The Tragedy of the Templars

by Michael Haag

  Outremer was ultimately swept away, and almost all the local records that would have provided a social history were destroyed. But here and there documents have survived, including lists of the inhabitants of Bethgibelin of the Hospitallers and the settlement of Magna Mahomeria (al-Bira), 10 miles north of Jerusalem, founded by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in about 1128. The lists indicate the settlers’ places of origins and their occupations,11 and they are striking first of all for showing that not a single settler at either place came from northern France, the origin of the greater number of crusaders. Instead the Frankish settlers at Bethgibelin and Magna Mahomeria came from central and southern France, Italy and Spain. They were peoples of southern Europe and the Mediterranean, familiar with the environment, bringing their enthusiasm and skills to bear in Outremer just as they had been doing in the West, where their ancient lands were being liberated from Muslim occupation. The First Crusade established the boundaries for Frankish settlement, but it did not determine the demographic composition of Outremer; that was left to a wider process of migration which was occurring also in Europe, where enterprising people travelled far afield in search of places offering better social and economic conditions. There may have been those who ventured to the East as much to satisfy their souls as to seek opportunities, but otherwise they were very much the same people who were settling in Sicily or Spain, newly recovered from Muslim occupation, or in any other area of European settlement, and who came almost by chance, who might have settled elsewhere but came to the Levant. ‘It is doubtful’, Ronnie Ellenblum has stated, ‘whether in the minds of the Lombards or Burgundians there was any great difference between settlement in Languedoc and Catalonia or the Frankish East.’12

  There was a difference, however, between the settlers in Outremer and in comparable places in the West. Compared to villagers in Languedoc, for example, the lists show that the inhabitants of Bethgibelin and Magna Mahomeria were highly skilled and specialised. This was probably true of the Templars’ settlement at Wadi al-Haramiya, 3 miles north of Magna Mahomeria, and indeed throughout Outremer. As well as the usual butchers, bakers and shoemakers, the settlers in the East counted among their number an unusually large number of builders, carpenters and blacksmiths, as well as a concentration of expertise in such areas as vegetable gardening, vineyards, grain cultivation and also rearing pigs, goats and camels. After centuries during which native Christians were forbidden by their Muslim masters to build churches or even keep them in repair, the locals had lost much of their experience in large-scale construction. The need to restore lost skills meant there was a particular demand for Frankish masons, carpenters and metalworkers, who also found themselves engaged in military activities such as building fortresses and siege engines and shoeing horses. Pig-breeding and wine-making served the requirements of the indigenous Christian and Frankish population, and the increase in olive oil production at least partly reflected its use in the growing number of new churches, while Frankish experts succeeded in the husbandry of animals such as goats and camels, previously largely the preserve of Muslims.

  The Frankish achievement in the rural development of the kingdom of Jerusalem was considerable. Recent archaeological investigations reveal that they founded over two hundred new settlements; they interconnected their sites with a network of roads, constructed bridges and renovated ancient aqueducts, built watermills and windmills, and in a hard and drought-prone environment mastered the complicated traditional techniques of irrigation. The military orders played a leading part; as well as founding settlements, both the Templars and the Hospitallers developed the rural economy by building watermills and granaries; the Hospitallers also engaged in the sugar industry and the Templars in the glass-making industry in the countryside.

  The Franks numbered about a quarter of the population of Palestine, over 100,000 out of an estimated 400,000 to 500,000 inhabitants in all,13 further bolstering the Christian character of Palestine, whose rural population was ‘still Christian on the eve of the Crusaders’ conquest’ and whose major city, Jerusalem, ‘was certainly inhabited mainly by Christians during the entire period [of the Muslim occupation]’.14 But during the Arab period some parts of Palestine – eastern Galilee, for example, and also the region on the west bank of the River Jordan around Nablus – had suffered from frequent nomad attacks and depredations, forcing the sedentary farming population to abandon their lands, which were eventually settled by Muslims. The pattern of Frankish settlement was affected by these conditions, the Franks preferring to establish themselves among fellow Christians, founding new sites in Christian neighbourhoods and marrying local Christian women, or even living in the same villages with Eastern Christians and sharing the same churches, but staying away from areas where the population was Muslim and largely intrusive, invaders rather than indigenous converts to Islam.

