The Tragedy of the Templars (36 page)

I
N THE EARLY
1190s, in a remarkably short and powerfully effective campaign, Richard the Lionheart, king of England and leader of the Third Crusade, together with his allies the Templars, delivered a series of powerful blows against Saladin and recovered much of Outremer. In name and number the revived crusader states were as before, but their outlines were diminished. There was the kingdom of Jerusalem, although its capital was at Acre, which the Templars made their new headquarters. To the north was the county of Tripoli. But the Muslims retained control of the Syrian coast around Latakia for some time, and so the principality of Antioch further to the north was now no longer contiguous to the other crusader states. Nevertheless the Third Crusade, in which Richard relied heavily on the Templars, had saved the Holy Land for the Christians and went a long way towards restoring Frankish fortunes. In this Richard was abetted by the military orders, whose great castles stood like islands of Frankish power amid the Muslim torrent. More than ever Outremer was relying on the military orders in their castles and on the field of battle, and the power of the orders grew. In fact, at no point in their history would the Templars be more powerful than in the century to come
.

Saladin died soon after the Third Crusade, and his dynastic empire dissolved, so that a quarter of a century later Frederick II, Holy Roman emperor, was able to mount an expedition against Egypt that forced Saladin's heir to cede control over Jerusalem. But the recovery of Jerusalem was brief and no more than symbolic; the life of Outremer had passed to the coast, where Acre, the new capital of the kingdom of Jerusalem, was a thriving cosmopolitan mercantile port that bore comparison to Constantinople
.

When the remnants of Saladin's dynasty, the Ayyubids, were overthrown in Cairo by the militaristic Mameluke Turks in 1260, a foreboding crept across Outremer. A slave warrior elite who soon extended their control from Egypt over the whole of western Asia, the Mamelukes could call upon boundless resources and the vast manpower derived from the continuing westward migration of Turkish tribes to subject Outremer to insistent and unrelenting attack. No amount of fighting excellence by the Templars or others in Outremer was sufficient to withstand the onslaught for long
.

C
ONTROL OF THE COAST
had always been essential for the security, the supply and the development of Outremer. But in its eagerness to capture Jerusalem the First Crusade marched past Acre in 1099, making no attempt to occupy the city. The conquest of the coast was left to King Baldwin I, who took the sea ports of Caesarea, Jaffa and Arsuf and in 1104 captured Acre with the help of a Genoese fleet. As other leading ports such as Tyre and Ascalon were still in Fatimid hands, Acre became the chief port of the kingdom of Jerusalem, and it attracted merchants from the great trading cities of Italy and Provence. Genoa, Pisa, Venice and Amalfi, and also Marseille, established themselves there, each community with its own quarter and piazza, with its own church, court house and warehouses, as well as its own mills, bakery and butchers. Also each community enjoyed a high degree of autonomy and was administered by its own representative; the interests and rivalries of these trading colonies would dominate the affairs of Acre throughout the two centuries to come.

Both the Templars and the Hospitallers had bases in the city. As the nearest good harbour to Jerusalem, Acre became the favoured port of disembarkation for pilgrims; the Hospitallers gave them hospitality, and the Templars escorted them on the road. Theoderich, a German pilgrim and author of a guide to the Holy Land, described the busy pilgrim traffic when he passed through Acre in 1172:

Because of the vital commercial and pilgrim traffic that passed through Acre, not to mention the city's military importance, it was ruled directly by the king of Jerusalem through a governor, who, notwithstanding the autonomy of the trading colonies, ran the police and the justice systems and collected the port taxes which were a principal part of the royal revenue. The kings themselves often spent time at Acre enjoying the Mediterranean weather, and numbers of the barony of Outremer had properties here; both they and the Latin bishop of the city were bound by the feudal levy to raise knights for the defence of the kingdom and to provide bodies of hired troops at times of great emergency; in the fateful year of 1187 the city's manpower contribution to the kingdom was second only to that of Jerusalem itself.

Acre was no less important for Muslim trade, and the city possessed two mosques, one inside the walls and one without. Ibn Jubayr, who visited Acre in 1185, was impressed, although that did not stop him from hurling the usual imprecation at anything Frankish.

After the defeat of the Frankish army at Hattin in July 1187, Acre surrendered to Saladin without resistance. Of all the seaports of the kingdom of Jerusalem only Tyre remained in Frankish hands; it had been overlooked by Saladin in his rush to take Jerusalem, a serious strategic mistake. Terricus, formerly grand preceptor of the Temple at Jerusalem, reported the situation to King Henry II of England in January 1188, saying that Saladin had now returned to Tyre and was besieging it ‘with thirteen
petrarii
launching stones nonstop, day and night', from 11 November 1187 to 1 January 1188. Conrad, the lord of Tyre, led the defence by positioning his knights and infantry on the city wall, and then,

The coastal campaign was straining Saladin's resources. His armies had already plundered the Frankish territories and devoured all their grain. Saladin was having to build ships, repair fortifications and install garrisons, yet instead of being a source of revenue the coast was becoming an expense. And worst of all, he was being beaten.

