God's War: A New History of the Crusades (136 page)

THE FALL OF THE TEMPLARS

As another symptom of contraction, one of the most prominent military, ideological and institutional features of active crusading was attacked and transformed. By 1291, the reputation of the military orders had long been equivocal. No observer could ignore their contribution to the
cause of the cross on all fronts. Yet other clerical interest groups resented the orders for their papally protected privileges. Their demands for profit from their extensive estates in the west, although justified as a means of funding war in the east, aroused resentment from their tenants. Secular rulers, notably the kings of France, relied on their banking skills, especially those of the Templars, to help manage royal finance. Rulers regarded the orders’ autonomy and supposed wealth with envy and suspicion even as they employed their leaders in secular government. The Masters and regional heads of the orders occupied important positions as representatives of large landed corporations in all the kingdoms of western Europe. In Spain, their autonomy was gradually eroded by the determined royal patronage and increasing control, until they became by the end of the middle ages almost an arm of the state. Hermann von Salza played a major political role in imperial politics under Frederick II and, as a prince of the empire, helped create a unique order-state in Prussia. In France, the Temple in Paris acted as a sort of national bank in the thirteenth century, closely integrated into servicing royal finances. In England the Priors of the Hospital sat in the House of Lords, some even acted as the king’s treasurer, such as Joseph Chauncy (1273–80) or Robert Hales (1381), the veteran of the Christian attack on Alexandria in 1365 who paid for his involvement in government with his life at the hands of rebels in London during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.
²⁷

However, the loss of the Holy Land in 1291 cast the very function of the orders into doubt. The Teutonic Knights, in the years around 1300, were vigorously attacked by the local Livonian church hierarchy, who accused them of cruelty, greed, friendship with pagans, larceny and violence against the church. The Knights were saved by their continuing role as defenders, with their blood and treasure, of the Christians of Livonia against the pagan Lithuanians. Even so, their escape from papal censure and suppression was a close-run thing.
²⁸
The Order of St John could still claim their original hospitaller calling. Yet, almost from the earliest days of the militarized religious communities in the mid-twelfth century, writers had noted the rivalries and divisions between the orders, from the Egyptian wars of the 1160s to the civil wars of later thirteenth-century Outremer. Sermons and chronicles may have included elevating anecdotes of the special Christian heroism of members of the orders, yet the darker aspect of their reputation could not be dispelled, especially once mainland Outremer fell.

The loss of the orders’ great fortresses in Syria and Palestine represented a potentially terminal threat to the orders’ occupation. Reform was suggested at the Second Lyons Council of 1274. Scandal had never been far from some military orders, unregulated by local ecclesiastical authority and institutionally introspective as their calling made them. The suppression of the Swordbrothers in 1237 could be seen only as an extreme – or publicized – example of the pitfalls inherent in a corporate ideal that insisted on the awkward marriage of religious conventual exclusivity with close and necessary involvement in secular affairs – war, diplomacy, finance and property. Some of these temporal snares were common to all religious orders, many of which attracted similar complaints of corruption throughout the middle ages. However, the military orders were more vulnerable. Their vocation, perched at an extreme of cultural acceptability, had always been controversial in some quarters. Unlike other religious orders, the success of a military order could, in a sense, be tested by tangible, not just imagined spiritual, results. Defeat in the Holy Land indicated clear failure. The cause could only be God’s displeasure, provoked by contumacious sin. The military orders thus stood as symbols – potential scapegoats – for the perceived moral failings of Christendom.
²⁹

Criticism, not all of it consistent, grew in scope after 1274. The orders were accused of being corrupt. Their ineffectual worldiness required the disendowment of their estates situated away from the frontlines. The orders should be amalgamated into one super-order to provide a well-funded, disciplined core for attempts to recover and defend the Holy Land. Some even argued that rule in a reconquered Holy Land should be vested in such a united order and its head, a
Bellator Rex
, recruited from one of the royal houses of the west. There was no consensus behind these ideas, the Master of the Temple, Jacques de Molay (1292–1314), for one arguing against union. Some critics appeared as enthusiastic for the idea of military orders as they were hostile to their practice. Others admired the model of an order-state pioneered by the Teutonic Knights. These ideas did not remain the preserve of theorists and lobbyists. In 1291, Nicholas IV instructed provincial church councils to consider the orders’ future. At least four (Arles, Canterbury, Lyons and Norwich) supported a merger, as did Charles II of Naples, son of Charles of Anjou and a claimant to the throne of Jerusalem.
³⁰
While between 1305 and 1307 the Masters of the Temple and Hospital added their own opinions,
unsurprisingly supportive of their orders, the weight of advice 1290–1312 urged at least reform of the orders, if not union or a new order altogether.

