The Tragedy of the Templars

by Michael Haag

  But pilgrims arriving in Outremer met Jacobites and Greek Orthodox Christians who told them the story was not like that at all. All these various Marys and unnamed women were quite separate people and, apart from Mary, sister of Lazarus, and the unnamed woman at the house of Simon the Leper, had no association with Bethany. John of Würzburg was one Western pilgrim who encountered these conflicting stories when he reached Bethany and Jerusalem, and he went away entirely confused. ‘If anyone wishes to know more about these things, let him come himself, and ask the more intelligent subjects of this land the sequence and truth of this story. As for me, I have not found quite enough to explain it in any of the Scriptures.’7

  So unsettling was this confusion to pilgrims that Gerard of Nazareth, a Benedictine monk who was bishop of Latakia, on the Syrian coast, determined to put the matter straight. In his treatise written in the 1160s against the tradition of the Eastern churches he reasserted the position of the Church at Rome that Mary Magdalene was the same person as the other Marys mentioned in the Gospels, and in particular she was the same woman as Mary, the sister of Martha. This was not a trivial issue of misidentification; great matters were at stake. Most obviously, if Mary Magdalene could no longer be associated with Bethany, then much of the appeal of its abbey would be lost and it would face financial collapse. Even worse, pilgrimages could expose people to rival views and undermine the traditions of the Roman Church – and undermine its authority in the East. If the Latin Church could get Mary Magdalene wrong, its interpretations of the Bible were open to doubt, as were the bases for so many of its rituals and practices, not to mention its arguments that had led to the Great Schism or were used to claim primacy for Rome. What authority, what ascendancy, would the Latins have left to them in the East?

  Heresies have been born from less and been visited with fierce correction. But not in Outremer, where Gerard framed his argument mildly: ‘There is no greatly pernicious error in this, and one can believe one or another without grave danger. But it is good, if possible, to hold to what is more truthful, not only this but in all controversy.’8

  Behind this atmosphere of toleration was the reality that Eastern Christians felt closer ties to their fellow Christians from the West than to either the Muslim Arabs or the Turks. By the twelfth century most of the local population spoke Arabic but were not yet culturally arabised; Greek, Armenian and Syriac all survived not only as liturgical languages but also in day-to-day use. Moreover the Turks and their Kurdish allies generally did not speak Arabic, or Syriac, Armenian or Greek, whereas the Franks, who shared a common faith with the local population, also made an effort to learn the local languages. But probably the biggest factor that encouraged the Franks and the native inhabitants of Outremer to get along was that they shared a common enemy – the Turks.9 Nor was it only Christians for whom the Turks were the enemy; they were the enemy for most Muslims too.

  Ibn Jubayr, a Spanish Muslim who had been on a pilgrimage to Mecca, wrote of his journey through Outremer in 1184 as he travelled between Damascus and Acre.

  We left Tibnin [Toron, within the kingdom of Jerusalem] by a road running past farms where Muslims live who do very well under the Franks – may Allah preserve us from such temptation! The regulations imposed on them are the handing over of half of the grain crop at the time of harvest and the payment of a poll tax of one dinar and seven qirats, together with a light duty on their fruit trees. The Muslims own their own houses and rule themselves in their own way. This is the way the farms and big villages are organised in Frankish territory. Many Muslims are sorely tempted to settle here when they see the far from comfortable conditions in which their brethren live in the districts under Muslim rule. Unfortunately for the Muslims they have always reason for complaint about the injustices of their chiefs in the lands governed by their coreligionists, whereas they can have nothing but praise for the conduct of the Franks, whose justice they can always rely on.10

  Clearly Muslim farmers had not been dispossessed of their lands by the Franks, while the tax and payment in kind were in line with amounts paid by Christian farmers too. In fact, Muslims were better off than Christians, who in addition to the payments due to their overlords were required to pay a tithe to the churches from which Muslims were exempt.

  Ibn Jubayr’s account is all the more striking as he was otherwise resolutely opposed to the Franks. But he could not deny the respect with which the Franks treated his fellow Muslims, as when he approached Acre and found Muslims entrusted with the local administration. ‘On the same Monday, we alighted at a farmstead a parasang distant from Acre. Its headman is a Muslim, appointed by the Franks to oversee the Muslim workers in it. He gave generous hospitality to all members of the caravan.’11 In Acre itself he discovered that although two mosques had been converted to churches, Muslims were nevertheless free to use them as meeting places and to pray in them, facing towards Mecca. There was nothing unusual about this; Usamah ibn Munqidh had mentioned the hospitality he received from the Templars, who welcomed him to pray in their chapel within what had been the Aqsa mosque on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount.

