The Knight in History (22 page)

Unable to rescue their comrades in Mansourah, by nightfall the French managed, by desperate fighting, to reach a point on the river opposite their old camp; here reinforcements arrived, and the Saracens again fell back to Mansourah. The Provost of the Hospitalers, Brother Henry de Ronnay, comforted the king for the loss of his brother by assuring him that by his deeds he had gained more honor than any other king of France, “For, in order to fight your enemies, you swam across a river, to rout them utterly and drive them from the field. Besides this, you have captured their machines, and also their tents, in which you will be sleeping tonight.” The king replied, “May God be worshipped for all He has given me,” but, Joinville reported, “big tears began to fall from his eyes.”
⁴³

After the battle of Mansourah, Louis had the choice of retreating to Damietta or holding his position on the Nile. He chose to remain. The French army was harassed by constant raids, and at sunrise on February 11, the Saracens mounted a full-scale attack. The first assault was met by the king’s brother Charles of Anjou, king of Sicily, and the barons of the Holy Land. “The enemy tackled him in the way that men play chess,” Joinville reported, “for first of all they sent their foot soldiers forward to attack him, and these hurled Greek fire at his troops. Then all the Saracens, both mounted and unmounted, pressed so hard on our people that [Charles of Anjou], who was on foot among his knights, was quite overpowered.” The king charged in person, sword in hand, “so far forward among the ranks of the Turks that they burnt his horse’s crupper with Greek fire,” and rescued his brother. Two more “battles,” divisions of knights, met the onslaught, holding back the Turks.

“The next to meet the enemy’s onset was Brother Guillaume de Sonnac, Master of the Temple, with the few members of his Order left to him after the battle on Shrove Tuesday. He had had a barricade erected in front of his men made up of the machines we had taken from the Saracens. When the enemy…hurled Greek fire at the defenses he had put up, these caught fire quickly…. The Turks did not wait for the fire to burn itself out, but rushed in and attacked the Templars amid the flames…. Behind the Templars there was a tract of land…which was so thickly covered with the Saracens’ darts that you could not see the ground.” The Master lost his other eye and died shortly after of his wounds.
⁴⁴

The Crusaders held out, but their losses were heavy. “The river was full of corpses,” wrote Joinville, “from one bank to the other, and as far upstream as one could cast a small stone.”
⁴⁵
The Saracens dismantled boats, carried them around the Christian camp by camel, and launched them downstream, cutting off the Crusaders from their supply base at Damietta. Soon the army was racked by hunger and plagued by sickness. At the end of March the king ordered a withdrawal, but it was too late; halfway back to Damietta the French were forced to surrender.

The Templars sent the news of the catastrophe to their brothers in France: only three Templars and five Hospitalers of the Crusading army had survived.

Negotiations for a peace agreement began. The Saracen envoys suggested exchanging the prisoners for Templar or Hospitaler castles, but this was impossible because every castle governor had sworn an oath never to surrender his castle to procure a man’s release from captivity. Louis IX himself endorsed the refusal, preferring to pay an enormous ransom, half of it immediately.

“It took the whole of that day [May 7] and the next day until night to count the money,” Joinville wrote, “which was reckoned by weight in the scales.” At about six on Sunday evening it became evident that the money was “a good thirty thousand pounds short of the sum required.” Joinville advised the king to send for the Commander and the Marshal of the Temple, since the Master was dead, and ask them to lend him the money from that deposited for safekeeping.

Presented with the request by Joinville, however, the Commander, Etienne d’Otricourt, refused. “My lord of Joinville,…you know that all the money placed in our charge is left with us on condition of our swearing never to hand it over except to those who entrusted it to us.” “On this,” Joinville reported, “many hard and insulting words passed between us.” Marshal Renaud de Vichiers found a way out of the dilemma. Joinville might simply “take the money if we will not lend it…. If you take what is ours here in Egypt, we have so much of what is yours in Acre that you can easily give us proper compensation.”

