1291, the Sultan Khalil opened the bombardment. He had at his disposal, according to one Moslem historian, the heaviest siege train ever known up to that time. It included over ninety mangonels and trebuchets. Both of these had their ancestry in the catapults used centuries before by the Romans. The trebuchet was a giant catapult which threw a mass of rock from the end of a long revolving arm, the propelling pow
er being provided by a counter-weight at the shorter end. The mangonel resembled a giant spoon and was operated by a windlass. It too could be used for hurling rocks and stones, as well as incendiary materials contained in pottery jars that burst on impact.

  On the fourth night of the siege the Templars supported by the English made a spirited sortie from the northern gate of Acre, the Porte St Lazare, inflicting a number of casualties upon the enemy but failing to destroy the siege engines. A similar sortie a few nights later was made by the Hospitallers but proved no more successful. The disciplined Mameluke troops were waiting for them and the Hospitallers were forced to withdraw. But the main threat to the defences of Acre came not so much from the siege engines as from the large and efficient body of sappers and miners whom the Sultan had brought with him from Egypt. Day after day the Moslems were undermining the walls, concentrating especially on the strongholds of the protecting towers. The towers of England and of Blois and of St Nicholas were among the first to begin to crumble. Gradually under the continuing weight of the attack the defenders found themselves being forced back within the second ring of concentric walls.

  At dawn on May 18th the Sultan launched a massive assault against the breached and ruined walls of this last Christian city in the Holy Land. As the siege engines continued to fire deep into the city, and as the air was darkened by a blizzard of arrows, the Mamelukes prepared for the general assault. Accompanying them, to inflame their ardour for battle as well as to demoralise the defenders, came no less than 300 camels with drummers continually thundering away on huge side-drums. The noise was indescribable and the weight of the attacking forces irresistible. By sunrise Moslem banners were fluttering along the walls and the advance columns were already overrunning the second line of defences and penetrating into the city. To the north the Templars were holding their own but the main Mameluke attack was thrown against the Hospitallers in the area of the Gate of St Antony. At this last moment—a moment which had to some extent arisen through the rivalry of the two Orders in the past—the Grand Master of the Templars led a supporting column down to give aid to the Hospitallers. This long area of wall against which was directed the main weight of the attack managed to hold out until well into the afternoon. Then it too was overrun and nearly all the Hospitallers were killed.

  Meanwhile, to the south, where the English and French had been holding out against the Mameluke attacks, the evacuation of as many men, women and children as could be accommodated in the ships lying in harbour was already under way. There were not enough vessels, however, to remove anything like the total population of Acre and in the slaughter which later developed thousands were killed and more thousands dragged off to slavery. For the Order of St John that day marked the end of all their days in Outremer. Only a handful of them managed to escape, among them their Grand Master John de Villiers who had himself been seriously wounded in the fighting. The Templars, who had retreated into their great palace at the northern tip of the promontory, managed to hold out for over a week. But in the end the combined weight of the assaults and the continuous tunnelling activities of the besiegers brought down the walls of this, the strongest fortification in the city. The Grand Master of the Temple, Peter de Sevrey, together with some other knights had already been beheaded when they had gone out to try to negotiate a truce in order to save the lives of the women and children who had taken shelter with them. Now, as the battered walls of the palace collapsed, the last of the Templars in Acre along with many of the enemy were buried together in one great smoking ruin.

  The whole city of Acre—its fortifications, walls, towers, merchant houses and store sheds, port installations and the warehouses that had harboured so rich a trade for centuries—was set afire and demolished. Within a few days such other few places as had remained within the Latin sphere were abandoned; the people fleeing by sea from such ancient cities as Beirut and Tyre, Haifa and Tortosa. Tyre, which in 332 B.C. had put up the best resistance of all the Phoenician cities to Alexander the Great, was the last to fall to the new conquerors. It was evacuated on July 14th, 1291. But whereas Alexander had brought Greek culture to the East, the Turkish Mamelukes brought nothing but fire and the sword. Baybers and those who followed him, including the now victorious Sultan Khalil, had finally achieved the dream of Saladin—the expulsion of the Franks. But they did not bring with them the Moslem civilisation that Saladin had known. There was little to choose between the desolation that the Mamelukes sowed behind them and that of the Tartar hordes.

  Thousands of Christians now flooded the slave markets of the East. These became so glutted that the price of a nubile young woman was no more than a simple silver coin. The Crusades were over. The dream of Outremer was over. The Latin kingdom of the East was gone for ever. Henceforth the energies and the violence of the Latins and other western Europeans would largely be directed against one another. A refugee among many other refugees in Cyprus, John de Villiers, the Grand Master of the Order of St John, wrote that his heart was sick and troubled, and that he was ‘overwhelmed with grief’.

