The Tragedy of the Templars

by Michael Haag

  6 Imad al-Din, in Gabrieli, Arab Historians of the Crusades, p. 156.

  7 Ibn Shaddad, in Hillenbrand, Crusades, 189.

  8 Imad al-Din, in Gabrieli, Arab Historians of the Crusades, p. 160.

  9 Tyerman, God’s War, p. 353.

  10 Hillenbrand, Crusades, p. 180.

  11 Lyons and Jackson, Saladin, p. 240.

  12 Ehrenkreutz, Saladin, p. 237.

  13 Lyons and Jackson, Saladin, p. 280.

  14 Ibid., pp. 275–6.

  15 See for example Tyerman, God’s War, p. 52: ‘The question of the extent of Arabisation and Islamicisation of conquered lands remains obscure and vexed, but it appears that the process was slow, uneven and, by the eleventh century, still incomplete. It is not certain whether there was even a Muslim majority in Syria or Palestine when the crusaders arrived in 1097.’ The evidence for a Christian majority is far greater than Tyerman admits and will be dealt with later in this book.

  16 Ibid., sura 9, verse 4.

  17 The Koran, trans. Dawood, sura 9, verse 14.

  18 See Cyril Glassé, The Concise Encyclopaedia of Islam, Stacey International, London 1991.

  19 Hillenbrand, Crusades, p. 444.

  20 Ibid., p. 333.

  21 Lyons and Jackson, Saladin, p. 276.

  22 Ibid., p. 361.

  23 William of Tyre, A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea, pp. 406–8.

  Part I: THE MIDDLE EAST BEFORE THE CRUSADES

  1: The Christian World

  1 Eusebius, Life of Constantine, 1.28; Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors, 44; also see Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, p. 611–18.

  2 Theodoret of Cyrrhus, A History of the Monks of Syria, p.165. Theodoret (393–466) is referring to the vast numbers of pilgrims who arrived from all over the Christian world to witness Simeon Stylites (c. 385–459) in northern Syria.

  3 Joseph Patrich, ‘Church, State and the Transformation of Palestine: The Byzantine Period’, in Levy, ed., The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land, pp. 470–72.

  4 Leontius of Byzantium quoted in Colin Morris, The Sepulchre of Christ and the Medieval West: From the Beginning to 1600, p. 53.

  5 The population of Palestine during the Byzantine period was about a million, a much greater population than at any time until the twentieth century. See Joseph Patrich, ‘Church, State and the Transformation of Palestine: The Byzantine Period’, in Levy, ed., The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land, p. 473; and Gil, History of Palestine, p. 169, and footnote 40 on that page, referring to Judaea.

  6 Antiochus Strategos, ‘The Capture of Jerusalem by the Persians in 614 AD’, trans. Frederick C. Conybeare, English Historical Review, 25 (1910), pp. 502–17.

  7 Sebeos, The Armenian History, Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 1999; also Sebeos’ History, trans. Robert Bedrosian, online: http://rbedrosian.com/sebtoc.html.

  8 For example, the Mamilla cave discovery in 1992, a mass grave for those whose bodies were recovered from the Mamel cistern after the Persian massacre: see Ronny Reich, ‘ “God Knows their Names”: Mass Christian Grave Revealed in Jerusalem’, Biblical Archaeology Review, 22/2 (1996,), pp.26–35; also Yossi Nagar, ‘Human Skeletal Remains from the Mamilla Cave, Jerusalem’, Israel Antiquities Authority: http://www.antiquities. org.il/article_Item_eng.asp?sec_id=17&sub_subj_id=179; and Gideon Avni, ‘The Persian Conquest of Jerusalem (641 CE): An Archaeological Assessment’: http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/pers357904.shtml.

  9 Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire, vol. 1, p. 197.

  10 Sebeos is quoted by Vasiliev in History of the Byzantine Empire, vol. 1, p. 198. See also Sebeos, The Armenian History, Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 1999, and Sebeos’ History, trans. Robert Bedrosian, online: http://rbedrosian.com/sebtoc.html.

  2: The Arab Conquests

  1 The Koran, trans. Dawood, sura 22, verses 39–40.

  2 Leoni Caetani, Studi di Storia Orientale, vol. 1, p. 368.

  3 Dosabhai Framji Karaka, History of the Parsis Including Their Manners, Customs, Religion and Present Position, vol. 1, p. 15.

  4 Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It, p. 120. This account in the manuscript of Thomas the Presbyter is the first non-Muslim reference to Mohammed; the battle took place on 7 February 634. The Samaritans were closely related to the Jews; they claimed theirs was the true version of Judaism as practised before the Babylonian exile. Their numbers were significant in Palestine at this time, but they now number fewer than a thousand worldwide.