  The Muslims had long failed to involve themselves in the daily lives and culture of the people they regarded as their chattel, the Christians and the Jews who had been ‘tolerated’ as dhimmis under Islamic rule; and they felt the same, even more so, about the Franks. Very few Muslims troubled to learn the languages of the Franks, or indeed were aware that the Franks spoke a variety of languages; instead they lumped them all together as speaking one Frankish tongue. The Arab writer and diplomat Usamah ibn Munqidh contemptuously dismissed them with the remark, ‘These people speak nothing but Frankish; we do not understand what they say.’15 Not that the Arabs chose to understand the Turks, nor the Turks the Arabs; there is very little evidence that they learned the other’s language. Usamah ibn Munqidh underlined the point when he added for good measure that he did not understand Turkish either. As Carole Hillenbrand, one of the leading scholars of the Turkish imperium admits, the effect of this linguistic haughtiness, or ignorance, is to cast doubt on Muslim chronicles of the time in which ‘dialogues in high-sounding Arabic’ are put in the mouths of Turkish commanders and sultans but ‘could never have actually taken place’.16

  To the extent that the Muslims verbally acknowledged the Franks, it was to hurl abuse, calling them devils, dogs and pigs, while the Muslim chroniclers could barely write a page about the Franks without resorting to some invective, calling them ‘accursed’ or ‘enemies of God’. Abusive phrases such as ‘may God curse them’ and ‘may God send them to perdition’ run like a litany through Muslim writings about the Franks,17 but the chronicles of those Franks who knew the East are generally free of such abuse towards Muslims. As Fulcher of Chartres observed, Franks did learn Arabic, and Syriac and Armenian too: ‘the one and the other use mutually the speech and the idioms of the different languages’.18 Knowledge of the local languages facilitated trade and allowed the Franks to work with the indigenous population in developing the country through agriculture, road-making, construction works and so on, and also to share in their lives as neighbours and to intermarry. The Franks were successfully establishing a political, social and cultural environment based on the local Christian population, accruing along the way a tolerance and breadth of view that Muslim society ignored. After several hundred years of alien occupation, Outremer was being restored to the Mediterranean world.

  12

  Zengi’s Jihad

  IN 1138 THE ARAB DIPLOMAT Usamah ibn Munqidh was sent to Jerusalem by the independent Turkish ruler of Damascus, Muin al-Din Unur. His purpose was to discuss with King Fulk the possibility of an alliance against Imad al-Din Zengi, who a decade earlier had been confirmed by the Seljuk sultan as the atabeg, or governor, of Mosul in northern Iraq and of Aleppo in northern Syria. But the Seljuk dynasty was in decline and exercised only the loosest control over its minions, or over the Abbassid caliph in Baghdad or over anyone else, leaving Turkish strongmen like Zengi to vie for power in the region. William of Tyre called Zengi ‘a vicious man’,1 and the inhabitants of Damascus agreed: they had learned something of his brutality during his unsuccessful siege of their city in 1135, and Usamah ibn Munqidh’s mission to Jerusalem was sent with popular supp
ort. For two years Usamah travelled back and forth, negotiating an alliance and making friends. Zengi threatened Damascus again in 1140, but his fear of being caught in a pincer movement forced him to withdraw, an event celebrated later that year when Usamah accompanied Muin al-Din Unur on a state visit to Jerusalem.

  During the times Usamah spent in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the kingdom he became a close observer of the Franks and their ways, and he described his encounters in his memoirs, though often in a tone of self-congratulation at what he saw as the superiority of his own culture over theirs. He was shocked, for example, by the lack of restriction placed on their women by Frankish men.

