by Dan Jones
Despite these lodgings, the Templars could hardly have been said to live in luxury. In their earliest years at the Holy Sepulchre, they had been dependent on charity, including handouts from the Hospitallers, who donated them their leftover food.35 Their official recognition and housing on the Temple Mount did not much improve their material fortunes. According to the Welsh courtier and chronicler Walter Map, Hugh of Payns and his men lived there ‘with humble attire and spare diet’, while Hugh used ‘persuasion, prayer and every means in his power’ to induce ‘all such pilgrims as were men of arms either to surrender themselves for life to the service of the Lord in that place or at least to devote themselves thereto for a time’.36 The tax revenues of a few villages near Jerusalem were assigned to them by Baldwin II and Patriarch Warmund, ‘to cater for their food and clothing’, but much of the first decade of the Templars’ existence were eked out in charitable penury, the small number of brothers dressed in second-hand clothes and not the distinctive uniforms they would later adopt.37
In truth, their home was fairly unprepossessing too. ‘Large and wonderful’ were the terms used by the chronicler Fulcher of Chartres to described the basic structure of the repurposed al-Aqsa mosque. But the lead that had lined its roof had been stripped and sold by King Baldwin I, and there had been no subsequent attempt to make repairs. ‘Because of our poverty [it] could not be maintained in the condition in which we found it,’ wrote Fulcher.38 During the Christian conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, this had been the venue for one of the worst massacres of Muslim women and children; their blood had run ankle deep throughout its halls. Now it was, in the words of one pilgrim who visited not long after Hugh of Payns’ men set up home, ‘the dwelling of the new knights who guard Jerusalem’.39
If these new knights were going to succeed in protecting Jerusalem’s Christian inhabitants, pilgrims and territories from the many enemies who threatened them, they would need to grow: to build up numbers, resources and wealth. What was more, they would need an identity. To improve their fortunes, Hugh of Payns’ men would have to look beyond their immediate surroundings, and back to the world that had sent them to the Holy Land in the first place. They would have to appeal directly to the pope.
* The Artuqids were a tribal Sunni Turkish dynasty begun by a soldier called Artuq Bey, who had worked as a general for the Seljuq sultan Malikshah I. Artuq’s descendants carved out an independent territory in northern Mesopotamia, northern Syria and eastern Anatolia.
† There was an echo here, perhaps deliberate, of the Biblical name given to a certain field used for burying strangers, which had been bought by the elders of Jerusalem using the thirty pieces of silver returned to them by Judas Iscariot shortly before his suicide (Matthew 27:6–8).
3
‘A New Knighthood’
One Christmas Eve a few years before the fall of Jerusalem, a seven-year-old boy from Fontaines in Burgundy had a dream. As he slept he saw the Virgin Mary holding the Christ child in her arms, as though he had been born that very moment, right before his wondering eyes. Bernard (known later as Bernard of Clairvaux, and later still simply as St Bernard) would grow up to be one of the greatest churchmen of his age: a champion of monastic reform, a renowned scholar, a bombastic and tireless letter-writer, a brilliant preacher and early patron and founding father of the Knights Templar.1 His religious awakening would shape the direction of the western church in the first half of the twelfth century.
By 1126, when Hugh of Payns set off for France, Bernard was thirty-six years old. For twelve years he had been the abbot of his own recently founded monastery in Clairvaux (‘the clear valley’) in the county of Champagne. The monastery sat in secluded, marshy ground watered by the River Aube, flanked by two low hills: one planted with vines and the other with crops. Here several dozen white-mantled Cistercian monks lived under Bernard’s direction following a strict, stripped-back monastic rule. The Cistercian order had been formed in 1098, when a group of monks of the more popular Benedictine order founded a new monastery at Cîteaux near Dijon to devote their lives to a purer form of religious life. The core Cistercian values were simple, ascetic existence; rigorous manual labour; and isolated living far away from civilization. Cistercians contrasted sharply and deliberately with the black-clad brethren of a typical Benedictine monastery, who tended to indulge in fine food, preferred liturgical chanting to physical labour and filled their ornate chapels with fine art and artifacts. In contrast, the Cistercian monks under Bernard’s care were committed to a life of obedience, prayer, scholarship, austerity and ceaseless toil at the abbey’s flour mills, fields and fishponds. ‘Here is a spot that has much to delight the eye, to revive the weak spirit, to soothe the aching heart and to arouse to devotion all who seek the Lord’, wrote one twelfth-century visitor to Clairvaux.2 Yet this was also a deliberately sparse and testing environment, as the physical hardship of a life of meagre sustenance was thought to encourage spiritual development and closeness to God. It suited Bernard perfectly.
