The Tragedy of the Templars

by Michael Haag

  At Bari, Bernard obtained papers from the emir permitting him to travel to the East, then continued to Taranto, also at the time under Muslim occupation. The principal commercial activity of Bari and Taranto was raiding the coasts and countryside of Italy for Christian slaves. At the port of Taranto, Bernard saw nine thousand captives from the principality of Benevento, near Naples, who were put aboard ships bound for Tripoli and Egypt – some of the millions of men, women and children who throughout the centuries were captured by Muslim corsairs along the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts of Europe, even in the English Channel, and were transported to a grim existence in North Africa and the Middle East, leaving depopulated and devastated homelands behind.27 Bernard boarded a ship packed with slaves bound for Egypt, and after thirty days he arrived at Alexandria. But no one in Egypt was impressed with his travel papers from Bari. The captain of his ship would not allow him to disembark without a bribe; the governor of Alexandria likewise demanded money before allowing Bernard to continue to Fustat, the capital founded by the Arabs near the future site of Cairo. There again Bernard showed his papers, both those from Bari and those from Alexandria, but was immediately clapped in jail until he paid the further sum of 13 dinars. This was apparently the jizya, for Bernard goes on to say that 13 dinars was the least a Christian had to pay ‘to have the right to live in freedom and security. [. . .] And any one who cannot pay the thirteen dinars, whether he is a native Christian or a stranger, is imprisoned either till such time as God in his love sends an angel to set him free, or else until some other good Christians pay for his freedom.’28 Even then, every time Bernard entered another city on his itinerary through Egypt and Palestine he had to pay a further dinar or two for permission to leave.

  From Fustat, Bernard travelled through the Delta along an eastern branch of the Nile, arriving at Tanis, ‘where the Christians are very conscientious, welcoming and hospitable. Indeed there is nowhere in the district belonging to this city which lacks a church.’ After Tanis, Bernard went to Pelusium, at the eastern edge of the delta, where ‘at the place to which the angel told Joseph to flee with his son and the mother, is a church in honour of Blessed Mary’. Hiring a camel at Pelusium, Bernard rode for six days through the desert to Palestine and so to ‘the holy city of Jerusalem, where we stayed in the hospice of the Most Glorious Emperor Charles [Charlemagne]. All who come to Jerusalem for reasons of devotion and who speak the Roman language are given hospitality there.’ Bernard also mentions the Church of St Mary, with its ‘splendid library’ built with Charlemagne’s help, as was the church’s pious foundation of twelve dwellings with fields, vineyards and a grove in the Valley of Jehoshaphat (the Kidron valley) between the city and the Mount of Olives. These fruits of Charlemagne’s generosity, also the many monasteries he founded throughout Palestine and the great sums of money he sent to the Christians there, were widely recorded and long remembered not only in the East but throughout both the Latin and the Byzantine worlds.29

  Given the difficulties, dangers and expense of travelling to the East, it is a wonder that Bernard and others like him should have gone on pilgrimage at all. But by the beginning of the tenth century the Byzantines and the Holy Roman Empire had driven the Muslims out of southern Italy, and soon they would be prised from their pirate lairs in southern France, while half-way through the century the Byzantines would recover Crete and their naval patrols would ensure the safety of travellers and trade in the Eastern Mediterranean. But although travelling by sea was more comfortable and cooler, it was cheaper to travel overland. Most pilgrims from the West first made their way to Constantinople, visited the great churches and famous relics there, and then continued through Asia Minor on the excellent Byzantine roads. But Western pilgrims were always the minority, a small stream compared to the great flow of travellers from the Byzantine Empire, from Egypt, from all over Palestine, Syria and beyond.30 Although much of the East was under Muslim domination, most of the millions who lived there were Christians inhabiting a Christian world.