  Chapter 7

  CRUSADERS IN EXILE

  The plight of all refugees is invariably a miserable one, but that of the former Latin settlers in Outremer was worse than most. They had lost not only their homes and private property but also their lands. Except for what they brought with then they were penniless. Their presence in the island only served to remind the Cypriots of the disaster that had befallen and as Sir Steven Runciman comments, ‘the Cypriots needed no reminder. For a century to come the great ladies of the island, when they went out of doors, wore cloaks of black that stretched from their heads to their feet. It was a token of mourning for the death of Outremer.’ The great military Orders on the other hand, although they too had lost castles, property and wide territories, were still immensely rich because of their money and holdings in Europe. In Cyprus itself, the Order of St John had several estates as well as properties in Limassol and Nicosia. On the southern promontory of the island, where the town and port of Limassol stands, they also had a castle at Colos. It was natural that Limassol should become their headquarters, and within a few years of their arrival they had begun the construction of a new hospital.

  The Hospitallers were fortunate in the fact that they still had their original vocation. Even if they, like the other Orders were demoralised in the immediate years that followed the loss of Outremer they were still conscious of their vows that enjoined them to be the servants of the poor and the sick. It was a different matter for the Templars and the Teutonic knights. Deprived of their raison d’être, it seemed as if they must inevitably disintegrate. At first the Templars, acting in conjunction with the Hospitallers, strove to regain their ancient role by mounting commando-type raids on Egypt and the Palestine coastline. In 1300, for instance, a fleet was despatched from Famagusta which landed a small force in the Delta, burnt a village, and then sailed down to Alexandria where they found the defences too strong for them. They next sailed back north and raided what remained of Acre and Tortosa. In a later engagement on the coast they ran into heavy opposition and had to retire, the Hospitallers losing a number of men including one knight The interesting point about this relatively unimportant excursion is that it is the first time that we find the Hospitallers making use of seapower against the Moslems. It is their first tentative step in the direction of the role of Christian corsair which was later to make them the terror of their enemies and famous throughout the Mediterranean and Europe.

  The Templars were less able to adapt and indeed were destined for extinction. Philip of France, who was desperately short of money, had long been casting a greedy eye upon their immense resources and property throughout the land. The opportunity to lay his hands upon the Templars’ wealth was presented by the fact that France at this time was under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition. The head inquisitor of France was also Philip’s personal confessor so Philip had the tools to his hand. In 1307, at a moment when the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, as wel
l as nearly all the Templars were in France, the king struck. All were arrested on the grounds of blasphemy and heresy. The charges were centred on the initiation ceremony, when the new knights were admitted into the Order. Now since this ceremony was secret, and since no one but a Templar could state what exactly occurred during it, it was possible to levy almost any charge against the Order. If the members denied it the Inquisition could always say that they were lying. On the other hand it was not difficult to extract whatever confession was required by the use of torture. The Inquisition anticipated the trials, the practices, and even the public confessions of Soviet Russia, by many centuries.

  The main charges against the Templars were that during the initiation ceremony the candidate was asked to deny Christ thrice, to spit three times upon a crucifix, and to give a triple kiss to the officer admitting him—on the buttocks, on the genitals, and on the mouth. They were also accused of worshipping a mysterious deity, Baphomet, and of indulging in homosexual orgies. The truth or falsehood of the charges against the Templars has long been debated, but the question is one that will never be resolved: no one can rely upon statements extracted under torture, particularly when the instigator of the charges is known to have had so much to gain by the confiscation of the Templars’ lands and money. Nevertheless, it is not impossible that some of the accusations were true. The triple denial of Christ may have been a means, in that simple age, of impressing upon the novice that his dedication to the Order was total, and that it even came before the Founder of the Church which the Order was designed to serve. The anal and genital kiss is a common enough charge against those accused of black magic and witchcraft. The charge of sodomy levelled against the Templars—a sin for which in the Church canon the penalty was death—may possibly be taken seriously. Homosexual relations have always been accepted without much difficulty in the East, and the Templars like all the other Latins in Outremer were heavily conditioned by the prevailing atmosphere of the Moslem world that surrounded them. Then again, although like the Knights of St John they had taken the vows of chastity, they were not priests, but arrogant, warlike young males. From the Spartans to the Prussians, homosexuality has always been prominent in warrior castes. In 1312 the Order of the Temple was suppressed and its last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, was burnt two years later at the stake, while the other chief officers were sentenced to life imprisonment. If Philip’s objective had been to secure all their wealth for himself he largely failed, for, except for their property and lands in Castile, Aragon, Portugal and Majorca, all the possessions of the Templars were transferred by papal bull to the Order of St John. In the end the Hospitallers were the main ones to benefit from the demise of their great rivals.