  The Franks are without any vestige of a sense of honour and jealousy. If one of them goes along the street with his wife and meets a friend, this man will take the woman’s hand and lead her aside to talk, while the husband stands by waiting until she has finished her conversation. If she takes too long about it he leaves her with the other man and goes on his way.2

  On a visit to Acre, Usamah met an important Frankish knight who had come on a pilgrimage. ‘He was of my intimate fellowship and kept such constant company with me that he began to call me “my brother”. Between us were mutual bonds of amity and friendship.’ But when the knight was about to embark for home and offered to take Usamah’s teenage son into his household for some time, a form of tutelage that was common among the nobility of Europe, Usamah declined, remarking in his memoirs that ‘even if my son were to be taken captive, his captivity could not bring him a worse misfortune than carrying him into the lands of the Franks’.3

  Usamah was an Arab, born at Shaizar in Syria in 1095, the year that launched the First Crusade. He was a widely read and cultivated man; he was also raised as a hunter and a warrior, and as a young man he helped defend Shaizar against all comers. He fought against the Franks at Tripoli and Antioch as well as against the Turks at Hama and Homs, and also against the Assassins who built their castle of Masyaf within view of Shaizar across the valley of the Orontes river. But in 1131 he was exiled by his uncle the emir of Shaizar, who feared that Usamah was plotting against him. Thereafter Usamah wandered the Middle East in the service of one ruler or another and developed a reputation as an unscrupulous political intriguer. He was accused of arranging the assassination of a Fatimid caliph and his vizier, as well as scheming against Muin al-Din Unur, the ruler of Damascus, whom he nevertheless served as diplomatic envoy. But his abilities and charm opened many doors, and he was befriended by numerous figures in the East, among them the Templars and King Fulk; Usamah died at Damascus in 1188, the year after the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin, another of his friends.

  Usamah came to know the Templars particularly well and told how they made a point of providing him with a place to pray in their headquarters on the Temple Mount, although inevitably in his memoirs he turned the tale against the Franks.

  This is an example of Frankish barbarism, God damn them! When I was in Jerusalem I used to go to the Masjid al-Aqsa, beside which is a small oratory which the Franks have made into a church. Whenever I went into the mosque, which was in the hands of Templars who were friends of mine, they would put the little oratory at my disposal, so that I could say my prayers there.

  Usamah would then arrange himself to pray towards Mecca, which is south of Jerusalem, whereas Christian churches were usually oriented to the east. But on one occasion a Frank noticed Usamah’s direction of prayer and roughly pointed him towards the east, saying ‘That is the way to pray!’ Usamah’s Templar friends rushed forward and led the man away, but when their attention was diverted the man accosted Usamah again, repeating ‘That is the way to pray!’ Again the Templars intervened and led the Frank away, apologising to their Muslim friend, saying the man had just arrived from the West and had never seen anyone pray as Usamah had done.4 All in all, decided Usamah, ‘There are some Franks who have settled in our land and taken to living like Muslims. These are better than those who have just arrived from their homelands, but they are the exception’.5

  During the Muslim occupation Christians were not permitted on the Temple Mount at all, whereas Usamah was treated royally by the Franks. But the Franks were ‘animals’, he wrote, ‘possessing the virtues of courage and fighting, but nothing else; just as animals have only the virtues of strength and carrying loads’.6 It was that old familiar contempt that Muslims had for dhimmis, which went back hundreds of years. As for his remark that the Franks ‘have settled in our land’, it comes oddly from Usamah, whose family, ensconced in Shaizar, were aliens to the place, which had only recently been in Byzantine hands and had been the seat of a bishop. Known to the Byzantines as Cezer, it had been part of Graeco-Roman Syria for a thousand years until it fell to the Arabs in 638, although it was recovered in 999. But in 1081, almost on the eve of the First Crusade and just fourteen years before Usamah was born, Cezer was lost to the Banu Munqidh, Usamah’s clan. It was not so much the Franks who had ‘settled in our land’ as the Banu Munqidh who had taken the land from the indigenous population.

  Early in 1099, after the First Crusade had captured Antioch and was marching south towards Jerusalem, the army at first followed the valley of the Orontes river, where the crusaders were welcomed by the Banu Munqidh clan of Shaizar, who were delighted to help any enemy of the Turks. The emir of Shaizar, the uncle of Usamah ibn Munqidh, provided them with horses and food and other provisions and gave them guides to show the way along the valley and through the Homs gap, where the army emerged on the Mediterranean just north of Tripoli. There another Arab clan, the Banu Ammar, gave the crusaders further help as they marched along the coast as far as Fatimid territory, where from Jaffa they ascended through the highlands to Jerusalem.

