by Dan Jones
The two leading voices throughout the proceedings were Hugh of Payns and Bernard of Clairvaux. Hugh had called the gathering so that the Templars could be officially recognized and given a form of quasi-monastic rule. The record of the council, written by a scribe by the name of Jean Michel, outlined the procedure: ‘we heard in common chapter from the lips of the... Master, Brother Hugh of Payns; and according to the limitations of our understanding we praised what seemed to us good and beneficial, and eschewed what seemed wrong’.24
This was, in other words, a drafting committee, engaged in a process of hearing, debating and amending the practices developed in Jerusalem during the first nine years of their existence. By the end of the council, Jean Michel had drafted in Latin a 68-point code of Templar conduct, later known as The Primitive (or Latin) Rule. This detailed the process by which knights of the order were to be selected and received, how they were to pray and which feast days they were to observe, what they should wear, eat and drink, where they should sleep, how they were to behave in public, and with whom they could – and could not – socialize.25
‘In this religious order has flourished and is revitalised the order of knighthood,’ claimed the Rule, praising all those who joined the Templars, willing to offer up their souls to God ‘for our salvation and the spread of the true faith’. The notion that the Templars represented a new form of knighthood, which did not terrorize the weak, but dedicated itself to destroying evil, was one which Bernard of Clairvaux was developing at the time of the Council of Troyes, and which he would expound upon at length in the years to come. The Rule bore the unmistakable stamp of his personal belief that knighthood could and should be reformed, Christianized, stripped of its earthly vanity and transformed into a calling of dignity, duty and godly purpose.
The Rule started by addressing the practical issues of how a Templar brother could hope to square the prayer-bound life of a monk with the rough-and-tumble life of a soldier in the saddle. Accepting that members were likely to spend much of their time on patrol or fighting in the field, rather than in the chapel contemplating the crucifix, the Rule allowed a brother to substitute each daily church service that he missed for a set number of repetitions of the Lord’s prayer (or paternoster). Thirteen paternosters made up for missing the morning service of matins, nine for missing vespers in the evening, and seven for each of the daily sung prayers known as the canonical hours. This stripped-back version of the daily routine of monastic worship was designed to be achievable by non-educated laymen. Everyone, even the most illiterate peasant in France, knew his paternoster; by reducing holy duties to the most mundane repetition of the best-known prayer in Christendom, the Templars opened their pool of potential recruits to dedicated and talented men of any rank, and not just the rich and well-schooled. The Rule also made clear that there were two distinct categories of knights: those who signed up for life, having ‘abandoned their own wills’, and those who agreed to join temporarily and fight ‘for a fixed term’. The latter could easily satisfy the religious demands of the order with the bare minimum of formal religious training.
Reaction to the knightly stereotype pulsed through the proceedings at Troyes. The Rule embraced simplicity and equality. Templar knights were to wear habits of all white,† ‘which signifies purity and complete chastity’.26 Black or brown habits were prescribed for the lesser rank of Templar sergeants and squires – brothers who were sworn members of the order but did not carry the full rank or training of the Templar knight.
This was a far cry from the typical appearance of a twelfth-century warrior, who consciously advertised his status with colourful dress, rich fabrics and ornate accessories. To emphasize the point, many marks of conventional knighthood were explicitly banned. ‘Robes should be without finery and without any show of pride,’ read the Rule, ‘and if any brother out of a feeling of pride or arrogance wishes to have as his due a better and finer habit, let him be given the worst.’ Fur was forbidden. A linen shirt and a woollen blanket were permitted as protection against the extremes of temperature in the east, but otherwise outward decorations were to be scorned. A particularly violent proscription was made against trendy footwear, which in the early twelfth century could be quite flamboyant. ‘We prohibit pointed shoes and shoe laces and forbid any brother to wear them... for it is manifest and well known that these abominable things belong to pagans.’ The knight’s lance was not to be adorned with a decorative cover. This austerity extended to every other aspect of horsemanship: ‘we utterly forbid any brother to have gold or silver on his bridle, nor on his stirrups nor on his spurs’. The bags in which a knight carried his daily rations were to be made of plain linen or wool and an official called the draper was to ensure that brothers had their hair cut regularly and their beards and moustaches trimmed, ‘so that no excess may be noted on their bodies’.‡
Life within a Templar house was designed where possible to resemble that of a Cistercian monastery. Meals were communal and to be eaten in near-silence, while a reading was given from the Bible. The Rule accepted that the elaborate sign-language monks used to ask for necessities while eating might not be known to Templar recruits, in which case ‘quietly and privately you should ask for what you need at table, with all humility and submission’. Equal rations of food and wine were to be given to each brother and leftovers would be distributed to the poor. The numerous fast-days of the church calendar were to be observed, but allowances would be made for the needs of fighting men: meat was to be served three times a week, on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Should the schedule of annual fast-days interrupt this rhythm, rations would be increased to make up for lost sustenance as soon as the fasting period was over.
