by Michael Haag
As a matter of prestige as well as needing to cater to the great flow of pilgrims to Jerusalem, the Franks desired to build a new fine church on the ruins of the old basilica, although several decades passed before they had the wherewithal to do so. The moment came during the reigns of King Fulk, Queen Melisende and their son Baldwin III, who were the primary patrons of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; this was the same moment as Zengi was destroying Edessa and Nur al-Din was menacing Antioch, yet Jerusalem felt secure. In 1149 the Franks dedicated new chapels decorated with mosaics on the fissured stone outcrop sanctified as Golgotha, and by 1153 they had built the new five-storey bell tower adjacent to the magnificent entrance façade, built in Romanesque style and decorated with local Eastern motifs. Also in Romanesque style similar to the great cathedrals built along the pilgrimage route across France and into Spain – Tours, Limoges, Conques, Toulouse and Santiago de Compostela itself – the Franks began their replacement for Constantine’s basilica in the 1130s, finishing it in the 1160s.
But the limited space available between the Rotunda and the chapels to the east marking various holy sites meant building to a unique plan. The nave was dispensed with, and instead the choir was built almost immediately east of the Rotunda, the two separated by a broad-aisled transept which served as a substitute nave. An ambulatory encircled the choir and was marked by the numerous chapels all the way round, allowing pilgrims in great numbers to circulate freely through the church and pause at the chapels for their prayers. The penultimate stop was Golgotha, where pilgrims left the crosses they had carried with them throughout their pilgrimage from home; then finally they prayed at the empty tomb of Christ at the centre of the Rotunda, the most important shrine of the Christian faith. Except for some depredations by Saladin and his successors, this is essentially the church one sees today.
At the same time as work was under way on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre the Hospitallers were building their new Hospital directly opposite, immediately to the south. Moreover, according to William of Tyre, it was ‘far higher and more costly than the church which had been consecrated by the precious blood of our Saviour’. Like the Templars, the Hospitallers were answerable to no one but the pope, and at Jerusalem, although their Hospital was located in the Patriarch’s Quarter, they maintained a strict autonomy which led to friction and eventually a rowdy dispute during which the Knights of St John rang all their bells to annoy the patriarch when he gave a sermon in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. ‘Whenever the lord patriarch went up to speak to the people, according to custom, from the place where the Saviour of mankind hung for our salvation’, wrote William of Tyre, ‘they endeavoured to hinder the celebration of the office entrusted to him. With intentional malice they set their many great bells ringing so loudly and persistently that the voice of the patriarch could not rise above the din, nor could the people, in spite of all his efforts, hear him.’5
Yet despite this behaviour the Hospitallers were well regarded – principally for their charitable works in the city. John of Würzburg, who visited Jerusalem in about 1165, described the Hospital ‘in which are gathered in various rooms a huge number of sick people, both men and women, who are cared for and refreshed daily at very great expense’. Two thousand people were looked after by the Hospital at the time of his visit, he said, and it ‘also sustains with its food as many people outside as inside’, quite apart from manning castles ‘for the defence of the land of the Christians against the incursions of the Saracens’.6
In writing about the Hospitallers, John of Würzburg made a significant comparison between them and the Templars, who also gave ‘a considerable amount of alms to the poor in Christ, but not a tenth part of that which is done by the Hospitallers’.7 A succinct explanation for this came from Jacques de Molay, the last Templar Grand Master, in a memorandum from 1305: ‘The Hospitallers were founded to care for the sick, and beyond that they bear arms [. . .] whereas the Templars were founded specifically for military service.’8 Whereas the Hospitallers had grown out of a breakaway group of Benedictine monks and continued to include sisters in their ranks, the Templars began as a company of secular knights. Initiates to both orders swore to be ‘serf and slave’, but for the Hospitallers that meant to the sick, while a Templar swore to be serf and slave to the order itself. For the Templars the defence of Outremer was their overriding priority, to which they gave their resources and their lives; for the Hospitallers warfare was an extension of their service to the sick and poor, and they correspondingly gave less of their resources to castle-building and military activities. As it happened, the Templars were much more representative of medieval society than the Hospitallers; membership of the Templars was open to everyone, from the richest noble to the poorest peasant, but they also drew a sharp distinction between their sergeants and their knights; unlike the Hospitallers, the Templars bestowed on their knights an elevated aura as a fighting elite, which set them apart. But the Hospitallers, in dividing their services between warfare and charitable services, kept one foot in the changing currents of medieval society, and that would help them to survive. The raison d’être for the Templars was to fight for the Holy Land, and if that battle was ever lost, the Templars too would fall.
