The Templars

by Dan Jones

  As soon as Baldwin II heard of the outrage, he scrambled troops out of Jerusalem to take revenge. But he was too late. The attackers were already safely back in their redoubts, counting their prisoners and delighting in the spoils of their raid.

  Scarcely two months later, more dreadful news arrived from the north. On 28 June 1119 at Sarmada, in north-west Syria, a very large force of Christians who were occupying Antioch went into battle against an army led by an Artuqid ruler known as Il-ghazi,* a drunkard but a dangerous general who occupied nearby Aleppo. According to an eyewitness, the battle was fought in a fierce dust-storm: a ‘whirlwind... twisting itself upwards like an enormous jar on the potter’s wheel, burnt up by sulphurous fires’.

  The Christians were slaughtered in their hundreds. Their leader, Roger of Salerno, was ‘struck by a knight’s sword through the middle of his nose right into his brain’ and died instantly. All around him the countryside was littered with human corpses and dying horses so thickly pierced with arrows they looked like hedgehogs.6 ‘The cavalry was destroyed, the infantry cut to pieces, the followers and servants were all taken prisoner,’ wrote the Arab historian Ibn al-Adim, approvingly.7 This was not all. After the battle, several hundred Christian captives were bound together by their necks and marched through the blistering heat of the day, tortured by the sight of a water-barrel from which they were not allowed to drink. Some were beaten. Some were flayed. Some were stoned to death. Others were beheaded.8 Fulcher of Chartres estimated that in all 7,000 Christians were killed, taking with them just twenty of Il-ghazi’s men.9 Fulcher may have exaggerated the numbers, but this demoralizing defeat was known thereafter among the Franks as the Field of Blood.† The defeat at Sarmada was a ghastly moment not only for the Christians of Antioch, but for the Franks in general. Yet out of it came the germ of an idea that would lie at the heart of Templar ideology.

  Following the battle, desperate measures were required to resist any further losses in Antioch. Il-ghazi was preparing a direct assault on the city. According to Walter the Chancellor, a senior bureaucrat from Antioch who was almost certainly present and very likely taken prisoner at the Field of Blood, ‘almost the entire military force of Frankish citizens was lost’. Armed assistance had been urgently requested from the kingdom of Jerusalem, but plainly it would take some time for this to arrive.

  Into the vacuum stepped a man named Bernard of Valence, Latin patriarch of Antioch.10 Bernard was one of the highest-ranking churchmen in all the crusader states. He had been patriarch since 1100, when the western invaders who conquered Antioch chased out the Greek Orthodox patriarch and installed their own man, who followed the traditions of the Roman church. During that time he had frequently helped Christian armies to prepare themselves spiritually for battle: preaching to soldiers and hearing the confessions of those who had shed blood in the course of the wars. Now it was not only souls that he would have to save; it was his city.

  ‘Of necessity, all came down to the clergy,’ wrote Walter the Chancellor, and this was no mere rhetoric.11 As Il-ghazi mustered his troops, inside Antioch the patriarch took supreme military command. He ordered a nightly curfew and decreed that no one was to carry arms within the city except for the Franks. Then he ensured that every tower along Antioch’s defences was ‘garrisoned at once with monks and clerics’, supported by what suitable Christian laymen they could find to assist them. Bernard arranged for constant prayers to be said ‘for the safety and defence of the Christian people’, and while these took place he ‘did not cease... to visit in turn, night and day, with his armed clergy and knights, in the manner of warriors, the gates, ramparts and towers and walls’.12

  These were the actions of a soldier prince, rather than the defensive measures of a man of the church. And they were stunningly successful: seeing that the city was well defended, Il-ghazi declined to attack. The lull in hostilities allowed Baldwin II to muster troops and take over the campaign. Antioch had been saved. In the words of Walter the Chancellor, ‘the clergy... acted the part of military service wisely and vigorously, inside and outside, and with God’s strength kept the city intact from the enemy’.13 It was a taste of what lay ahead.