  Yet within Usamah’s own lifetime the attitude of local Muslim rulers, whether Arab or Turk, towards Turkish imperial domination went from resistance to acceptance, mostly because they were beaten into submission in the cause of dynastic ambition by successive warriors, Imad al-Din Zengi, his son Nur al-Din, and Nur al-Din’s successor Salah al-Din, famous in the West as Saladin. One historian has succinctly explained Zengi’s technique as a ‘policy of deliberately refraining from serious attack on the Latin states and concentrating his assaults on his Muslim rivals. His programme of the status quo in respect to the Franks was of course designed to give him a free hand in his endeavours to best his Muslim foes.’7

  Zengi was a Turk who in 1127 prevailed on the weakened Seljuk sultan in Baghdad to appoint him atabeg, or governor, of Mosul in northern Iraq. A year later, after agreeing a truce with the Frankish count of Edessa, Zengi marched into northern Syria and made himself atabeg of Aleppo as well. By means of war and intimidation Zengi soon extended his authority over much of Muslim Syria, and he would have taken Damascus too but for the alliance negotiated in 1139 by Usamah ibn Munqidh between its Turkish ruler, Muin al-Din Unur, and King Fulk and Queen Melisende of Jerusalem.

  Zengi’s ambition to take Damascus had already brought him into conflict with the Franks and also with the Templars. In 1137 Zengi laid siege to the Syrian city of Homs, which was a dependency of Damascus, but Raymond II, the count of Tripoli, went to its defence if only to keep Zengi in check and to prevent him from gaining too much power. As the Franks approached, Zengi abandoned his siege and withdrew north into the Orontes valley, where he invested the castle of Montferrand, an outpost of the county of Tripoli. Raymond followed Zengi north, meanwhile calling on Jerusalem for assistance. King Fulk answered by dashing to Tripoli and through the Homs gap at the head of a small army which included a number of Templars.8 For all that the Templars were beholden to no authority other than the pope, they had from the beginning enjoyed a close relationship with the ruling family of Jerusalem, were prominent at court and played an important role in the political as well as the military affairs of the kingdom. The Templars’ participation in the failed assault against Damascus in 1129 and now this march north to the Orontes are the first recorded instances of the order being involved in outright warf
are in the East rather than policing actions, and in both cases the Templars were lending their services to the king. But like the Damascus debacle, this adventure also ended in ignominious disaster.

  As Raymond and Fulk marched against Zengi at Montferrand, Zengi quit his encirclement of the castle and fell upon the Franks, taking them by surprise, decimating their infantry and taking Raymond and a number of knights captive. Fulk and his forces, including the Templars, abandoned their supplies and sought refuge at Montferrand, where Zengi quickly put them under siege. Help was on the way; a mass conscription of fighting men from Jerusalem, Antioch and Edessa rushed towards the Orontes, so numerous that it seemed to the Muslims like a fresh crusade. This was the usual form of Frankish defence in the early years of Outremer; rather than relying on massive castles and static warfare, the Franks rapidly deployed their forces to relieve the town or fortress that was under attack or siege, which had only to hold out for a few days until overwhelming help arrived. But the Franks had dashed inside the castle of Montferrand without their supplies, and they were starving now and eating their own horses. Isolated and unaware of the approaching forces, they sued for terms. Zengi agreed to let them go for nothing more than the surrender of Montferrand; at first astonished at his generosity, the Franks soon learned of the relieving army and reproached themselves for giving in too soon. Among those who went free were eighteen humiliated Templars. As for Zengi, he had avoided a major battle with the Franks, which, had he suffered a loss, would have played to the advantage of his true enemy, Damascus; but he had acquired Montferrand, which would prevent the Franks from pushing through the Homs gap into the Orontes valley and which gave him control of Homs and the nearby city of Hama, a gain that the Franks would never succeed in taking back. A year later, in not dissimilar circumstances, Zengi would show how he dealt less favourably with his fellow Muslims; while besieging Baalbek, a dependency of Damascus, he guaranteed the safety of its garrison if they would surrender; when they did so, he skinned their commander alive and crucified the rest.