Today nothing of the Hospital in Jerusalem survives – only the name, Muristan, meaning ‘hospital’, which is now applied to the late nineteenth-century Ottoman market that fills its place. After Saladin’s conquest of Jerusalem in 1187 various parts of the Hospital were converted into mosques and an Islamic college. By 1868 it was a heap of ruins. Nor does much evidence survive of the Templars after Saladin’s ‘purification’ of the Temple Mount – mostly fragments built into the Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock, testimony to a workshop that stood at the southern end of the Mount, where a large quantity of exceptionally beautiful architectural sculpture was produced in a unique synthesis of Byzantine, Western European and Levantine styles.
But in the decades following the Second Crusade visitors to the Temple Mount were impressed with how it was being developed by the Templars. After prayers at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, with its chapels associated with the crucifixion and burial of Jesus and the discovery of the True Cross, pilgrims walked to the Temple Mount, entering through the western gate near the south side of the Dome of the Rock, the Templum Domini, or Temple of the Lord, a church which, like the Holy Sepulchre, was under the guardianship of the Augustinian order. On the outer court the Augustinian canons and the Templars had built houses and planted gardens.
According to Theoderich, a German pilgrim who wrote about his visit to the Holy Land in 1172, the Temple of the Lord bore an inscription that read ‘The house of the Lord is well built upon a firm rock’, but as pilgrims were in the habit of chipping away bits of the holy rock, its surface had to be paved with marble and it was cordoned off by a tall and beautifully worked wrought-iron screen which was put up between the encircling columns. By choosing to identify the Dome of the Rock and also the Aqsa mosque with Solomon’s Temple and palace, the Franks incorporated them into the biblical heritage of Christianity; rather than destroy them, they preserved them by turning them to Christian use.
From the Temple of the Lord, continued Theoderich, the pilgrims made their way south to the Templar headquarters at the Aqsa mosque, or rather what he called the Palace of Solomon,
which is oblong, and supported by columns within like a church, and at the end is round like a sanctuary and covered by a great round dome. This building, with all its appurtenances, has passed into the hands of the Knights Templar, who dwell in it and in the other buildings connected with it, having many magazines of arms, clothing, and food in it, and are ever on the watch to guard and protect the country. They have below them stables for horses built by King Solomon himself in the days of old, adjoining the palace, a wondrous and intricate building resting on piers and containing an endless complication of arches and vaults, which stable, we declare, according to our reckoning, could take in ten thousand horses with the
ir grooms. No man could send an arrow from one end of their building to the other, either lengthways or crossways, at one shot with a Balearic bow. Above, it abounds with rooms, solar chambers, and buildings suitable for all manner of uses. Those who walk upon the roof of it find an abundance of gardens, courtyards, ante-chambers, vestibules and rain-water cisterns; while down below it contains a wonderful number of baths, storehouses, granaries, and magazines for the storage of wood and other needful provisions.
Clearly the Templars had considerably renovated what had been a truncated and dilapidated building. But they were doing far more.
On another side of the palace, that is to say on the western side, the Templars have erected a new building. I could give the measurements of its height, length, and breadth of its cellars, refectories, staircases, and roof, rising with a high pitch, unlike the flat roofs of that country; but even if I did so, my hearers would hardly be able to believe me. They have built a new cloister there in addition to the old one which they had in another part of the building. Moreover, they are laying the foundations of a new church of wonderful size and workmanship in this place, by the side of the great court.9
The Templars had grandly transformed the southern part of the Temple Mount into the combined administrative, military and religious headquarters of their order, with a vast stable underneath. The Temple Mount was the nerve centre of the entire Templar order, not only for Outremer but for Europe too. France, England, Aragon, Poitou, Portugal, Apulia and Hungary each had a provincial master, who was responsible to the Grand Master. But the Grand Master, although he had considerable powers, did not rule as an autocrat. All major decisions taken by the Grand Master, such as whether to go to war, agree a truce, alienate lands or acquire a castle, required that he consult with the Grand Chapter, which was comprised of senior officials.