The king accepted the suggestion and sent Joinville to take the money from the Templars’ flagship. The Commander declined to accompany him, but the Marshal went along. They found the Temple Treasurer in the ship’s hold, where the money on deposit was kept in chests, each labeled with the name of the Crusader-client. Joinville demanded the keys; the Treasurer refused—Joinville believed that the man was taking advantage of his condition, wasted as he was by dysentery. “I caught sight of a hatchet lying there; I picked it up and told him I would make it serve as His Majesty’s key.” The Marshal thereupon ordered the Treasurer to turn over the keys, and Joinville took enough money to complete the ransom.
⁴⁶

The Templars evidently approved of Renaud de Vichiers’ handling of the affair, for when he returned to Acre they elected him Master—with the support of the king, according to Joinville.

Joinville had another experience with the Templars as bankers. Collecting his own back pay from the king, he deposited most of it with the Commander of Acre. Later he sent a messenger to withdraw cash, but “the Commander told him that he had no money of mine, and did not know me.” Joinville had to appeal to Renaud de Vichiers, and after suffering “for four whole days…such anxiety as a man must feel when he has no money to meet expenses,” received his funds. To his further satisfaction, the Commander was demoted.
⁴⁷

Joinville also had the opportunity to observe successful Templar and Hospitaler diplomacy. A sinister Islamic chieftain known to the Europeans as the Old Man of the Mountains ruled as Grand Master of the feared “Assassins” of Persia, who extorted tribute by threatening the lives of rulers, both Christian and Muslim. The Old Man sent emissaries to King Louis in Acre demanding payment. The representatives, splendidly dressed, postured and threatened: one held in his clenched fist “three knives, with blades that fitted each into the handle of another,” which he was to present to the king if he refused the offer, “in token of defiance” a second carried “a stout roll of linen wound round his arm, which he was to present to the king as a winding-sheet for his burial.” But Joinville discovered that the Assassins themselves paid tribute to both Templars and Hospitalers, whose Masters refused to be terrorized, although “the Emperor of Germany, the King of Hungary, the Sultan of Cairo, and other rulers” had surrendered to the extortion. The envoy made an offer: Louis could fulfill his obligations toward the Old Man of the Mountains by arranging for the latter to be released from paying tribute to the Hospital and the Temple.

The king told the chief envoy to return in the afternoon, and summoned the Masters of the Temple and Hospital. The Assassin found them seated on either side of the king, who told him to repeat the message he had delivered that morning. The two Masters then had orders given him “in the Saracen tongue” to come to the headquarters of the Hospital the following day. When he appeared, they told him through an interpreter that he had “acted very rashly in daring to send such an insolent message to the king…[and] if the honor of the king…had not been involved they would have had [the emissaries] drowned in the filthy sea of Acre….” The envoy was commanded to go back to his lord and return in a fortnight with “such a letter and such jewels as may appease His Majesty and make him graciously pleased with you.” The crestfallen envoy obeyed, and on his return brought his lord’s ring, engraved with his name, and other gifts, including his shirt, explaining that “as the shirt is closer to the body than any other garment, so did their lord hold His Majesty as closer to himself in love than any other king.”
⁴⁸

In August, the king’s brothers sailed for home, taking with them the bulk of the army; the king remained, and a quarrel between the Muslims of Syria and Egypt strengthened his position. He found himself holding the balance of power between Syrians and Egyptians, with both parties suing for his support. The Egyptians, heretofore slow in adhering to the terms of their treaty with Louis, began to send large groups of prisoners back, at the same time offering alliance, with the prospect of restoring Syria west of the Jordan to the Crusaders. Negotiations were proceeding when the king learned that the Templars had been carrying on diplomacy of their own with Damascus. Renaud de Vichiers had sent his Marshal, Hugues de Jouy, to the sultan of Damascus to work out an agreement over some land held by the Temple. The contract was made, subject to the king’s approval, and Brother Hugues returned, bringing with him a Damascene emir as the sultan’s representative. The king was furious; the Master should not have negotiated an agreement without consulting him. Such insubordination must not go unpunished, and the king decided to exact reparation from the whole Order, in the form of a disciplinary session of one of its own chapters. “The king had the flaps of three of his pavilions raised,” Joinville wrote, “and all the lower ranks of the army were given leave to come and see…. The Master of the Temple and all his knights advanced barefoot right through the camp…. The king made the Master of the Temple and the sultan’s envoy sit in front of him, and addressed the former in a loud voice. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘you will tell the sultan’s envoy that you regret having made any treaty with his lord without first speaking to me. You will add that since you did not consult me you must hold the sultan released from the agreement he has made with you, and hand all relevant documents back to him.’ Thereupon the Master of the Temple produced the written agreement and handed it to the emir, saying as he did so: ‘I give you back the contract I have wrongly entered into, and express my regret for what I did.’

