“though still pursuing his crusading ideal, Henry increasingly mounted his
explorations for the sake of knowledge, leading to a series of discoveries
down the coast of Africa and out in the Atlantic, including the Madeira
islands in 1418 and the Azores and the Cape Verde islands in 1456. Though
Henry did not himself sail with these expeditions, he was their intellectual
inspiration and through the Order of Christ he provided the financial
wherewithal. He based himself at Sagres on a wild and windswept Atlantic
headland of the Algarve, from where the first long caravels were launched
[…].” (Haag, 2010, p. 102)


“In 1319, with Papal permission, the Portuguese King Diniz reconstituted the
Templars as the Order of Christ (Ordem dos Cavaleiros de Nosso Senhor Jesus
Cristo), and–after four years of negotiation–he was authorised by Pope John
XXII to endow the order with the Templars’ possessions. Moreover, in 1357 the
Order of Christ, which initially had been based in the Algarve, was
transferred to the Templars’ former headquarters northeast of Lisbon at Tomar
[…]. the knights pledged obedience to the king; they had been nationalised and
now existed to serve the interests of the Portuguese crown. Successive kings
of Portugal were able to install royal princes or other favourites as Grand
Master of the new order. The greatest of these was Prince Henry the Navigator,
appointed in 1418, who used the wealth of the order to establish the
navigators’ school at Sagres from where the first great wave of exploratory
voyages, likewise financed by the order, were launched down the coast of
Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope and eventually to Asia. Vasco da Gama,
who discovered the sea route round Africa to India in 1497, was himself a
member of the order, and soon the Templar cross, adopted by the Order of
Christ, was emblazoned on the sails of Portuguese ships sailing to Brazil,
India and Japan. By the end of the fifteenth century the order possessed 454
commanderies in Portugal, Africa and the Indies. It is no exaggeration to say
that Templar wealth, given a new purpose in the vision of Prince Henry the
Navigator, inaugurated the new Age of Discovery that would transform the
world–and open up the New World–over the next four centuries. The Order of
Christ was secularised in 1789 and in 1834 lost all of its possessions, under
an anti-Church government. However, it was re-established–and survives–as an
order of merit awarded for outstanding service to the Portuguese republic.”
(Haag, 2010, p. 102)


“Despite the protests of King Jaime II of Aragon, Pope Clement’s bull
suppressing the order could not be averted. But Jaime had no intention of
allowing Templar properties in Aragon and Valencia to pass to the
Hospitallers. Instead in 1317, with the permission of the Papacy, he formed
the new Order of Montesa–a body not essentially different from that of the
Templars–which acquired the old Templar assets and was charged with the
defence of the frontier. And so the Templars continued in Spain under another
name. Another 175 years would pass before Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of
Castile drove out the last Muslim invaders when Granada fell to them in 1492,
years in which the descendants of the Templars continued to play a vital role.
The order declined thereafter and in 1587 Philip II joined the office of Grand
Master with that of the crown.” (Haag, 2010, p. 101)


“In 1307, when Philip IV of France ordered the suppression of the Templars,
Edward II of England dismissed the charges laid against them as implausible.
Despite considerable pressure by the French king and the Pope, Edward resisted
the Inquisition, which had no standing in English common law. […] Nor was the
king keen to hand over Templar properties to the Church, arguing that they had
originally been donated by the English nobility, which was entitled to have
them back. Though the Hospitallers did receive some Templar possessions, the
king felt free to redistribute much of it as he liked. This reintegration of
Templar property into the fabric of English life helps explain why so much of
the Templar past survives today.” (Haag, 2010, p. 101)


“The Hospitallers were dispersed throughout Europe, though they reformed, with
the Tsar as Grand Master, in Russia, while in the 1820s the Most Venerable
Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem was founded in the 1820s with
the intention of forming a mercenary army to liberate Greece from Ottoman
rule. But this order soon took on an entirely pacific nature devoted to
charitable works, as did offshoots and revivals in Britain (where Henry VIII
had confiscated the property of the original order), Germany and Italy. The
latter, the Sovereign Order of Malta, has its headquarters in Rome and has
observer status (as a quasi-sovereign state) at the UN. It has recently
returned to Malta, whose government granted it a lease on the Fort Sant
Angelo. In Britain, the modern-day Hospitallers–the (largely Protestant) Order
of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem–are best known for their service
organisation, the Saint John’s Ambulance Brigade.” (Haag, 2010, p. 101)