The Grand Master, who was elected by twelve senior members of the order, had his chambers here and was attended by his entourage, which included a chaplain, two knights, a clerk, a sergeant and a Muslim scribe to act as an interpreter, as well as servants and a cook. The Seneschal, the Marshal, the Draper and the Commander of the kingdom of Jerusalem were also here along with their attendants. The Seneschal was deputy and adviser to the Grand Master. The Draper was keeper of the robes; he also issued clothes and bed linen, removed items from knights who were thought to have too much and distributed gifts made to the order. The Marshal was responsible for military decisions, such as the purchase of equipment and horses, and he exercised authority over the regional commanders. These were the Commander of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, who acted as the order’s treasurer and within the kingdom had the same powers as the Grand Master; the Commander of Jerusalem, who within the city had the same powers as the Grand Master; and the commanders of Acre, Tripoli and Antioch, each with the powers of the Grand Master within their domains. In addition there were about three hundred Templar knights and a thousand sergeants on active service in the kingdom of Jerusalem, as well as the native light cavalry, called Turcopoles, who were employed by the order, and numerous auxiliaries, including grooms, blacksmiths, armourers and stonemasons, and many of these would have been quartered on the Temple Mount.
The Temple Mount was a busy place. Yet at its heart it was as silent as any monastery, for the Templars followed the canonical hours like any Cistercian or Benedictine monk, and otherwise caring for their horses. The so-called Stables of Solomon were, in fact, a substructure of vaults and arches built by Herod to extend the platform of the Mount, and later reconstruction work was undertaken by the Umayyads and the Templars. The Templars indeed used this as a stable, but Theoderich’s claim that ten thousand horses could be stabled beneath the Mount is an exaggeration; other travellers estimated the capacity at about two thousand horses, and allowing space for squires, grooms and perhaps even pilgrims sleeping there, the number of horses stabled at any one time was more like five hundred. A gate constructed by the Templars in the southern wall of the Temple Mount gave direct access to their headquarters and to the stables.
These warrior monks were a powerful force in the Holy Land, whose defence since the Second Crusade fell increasingly on their shoulders. Vassals under the feudal system produced no more than 1,000 knights throughout the whole of Outremer, although the king of Jerusalem did have sufficient resources to hire mercenaries. Nevertheless, by the 1170s the Templars alone had 300 knights and another 1,000 sergeants based at Jerusalem, and a similar number distributed among Tripoli, Antioch, Tortosa and Baghras: in other words 600 knights and 2,000 sergeants in all. When the Hospitallers were included, the military orders provided the greater part of the military prowess of the Frankish states in the East.10
Far from being fanatics forever in search of battle with the infidel, as sometimes they are portrayed, the Templars were pragmatic and conservative in their approach to politics and warfare – if anything, more so than the counts and kings of Outremer, who were driven by personal and dynastic ambitions in the here and now. In becoming a Knight Templar each man surrendered his will to the order, as in the words of one recruit: ‘I, renouncing secular life and its pomp, relinquishing everything, give myself to the Lord God and to the knighthood of the Temple of Solomon of Jerusalem, that, as long as I shall live, in accordance with my strength, I shall serve there a complete pauper for God.’11
Self-will was replaced with service to the order and its aims, and the Templars were playing a long game, dedicated to defending the Holy Land for all time. In any case, conflict in the Middle Ages tended to be more about sieges of cities and castles than battle in the open field, which was unpredictable and risky even under the most favourable circumstances. And in Outremer patience had its rewards, as it was usually only a matter of time before the uneasy Muslim coalitions against the Christians fell apart. And so it was with confidence that the Templars looked out from their headquarters atop the Temple Mount upon Jerusalem and the future that lay beyond.