  Although Ibn Jubayr, a Sunni Muslim himself, was full of praise for Saladin’s Sunni regime in Cairo, he admitted that the majority of Muslims in Outremer and Syria were heterodox in their beliefs. ‘Dissident Muslim elements, comprising Shiites, Ismailites and Nusayriyah [Alawites] [. . .] according to Ibn Jubayr, outnumbered the Sunnites’, and also there were the Druze, an historical offshoot of the Ismailis who had separated themselves from Islam altogether, none of whom welcomed the prospect of being forced by Saladin into the Sunni mould and who therefore allied themselves as necessary with the Franks.12

  The Ismailis, Alawites and Druze were all dualists: that is, they believed that the universe contains both good and evil because God himself is made up of good and evil. They saw evil not as the absence of good but as part of the essence of both the world and its creator, who in turn may have been an emanation of an ultimate and unknowable God. Dualism was deeply rooted in the East and penetrated Islam via Mani, a third-century Persian, who drew on Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Babylonian Mandaeism and Christianity. In fact the term ‘Manichaean’, the name some medieval French chroniclers gave to the Cathars, was used by the Byzantines to describe the dualist ideas of Mani. But the Ismailis, Alawis and Druze went beyond religious belief; they were also initiatory secret societies with political aims tending towards the apocalyptic. In rejecting Islamic orthodoxy, which teaches that God is the sole principle and is good, their enemy were the Sunnis, who under Zengi, Nur al-Din and now Saladin were determined to eradicate them; the stronghold of dualist resistance was the less accessible regions of the East, particularly the coastal mountains.

  As it happens, the battle between Muslim dualists and Sunni Islam began just as the Cathars first made their appearance in France, in the 1140s. There were similarities between the two. The origins of Cathar dualism lay in the East, where it can be traced back to the Christian Gnostics, who flourished in the second and third centuries AD all round the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean, in Egypt, Syria and Palestine, and perhaps also in Asia Minor and Greece. Gnosis is Greek for ‘knowledge’, and the Gnostics believed that salvation lay in their understanding of the true nature of creation. They believed that there were two worlds: the material world of evil and decay that had been made by an evil demiurge, the enemy of man; and the world of light where the primal God resides. Mankind inhabits a catastrophe not of God’s making, but the Gnostics said they knew the secret of salvation. At the moment of the cosmic blunder, sparks of the divine light, like slivers of shattered glass, became embedded in a portion of humankind. These people were the elect, and the Gnostic aim was to lead them back to God. The crucifixion and the resurrection had no place in Gnostic belief; instead, the role of Jesus was to descend from the primal God and impart to his disciples the secret tradition of the gnosis.

  Like the Gnostics, the Ismailis believed that man possesses slivers of the divine spark whi
ch, given possession of the secret knowledge, can reunite man with the unknown God. The Ismailis claimed to possess this knowledge. And at the opposite end of the Mediterranean, especially in Languedoc, which was a major source of Templar income and recruits, the Cathars likewise claimed knowledge of this divine secret.

  During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Languedoc, in southern France, was the centre of a rich and complex religious life in which Jews, Catholics and communities of Arian, Waldensian and Manichaean heretics lived side by side. The Arians were the survival of that 900-year-old heresy that began in Alexandria and tended towards undermining the divinity of Jesus Christ, while the Waldensians were a new twelfth-century movement that espoused poverty, called for the distribution of property to the poor, rejected the authority of the clergy and claimed that anyone could preach, saying their literal reading of the Bible was all that was needed for salvation. According to the thirteenth-century chronicler and Cistercian monk Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay, the Waldensians ‘were evil men, but very much less perverted than other heretics; they agreed with us in many matters, and differed in some’.13 The ‘other heretics’ were the Manichaeans, also known as Cathars, meaning ‘pure’. The Templars partly owed their great expansion in Languedoc to the support of the nobility, with whom they were in close alliance, the combination of nobles’ land and Templar capital allowing the establishment of new communities and the development of previously uncultivated territories. Some of these Templar patrons were renowned Cathar supporters.

  After Catharism appeared in southern France towards the middle of the twelfth century, its adherents quickly became numerous and well organised, electing bishops, collecting funds and distributing money to the poor. But they could not accept that if there was only one God, and if God was the creator, and if God was good, that there should be suffering, illness and death in his world.

  The Cathars’ solution to this problem of evil in the world was to say that there were really two creators and two worlds. The Cathars were dualists in that they believed in a good and an evil principle. The former was the creator of the invisible and spiritual universe; this was the celestial Christ, and his bride was Mary Magdalene. The latter was the creator of our material world; this was the terrestrial pseudo-Christ, for whom Mary Magdalene was not a wife but his concubine.14

  All matter was evil because it was the creation of the false, terrestrial Christ, but the ideal of renouncing the world was impractical for everyone, and so while most Cathars lived outwardly normal lives, pledging to renounce the evil world only on their deathbeds, a few lived the strict life of the perfecti.

  Because human and animal procreation perpetuated matter, the perfecti abstained from eggs, milk, meat and women. But both ordinary Cathars and the perfecti actively shared in their belief that the true Christ was not part of this world of evil. As the celestial Christ, he was not born of the Virgin Mary, nor had he human flesh, nor had he risen from the dead; salvation did not lie in his death and resurrection, which were merely a simulation; instead, redemption would be gained by following Jesus’ teachings.

