The Tragedy of the Templars

by Michael Haag

  The knights and the nobility may have thought that they were leading the crusade, but the poor who marched in their wake regarded themselves as the elite, a people chosen by God. Most of the common people who had joined the first wave of the crusade perished on the long journey across Europe or were cut to ribbons by the Seljuks no sooner than they had crossed the Bosphorus. Many of those who survived and had joined the second wave of the crusade, the one led by Adhemar, bishop of Le Puy, and the great French, Norman and Provençal lords, were known as Tafurs.

  A modern historian has described the Tafurs as ‘a hard-core of poor men organised under their own leaders, whose name may be derived from the big light wooden shield which many of them carried, the talevart or talevas. These desperadoes seem to have been pre-eminently North French and Fleming in origin and to have represented a quasi-autonomous force within the army.’11 Stories describe them as barefoot, wearing sackcloth, being covered in sores and filth, and living on roots and grass and sometimes the roasted corpses of their enemies. Wherever they went, they left a trail of devastation. Too poor to afford swords, they fought with clubs, knives, shovels, hatchets, catapults and pointed sticks. Although the Tafurs made a virtue of their poverty, they looted cities captured by the crusaders; they also raped Muslim women and committed massacres. Their ferocity was legendary; the leaders of the crusade were unable to control them and never went among them without being armed.

  After Antioch, as the crusaders advanced deeper into Syria, the Tafurs were said to have resorted to cannibalism at the siege of Ma’arra, according to Raymond of Aguilers, although other chroniclers of the crusade make no mention of the incident and modern scholars have their doubts. ‘It is tempting to deduce that they were accused of this crime because they were poor warriors, even peasants, despised and feared by the more noble warriors who regarded them of being capable of any depravity. In other words, the accusation reflects fear and distrust between classes, rather than what actually happened.’12 Certainly the Muslims were terrified of the Tafurs, but that may have been the point. The Tafurs may have invented the story of cannibalism themselves to so terrify their enemies that they would fear to fight them and instead would flee.

  The pilgrim army marched along the coast as far as Jaffa, which they reached on 3 June. Taking the inland road that wound into the Judaean Hills, they were welcomed as liberators at Bethlehem, which they entered on the 6th, the whole town turning out in celebration with relics and crosses from the Church of the Nativity and to kiss the crusaders’ hands. That night the crusaders were amazed to see a lunar eclipse, which they took as a sign from God that the crescent of Islam was on the wane. Early the next morning, on 7 June 1099, after journeying nearly three years and over 2,000 miles, the pilgrims climbed the hill which they named Montjoie and gained their first sight of Jerusalem. Many of them wept. It seemed a miracle that they had survived. They had fought and beaten the Seljuks and had restored Asia Minor to the Byzantine Empire, and they had liberated Antioch and Edessa from Muslim rule. But they had suffered greatly along the line of march; many had fallen in battle, and many more had succumbed to starvation and disease, among them the papal legate Adhemar, bishop of Puy, who died during an epidemic, probably typhoid, at the siege of Antioch. Yet now, as in a vision, the earthly Jerusalem rose before them; for many it was the key to the heavenly city.

  The Fatimids had lost Jerusalem to the Seljuks in 1073, but in July 1098 they had recovered it once more. Marching up from Cairo, the Fatimid vizier al-Afdal had laid siege to the city, ‘bombarding it from forty catapults during forty days’, according to the Arab chronicler Ibn Khaldun. The vizier then returned to Cairo, leaving a large garrison of well-trained Arab and Sudanese troops in Jerusalem.13 With the destruction done to the city and the killing and menacing of its population by Atsiz and then al-Afdal, it is a wonder it had any inhabitants at all.