  *

  The notion that churchmen might go into battle armed not only with prayer but with deadly weapons was hardly new. It spoke to a tension that had existed at the heart of Christian thought for a thousand years, as the pacifism suggested by the example of Christ’s life rubbed against a martial mentality embedded in the language of Christian rhetoric and scripture.14 It also followed naturally from the ideas underpinning the whole crusading movement.

  On the face of it, Christianity was a faith rooted in peace. Jesus had admonished his disciples for resorting to violence even under the most extreme provocation, urging them to sheathe their weapons during his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, and saying ‘they that take the sword shall perish by the sword’.15 But during the decades immediately following his death, St Paul had exhorted the Ephesians to arm themselves with ‘the breastplate of righteousness’, ‘the helmet of salvation’ and ‘the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God’.16 The warfare Paul advocated was spiritual rather than physical, but the terms of Christian ideology drew directly from the language of war. The idea of Christian existence as an act of cosmic, spiritual battle – a fight against the devil – dominated the worldview of many of the great Christian thinkers of the classical world such as St Ambrose and St Augustine of Hippo. This was perhaps no surprise, given how frequently during the first centuries of Christianity’s emergence the faithful had found themselves compelled to commit or endure bodily violence, whether in the amphitheatres of the Romans or in suffering the death-throes of martyrdom. Indeed, martyrdom had become an admirable thing in itself, and a staple part of the notion of sainthood.

  By the time of the First Crusade, the notion of Christian war was not just metaphorical. Christian societies in Europe were structured around the existence of a warrior caste – knights – and churchmen had occasionally begun to engage more directly in warfare, no longer contenting themselves with the struggles of the soul. Rudolf I, bishop of Würzburg, died fighting the Magyars in 908. An English record known as the Abingdon chronicle, compiled shortly before the First Crusade, describes how the abbot of Abingdon commanded a retinue of knights.17 This is not to say that the practice of holy warfare was universally accepted: in the ninth century Pope Nicholas I had specifically stated that for churchmen, self-defence must mean following Christ’s example and turning the other cheek, while the Byzantine princess and biographer Anna Komnene frequently expressed in her writings a marked distaste for the idea of Christian clerics having any involvement in maiming or killing people.18

  But in the white heat of war in Syria and Palestine a restriction on Christians of any sort bearing arms was increasingly impractical. For a start, a significant factor behind the existence of the crusade movement was a widespread acceptance of the concept of Christian holy war, waged by secular men for spiritual reward. Successive popes had worked this up into a practical philosophy of Christian violence, manifested in the First Crusade. Laymen who went to fight Muslims in the east were described as having joined the ‘knighthood of Christ’ (militiae Christi), and having taken up the ‘gospel knighthood’ (evangelicam militiam).19

  From here it was a relatively small step to argue that if fighting men could become holy, then it was possible to imagine that holy men could fight. Indeed, given the strain on resources in the crusader states in the 1120s, it was a matter of necessity to concede that a cleric could from time to time wield weapons without reproach – as Patriarch Bernard had done at Antioch. Several months later, at a grand gathering of clerical and secular leaders from the kingdom of Jerusalem, the idea of churchmen bearing arms was institutionalized for the first time.

  The Council of Nablus convened on 16 January 1120 under the auspices of King Baldwin II and Warmund, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem. It was attended by many of the highest-ranking churchmen
in the Holy Land, including the archbishop of Caesarea, the bishops of Nazareth, Bethlehem and Ramla and – significantly, as it would later turn out – the priors of the Holy Sepulchre and the Temple of the Lord in Jerusalem. The purpose of this gathering at Nablus (a town nestled in a valley between two mountains in central Palestine, notable for its plentiful olive trees) was to provide a set of written laws, or ‘canons’, by which the kingdom could be properly governed in a manner pleasing to God.20

