The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (30 page)

The Templars had their champions. When de Molay was interrogated by three cardinals sent expressly to Paris by the Pope, he formally revoked his confession and bared his breast to show unmistakable signs of torture. At Clement’s first consistory, no less than ten members of the Sacred College threatened to resign in protest against his policy, and early in February the Inquisition was ordered to suspend its activities against the Order. But it was impossible to reverse the tide. In August the Grand Master, examined yet again, renewed his former confessions.

The public trial of the Order opened on 11 April 1310, when it was announced that any of the accused who attempted to retract an earlier confession would be burned at the stake; on 12 May fifty-four Knights suffered this fate, and in the next two weeks nine others followed them. The whole contemptible affair dragged on for another four years, during which Pope and King continued to confer–a sure sign of the doubts that refused to go away–and to discuss the disposition of the Order’s enormous wealth. Meanwhile Jacques de Molay languished in prison until his fate could be decided. Not until 14 March 1314 did the authorities bring him out on to a scaffold before the Cathedral of Notre-Dame to repeat his confession for the last time.

They had reason to regret their decision. As Grand Master, Jacques de Molay can hardly be said to have distinguished himself over the previous seven years. He had confessed, retracted and confessed again; he had shown no heroism, few qualities even of leadership. But now he was an old man, in his middle seventies and about to meet his God: he had nothing more to lose. And so, supported by his friend Geoffroy de Charnay, he spoke out loud and clear: as God was his witness, he and his Order were totally innocent of all the charges of which they had been accused. At once he and de Charnay were hurried away by the royal marshals, while messengers hastened to Philip. The King delayed his decision no longer. That same evening the two old knights were rowed out to a small island in the Seine, where the stake had been prepared.

It was later rumoured that, just before he died, de Molay had summoned both Pope Clement and King Philip to appear at the judgement seat of God before the year was out, and it did not pass unnoticed that the Pope was dead in little more than a month, and the King killed in a hunting accident towards the end of November.
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The two men faced the flames with courage and died nobly. After night had fallen, the friars of the Augustinian monastery on the further shore came to collect their bones, to be revered as those of saints and martyrs.

Although the Knights Hospitaller of St John had played no part in the persecution and ultimate annihilation of the Templars–and it would be unkind even to suggest that they experienced even a touch of
Schadenfreude
–there is no doubt that they were far and away the greatest beneficiaries of their brothers’ demise. By a bull dated 2 May 1312, Pope Clement had decreed that all the Templars’ wealth and property–outside the kingdoms of Castile, Aragon, Portugal and Majorca, on which he deferred his decision–should devolve upon the Order of the Hospital; even though King Philip received most of his expected rewards, it was the Hospitallers who suddenly found themselves richer than they had ever dreamed.

In its origins, their order was older even than that of the Templars. An early hospice for pilgrims to Jerusalem had been established by Charlemagne, and had been active until 1010 when it was destroyed by the fanatically anti-Christian Caliph Hakim; the site was purchased in about 1023 by a group of merchants from Amalfi, who re-established it under the authority of the Benedictines. Soon afterwards it was dedicated to St John the Baptist, and by the time of the Latin conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 its director, Brother Gerard, had made it the centre of its own religious order with a single aim: that of tending, and if possible healing, the sick. It was Gerard’s successor, a certain Raymond of Le Puy, who revised its rule and gave it its second purpose: the military protection of Christian pilgrims. From the 1130s onwards both the Templars and the Hospitallers were taking a regular part in the wars of the Cross. Both were religious orders, whose members took the usual monastic vows; but whereas the Templars were a purely military organisation, the Hospitallers never forgot that they were primarily a nursing brotherhood, whose duty it was to minister to ‘our lords the sick’. When not actually fighting, they were constantly occupied with the building and furnishing of their hospitals, and their standard of medical treatment was the highest in the medieval world.