15
The Defence of Outremer
SINCE THE DEATH of King Fulk in 1143, his wife and co-ruler, Melisende, had been ruling the kingdom of Jerusalem both in her own right and as regent for their son Baldwin III. In this she had the support of the Templars, owing to the boy’s age, but in 1150, by when he had long since achieved his majority, Baldwin demanded the right to rule as joint monarch with his mother. Tensions grew during the next two years as factions of the nobility backed Baldwin or Melisende, and there were fears of civil war, but the matter was decided in 1152, when Baldwin made a convincing show of force and his mother was retired to Nablus. There is evidence that suggests the Templars may have supported Melisende to the last, but if so, they suffered no breach with Baldwin; although answerable to no one but the pope, the Templars were always strong supporters of whoever wore the crown at Jerusalem. In any case two years later, in 1152, Melisende and Baldwin were reconciled and, although still ensconced at Nablus, which she had been allowed to hold for life, Melisende continued to exercise influence at court, where her experience was valued and she also acted as Baldwin’s regent when he was away on campaigns.
Baldwin III’s first major campaign was against Ascalon, to which he laid siege in January 1153. Garrisoned by the Fatimids of Egypt, Ascalon was the last Muslim outpost along the Palestinian coast and had served as a base for raids against the kingdom of Jerusalem and acts of piracy at sea. But although Fatimid Egypt had been weakening, Ascalon was powerfully fortified, and the siege wore on well into the summer, the city finally falling only in August. The booty was enormous, and the Christian recovery of Palestine was complete. The Templars played a prominent part in this triumph, for they were first into the breach when a section of the walls came down, yet William of Tyre was predictable in turning this against them when he claimed in his chronicle that their eagerness was due to their greed for spoils, a theme he was to develop and which was taken up by others. William of Tyre’s resentment towards the Templars arose from their independence, as an order responsible only to the pope an
d otherwise operating outside all jurisdiction of church or state. As a churchman himself, and frustrated in his ambition to become patriarch of Jerusalem, he rarely failed to find low motives underlying the Templars’ successes, a view that in time would find broader support. In fact, at Ascalon there was no Templar greed, rather a great sacrifice; they lost forty or so knights in the attack, and their Grand Master lost his life.
Baldwin’s siege of Ascalon would prove to have a price. Almost immediately after the failed siege of Damascus by the Second Crusade, its atabeg, Muin al-Din Unur, renewed his old alliance with Jerusalem; it was a matter of practical politics in the face of his greater enemy Nur al-Din. But in 1149 Muin al-Din Unur died; under his successor Mujin al-Din Ibn al-Sufi, Damascus suffered several attacks and sieges by Nur al-Din. In a desperate effort to maintain the independence of the city, Mujin al-Din on the one hand recognised the suzerainty of Nur al-Din but on the other hand maintained the alliance with Jerusalem. Meanwhile Nur al-Din’s jihad propaganda was having an effect on the Muslims of the city. Christians had remained the majority at Damascus until at least the tenth century and maybe into the eleventh,1 and even now in the mid-twelfth century their numbers approached half the population. But faced with Nur al-Din’s incessant intimidation coupled with his propaganda – and with Baldwin’s forces recently tied up at Ascalon and the kingdom of Jerusalem lacking the resources to come to the aid of Damascus – in April 1154 an element of the Muslim population opened the city’s gates to Nur al-Din.
Immediately after his occupation of Damascus, Nur al-Din applied the same programme of exciting popular religious feeling as he had done at Aleppo, founding new madrasas and mosques to preach jihad – and just as at Aleppo, he directed the energy of its people not against the Franks but against Muslim states elsewhere in Syria and beyond which still resisted submission to his authority. In fact, he renewed the peace treaty with Jerusalem and even agreed to pay a tribute to the Franks, meanwhile subjugating Muslim-held Baalbek and snatching lands from the Seljuks in Asia Minor. Never for the rest of his life did Nur al-Din pursue jihad against the Franks. But he did now possess Syria’s greatest city, and beyond it to the south lay Egypt.