The arrest, persecution, trials and final suppression of the Templars did not, therefore, come from nowhere.
³¹
Beginning with the arrest of all Templars in France on Friday 13 October 1307 (allegedly the origin for the ill-omen of Friday 13th), punctuated by torture, confessions, recantations and burnings, the sordid process was driven by officials of the king of France, appeased by the papal Curia and the other monarchs of western Europe. The attack culminated in the order’s suppression by Clement V at the Council of Vienne in 1312 and the final, brusque execution by burning of the last Master in Paris in 1314. The assault on the Templars became notorious for the luridness of the accusations against them, the barbarism of the use of torture by French inquisitors, the inconsistent leadership of Clement V, the confused defence mounted by the order and the single-minded ruthlessness of Philip IV of France and his ministers, especially Guillaume de Plaisians and Guillaume de Nogaret. The ambitious but sporadically spendthrift Philip IV may have wanted control of Templar propertied wealth. He may also genuinely have believed them to have failed in their holy mission, to which he possibly held a sincere attachment.
³²

If so, he was by no means alone. Pious conviction, self-righteous brutality and myopic moral certainty are familiar partners. There existed sufficient belief in the justice of their cause among the French persecutors and the watching secular and ecclesiastical elites of western Christendom to sustain a campaign of oppression that reeked of hypocrisy, mendacity and avarice as well as cruelty. The charges of blasphemy, sodomy, irregular and obscene ceremonies, the common currency of formal ecclesiastical abuse, were lent added plausibility by the perception of dereliction of duty. The low grade of Templar membership, comprising a worryingly high number of dim, often elderly and politically inadequate minor nobility, did not enhance their defence or inspire confidence in the order’s long-term value or viability. The garbled accounts of peculiar, half-remembered admission rituals may indicate some strange practices, not uncommon in closed, secretive elite male societies. Yet the confessions to the substantive charges appear mainly to have been extracted under torture, the trauma of public humiliation and sudden loss of liberty or the threat of violence. When led to the stake by his persecutors
in 1314, the unfortunate Jacques de Molay insisted on his and his order’s innocence of all charges, a protestation
in extremis
from an unsubtle man of apparent sincere faith that perhaps should command credence. Clement V refused to bow to French pressure to condemn the order, merely citing its irredeemable loss of reputation as the cause for its suppression in 1312 without a verdict of guilt or innocence. Clement even wrong-footed the French persecutors by granting the confiscated Templar property to the Hospitallers.

The Templar scandal exerted a significant influence on the future direction of the two largest surviving military orders. The Teutonic Knights narrowly avoided the similar, perhaps better-merited, fate of dissolution after another inquiry begun by Clement V in 1308. Fresh from having only just escaped condemnation by Boniface VIII, the order at Riga was briefly excommunicated in 1312–13. Hard lobbying and the order’s role in Prussia and German imperial politics saved them, rather than any marked change in public or private behaviour, which continued to attract hostile comment, including a critical papal verdict in 1324 over the Livonian affair, before resurfacing prominently at the Council of Constance (1414–18).
³³
The Hospitallers too were not immune to external scrutiny, some of it highly critical, at times menacing, as when Pope Innocent VI threatened to impose reform from without.
³⁴

Both orders learnt from the Templar debacle that protection lay in physical security. After 1291, the Hospitallers, like the Templars, had been based in Cyprus; the Teutonic Knights in Venice. Between 1306 and 1310, the Hospitallers conquered the island of Rhodes, transferring their headquarters there in 1309. The same year, the Master of the Teutonic Knights moved to the distant safety of Marienburg (Marlbork) in Prussia. Both orders were now settled in their own order-states. The timing was hardly accidental, precisely coinciding with the trials of the Templars. From these moves the orders gained protection and a restatement of their vocations as warriors of Christ on the frontiers of Christendom. Whatever the compromises with supposed enemies across the religious frontier – and there were many – the relocation of the military orders altered their role. The Teutonic Knights effectively abandoned the eastern Mediterranean while the Hospitallers created an independent eastern Mediterranean principality. Although still supported by estates across all of Europe – Rhodes receiving its western profits in the
form of annual ‘responsions’ – both orders now operated behind their own palisades as sovereigns, at no one’s beck and call except their own. By doing so, they helped shape the later medieval pattern of devolved and local campaigns in the east, which replaced the grand international expeditions of earlier generations in tackling the great new crusading venture of the later middle ages.