  The Council of Nablus produced twenty-five decrees, which touched initially on matters of jurisdiction between the secular and clerical authorities, and for the most part focused on sex.21 Declarations were made against sins including adultery, sodomy, bigamy, pimping, prostitution, theft and sexual relations with Muslims, for which the prescribed punishments ranged from penance and exile to castration and nose-slicing. Tucked among these was a dictum that would be of fundamental importance to the origins and history of the Knights Templar. It was Canon 20, and its first line stated simply that ‘if a cleric takes up arms in the cause of self-defence, he shall not bear any guilt’. The second line suggested that this was envisaged as a temporary measure, and that the abandonment of the holy duty for a martial one was to be carried out only under duress (clerics who permanently abandoned their tonsures to become knights or join secular society could be disciplined by the patriarch and the king). Nevertheless, in the context of the early months of 1120, this was significant indeed. The men who met in Nablus were not just working out a code of law and morality for the Holy Land. They were seeding in law a revolutionary idea, which would evolve before long into the notion – and fact – that religious men under arms might serve as a central plank in the defence of the crusader states.

  *

  ‘At the beginning of the reign of Baldwin II,’ wrote a late-twelfth-century churchman called Michael the Syrian, ‘a Frenchman came from Rome to Jerusalem to pray’.22 This Frenchman’s name was Hugh of Payns. He was born some time before the year 1070, probably in the village of Payns, near the town of Troyes, some 90 miles (145 km) south-east of Paris in the county of Champagne. We know little else about Hugh of Payns’ early life, other than that he was of sufficiently high rank to witness charters for local noblemen in France. If Michael the Syrian was correct, by the time the Council of Nablus assembled in January 1120, Hugh of Payns had been in the Holy Land for roughly as long as Baldwin had been king – a matter of some twenty months. This was long enough for him to see the sights, assess the dangers of the region and, evidently, to determine that rather than fleeing home by way of the pirate-infested waters of the eastern Mediterranean, he would see out a substantial number of his remaining years as part of the community of occupying Franks in Jerusalem. He planned first to serve in the royal army, and then to retire from the hardbitten life on the front line to become a monk.23

  Hugh was not alone in making this decision. There were other men of knightly rank in the city of Jerusalem at the time, and they began to cluster together at the most obvious spot for tourists and newcomers of all backgrounds and nationalities to meet: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.24

  Indeed, they did more than cluster. It would seem that in the months preceding the Council of Nablus a handful of Jerusalem’s expatriate knights (later sources suggested it was initially between nine and thirty men) had formed a sort of loose brotherhood, or confraternity, of the type that had cropped up in the west during the previous century for the purpose of defending churches and shrines from bandits.25 They had sworn oaths of obedience to Gerard, prior of the Holy Sepulchre, on whose patronage and hospitality they depended for their day-to-day livelihood.26 They were not, strictly speaking, clergymen, but rather able-bodied warrior-pilgrims who could fight and who had made a significant decision to live a quasi-monastic life of penitence, poverty, obedience and duty beyond the normal vows of a crusader.

  By the beginning of January 1120 there was a feeling that these religiously minded soldiers were being underused. One later writer characterized the day-to-day lives of Hugh of Payns and his companions at that time as squandered in underemployed frustration: ‘drinking, eating, wasting... time and doing nothing’ at the Holy Sepulchre.27 If true, this was clearly a shameful misuse of talent. Already there existed an order of Benedictine monks who dedicated themselves to tending to sick and wounded pilgrims at the infirmary known as the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem. That order – the Hospitallers – had been granted official papal recognition in 1113, and operated from premises that were not far from the Holy Sepulchre. They were not yet soldiers (although they would later become so), but their contribution to life in Jerusalem was generations old and highly valued. It must have seemed that a complementary order of armed escorts could lighten the load on the Hospitallers and further improve conditions for the thousands of pilgrims who passed through the region.