It was recognized that the Templars were killers. ‘This armed company of knights may kill the enemies of the cross without sinning’, stated the Rule, neatly summing up the conclusion of centuries of experimental Christian philosophy, which had concluded that slaying humans who happened to be ‘unbelieving pagans’ and ‘the enemies of the son of the Virgin Mary’ was an act worthy of divine praise and not damnation. Otherwise, the Templars were expected to live in pious self-denial.
Only three horses were permitted to each knight, along with one squire whom ‘the brother shall not beat’. Hunting with hawks – a favourite pastime of warriors throughout Christendom – was forbidden, as was hunting with dogs. The only beasts Templars were permitted to kill were the mountain lions of the Holy Land. They were forbidden even to be in the company of hunting men, for the reason that ‘it is fitting for every religious man to go simply and humbly without laughing or talking too much’.
Banned, too, was the company of women, which the Rule scorned as:
A dangerous thing, for by it the old devil has led man from the straight path to paradise... the flower of chastity is always [to be] maintained among you... For this reason none of you may presume to kiss a woman, be it widow, young girl, mother, sister, aunt or any other... The Knighthood of Christ should avoid at all costs the embraces of women, by which men have perished many times.
While married men were permitted to join the order, they were not allowed to wear the white cloak, and wives were not supposed to join their husbands in Templar houses.
As if anticipating one natural consequence of this insistence on chastity, a further provision was made for knights who found themselves sharing a room in taverns while on Templar business. ‘If possible the house where they sleep and take lodging should be not without light at night, so that shadowy enemies may not lead them into wickedness, which God forbids them.’
Finally, the order was to be ruled over by the master, advised by a council of ‘those brothers whom the Master knows will give wise and beneficial advice’. Obedience to the master’s commands was essential, and once orders were given, they were to be carried out ‘as though Christ himself had commanded it’. It was in the master’s power to examine and receive new recruits to the order, to distribute horses and armour among the brothers, to punish
those who sinned or broke the Rule and to use his discretion in enforcing the Rule as he saw fit.
As time went on, the Templar Rule would expand to a set of regulatory principles of formidable length and complexity, adapting and developing as the order grew and changed. But with this first Rule drawn up and approved under the authority of the papal legate in Troyes in January 1129, Hugh of Payns had achieved one of his principal goals in travelling to Europe. He had given his nascent organization a structure and a code of conduct by which to live. His next task was to make the knights of the Temple famous, and to persuade the brothers themselves that they were doing the Lord’s work.
*
At around the time Hugh of Payns was at the Council of Troyes, a man identifying himself as ‘Hugh the Sinner’ (Hugh Peccator) prepared a letter addressed to ‘the soldiers of Christ in the Temple in Jerusalem’.27 Who exactly he was is uncertain, but it is tempting (and plausible) to identify him with Hugh of Payns himself. He certainly showed much the same concern for the furtherance of the Templar mission. The letter was inexpert but passionate. Some of its Biblical allusions were mangled, others simply invented. Nevertheless, Hugh the Sinner implored his audience to one simple mission: to fight and win for the sake of Jesus Christ.