  5 Washington Irving, Mahomet and His Successors, vol. 2, in The Works of Washington Irving, vol. 13, chapters 9–11; also Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter 51.

  6 Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter 51.

  7 Sophronius’ sermon of 6 December 636 or 637, in Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It, p. 72.

  8 Some Muslim sources say Jerusalem endured a seven-month siege, but the oldest Muslim sources, and also Byzantine sources, say it lasted nearly two years. For the sufferings and deaths caused by the siege see Cline, Jerusalem Besieged: From Ancient Canaan to Modern Israel, pp. 149–50.

  9 The Koran, trans. Dawood, sura 2, verse 137.

  10 Adamnan, The Pilgrimage of Arculfus in the Holy Land, pp. 4–5.

  11 The Koran, trans. Dawood, sura 2, verses 142–5.

  12 Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari, History of the Prophets and Kings, cited in Gil, A History of Palestine, p. 66.

  3: Palestine under the Umayyads and the Arab Tribes

  1 Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilizations, Allen Lane, London, 1994, p. 335.

  2 Whitcomb in Levy, ed., The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land, p. 499.

  3 Muqaddasi, Description of Syria, p. 23.

  4 Ibid., p. 23, footnote 1.

  5 Karsh, Islamic Imperialism, p. 63, citing Hamilton A. R. Gibb, Studies on the Civilization of Islam, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1962, pp. 51–7; and Oleg Graber, ‘Islamic Art and Byzantium’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, vol. 18 (1964), p. 88.

  6 Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire, vol. 1, p. 233.

  7 Koran, trans. Arberry. Some translations of the Koran – for example, that of Dawood – refer to ‘the farthest Temple’, but in the original Arabic of the Koran the phrase is ‘al-masjid al-aqsa’, masjid meaning ‘mosque’ and aqsa meaning ‘farthest’.

  8 For example, ‘Was the Prophet Muhammad’s Night Journey to Palestine or Medina?’ by Ahmad Muhammad Arafa in the Egyptian Ministry of Culture publication Al-Qahira (5 August 2003); this can be viewed online: www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/941.htm

  9 Gil, A History of Palestine, p. 98, footnote 22.

  10 Whitcomb in Levy, ed., The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land, p. 499.

  11 Koran, trans. Dawood, sura 4, verse 171.

  12 Muqaddasi, Description of Syria, p. 46.

  13 The first evidence that the mosque was called al-Aqsa comes in Fatimid times, when it was yet again rebuilt and an inscription added about the ‘furthest mosque’ from Koran, sura 17, verse 1.

  14 In the early Islamic period seafaring round the Arabian peninsula and to East Africa and India was in the hands of Persians. See George Hourani, Arab Seafaring, p. 79. Syrian seafarers were the descendants of the coastal Phoenicians who had competed with the Greeks in trade and colonisation throughout the ancient Mediterranean.

  15 Leo I, Letter XXVIII, Tome 2, AD 449; Henry Bettenson, ed., The Later Christian Fathers, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1970, p. 278.

  16 Alfred J. Butler, The Arab Conquest of Egypt, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1902, p. 158.

  17 Gil, A History of Palestine, p. 141 (from Tabari, Ta’rikh, II, 1372).

  18 Al-Maqrizi, fifteenth-century Egyptian historian, quoted in Otto Meinardus, Monks and Monasteries of the Egyptian Deserts, The American University in Cairo Press, Cairo, 1989, p. 55.

  19 Gil, A History of Palestine, p. 86, citing Tabari, Ta’rikh, II, 1834ff.

  20 Ibid., p. 86, footnote 11.

>   21 Theophanes, Chronicle, p. 112.

  4: The Abbasids and the Arab Eclipse

  1 A village called Baghdad has been recorded on that spot since the eighteenth century BC; the name has been assimilated to a later but similar Persian word meaning ‘Gift of God’. See Spuler, The Muslim World, p. 51.

  2 Mansur’s words as reported by the geographer and chronicler Ahmad al-Yaqubi, cited in Lewis, The Arabs in History, p. 82.

  3 Thubron, Mirror to Damascus, p. 103.

  4 Hourani, Syria and Lebanon, p. 21.

  5 Whitcomb in Levy, ed., The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land, p. 488.

  6 Spuler, The Muslim World, p. 27.

  7 The Koran, trans. Dawood, sura 5, verse 66; 2:62. Also sura 5, verse 69, is similar.

  8 Ibid., sura 22, verse 17.

  9 Frye, ed., The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 4, p. 32.

  10 Boyce, Zoroastrians, p. 147; Frye, ed., The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 4, p. xii.

  11 Spuler, The Muslim World, p. 52.

  12 Frye, ed., The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 4, p. xi.

  13 Ibid., vol. 4, p. xi.

  14 Gil, A History of Palestine, p. 284.

  15 Ibid., pp. 171, 442.

  16 Hitti, History of Syria, p. 543f; Gil, A History of Palestine, p. 159f.

  17 Gil, A History of Palestine, p. 475.

  18 Frye, ed., The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 1, p. 122.

  19 Carl F. Petry, ed., The Cambridge History of Egypt, vol. 1, Islamic Egypt, 640–1517, p. 83; Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude, pp. 62, 64.