  Around the time of the Council of Nablus it was decided that instead of being attached to the Holy Sepulchre, this pious band of knights should be given independence, some means of feeding and clothing themselves, access to priests who could lead prayers for them at the appropriate hours of the day, and a place to live in one of the prominent areas of Jerusalem. The crown would assist with the means of their upkeep, but their main task would be one of equal interest to king, patriarch and every other Christian visitor to the Holy Land. They would be responsible, in the words of a charter produced in 1137, for ‘the defence of Jerusalem and the protection of pilgrims’.28 Part bodyguards, part paupers, a tiny brotherhood devoted only to arms and prayer: the Templars now had a purpose.

  *

  Temples had stood on the eastern side of Jerusalem for thousands of years. The first was a huge complex erected by King Solomon, the fabulously rich, wise and worldly Old Testament ruler who had ruled over the tribes of Israel after the death of his father King David. The construction of Solomon’s Temple was described at length in the Book of Kings. It was made of ‘costly stones’, panelled with delicately carved olive wood, cedar wood and gold and held up by countless pillars; concealing at its heart the Holy of Holies, a sacred room where God’s name ‘lived’ and where the ark of the covenant – the repository of the original tablets inscribed with the ten commandments – was stored.29

  The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II destroyed Solomon’s Temple in 586 BC and at that point the ark of the covenant disappeared. But a few decades later the temple rose again. The Second Temple was built by Jewish exiles returning to Jerusalem in 520 BC and massively enlarged half a millennium later during the reign of Herod the Great. It stood on a vast stone platform covering a natural hill – the Temple Mount – and served as a place for sacrifice, prayer, worship, trade, medical care and entertainment. It was completed around 10 BC and was the centre of Jewish life in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus’ ministry. Like Solomon’s original Temple, the Second Temple was destroyed by the wrath of an outside empire: wrecked by fire in AD 70 during the suppression of a Jewish revolt against the Roman emperor Titus. Sixty-five years later its ruins were demolished for good and pagan statues were erected on the site.

  By the time Hugh of Payns set up his order in Jerusalem, the Temple Mount had been refashioned once again: not by Jews or Christians, but by the Umayyads – the all-powerful Sunni caliphate whose armies had conquered the city in the late seventh century AD, a few decades after Muhammad’s death. Two extraordinary buildings now dominated Jerusalem’s skyline. The Dome of the Rock’s huge golden roof shimmered like a fireball, visible for miles around (‘as soon as the beams of the sun strike the cupola and the drum radiates the light, then indeed is this marvellous to behold’, recorded one Muslim traveller and geographer of the tenth century).30 At the other end of the Temple Mount complex was another imposing building: the al-Aqsa mosque, most recently refashioned in the 1030s. This was regarded as the most important and most beautiful mosque outside Arabia, more magnificent even than the Great Mosque of Damascus. When a Persian traveller visited al-Aqsa in its heyday, he described seeing:
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  Two hundred and eighty marble columns, supporting arches that are fashioned of stone, and both the shafts and the capitals of the columns are sculptured... the mosque is everywhere flagged with coloured marble, with the joints riveted in lead... Above rises a mighty dome that is ornamented with enamel work.31

  Around this lived devout men who had retired from the world and given themselves over to the religious life: the chronicler Ibn al-Athir wrote that at the time of the First Crusade the mosque was frequented by ‘imams, ulema, righteous men and ascetics, Muslims who had left their native lands and come to live a holy life in this august spot’.32

  Under crusader rule, both the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque were stripped of their Islamic sanctity: the Dome became a church, while the mosque was repurposed as a palace for the king of Jerusalem. The Christians called the Dome of the Rock the ‘Temple of the Lord’ and they identified al-Aqsa with the Temple of Solomon, in tribute to its historic location. The magnetism of the site to men of the world who wished to embrace spiritual life survived the transition from Muslim to Christian rule intact: for it was here that Hugh of Payns and his small band of followers were allowed to lodge following the creation of their order in 1120. According to the writer known as Ernoul, this was the king’s ‘most splendid’ residence in the city.33 The twelfth-century archbishop and chronicler William of Tyre explained that ‘because... they live next to the Temple of the Lord in the king’s palace they are called the brothers of the Knighthood of the Temple’.34