The devil, he wrote, was constantly trying to lure good men away from their good deeds. It was the duty of the Templars to resist Satan’s wiles, to keep their faith in the order they had joined and to ignore the temptations that the world laid before them. They were not to ‘get drunk, fornicate, quarrel, backbite’. The author was most worried that the Templars’ morale was sagging in face of the hardship of their mission. ‘Stand firm and resist your adversary who is the lion and the serpent’, he wrote. ‘Bear with patience what God has ordained for you.’ The duty of the Templar was not to seek lasting personal fame, but to serve the order.
At around the same time a much longer tract appeared, which also spoke directly to the order, spelling out its special place in the world and the providential importance of its mission. In this case its authorship was undisputed, and esteemed: it was sent by Bernard of Clairvaux.
‘The book to the Knights of the Temple, in praise of the new knighthood’ (Liber ad milites templi de laude novae militia – now usually referred to as De Laude) was written at some point between the founding of the order and 1136. Its content suggests that Bernard began work on it around the time of the Council of Troyes in 1129. The book is addressed directly to Hugh of Payns – ‘my dear Hugh’ – whom Bernard says ‘asked me not once or twice but three times to write a few words of exhortation for you and your comrades’.28
‘A new kind of knighthood seems recently to have appeared on the earth,’ he began. ‘It indefatigably wages a twofold combat, against flesh and blood and against spiritual hosts of evil in the heavens.’29 To fight and die in the name of the Lord was the ultimate sacrifice. Bernard emphasized the profound difference between homicide – the sin of killing a man – and malicide, the act of killing evil itself, which God would consider a noble deed. Armed with this ingenious theological distinction, the knights of the Temple could take on the most exalted of tasks: not merely to act as bodyguards for pilgrims, but to defend the Holy Land itself. ‘March confidently then, you knights,’ Bernard wrote, ‘and with a stalwart heart repel the foes of the cross of Christ.’
Just as the Rule of the Templars railed against the traditional trappings of secular knights, so too did De Laude, which was drenched in Cistercian values. Long hair, decorated armour, painted shields and saddles, gold spurs, billowing tunics, long sleeves, dice, chess, falconry and entertainments including jesters, bards and magicians were all dismissed with a sneer. ‘Are these the trappings of a warrior or the trinkets of a woman?’30 Bernard praised instead the life of the new, ascetic, godly knight of the Temple: disciplined and chaste, his face stained by dust and sun, practical, egalitarian, well spoken and busy. These men lived for the sole purpose of destroying the faithless and casting out ‘the workers of iniquity... from the city of the Lord’.31 Although they lived quietly they would give battle like lions. ‘They set their minds on fighting to win rather than on parading for show,’ riding strong, swift horses rather than dappled show-ponies and seeking to be ‘formidable rather than flamboyant’. Thus, Bernard wrote, the new knights could be seen as the saviours of Jerusalem; an army true to the spirit of the Maccabees of ancient Judea, who had waged a war against superior forces to liberate the Holy City from foreign occupation. ‘This is the help sent to you by the Holy One! God has hand-picked such troops.’
This paean to the character and purpose of the Templars occupied the first four chapters of De Laude. The remainder – a further nine chapters – was a guided tour of the sites of the Holy Land which the Templars had been assembled to defend. It begins with the Temple itself – ‘adorned with weapons rather than jewels’ – and includes succinct descriptions of Bethlehem, Nazareth, the Mount of Olives, the River Jordan, the Holy Sepulchre and the villages of Bethphage and Bethany – popular pilgrimage spots within a day’s ride of Jerusalem. Bernard never travelled to Jerusalem in person – to him, Clairvaux Abbey was the real centre of all spirituality – so his physical descriptions of the Holy Land relied on details gleaned from travellers and pilgrims.