It suited many others, too, for the Cistercians were not the only men trying to re-imagine monasticism. The twelfth century was one of the richest times of Christian renewal in the whole Middle Ages. Monasticism was exploding in popularity, and flowering with a diversity unseen since the early days of the church. ‘O how innumerable a crowd of monks has by divine grace multiplied above all in our days’, wrote one abbot in the 1130s. ‘It has covered almost the entire countryside of Gaul [i.e. France] and filled the towns, castles and fortresses.’3 This was more than rhetoric: it has been estimated that between the middle of the eleventh and the middle of the twelfth centuries the number of religious houses in many parts of Europe had expanded by 1,000 per cent.4
This great surge in monastic living brought with it an appetite for new ways to live, most of them centred on poverty, obedience and contemplation. Besides the Cistercians, the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries saw the establishment of the Carthusians (an order of hermits founded by Saint Bruno in 1084); the Grandmontines (an extremely strict and poor order founded near Limoges around 1100); the Tironensians (grey-clad and severely penitential brothers following the example of Saint Bernard of Thiron, who founded an abbey in 1109); the Premonstratensians (established by Saint Norbert around 1120 to preach and serve ordinary parishioners in the community as ‘canons regular’); and many other orders, some enduring and others fleeting. Many of the religious orders, old and new, made provision for houses of women to live under their rule as nuns; there was also a growing trend for women becoming hermits or anchoresses, walled up for life in bare and remote cells. All of these allowed people to express their religious urges through their order: an all-consuming way of life governing what they wore, where they lived, what they ate and how (or even if) they spoke.
Some time before October 1126, Bernard of Clairvaux received a letter from King Baldwin II of Jerusalem.5 In it the king wrote that a new religious group had been formed in the contested lands of the east, whose members had been ‘stirred by the Lord’ for the defence of the crusader realm.6 They were, wrote Baldwin, the fratres Templarii – the brothers of the Temple – and what they sought more than anything else was confirmation and a rule that would govern their lives. To that end he intended to send back two of his men, so that they might ‘obtain approval of their order from the Pope’. He hoped the pontiff would help them raise money and support, so that the Templars could better pursue the fight against ‘the enemies of the faith’.7 Baldwin urged Bernard to throw his weight behind this project by encouraging secular rulers across Europe to support the Templars, and lobbying the pope for formal recognition of the new order.
There was probably no one better in Europe to have asked to help. Bernard was a reformer, a powerful thinker and someone who understood what drove people to seek a new calling in life. More importantly, he was a master at extracting favours from the great and good. In hundreds of letters over the course of his long career, written in florid Latin and frequently at very great len
gth, he flattered, supplicated, bullied and berated everyone from popes, kings, archbishops and abbots to runaway novices and would-be nuns doubting their vocation. He advocated causes as weighty as international war and papal schism, but was also quite happy to fight the causes of the humble and powerless. In one letter addressed to Pope Innocent II on behalf of a group of poor Cistercians, Bernard apologized for bothering Innocent when he was busy, then proceeded to lecture him on the business of being pope: ‘if you are faithful to the duty and traditions of the Apostolic See, you will not disregard the complaints of the poor’.8 On another occasion he wrote to a young virgin, Sophia, enjoining her at length to maintain her chastity, and inviting her to compare herself with other women who lived loosely and gave themselves over to finery instead of spiritual purity: ‘they are clothed in purple and fine linen, but their souls are in rags. Their bodies glitter with jewels but their lives are foul with vanity’.9 Bernard was a master of rhetoric and a friend of the powerful – a potent combination in any era.