  5

  Byzantine Crusades

  THE AGHLABIDS, who made themselves the masters of North Africa in 800 and who dominated the Mediterranean during the travels of Bernard the Monk, were a symptom of the weakening authority of the Abbasids in the western reaches of their empire, which was partly a consequence of moving the caliphate eastwards from Damascus to Baghdad. Spain became effectively independent of the Abbasids already in 756, right after the fall of the Umayyads; while Ibn Tulun, a Turk who was sent from Baghdad to Egypt as governor in 868, was busy creating a powerful black and Turkish slave army when Bernard passed through the country, and used it to make himself autonomous of the caliphate, although he maintained a nominal allegiance. Taking advantage of declining Abbasid authority in Palestine and Syria, the Arab tribes again rose in revolt in the 860s and were only suppressed in 878, when Ibn Tulun took control of the region. From then on, with only occasional interruptions, Palestine and Syria ceased to be ruled from Baghdad and would fall within the orbit of whoever ruled Egypt.

  Persian ambitions had a similar fragmenting effect in the eastern lands of the caliphate, where a number of local dynasties were established during the ninth century. Soon the caliphs’ writ hardly ran beyond Iraq. As their revenues declined, they resorted to tax farming, turning over tax collection to local governors who remitted an agreed sum to the central government, keeping any surplus for themselves. Increasingly the real power in the Abbasid empire rested with these governors, mostly Persian, and with the army commanders, usually Turkish Mamelukes, who served as their enforcers. These same Mamelukes formed the palace guard, which was supposed to protect the caliph. But in 861, when the caliph Mutawakkil tried to counter the growing power of the Mamelukes by recruiting troops from Armenia and North Africa, he was murdered by a palace conspiracy, and thereafter it was clear that any caliph who did not answer to the demands of the Mamelukes would not last long. The caliphs became figureheads, the symbolic representatives of Islam and the state; often they were merely puppets in the hands of one warlord or another who over the coming centuries fought one another incessantly with the result that the Abbasid heartlands of Persia and Mesopotamia, once the most flourishing part of the Islamic world, were laid waste.

  But internal upheavals did not stop the Baghdad regime from launching its almost annual attacks against the Byzantines along the eastern borders of Asia Minor; in fact, Muntasir, who succeeded the murdered Mutawakkil, understood well enough that the call to jihad could distract from internal ailments when he declared holy war against the Byzantines in 862. In a letter broadcast from the mosques during Friday prayers, he proclaimed the excellence of Islam, quoted from Koranic texts which justified jihad, and promised the joys of paradise to all those who gathered at the frontier to wage war against the Byzantines: ‘The Commander of the Faithful desires to come close to God by waging Holy War against his enemy, by carrying out His obligations in the religion that He entrusted him with and seeking closeness to Him by strengthening his friends and permitting injury and revenge against those who deviate from His religion, deny His messengers and disobey Him.’1

  But the answer to continued Muslim aggression came in the tenth century, when the Byzantines, after three centuries of keeping on the defensive, began to advance and triumph under the emperor Romanus Lecapenus and his general John Curcuas, ‘the most brilliant soldier that the Empire had produced for generations. He infused a new spirit into the imperial armies, and led them victorious deep into the country of the infidels.’2 In 933 Curcuas won an important victory when he captured Melitene (present-day Malatya, in Turkey) at the foot of the Anti-Taurus mountains. The fall of Melitene was a profound shock to Muslims. The city had been taken during the initial Arab conquests in 638 and had remained a base for Umayyad and Abbasid raids into Byzantine territory ever since, but now its reconquest was the first major recovery of Byzantine territory and opened the way for the even more dramatic reconquests later in the century.

  But in
923, even before the start of Curcuas’ eastern campaigns, a year-long wave of persecutions by Muslims against Christians swept through the Middle East. Atrocities were committed in Egypt, Syria and Palestine; in Ascalon, Caesarea and Jerusalem churches were destroyed. The fall of Melitene, followed by further Byzantine victories, aroused still greater Muslim violence; on Palm Sunday 937 in Jerusalem a mob attacked the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, robbed it of its treasures and set it alight, causing large sections of the church to collapse, including the Rotunda or Anastasis enclosing the tomb of Jesus.