  Nevertheless Jerusalem was one of the great fortresses of the medieval world, and despite everything its population is estimated to have been between twenty and thirty thousand.14 The Fatimid governor prepared for the arrival of the crusaders by augmenting his forces with four hundred elite cavalrymen from Egypt and by strengthening the city walls. After extorting all the money and goods in the possession of the Christian inhabitants, he expelled them from the city, fearing that, as at Edessa, Antioch, Bethlehem and elsewhere, they would welcome the approaching army as liberators; then, after bringing the Muslim inhabitants of the outlying villages within the walls, he poisoned all the surrounding wells, secure that within Jerusalem’s formidable defences he could rely on its numerous underground cisterns for good water. He knew that the crusaders were hundreds of miles from any relief from Antioch, and in their haste they had not even attempted to take the port of Jaffa. Moreover, as both he and the crusader leaders knew, an army was mustering in Egypt. Isolated and unsupplied in the face of a gathering enemy, the crusaders’ complete destruction seemed just a matter of time.

  By now the crusaders had only about 1,200 knights and 15,000 able-bodied men; their force was insufficient to surround the city effectively; but they had an unshakeable conviction that under divine protection their moment of victory had come. On 13 June they launched a general attack with great fervour and overran the outer defences, but they had too few ladders to scale the walls in several places simultaneously, and after a long morning of desperate fighting they withdrew. They needed siege engines and more ladders, but the crusaders lacked the bolts and ropes and mangonels, and the area around Jerusalem had few trees. But then they had a stroke of luck: the Fatimids had left Jaffa unprotected, and six ships had sailed into the port – two from Genoa, four from England – carrying arms and food supplies and all the equipment necessary for building siege machines.

  On the night of 13–14 July the attack resumed, simultaneously from north and south. The fighting continued throughout the day and on into the following night as, against terrific resistance, the crusaders managed to move their machines closer to the walls. Around noon on 15 July Godfrey of Bouillon forced his way onto the northern battlements, and soon Tancred and his men surged deep into the city’s streets towards the Temple Mount surmounted by the Dome of the Rock and the Aqsa mosque, where the Muslims were retreating, intending it as their last redoubt. To the south the Fatimid governor paid Raymond of Toulouse an immense treasure in return for sparing his life and that of his bodyguard; they were escorted out of the walls and rode to safety at Ascalon. Those on the Temple Mount surrendered to Tancred, who accepted and gave them his banner for protection, but the next morning the Tafurs killed a great number, which outraged Tancred when he found out, and they set alight the synagogue, burning many Jews who had taken refuge within in reprisal for their having been allies of the Fatimids.

  In a letter sent by the crusade leaders to the pope in September, just two months after the city was taken, they wrote: ‘If you wish to know what was done unto the enemies found there, rest assured that in Solomon’s portico and in his Temple [as the crusaders believed the Aqsa mosque to be] our men rode in the Saracens’ blood up to the knees of the horses.’15 In an age when victory was seen as a sign of divine favour and defeat as a punishment for sins, exaggeration served the purposes of both papal authority and of the crusade itself. The chroniclers followed suit, for example Raymond of Aguilers, Robert the Monk and Fulcher of Chartres, all of whom strongly favoured the reformist programme of Gregory VII and Urban II. The greater the victory, the more it justified the pope’s ability to raise armies and fight wars, an authority opposed by the papacy’s great adversary in the Investiture Controversy, the Holy Roman emperor and his allies.

  And so Raymond of Aguilers, who was attached to Raymond of Toulouse and entered Jerusalem with the crusaders, does not hesitate to embellish the victory with exaggerated gore as in these often quoted lines:

  Piles of heads, hands, and feet were to be seen in the streets of the city. It was necessary to pick one’s way over the bodies of men and horses. But these were sma
ll matters compared to what happened at the Temple of Solomon, a place where religious services are ordinarily chanted. What happened there? If I tell the truth, it will exceed your powers of belief. So let it suffice to say this much, at least, that in the Temple and porch of Solomon, men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins. Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgment of God that this place should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers, since it had suffered so long from their blasphemies.16

  Where the crusade leaders had written of blood up to their horses’ knees, here Raymond of Aguilers goes one better and mentions the bridle reins, thereby raising the level of the blood by at least a foot. But Raymond was something of a credulous apocalyptic and described all sorts of visions and miracles, and his accounts of slaughter at Jerusalem had more to do with his notions of the Last Days than with what actually happened.