Yet it was not just the nimble efficacy of Bernard’s entreaties that made him such an appealing advocate. There were similarities between the still-developing Templar ideal and the Cistercian movement into which Bernard had thrown himself as a young man. Both were new spiritual organizations that placed poverty and obedience at their heart, rejecting earthly vanities in favour of hard physical work in the service of the Lord. And the Order of the Temple had close links, through its first members, to Champagne, the region of France that housed Clairvaux Abbey and where Bernard had spent most of his adult life.
So in 1126, when Bernard received King Baldwin’s letter requesting the abbot’s help, he looked favourably upon it. This was just as well, as the following year, in autumn 1127, the group of emissaries promised by Baldwin arrived in Europe.10 Prominent among them was the first master of the Temple, Hugh of Payns.
*
Hugh of Payns was sent west with a clear mission: to whip up support for the kingdom of the east. He did not go alone. In fact, he was one of several high-profile ambassadors from the Holy Land to visit Europe between 1127 and 1129, all aiming, in separate but connected ways, to strengthen links between the two blocs of Latin Christendom. One of these was William of Bures, King Baldwin’s royal constable, who had come to contract the marriage of Fulk, count of Anjou, to King Baldwin’s eldest daughter Melisende: a union that promised to make him heir to the sonless Baldwin’s throne. The count of Anjou was a perfectly good choice as future king: a wealthy widower, around forty, pious but tough, and an experienced crusader who took a standing interest in the affairs of the east. He was said to maintain 100 knights in Jerusalem at his own (no doubt considerable) expense. During his time in Outremer in the early 1120s he had met some of the first Templars, and since then he had paid them a modest but useful annual stipend of ‘thirty livres in the money of Anjou’.11
Nevertheless, securing his agreement to become Baldwin’s heir was a delicate political operation. It required Fulk to turn over his lands to his son, travel a thousand miles to meet a woman he had never set eyes on and take her as his wife, and embrace the most challenging military post in the Christian world. To sweeten the deal, William had brought with him some truly magnificent gifts, including a fragment of the True Cross and a decorated sword, which were to be presented to the cathedral in Le Mans, at the heart of Fulk’s territories.12
Hugh of Payns did not come bearing such impressive gifts but his task was just as urgent and, if anything, even more daunting. While William sought to cajole a single man into taking a crown, Hugh was tasked with encouraging hundreds to part with their possessions and possibly even their lives in exchange for a far more uncertain reward.
Hugh was on a military recruiting tour, with one main objective. Back in the kingdom of Jerusalem Baldwin II was planning a major assault on Damascus, aiming to transform a period of raiding that had begun late in 1125 into a full campaign of conquest. His hope was to seize the great city – a one-time seat of the Sunni Caliphate – permanently from its ruler, the Turkic atabeg* Toghtekin.13 Baldwin calculated that taking Damascus would require, in the words of the chronicler William of Tyre, ‘the entire military strength of the kingdom’.14 He foresaw the need for western reinforcement; signing up more knights and experienced commanders to join the campaign was Hugh’s overriding aim.
Hugh’s role as master of the Order of the Temple was a crucial factor in his selection to lead such a prominent mission. The order was young indeed, but it had already established itself as an elite military organization acting on behalf of the crusader states. The claim made in later years that there were only nine Templars during the first nine years of the order’s existence was romantic and numerologically pleasing, but false.15 Hugh was accompanied in Europe by at least five Templar brothers: Godfrey of St Omer, Rolan, Payen of Mondidier, Geoffrey Bisol and Archambaud of St Amand.16 This was evidently an arresting delegation, for they were granted audiences with some of the most powerful men in north-west Europe.