  Again in 966, towards the end of May, severe anti-Christian riots took place in Jerusalem. The Byzantines had reconquered Crete in 961, releasing the island from 135 years of Muslim occupation and clearing out the pirates whose slave raids had terrorised the coasts and islands of the Aegean; and another expedition drove the Muslims out of Cyprus in 965. But these events had nothing to do with the disturbances in Jerusalem, which were caused by Mohammed al-Sinaji, the governor of the city, in revenge against the Christians because they would not submit to his demands for bribes beyond the normal level of taxation. When the patriarch John VII dared complain to the governor’s superiors in Egypt – the short-lived Ikhshidid dynasty, a Turkish military dictatorship like the earlier Tulunids – al-Sinaji directed a mob against the patriarch, who took refuge in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The mob looted and set fire to the church, causing its dome to collapse, and the patriarch, who had hidden in a vat of oil, was tied to a pillar and set alight. The Muslims set their seal on these acts by seizing part of the entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where they constructed the mosque of Umar. But the Ikhshidids in Egypt also attempted to appease the Byzantine emperor by saying they would rebuild the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and make it lovelier than it had been before. Back came the reply from Nicophorus Phocas: ‘No, I shall build it, with the sword.’3

  In the aftermath of these events Nicophorus Phocas, the victor of Crete and Cyprus who had been crowned Byzantine emperor in 963, made it his mission to liberate Jerusalem after more than three hundred years of Muslim occupation – to launch ‘a sort of tenth-century crusade’.4 In 968 he breached the Abbasid defences along the Taurus mountains and captured Tarsus, followed by the whole of Cilicia; and crossing into Syria in 969 he recovered the ancient Greek city of Antioch, the cradle of gentile Christianity. Shortly afterwards his armies took Aleppo and Latakia along with a coastal strip extending down through Syria nearly to Tripoli, in northern Lebanon. Cilicia and Antioch, with much of northern Syria, were restored to the Byzantine Empire. Aleppo was left under Muslim control but made a Byzantine vassal state, the treaty terms allowing the Muslim inhabitants to remain undisturbed, but now they were to pay taxes from which the Christians were exempt, the revenue going towards rebuilding churches that had been destroyed, while the freedom to convert from Islam to Christianity (previously punishable by death) or from Christianity to Islam was guaranteed.

  Nicophorus Phocas was assassinated in the same year he took Antioch, but his successor, Emperor John Tzimisces, continued the Byzantine campaign, ‘a real crusade’,5 to wrest Jerusalem from Muslim control. Marching south from Antioch, John Tzimisces took Damascus, the first Byzantine city to have been conquered by the Arabs, which left open the way to Baghdad. But the Abbasid capital was hardly worth taking. Throughout Mesopotamia and Persia military disorders and financial crises had taken their toll. Incessant fighting between warlords had laid waste to what had only recently been the flourishing centre of the Muslim world. Agriculture was devastated, irrigation canals ruined beyond repair, and much of Baghdad had been pillaged and abandoned. Security throughout the caliphate had collapsed, and Bedouin adherents of the Qaramatian sect had even stolen the sacred black stone from the Kaaba in Mecca.6 Instead John Tzimisces advanced into Palestine, where Nazareth and Caesarea opened their gates to him and the Muslim authorities at Jerusalem pleaded for terms. But first the emperor turned towards the Mediterranean to clear the enemy from the coast – only to die suddenly, possibly of typhoid, in 976, before he could return his attention to Jerusalem. For the next century the Byzantines remained in control of northern Syria, but their attempts to liberate Jerusalem were frustrated by a new regime in Egypt, the Fatimids.