After the fall of Acre and the end of Frankish Outremer, the Knights of the Hospital first took refuge in Limassol, but they had no wish to subject themselves to the house of Lusignan and in 1306 their Grand Master Foulques de Villaret–with the willing permission of Pope Clement–came to an agreement with a Genoese pirate named Vignolo de’ Vignoli for a concerted attack on the island of Rhodes, then part of the Byzantine Empire. It was, geographically, a perfect choice. The most easterly island of the Aegean, it lay only ten miles off the coast of Asia Minor, the intervening channel carrying much of the merchant shipping that plied between the ports of western Europe and those of the Levant. Its mountain ridge, rising to some 4,000 feet, offered several vantage points from which lookouts could keep a watch on both Asia Minor and the islands of the Dodecanese; on clear days even the outline of Mount Ida in Crete–well over 100 miles away to the southwest–was clearly visible. The fields were rich in orchards and vineyards, ensuring copious supplies of food and wine. Vast pine forests provided virtually limitless wood for shipbuilding. Moreover, the people boasted a seafaring tradition that went back to the days of antiquity. The Roman navy of the east had been largely staffed by Rhodians, as had successive Byzantine fleets. If the Knights, hitherto based firmly on land, were now to become men of the sea, they could not hope to find better instructors in shipbuilding, seamanship and navigation.

First, however, the island had to be conquered. Its people put up a stubborn resistance, and it was only after two years’ hard fighting that the city of Rhodes itself, with its two magnificent harbours, eventually fell to the Knights. On 15 August 1309 it opened its gates, and a year later became the official headquarters of the Order. An agreement was quickly reached with the pirate Vignolo according to which, in return for one-third of their revenues, the Knights were to keep the whole island except two small villages, plus the neighbouring islands of Kos and Kalymnos and several others of the Dodecanese. It was an excellent bargain. After nineteen years, they once again had a permanent home–on an island which, by a subsequent papal decree, was their property absolutely. In these new circumstances they were not only an order of knighthood; they were a sovereign state. Now at last they were able to resume their continuing war against the infidel, with its avowed object of ‘reducing to silence the enemies of Christ’, but even as they did so they never forgot that they had another duty, more pressing still. One of their very first tasks on settling in Rhodes was to start work on their new infirmary. It was to become the best and most celebrated hospital in the world. The great ward–which remains today almost exactly as it was when the Order left it nearly five centuries ago–could accommodate no less than eighty-five patients, all tended by the Knights themselves.

They also established a completely new administrative structure. The head of state was the Grand Master; beneath him the Order was divided into eight
langues
, or tongues–those of France, Provence, Auvergne, England, Italy, Germany, Aragon and Castile–each of which enjoyed a considerable degree of independence. In order to bind together this motley collection of races and languages, it was decided that each tongue should assume responsibility for an individual task. Thus the Admiral was almost invariably an Italian, the Grand Commander a Provençal, the Marshal an Auvergnat and the Grand Bailiff a German. The English provided the Turcopolier, who was charged with the coastal defences of the island. Every Knight without exception was required to wear on his gown or cloak the characteristic eight-pointed cross, ‘to put him in mind of bearing always in his heart the cross of Jesus Christ, adorned with the eight virtues that attend it’.

Within the tongues, the Knights were of three main classes. First were the Knights of Justice, who were recruited only from the aristocratic families of Europe and were required to give proof of their noble blood. Next in the hierarchy came the serving brothers, who were of slightly lower social status; some would be soldiers, some diplomats and civil servants, others would work in the hospital. The third category was formed by the chaplains who served in the churches and chapels. Each Knight was required to serve two initial years on probation, one of which would be spent in the galleys. Only then was he required to take the oath:

You promise and vow under God, and unto our Lady, and unto our Lord St John Baptist to live and to die in obedience. You likewise promise to live without property of your own. There is also one other promise, made only by the Order: to be the serf and the slave of our lords the sick.

Many remained abroad for the best part of their lives, in the Order’s local commanderies, but all without exception were bound to return instantly to Rhodes when summoned.

As the fourteenth century wore on, it is not altogether surprising that the Knights began to compromise on some of their early ideals. Although their hospital continued to flourish and to attract patients from all over the eastern Mediterranean, their own steadily increasing wealth–combined, perhaps, with the near-perfect climate in which they lived–led to a gradual relaxation of their once austere monastic habits. But they never neglected their military duties. They continued to police the narrow seas; their consuls in Egypt and Jerusalem watched over the interests of the Christian pilgrims; and they kept up the pressure against the Turks, substantially delaying their development as a first-rate naval power. In 1348, in alliance with Venice and Cyprus, they took Smyrna (lzmir), successfully defending it against a Turkish counter-attack ten years later; and in 1365 they participated in the last effort ever made to rescue the Holy Land from the infidel.