  Robert the Monk, who was not there, envisages waves of blood that drive dead bodies across the floor, while dismembered arms and hands float on this sea of blood until they haphazardly join up with some corpse. And Fulcher of Chartres, who had been with Baldwin at Edessa and came to Jerusalem only in December to celebrate Christmas, makes up for not being an eyewitness to the siege by making himself a nose-witness to the aftermath, remarking that such were the numbers of dead still lying both inside and outside the city walls that he had to hold his nose against the stench – a patent nonsense, as a body left unburied in July would have been reduced by rats, dogs, birds, flies and beetles to a fleshless and odourless skeleton within a month – that is, if any bones would have been left at all.17

  By the standards of the time, and adhered to by Christians and Muslims alike, if a city resisted conquest the lives of its inhabitants were forfeit when it fell. But despite exaggerated reports that Jerusalem’s entire population was put to the sword – 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, even over 60,000 killed, depending on the source – this is not what happened. The killing was never as massive or as indiscriminate as certain medieval historians have alleged, or as many modern historians have chosen to accept. Exaggeration was due to misinformation, or to a desire to praise the crusaders, or to assert the power of the papacy, or to captivate an audience; exaggeration was also due to ideology, the belief that tales of massive and indiscriminate bloodshed conferred a kind of purification on its perpetrators and the city. Yet no less a figure than Steven Runciman has written that ‘the Crusaders rushed through the streets and into the houses slaying everyone that they saw, man, woman, and child’, and that ‘the only survivors’ were the few hundred troops of the garrison who surrendered to Raymond of Toulouse; yet he contradicts himself by noting that the city was cleared of corpses after the siege by the surviving inhabitants.18 Which raises the question of Runciman’s motives and bias in distorting history, and the motives and bias of those who repeat the distortions to this day.19

  The anonymous Gesta Francorum mentions that prisoners, men and women, were taken at the Aqsa mosque, which the crusaders, referring to King Solomon, called the Templum Solomonis. The Gesta also says that it was the surviving inhabitants who cleared the corpses. Moreover, letters sent to the Jewish community in Cairo and throughout the Eastern Mediterranean by Jews of Jerusalem at the time tell of Jewish survivors, Jews held for ransom, and captive Jews sold in such numbers that they depressed the price of slaves. Quite apart from the Fatimid governor and his forces who were set free, Muslim captives are known to have survived, many later turning up in Damascus. None of which means that there was not a massacre when Jerusalem was captured. But one should also listen to Ibn al-Arabi, that young Islamic scholar from Seville who had lived in Jerusalem until only three years before the arrival of the crusade and knew it well. In 1099 he was in Egypt, mostly in Alexandria, where he followed events in Jerusalem with an intimate knowledge of the setting and its people. Certainly there was a massacre, for al-Arabi writes of 3,000 men and women, ‘including God-fearing and learned worshippers’, being killed on Friday morning 16 July in the Aqsa mosque, and he also mentions several women who were killed near the Dome of the Rock.20 Against this informed account we have the rhetoric of Fulcher of Chartres, who says ten thousand were killed at the mosque, or Matthew of Edessa who puts the figure at sixty-five thousand. But as one eminent historian of the crusades has written, ‘stories of the streets of Jerusalem coursing with knee-high rivers of blood were never meant to be taken seriously. Medieval people knew such a thing to be an impossibility. Modern people, unfortunately, often do not.’21

  On one point all the chroniclers agree. When the killing was over, the knights went ‘rejoicing and weeping’22 to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to give thanks to God at the site of the death and resurrection of Jesus.

  PART III

  The Founding of the Templars and the Crusader States

  POPE URBAN II DIED on 29 July 1099, two weeks after the recovery of Jerusalem but before the news reached Rome. He had no plans for ruling in the East; his object was to liberate its indigenous Christians from Arab and Turkish occupation and to restore Asia Minor and Syria to Byzantine rule. Carried forward by their courage and their faith, the crusaders had also captured Jerusalem. Their leaders established a feudal system and a hierarchy of self-governing states, the county of Edessa, the principality of Antioch, the county of Tripoli and the kingdom of Jerusalem, which was paramount.