  6

  Muslim Wars and the Destruction of Palestine

  THE FATIMID DYNASTY came originally from Syria and claimed descent from the third caliph, Ali, and his wife, Fatima – hence their name – and after migrating across North Africa they established their own caliphate centred on Tunisia in 909. Sixty years later they returned eastwards and invaded Egypt, where they founded ‘The Victorious City of the Exalter of the Divine Religion’, or ‘Victorious’ for short, al-Qahira in Arabic – that is Cairo, just north of Fustat – and immediately built the great mosque and theological school of al-Azhar to propagate their version of Islam among Egypt’s Sunni Muslims. The Fatimids were Ismailis, a dualist offshoot of Shia Islam; they believed that the universe contains both good and evil because God himself is made up of good and evil, light and darkness. This set them apart from orthodox Islam (or for that matter from orthodox Christianity), which believes that God is wholly good and that evil has its origins elsewhere. Dualism is an ancient belief that can be traced back to Manichaeanism in Persia and to Hellenistic Gnosticism, and which, without altering its fundamental outlook, cloaked itself in later religions such as Islam and Christianity in order to survive and propagate.

  The Fatimids may have picked up their dualism from Persian influences while still in Syria or from the Berbers of North Africa, many of whom had been Christian Gnostics and now constituted the bulk of the army. The Fatimids’ caliphs were also the Fatimids’ imams, which according to Ismaili doctrine meant they were the infallible essence of the divine on earth. By establishing a caliphate the Fatimids were laying claim to universal political and spiritual dominion, and the conquest of Egypt was their first step towards their ambition of overthrowing the Abbasids’ Sunni caliphate in Baghdad and imposing themselves and their beliefs on the entire Islamic world. The Templars would later encounter Ismaili dualists in the form of the Assassins, who would descend from their Syrian mountain eyrie to commit acts of terror against all sides.

  The Fatimid victory over the Ikhshidids in Egypt was helped by a terrible famine caused by the failure of the Nile to rise sufficiently in 967; the land was still in the grip of starvation and plague, six hundred thousand people were said to have died in the region of Fustat alone, and many thousands more were abandoning their homes to seek salvation elsewhere.1 Less than a year later, in the spring of 970, with Egypt still suffering from hunger and disease, the Fatimids resumed their campaign against the Abbasid caliphate and marched northwards into Palestine. But this was no easy conquest; their arrival marked the start of a series of wars against a succession of enemies, including Arab tribes, Turkish warlords and a terrorist sect called the Qarmatians, who like the Fatimids were Ismailis but refused to accept their imams as their spiritual overlords. ‘A state bordering on anarchy prevailed. Pillage, fire and slaughter marched in the wake of the invaders’, while cities such as Jerusalem and Damascus were ‘tossed like a ball from one alien hand to another’,2 usually with much slaughter. Throughout the Umayyad period the Muslims of Syria and Palestine had followed the orthodox Sunni line, but their growing hatred for the distant Abbasid regime opened the way for many to adopt the apocalyptic and communistic outlook of the Qarmatians. Sectarian divisions between the various Muslim forces made the fighting all the more vicious. ‘Atrocities, the like of which had never been seen in the lands of Islam, were committed by them.’3 The people who most suffered were those who were the majority of the population in Palestine, the Christians and the Jews, but who played no part in this long catalogue of violence, this ‘almost unceasing war which destroyed Palestine’.4

  The Fatimids did what they could to impose their Shia beliefs on Egypt, but whether Shia or Sunni, Egypt’s Muslims were outnumbered by the Copts,
the native Christians of the country.5 To bolster their position against the recalcitrant Sunni, the Fatimids put special emphasis on good relations with Egypt’s Christians and Jews. Anxious to preserve the expertise that came with continuity, the Fatimids showed a preference for Copts in their administration, especially in the irrigation department, where traditional techniques going back to ancient times and exact knowledge were essential; and in the closely linked revenue department, where the Copts’ carefully devised system of record-keeping was indispensable. In financial matters and international trade the Fatimids relied on Jews and their well-developed knowledge of Mediterranean commerce. Egyptian foreign trade during the preceding Muslim regimes had been negligible, but under the Fatimids Egypt was at the centre of a flourishing network of mercantile relations extending from India to Spain, and its harbour at Alexandria was alive with ships bound for Amalfi, Pisa and Venice. With their initiative and experience, and their readiness to adapt to the Arabic cultural environment, Jews served the Fatimids loyally and well.