Between October 1127 and the spring of 1129, Hugh of Payns and his companions met two successive counts of Flanders and the count of Blois, visited Fulk, count of Anjou, and secured his agreement to help in the Damascus campaign, and even tracked down Henry I, king of England and duke of Normandy, whom he pressed for permission to raise funds across the Channel. Their encounter was recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: ‘Hugh of the Knights Templar came from Jerusalem to the king in Normandy; and the king received him with great ceremony, and gave him great treasures of gold and silver, and sent him thereafter to England, where he was welcomed by all good men.’ The chronicler clearly judged the meeting a success. Hugh, he wrote, ‘was given treasures by all, and in Scotland too; and by him much wealth, entirely in gold and silver, was sent to Jerusalem’.17 The mission persuaded more people to go east and fight ‘than ever before since the time of the first crusade’.18 This was quite an achievement. Between 1127 and 1129 Hugh of Payns and his fellow Templars were, in effect, preaching a crusade all of their own.19 They had no formal backing from the pope, and contemporaries did not record them holding the sort of mass rallies of public cross-taking that had characterized the First Crusade, but this direct appeal for reinforcement to fighting men of the west was extraordinarily successful. When Baldwin finally mounted his attack in 1129 the perception in Damascus was much the same. The Arab chronicler Ibn Al-Qalanisi estimated that the Christian army was tens of thousands strong, thick with reinforcements from overseas.20
At the same time as he sought to round up an army to attack Damascus, Hugh of Payns was eager to expand the reach, wealth and membership of the Order of the Temple. Working through family networks and social ties, particularly around his home region of Champagne, he secured gifts of land, income from property, rights to feudal payments, gold, silver and – perhaps more valuable than anything else – promises of personal service. Dozens vowed that they would travel to the Holy Land and join the order, either temporarily or for life.
In October 1127 the Templars were granted a house, grange and meadow at Barbonne, in western Champagne. At roughly the same time they were awarded an income drawn from feudal reliefs in Flanders. In the spring of 1128, while Hugh was in Anjou to witness Count Fulk taking the cross, the Templars secured land in the neighbouring county of Poitou. Donations were sent from as far afield as Noyon, a church north of Paris, and Toulouse, a day’s ride from the Pyrenees.
It is worth noting that Hugh was not yet attempting to set up a western branch of the fledgling order. His military concerns lay in the east and his chief goal lay in building a network of patronage, capital and personal interest that would bridge the 2,000 miles (3,220 km) between the wealthy estates of central France and the dangerous plains and mountains of Syria and Palestine.21
One more purpose behind Hugh’s journey could be satisfied neither by grants of wealth nor by pledges of military assistance. As King Baldwin’s letter of 1126 had intimated, what the Templars desired above all was c
onfirmation by the pope of their order’s legitimacy, and a formal Rule under which they would live. In January 1129 a great ecumenical council gathered in Troyes, in Champagne – conveniently located just 50 miles (80 km) north-west of that austere Cistercian monastery on the River Aube where Bernard of Clairvaux prayed and watched the energetic activities of his fellow countrymen with growing interest.
*
The Council of Troyes formally assembled for its first session on Sunday 13 January 1129. It was a meeting of friends and colleagues, mostly from the north-east of France. The seat of the count of Champagne, Troyes was a a prestigious commercial hub whose skyline was dominated by two great religious buildings: the Romanesque cathedral of St Peter and St Paul, and the Abbey of St Loup, a famously learned house of Augustinian canons. The city had, until recently, been the home of the great crusader lord Hugh, count of Champagne, who had donated the land for the foundation of the abbey of Clairvaux. This was the self-same Hugh who, as a former overlord (and possibly relative) of Hugh of Payns, had resigned his title in 1125 and joined the Order of the Temple in Jerusalem (Bernard of Clairvaux had written to commend him around the time of his abdication: ‘you from being a count have become a simple soldier, from being a rich man have become poor’).22 When the council assembled in 1129 Hugh remained in the Holy Land, but it was his connections and wealth that had drawn together the master of the Temple and the abbot of Clairvaux.
The council was presided over by a papal legate, Matthew, bishop of Albano, representing Pope Honorius II. Twenty other churchmen attended: two archbishops, eleven bishops and seven abbots. Almost all were from Champagne or nearby Burgundy, as were the two leading noblemen present: Theobald, count of Champagne and William, count of Nevers.23 The majority of the abbots were Cistercians.