  20 Kennedy, The Court of the Caliphs, p. 264 [240 in paperback].

  21 Hitti, History of Syria, p. 543f.; Gil, A History of Palestine, p. 473f; Kennedy, The Court of the Caliphs, p. 240.

  22 Ibid., p. 278 [254 in paperback].

  23 Eginhard, Vie de Charlemagne, Paris, 1923, chapter 16, p. 46, cited in Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrims before the Crusades, p. 12.

  24 Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrims, p. 12; Gil, A History of Palestine, p. 288.

  25 Bernard the Monk’s account of his travels is found in Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrims, pp. 141–5.

  26 Kreutz, Before the Normans, p. 27.

  27 Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800. Davis does not cover slavery before the sixteenth century, but he estimates that in the hundred years from 1580 to 1680 nearly a million white Christian Europeans were captured and sent as slaves to the Barbary Coast (i.e., the Maghreb, present-day Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya) – that is, about 8,500 each year. During his brief sojourn in Taranto Bernard the Monk claims to have seen nine thousand slaves awaiting shipment to Egypt and North Africa, suggesting that the slave trade was at least as active in the ninth century as in later centuries. Whatever the number, swathes of coastal Europe were depopulated by the Muslim raids, with devastating economic consequences: see Davis, p. 3f; also Kreutz, Before the Normans, p. 53.

  28 Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrims, p. 142.

  29 Ibid., p. 142; Gil, A History of Palestine, p. 285.

  30 Gil, A History of Palestine, p. 483.

  5: Byzantine Crusades

  1 Kennedy, The Court of the Caliphs, p. 269, which quotes from al-Tabari’s History.

  2 Runciman, The Emperor Romanus Lecapenus and His Reign: A Study of Tenth Century Byzantium, p. 146.

  3 Gil, A History of Palestine, p. 326, footnote 100, citing Dhahabi’s Tarikh al-Islam as the Arabic source.

  4 Ibid., p. 477: ‘The mistreatment of the Christian population, and especially the churches of Jerusalem, was what drove the Byzantines to recruit forces for a struggle of a decidedly religious nature – namely, to free Jerusalem of the Muslims in a sort of tenth-century crusade’.

  5 Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire, vol. 1, p. 310, refers to a letter from John Tzimisces to the Armenian king Ashot III, preserved in the works of the Armenian historian Matthew of Edessa, which ‘shows that the Emperor, in aiming to achieve his final goal of freeing Jerusalem from the hands of the Muslims, undertook a real crusade’.

  6 Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, p. 403; Kennedy, Court of the Caliphs, p. 295; Glassé, The Concise Encyclopaedia of Islam, p. 323.

  6: Muslim Wars and the Destruction of Palestine

  1 Lane-Poole, A History of Egypt in the Middle Ages, p. 101.

  2 Hitti, History of Syria, p. 572.

  3 Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, p. 403, quoting M. Gil, ‘The Sixty Years’ War (969–1029)’, Shalem, 3 (1981), p. 1–55 (in Hebrew, with English summary). See also Bosworth, ed., Historic Cities of the Islamic World, p. 232, which describes the details as ‘revolting’.

  4 Gil, A History of Palestine, p. 336.

  5 Hitti, History of Syria, p. 588.

  6 In the units of measurement at the time, the cross had to weigh 5 rotls and be 1 cubit long.

  7 El-Leithy, ‘Coptic Culture and Conversion in Medieval Cairo’. Tamer el-Leithy is the nephew of the liberal Egyptian thinker Tarek Heggy.

  8 Gil, A History of Palestine, pp. 222, 376f.

  9 Yahya Ibn Said, History, cited in Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrims, p. 14.

  10 Armstrong, Jerusalem, p. 259.

  11 Runciman, History of the Crusades, vol. 1, p. 35; Gil, A History of Palestine, pp. 376, 378.

  12 Gil, A History of Palestine, p. 480.

  13 Sir Hamilton A. R. Gibb, ‘The Caliphate and the Arab States’, in Setton, ed., A History of the Crusades, p. 90.

  14 The Koran, trans. Arberry. For Fatimid policy about Jerusalem, see Hillenbrand, Crusades, p. 147, and S. D. Goitein and O. Grabar, ‘Jerusalem’, in Bosworth, ed., Historic Cities of the Islamic World p. 252.