  By 1200 the Cathar heresy had become so widespread that the papacy was alarmed. Pope Innocent III said that the Cathars were worse than the Saracens, for not only did Catharism challenge the Church but by condemning procreation it also threatened the very survival of the human race. In 1209 a crusade was launched against them – called the Albigensian Crusade, as so many Cathars lived around Albi – and an inquisition was introduced. In that year the core of Cathar resistance withdrew to the castle of Montségur atop a great domed hill in the eastern Pyrenees, where they withstood assaults and sieges until capitulating in 1244. Some two hundred still refused to abjure their errors; they were bound together within a stockade below the castle and were set ablaze on a huge funeral pyre.

  The Templars played no part in the Albigensian Crusade, which was bound to attack some of their own patrons, who were likewise patrons of the Cathars. Nor has it been shown that the Templars were infected by the Cathar heresy. But like the Ismailis and other Shia offshoots in the East, the charge of heresy was soon used against the Cathars for political reasons; just as Zengi, Nur al-Din and Saladin waged jihad against heterodox Muslims in order to advance their own dynastic interests, so the kings of France put their military muscle into the Albigensian Crusade and rewarded themselves by annexing Languedoc to the French crown. And in this political sense the fates of the Templars and the Cathars would be intertwined. From their inception the Templars had been protected by the pope; no church or secular authority could act against them without the pope’s approval. But the machinery of the inquisition that had been used against the Cathars did not die with their destruction; instead it was resurrected and manipulated for secular purposes by King Philip IV in 1307, when he arrested the entire Templar network of France at dawn on Friday 13 October on charges of heresy and blasphemy.

  As the Sunni Turks under Zengi and Nur al-Din imposed themselves more completely on Syria, the Ismailis withdrew into that region of the coastal mountains, the Jebel al-Sariya, girded by the great Templar and Hospitaller strongholds of Tortosa, Chastel Blanc, Margat and Krak des Chevaliers, where the movement assumed its militant and murderous form known as the Assassins. From such strongholds as al-Ullayqa, Qadmus, Qalaat al-Kahf and especially Masyaf, the headquarters of the Assassins’ leader, the Sheikh al-Jebel, the Old Man of the Mountain, they employed a strategy of assassination to influence and control anyone, mostly Sunni Muslims but sometimes also Christians, who might threaten their independence.

  The Assassins’ method of recruitment was famously described by Marco Polo, who in the latter part of the thirteenth century encountered a branch at Alamut in Persia. Referring to them as Malahida, meaning ‘deviators’ or ‘heretics’, as they were called in Persia, he said they used drugs (including hashish, from which the word ‘assassin’ derives) to convince novices destined to become self-destructive feddayin, ‘the self-sacrificers’, that they had entered a garden of delights where fountains flowed with milk, honey and wine, and where houris, those maidens of Paradise, were likewise on tap. Brought back to their normal state, the initiates were told that they had indeed visited Paradise, which would certainly be forever theirs provided they gave absolute obedience to the commands of the Assassins’ imam.

  A later account, published in 1307 by the Venetian historian Marino Sanudo, relates that when Count Henry of Champagne was on a visit to the Assassins he saw two young men dressed in white sitting at the top of a high tower. When asked by the Assassin leader whether he had any subjects as obedient as his own, the count had no time to reply before a sign was given to the two, who immediately leapt from the tower to their deaths. Their willingness to sacrifice their lives made the feddayins’ attacks that much more disturbing; their mission was to sow fear of the sect and at the same time weaken the resolve of their enemies by the murder of key figures. The Assassins infiltrated the ranks of their adversaries, and when they had won their victim’s trust they would kill him, always using a knife. These were suicide attacks, for apparently by design they themselves perished in carrying out their orders. The killers were unlikely to have dosed themselves beforehand on hashish, however, as its effect would have made them almost useless.

  Among the Assassins’ rare Christian victims were Raymond II, count of Tripoli, in 1152; Conrad of Montferrat, king of Jerusalem, in 1192; and another Raymond, heir to the thrones of Antioch and Tripoli, who in 1213 was stabbed to death outside the door of the Cathedral of Our Lady at Tortosa. But the Assassins’ most famous attempt was against Saladin in 1176. As the champion of Sunni orthodoxy, he had already overthrown the Ismaili Fatimids in Egypt and was now at war with independent Muslims throughout the East. He entered the Jebel al-Sariya to lay siege to Masyaf, but his soldiers reported mysterious powers about, while Saladin was disturbed by terrible dreams. One night he awoke suddenly to find on his bed some hot cakes of a type that only the Assassins baked and with them a poisoned dagger a
nd a threatening verse. Convinced that Rashid al-Din Sinan, the Old Man of the Mountain, had himself entered his tent, Saladin’s nerves gave way. He sent a message to Sinan asking for forgiveness and promised not to pursue his campaign against the Assassins provided he was granted safe conduct. Saladin was pardoned and hastened back to Cairo.

  The one effective organisation against the Assassins was the Templars. Being an undying corporate body, the Templars could not be intimidated by the death of one of their members. The Assassins themselves admitted that they never killed a Grand Master because they knew that someone equally good would be put in his place.