Their ally and inspiration on this occasion was King Peter I of Cyprus, the first monarch since St Louis to be fired with a genuine Crusading spirit. In 1362 he set out on an extended tour of the west to seek support for his plans. Pope Urban V in Avignon, the Emperor Charles IV in Prague, John II of France and Edward III of England all promised help, and there was a useful naval contribution from Venice. The expedition assembled in Rhodes in August 1365, with a navy estimated at some 165 ships, including 108 from Cyprus–by far the largest combined force since the Third Crusade. Only after the whole fleet had set sail was it announced that the first destination was Alexandria. The Crusaders landed there on 9 October; two days later the city was theirs.

What followed was a massacre–a massacre worse, if anything, than that by the soldiers of the First Crusade in Jerusalem in 1099 or that by the Franks in Constantinople in 1204. The slaughter was indiscriminate. The important Christian and Jewish communities suffered as much as the Muslim majority; churches and synagogues as well as mosques were put to the torch. Five thousand prisoners were captured and sold into slavery. King Peter, horrified at the turn events had taken, did his best to restore order and to hold what was left of the city, but the army, having possessed itself of all the plunder it could carry, was impatient to be off before an avenging Mameluke army arrived from Cairo. The King had no course but to order his fleet back to Cyprus. Even then he hoped to sail back on a second expedition to the east, but on arrival at Famagusta the entire army disintegrated, knights and foot-soldiers alike thinking only of returning home with their loot as quickly as possible.

This was the last Crusade, and the most shameful of them all; it set back the cause of progress in the Mediterranean by the best part of a century. When it took place, the Franks and the Mamelukes had been at peace for fifty years and more. Pilgrims were travelling freely to the Holy Places; trade was flourishing between the west and the Muslim world. Now, at a stroke, all the old enmities were revived: native Christian communities began once again to suffer persecution, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was once again closed to pilgrims. To the Mamelukes of Egypt, the Christian Kingdom of Cyprus was once again their arch-enemy. Sixty years later they were to have their revenge.

It would be unfair to attach too much of the blame for this catastrophe to the Knights of the Hospital. Their lives were, after all, dedicated to the saving of life rather than to the taking of it; their vow of poverty ruled out any form of looting; and they had lived long enough in the east to understand the principles of coexistence. There can be little doubt that they were as shocked as anyone by the behaviour of their allies, and they would certainly have done their best to exercise a moderating influence; their guilt, such as it was, was guilt by association only. Nonetheless, the massacre at Alexandria signals the low point of their history, and marks their record with its blackest stain. For the rest, idle and ineffectual as they frequently were, it remains a fact that throughout their 213-year residence in Rhodes and for much of their 268-year occupation of Malta which followed it, the Knights Hospitaller of St John of Jerusalem were to be a beneficial–and occasionally dramatically decisive–force in Mediterranean affairs.

The palace of the Alhambra at Granada is one of the most superb Islamic buildings remaining anywhere in Europe. No visitor can fail to be seduced by the grace of its architecture, the delicacy of its carving, the play of sunshine and shadow in its courts and gardens. The horseshoe arches, the swirling Arabic calligraphy, the stalactite vaulting, all radiate the spirit of Islam at its elegant best. Then, suddenly, there comes a surprise. In three of the alcoves of the Sala de los Reyes
–
it is sometimes known as the Sala de la Justicia–are some extraordinary ceiling paintings. They are painted on leather, which might be thought unusual enough, but what makes them more remarkable still is their subject. In the central alcove ten men of Moorish appearance are sitting at a council meeting, while to each side there are scenes of hunting, fighting, chess-playing and the making of courtly love, all in the manner of Christian Europe in the later Middle Ages. The style suggests the mid-fourteenth century, so they must be virtually contemporary with the palace itself, which was completed in about 1350; but how did they come to be painted? The tenets of Islam strongly discourage figurative art in any form, and particularly representations of the human figure;
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and Muslim Granada still had a century and a half to go. We can only conclude that an Islamic ruler commissioned a Christian artist to provide them, which in turn suggests that at this time at least the two religions had achieved a happy and harmonious coexistence.