  15 Landes, Relics, Apocalypse, and the Deceits of History: Ademar of Chabannes, 989–1034, p. 41. Also Gil, A History of Palestine, p. 379.

  16 Gil, A History of Palestine, p. 325.

  17 Cantor, Civilisation of the Middle Ages, pp. 364f.

  18 Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 76.

  Part II: THE TURKISH INVASION AND THE FIRST CRUSADE

  1 Fulcher of Chartres, in Thatcher and McNeal, ed., A Source Book for Mediaeval History, pp. 513–7.

  7: The Turkish Invasion

  1 Lang, The Armenians: A People in Exile, p. 37, gives the figure as ‘about a million and a half’. On 23 January 2012 the French Senate followed the National Assembly in approving a bill which declares that between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians suffered genocide under the Ottoman Empire largely between 1915 and 1917, reported in The Times (24 January 2012), p. 26.

  2 Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. V, chapter LVII, p. 554.

  3 Norwich, Byzantium: The Apogee, pp. 342–3.

  4 Nizam al-Mulk in his Book of Government, quoted in Hillenbrand, Turkish Myth and Muslim Symbol, p. 6.

  5 Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire, vol. 1, p. 355, citing an anonymous chronicler collected in Constantine Sathas, ed., Bibliotheca Graeca Medii Aevi, VII, 169, Paris 1872–94.

  6 Stoneman, Across the Hellespont: A Literary Guide to Turkey, p. 206, quoting from Aristakes Lastivertsi, whose History of Armenia, written at Constantinople from 1072 to 1079, relates the fall of the Bagratid kingdom of Armenia, the destruction of Ani and the victories of the Seljuk Turks.

  7 Annalist of Nieder-Altaich, The Great German Pilgrimage of 1064–65, in Annales Altahenses Maiores, in Brundage, trans. and ed., The Crusades.

  8 Gil, A History of Palestine, p. 487. Sources differ about the size of the 1064–6 German pilgrimage, the Annalist of Nieder-Altaich stating 12,000 and Gil referring to sources stating 7,000; Gil also says that ‘less than 2000’ returned home safely.

  9 Bosworth, ed., Historic Cities of the Islamic World, p. 233, and Richard, The Crusades, p. 14, are explicit that Atsiz massacred Muslims even in the Aqsa mosque.

  10 Gil, A History of Palestine, p. 416; Montefiore, Jerusalem, p. 202.

  11 Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologia Latina, 148:329, in Thatc
her and McNeal, ed., A Source Book for Mediaeval History, pp. 512–3.

  12 Cantor, Civilisation of the Middle Ages, p. 246.

  13 Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 5, chapter 57, p. 554.

  14 Hillenbrand, Crusades, p. 50; Gil, A History of Palestine, pp. 488–9.

  15 Spuler, The Muslim World, p. 109.

  16 Gil, A History of Palestine, pp. 171–2, ‘As to the rural population [of Palestine], in the main it was still Christian on the eve of the Crusaders’ conquest’; and ‘Jerusalem was certainly inhabited mainly by Christians during the entire period [of the Muslim occupation]’. Gil’s sources include al-Arabi, Muqaddasi, and the Geniza documents.

  17 Ibn al-Arabi, quoted in Gil, A History of Palestine, p. 171.

  8: The Call

  1 V. Vasilievsky, quoted in Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire, vol. II, pp. 384, 386.

  2 Anna Comnena, The Alexiad, Book VIII, chapter V. For the nature of Alexius’ contacts with the West, see Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire, vol. II, pp. 386–88; Erdmann, The Origin of the Idea of Crusade, pp. 322–3, also p. 358.

  3 Somerville, Urban II’s Council of Piacenza, p. 8.

  4 Bernold of Constance quoted in Somerville, Urban II’s Council of Piacenza, pp. 54–5.

  5 Edgington, Oxford Medieval Texts, p. 5.

  6 Ibid., p. 7.

  7 Ibid., p. 5.

  8 Riley-Smith, The First Crusaders, pp. 55–6.

  9 Jotischky, ‘The Christians of Jerusalem’, p. 57. As Jotischky explains in his article, the reliability of Albert of Aachen’s account of Peter the Hermit’s visit to Jerusalem has been disputed, but recent scholarly work argues for its fundamental accuracy. See also Norman Housley, Contesting the Crusades, Blackwell, Oxford 2006, p. 44.

  10 Chevedden, ‘The View of the Crusades’, pp. 307–8.

  11 Fulcher of Chartres, in Thatcher and McNeal, ed., A Source Book for Mediaeval History, pp. 513–7.