Each chapter was effectively a short sermon.32 Had it been read aloud or recited from memory at the relevant holy site, it would have provided inspiration, encouragement and insight to those who found themselves there. A knight of the Temple guarding a procession of pilgrims on the road to Bethlehem would be both practically and spiritually equipped for the task. He would be able to explain in reasonably learned terms the significance of each holy site to the civilians who travelled beside him. And should he find himself quaking inwardly for fear of ambush, he could steel himself with the words Bernard had written about the town, reflecting that this was ‘the house of bread’, where Christ, ‘the living bread come down from heaven [was] born of the Virgin’.33 Likewise in Nazareth, the momentarily disheartened Templar could cheer himself by recalling another one of Bernard’s aphorisms, reflecting that he was walking on the very spot where ‘the infant God... grew to maturity, as the fruit matures within the flower’.34
Hugh of Payns had asked Bernard to write ‘a few words of exhortation’, designed to lift the spirits of men on the front line of combat. He had been tasked with giving ‘moral, rather than material, support’ to the new order.35 No one had thought harder about the Templars’ curious fusion of the roles of monk and knight, and no one was better suited to putting into words the spirit of this potent new order. But Bernard was not the only one thinking seriously about the Templars; far away from the Holy Land another patron was thinking about how he could help support the newly founded order. His name was Alfonso, king of Aragon, and he was at the forefront of the struggle against Islam – not battling Seljuqs and Fatimids in the Holy Land, but fighting the Moors of southern Spain, in the war known as the Reconquista.
* Within the fractured Seljuq empire there were several parallel systems of political and military office. The sultan was like a king. An emir was a rank below, who could exercise personal office over a city or particular region. An atabeg was a regent-style governor, who exercised power on behalf of an emir too young or weak to do so personally.
† The choice of white robes was one of the clearest Cistercian influences on the Templar Rule. The famous red cross would be added later, in 1139.
‡ Despite this, Templars wore their hair and beards in different styles according to the day: some images show them with full beards and others with long curly hair. An account by James of Vitry from the thirteenth century mentioned Templars with closely shaven heads.
4
‘Every Good Gift’
In July 1134 Alfonso the Battler, king of Aragon, set up camp outside the city of Fraga and commanded his servants to bring him his relics, of which he had quite an impressive collection. Over the course of a long and colourful career the sixty-one-y
ear-old king had acquired fragments of the bodies or belongings of the Virgin Mary, several Apostles, a few early Christian martyrs and assorted other saints, all of which were housed in small ivory boxes leafed with gold or silver and studded with precious gems. His finest relic of all was a piece of timber said to have come from the cross on which Jesus was crucified, which had been carved into a mini-crucifix and was kept in a jewel-encrusted ark made of solid gold. Alfonso had stolen it from a monastery in León, on the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela.1
It was Alfonso’s habit to keep his relics close by at all times. These shards of sainthood had seen plenty of action as he had spent almost his entire adult life in the field, fighting with great success and little discrimination both the Christian princes whose territories neighboured his own and the Muslims who occupied much of the southern Iberian peninsula. During most of that time the relics had been part of his baggage train, transported with the tent that served as his portable chapel. Now the priests brought the relics out, and before these precious flakes of wood, bone and leathery skin, Alfonso swore a violent oath.
Fraga lay on the banks of the River Cinca. This was frontier land, where Christian Europe butted up against al-Andalus: the Muslim states that had occupied most of southern Spain ever since the armies of the Umayyad caliphate had crossed the straits of Gibraltar in the eighth century. For generations Christian and Muslim people here had rubbed shoulders under a shifting, multi-ethnic patchwork of kingdoms and emirates, which alternated between pragmatic co-existence and brutal warfare. Since the late tenth century, however, there had been a hardening of religious differences on the peninsula, and the wars between the various kingdoms had taken on an increasingly sectarian nature, in which the Christian rulers of the north saw it as their common duty to push the forces of Islam back towards north Africa. This effort had been granted papal blessing in 1101 by Pope Paschal II, who forbade Spanish Christians to join the holy war in the east, telling them to ‘remain in your country fighting with all your strength against the Moabites and the Moors’.2 At the First Lateran Council in 1123 this command was repeated, and the wars against Muslims in Spain were given explicit parity with the wars in the Holy Land. People began to speak of the via de Hispania: the ‘way of Spain’, by which the Christians might ultimately open a sea route to Jerusalem from liberated ports in Spain or even a land route through north Africa and Egypt. And the campaigns to erode al-Andalus became an official second theatre in a much grander war whose ultimate goal was the conquest of the Holy Land.3 Alfonso was an enthusiastic subscriber to this view of the world.