  Divisions in the Islamic world – not only the rivalry between the Arab Fatimid dynasty in Egypt and the Baghdad caliphate, which had been taken over by the Seljuk Turks, but also local divisions in Syria and Palestine, Arab against Arab, Turk against Turk – meant that the Middle East was fragmented into numerous Muslim emirates. The crusader states fitted into this mosaic and were accepted in the wider scheme of things. Rather than reacting to the fall of Jerusalem with a call to arms, local Muslim rulers sought accommodation with the Franks – the Franj as they were known in Arabic, meaning not only Franks but anyone from Western Europe.

  The Franks were welcomed among the indigenous Christian population, as the celebrations at Bethlehem, Edessa and elsewhere showed. Moreover the Franks were welcomed by Muslims too, who valued the protection they offered against the depredations of the Turks. At first the Franks regarded the Muslims as the enemy, but gradually their attitude changed, partly as some among the Franks began to learn Arabic, and partly because in making allies among the Muslims they came to respect Islamic society. Outremer, the land across the sea, as the crusader states were collectively known, became a successful and progressive society and a source of fruitful exchange of goods and ideas between Latin Europe and the Muslim East.

  The Templars were established to maintain security for pilgrims against marauding brigands, successors to those tribesmen who lived by plunder and had caused trouble throughout the days of Muslim rule. But apart from these local disturbances, the lands of Outremer were at peace. Only later, in the face of renewed Turkish aggression, did the Templars’ moment come, when they fought to the death for the defence and survival of the Holy Land.

  10

  The Origins of the Templars

  ON 17 JULY 1099, two days after the reconquest of Jerusalem, the crusader barons met to choose a leader. This was against the wishes of the Tafurs, who hourly awaited the Second Coming and wanted no government at all. The favourite choice among the barons would have been Adhemar, the papal legate, but he had died a year earlier at Antioch. In his stead, the crown was offered to Raymond of Toulouse; his age, wealth, experience and his closeness to both Adhemar and the Byzantine emperor Alexius made him the almost necessary choice. But Raymond knew he was unpopular, and his own soldiers wanted to return home, so reluctantly he refused. Of the other candidates, Bohemond had already made himself prince of Antioch after leading the attack on that city, his nephew Tancred was regarded as merely an appendage of his uncle, and Robert of Normandy had let it be known that he wanted to return to Europe. And so on 22 July the crown was offered to Godfrey of Bouillon, who delicately replied that he would wear no crown
where Jesus had worn the crown of thorns, nor would he presume to bear the title of king in Christ’s holy city, but he would accept kingly powers under the title of Advocatus Sancti Sepulchri, the Defender of the Holy Sepulchre.

  There were some, in particular the Latin patriarch of the city, who wanted Jerusalem to be governed as a theocracy under patriarchal rule and subject to the pope at Rome. But the papacy had never seen the crusade as an imperial venture. Moreover within a year the pious Godfrey was dead and the crown passed to his brother, Baldwin of Boulogne, who had no qualms about ruling over a secular kingdom of Jerusalem as Baldwin I. After granting the county of Edessa to his cousin Baldwin of Bourcq, Baldwin I took up residence at Jerusalem. The Seljuks had turned the Temple Mount into a militarised acropolis, garrisoning their troops there. The crusaders were attracted by its biblical associations. For his palace Baldwin used the Aqsa mosque, which was assumed to stand on the site of Solomon’s Temple, as it is confusingly phrased in English; the Greeks called it the Nαός του Σολομώντα, where naos means both ‘temple’ and ‘palace’, while in Latin it was called Templum Solomonis, where again templum can mean ‘palace’; Christians at the time understood the meaning to be ‘palace’.1 The Dome of the Rock, which the crusaders not surprisingly mistook for a Byzantine building, was understood to occupy the site of the Jewish Temple. Known to Christians throughout the Muslim occupation of Jerusalem as the Holy of Holies, it became a Christian church, the Templum Domini, the Temple of the Lord, under the guardianship of the Augustinian canons of the Holy Sepulchre, although only much later was a cross placed atop the dome.