THE OTTOMAN TURKS

One of about ten emirates arising from the debris of the collapsed Seljuk sultanate of Rum in the later thirteenth century, the Ottomans fed on the carcass of the Byzantine empire.
³⁵
While their rivals to the south engaged in piracy in the Aegean, attracting naval leagues under papal auspices in 1332–4 and 1343–5, leading to the capture and occupation of Smyrna (1344–1405) and a futile campaign by Humbert, dauphin of Vienne (1345–6), the Ottomans posed a different problem. Originating in the area around Bursa in north-west Asia Minor, the Ottomans, followers of Osman and his son Orkhan (1326–62), began to annexe lands along the Sea of Marmora, reaching the Bosporus and Dardenelles by the 1330s. While other Turkish mercenaries were defending Smyrna from the Christian Holy League, in 1345 Orkhan was hired by a claimant to the Byzantine throne, John VI Cantacuzene, to fight in Thrace during the imperial civil war, first against rival Greeks then against invading Serbs. The Ottomans soon secured their own bases in the Gallipoli peninsula, Gallipoli itself falling in 1354. An Ottoman empire was being created in Europe, not Asia, on land, not around easily accessible coasts.

Alarm at Ottoman advances in Thrace led to the first crusading coalitions to stop them. An offshoot of the crusade plans of Urban V and Peter I of Cyprus, a small expedition commanded by Count Amadeus VI of Savoy in 1366–7 succeeded in capturing Gallipoli and a number of Black Sea ports.
³⁶
This hardly gave the Ottomans pause. Around 1369, they took Adrianople (Erdine), which became their capital. By the end of the century, after their defeat of Serbia at Kossovo in 1389, they dominated the Balkans between the Danube and Gulf of Corinth. While the spirited but ill-conducted crusade that was crushed at Nicopolis on the Danube in 1396 served only to consolidate Ottoman power, their defeat by Timur in 1402 spared central Europe immediate further
assault. Under Murad II pressure was resumed. Gradually, assisted by confessional and political bickering among their Christian opponents, the Ottomans conquered the whole of the Balkans, as well as Asia Minor and Anatolia. The capture of the long-isolated Constantinople in 1453 by Mehmed II the Conqueror led to the absorption of the rest of Latin and Byzantine Greece by the mid-1460s and Venetian Negroponte in 1470. After a generation of relative peace after Mehmed’s death, Selim I the Grim and Suleiman I the Magnificent conquered Mamluk Syria, Palestine and Egypt (1516–17), Belgrade (1521), Rhodes (1522–3) and most of Hungary after the crushing victory at Mohacs (1526). Vienna was besieged, but not taken, in 1529. This transformation of the political map of eastern Europe and the Mediterranean was conducted on the ideological terrain of the wars of the cross. Yet, the improbably successful defence of Belgrade in 1456 aside, no crusade had done much to prevent it.

Remarkably, compared with the number of sermons preached, taxes levied and indulgences sold, active crusading against the Turks remained a sideshow. Even at the height of the Ottoman threat to central Europe, when in 1463 Pius II was pointing to their presence ‘from the Black Sea to Hungary, from the Aegean shore to the Danube’, planners felt the need to associate their grander schemes of resistance with the pipe-dream of the recovery of the Holy Land.
³⁷
Yet this was no distant war that relied on dedicated rhetorical fictions and religious empathy to render it immediate, as was the case with the Holy Land. The Greek émigré Cardinal John Bessarion argued, in 1463, that the Ottomans threatened ‘our country, our homes, our children, our family, and our wives’ as they wished ‘to subjugate the entire world starting with Italy’.
³⁸
Four years earlier, a papal legate told Henry VI of England that Ottoman dominance of the Danube threatened the Rhine and hence English interests directly. The later fifteenth-century English House of Commons feared lest the Ottoman conquests interrupt the supply of bowstaves from the Crimea.
³⁹
Scare-mongering of Italy in danger did not appear fanciful when Otranto was briefly occupied in 1480. The chances of a Turkish conquest of Rome, of Italian Renaissance artists serving an Ottoman sultan were not entirely remote. As a barometer of their success, the demonized Turk replaced the Saracen as a western European catch-all bogeyman.