“Then the king told the Master and other Templars to rise, which they accordingly did. ‘Now,’ said His Majesty, ‘kneel and make reparation to me for having thus approached the sultan against my will.’ The Master knelt, and holding the hem of his mantle toward the king, surrendered to him everything his Order possessed, so that His Majesty might take from it whatever compensation he might choose. ‘I declare…,’ said the king, ‘that Brother Hugues, who made this agreement, shall be banished from the whole Kingdom of Jerusalem.’ ”
⁴⁹

Brother Hugues was banished, and the Order, angry at the public humiliation, soon after either deposed or demanded the resignation of Renaud de Vichiers.

The last Christian prisoners were returned, the remaining half of the ransom was canceled, and Louis made an alliance with the Egyptians in 1252, supporting their invasion of Syria in return for Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and most of the land west of the Jordan. But the allies were blocked from joining forces by the Syrian occupation of Gaza, and a treaty was signed between the Syrians and Egyptians in April 1253 before Jerusalem could be regained.

Although Louis made one more attempt at a Crusade in the last year of his life, 1270, he drew little support in Europe. The age of Crusading was in fact over. The great rearguard of the Military Orders fought heroically to the end, their castles like the knights themselves falling one by one until in 1291 Templars and Hospitalers made their last stand in Acre. In the final battle, the Marshals of both Temple and Hospital were killed, the two Masters mortally wounded. The Master of the Hospitalers, dying in Cyprus, wrote to the Prior of the province of St. Gilles “in great sadness of heart, overcome with deep sorrow….”
⁵⁰

A troubadour named Oliver the Templar penned a bitter requiem:

Anger and sadness have entered my heart

So that I hardly dare remain alive,

For they have lowered the Cross that we took

In honor of the One who was crucified.
⁵¹

The spirit of 1095 had indeed vanished from Europe, its fanaticism and idealism replaced by a more rational and material outlook. Perhaps the spirit of 1291 was exemplified less by the Templars who perished sword in hand amid the flames of Acre than by a knight named Roger de Flor who fought bravely till the cause was lost and then executed a coolheaded escape, loading a ship with jewels, silks, church ornaments, and other valuables, and sailing out of the stricken harbor in a shower of missiles, to snatch a fortune from catastrophe.

With the end of the Christian European presence in the Holy Land, the Military Orders lost their reason for being but continued to exist on the strength of their wealth, power, and organization. A generation after the fall of Acre, the most prestigious of the three, the Knights Templars, fell victim to their very wealth when Philip IV of France hit on the liquidation of the Order as a financial expedient. The Templars were accused of a variety of crimes, chief among them heresy, idol worship, and sodomy; a number of confessions were obtained by torture; the Grand Master and several others were burned at the stake; and the Order was suppressed. The pope, who pronounced the dissolution, prevailed on Philip to concede the confiscated Templar lands to the Hospitalers, who thus gained a fresh lease on life. Philip himself profited from the sale of chattels and the cancellation of his own large debts.

The Hospitalers remained for a time based on Cyprus, then retreated first to Rhodes and finally to Malta, where they withstood a prolonged siege by the Ottoman Turks in 1565, and whence they were finally expelled by Napoleon’s expedition of 1798.