In 1188 Saladin turned his attention to northern Syria, where he stormed one castle after another and took the city of Latakia. But here too he was checked, this time by the massive castles of the military orders. He baulked at the key Hospitaller castles of Margat and Krak des Chevaliers and at the Templars' castle at Safita called Chastel Blanc and their fortified city of Tortosa – though vengefully he destroyed the church there, ‘one of the largest of its kind'.
⁴

As soon as the Franks recovered their morale, they made the recapture of Acre their objective, and at the end of August 1189 King Guy advanced from Tyre to besiege the city. His army was small and outnumbered by the Muslim garrison within the walls, but Guy had the benefit of the newly arrived Pisan fleet, which blocked Acre's harbour. Saladin mustered his forces on the plain of Sephoria in Galilee and marched to relieve his garrison on the coast; fanning out round the city, he encircled the Frankish forces, besieging the besiegers, but the Franks still maintained communication with the Pisan fleet and would not surrender their position. ‘If a ten years' war made Troy renowned', wrote the historian Stanley Lane-Poole, ‘surely to Acre belongs eternal fame – the city for which the whole world contended.'
⁵

Perpetual skirmishing went on between the two armies, with moments of brutality and danger, Ibn al-Athir reporting Bedouins falling upon Christian stragglers and bringing their heads to Saladin for a reward, and women in the Frankish camp dragging Turkish prisoners by the hair, abusing them and then hacking off their heads with knives. But then at daybreak on 4 October the Franks went into action, the Templars on the right crashing into a Kurdish contingent from Diyarbakir and scattering it to flight; the Kurds were next heard from, crossing the Jordan below the Sea of Galilee well on their way to Damascus. The Templar Grand Master Gerard of Ridefort, who had been captured by Saladin and then released in 1187, fell in the attack and received a last acclaim from the anonymous English knight on whose lost journal the
Itinerarium Regis Ricardi
was based, who said that he was crowned with the laurel of martyrdom ‘which he had merited in so many wars',
⁶
a washing away of any blame he may have incurred for the disasters at the Springs of Cresson and the Horns of Hattin.

Saladin rallied his centre and prevented a general rout, and the battle proved inconclusive but bloody nonetheless, certainly for the Franks. On the Muslim side the loss was more by flight than slaughter; the Franks estimated that fifteen hundred of Saladin's horsemen were killed while being secretive about their own casualties, but according to Saladin's friend Ibn Shaddad, who saw their bodies being carried to the river to be thrown in, the total Frankish dead numbered over four thousand. Yet even so, the Franks held on and persisted with their blockade of Acre through the winter and all the following year, driving Saladin to despair as he desperately made appeals as far away as Baghdad and Morocco but received no fresh aid.

In the spring of 1191 the main armies of the Third Crusade arrived. First came the forces led by King Philip II of France, who set up his headquarters outside Acre on 20 April and took command of the besieged and besieging Christians, though to little effect. Meanwhile everyone waited in anticipation for the arrival of King Richard I of England, Coeur de Lion, the Lionheart.

On his way to the Holy Land, Richard was distracted by a series of adventures. His mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, had arranged that her son marry Berengaria, daughter of King Sancho VI of Navarre, and had now shipped her to Messina in Sicily, where Richard would marry her as he voyaged east and take her with him to the Holy Land. Eleanor herself had joined the Second Crusade as the young bride of Philip's father, Louis VI, and now she was stirring things up again, for Richard was already engaged to Philip's sister Alice. Philip, who likewise put in at Messina, demanded that Richard make financial restitution for breaking the engagement, which Richard did, but in contrast to Richard's large, flamboyant personality, Philip was a small and peevish man whose bitterness remained. On 30 March Philip sailed from Sicily with his fleet bound for Acre; Richard waited for Berengaria, then sailed on 10 April. Richard's passage proved tempestuous; his fleet was broken up by winds, one of his ships was lost in a storm, and another three, including the ship bearing Berengaria, were blown towards Cyprus. Berengaria's vessel managed to anchor safely off Limassol, but the other two were wrecked on the south coast of the island. The ruler of Cyprus, Isaac Ducas Comnenus, had rebelled against Byzantium and established himself locally as emperor; unpopular on the island, the appearance of Franks filled him with alarm, and he imprisoned the shipwreck survivors, confiscated their goods and tried to lure Berengaria ashore, quite likely with the intention of holding her for ransom. A week later, on 6 May, Richard sailed into view with the main fleet and was outraged at Isaac's behaviour. Writing to his chancellor back in England, Richard himself told what happened next.

Richard's capture of Cyprus opened up possibilities for the Templars. Robert of Sablé became Grand Master of the Templars in 1191, almost certainly through the influence of King Richard, whose vassal he had been, and it was probably this connection that led Richard, who found he lacked the means to hold the island, to sell it to the Templars. The entire future of the Templars might have been different had they devoted more resources to the island, but they placed only twenty knights on Cyprus and another hundred men at arms, insufficient to secure it, and so they gave it back to Richard. Possessing a territory of their own, the Templars would have anticipated the achievement of the Knights Hospitaller, who established their own independent state on Rhodes in 1309. Instead Templar fortunes remained tied to the Holy Land, and when it fell, the Templars fell soon after.