“the Hospitallers held on to Rhodes until it fell to the Ottoman Turks in
1522. They then retreated to Malta, where they withstood a five-month Ottoman
siege in 1565, and six years later Hospitaller ships were part of that great
Western armada which defeated the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto off the coast of
western Greece, the battle that finally put into permanent reverse the Muslim
aggression […]. in 1792 the French National Assembly confiscated its estates,
and in 1798 the Hospitallers offered no resistance when Napoleon came to Malta
and after a one-day siege expelled them from the island.” (Haag, 2010, p. 100)


“the Hospitallers survived the destruction of the Templars and indeed
benefited from their demise by acquiring the greater part of their properties.
Possibly they survived Philip IV’s avarice and ambition because their
headquarters was on Rhodes, though this can hardly be the whole explanation as
most of their property was in France. Certainly in 1312 Philip was already
making menacing noises about ‘reforming’ the Hospitallers, and in that same
year, as if to put the initiative back into Papal hands, Clement V announced
his own inquiry and programme of reforms. But both Philip IV and Clement V
died within a year of James of Molay, and it is this that may have saved the
Knights Hospitaller.” (Haag, 2010, p. 100)


“Remarkably, in April 2009 support came from the Vatican itself, where Barbara
Frale, the scholar who discovered the Chinon Parchment, found a further
document, this one the testimony of Arnaut Sabbatier, a young Frenchman who
entered the order in 1287. As part of his initiation, he said, he was taken to
‘a secret place to which only the brothers of the Temple had access’, where he
was shown ‘a long linen cloth on which was impressed the figure of a man’ and
was told to venerate the image by kissing its feet three times. The Templars
had rescued the Shroud to ensure that it did not fall into the hands of
heretics such as the Cathars, who claimed that Jesus did not have a true human
body but only the appearance of a man and neither died on the Cross nor was
resurrected. For their pains they were burnt at the stake. Not that this
discovery has any bearing on the authenticity of the Shroud. The Vatican
leaves the question of whether or not the Shroud is a medieval forgery to the
faith of believers. But it does suggest that the cloth today known as the
Turin Shroud, fake or not, was in the possession of the Templars, that they
believed it to be real, and that for a century it played a central part in
their initiation ceremonies.” (Haag, 2010, p. 99)


“The treatment meted out by the royal authorities to individual Templars
varied. Those who had confessed were subjected to penances, and these were
sometimes heavy, including lengthy imprisonment. Others who had confessed to
nothing or were otherwise of little account were sent to monasteries for the
rest of their lives.” (Haag, 2010, p. 98)


“Clement had senior advisors who argued that no time should be wasted on
discussion or defence, and that the Pope should use his executive powers to
abolish the Templars forthwith. One said that the Templars had ‘already caused
the Christian name to smell among unbelievers and infidels and have shaken
some of the faithful in the stability of their faith’. […] seven Templars
appeared at the council to argue for the defence of the order. The Pope
reacted swiftly and had them locked up.” (Haag, 2010, p. 98)


“Deeply worried by this growing confidence among the Templars, Philip took
drastic action and had the Archbishop of Sens, a royal nominee, reopen his
episcopal inquiry against individual Templars in his diocese. Obedient to his
king, the archbishop found fifty-four Templars guilty as relapsed heretics–in
other words guilty of having revoked their earlier confessions–and handed them
over to the secular authorities. On 12 May 1310 in a field outside Paris the
fifty-four Templars were burnt at the stake.” (Haag, 2010, p. 97)


“The parchment is a contemporary account of the testimony of James of Molay
and other Templar leaders at a secret Papal hearing held at the royal castle
of Chinon from 17 to 20 August 1308. The document reveals that the Pope found
no heresy among the Templars and granted absolution to its leaders. Indeed, he
fought with some determination to protect the Templars against the French
king. Fatally, however, the Pope delayed making his absolution public owing to
the extreme passions of the time. And so Phillip IV was able to have James of
Molay and the other Templar leaders put to death before the Pope’s verdict
could be published. Subsequently the Chinon Parchment was mislabelled and
misplaced amid the labyrinthine files of the Secret Archive until Barbara
Frale, an Italian researcher at the Vatican School of Paleontology, found it
and recognised its significance. She deciphered its tangled and coded writing
and published her findings in the Journal of Medieval History in 2004. This
was followed in 2007 by a facsimile publication of the parchment by the
Vatican itself–no doubt eager to avoid the appearance of yet more conspiracy
amid the fallout from their fictional machinations in Dan Brown’s bestselling
novel The Da Vinci Code.” (Haag, 2010, p. 96)


“the discovery of the Chinon Parchment in the Vatican archives in 2001 and its
publication by the Vatican in 2007. This showed unequivocally that despite the
chief Templars being held prisoner by the king, a hearing had somehow been
arranged within the royal castle at Chinon.” (Haag, 2010, p. 95)


“Clement’s understanding of these strange Templar practises was that they were
simply an entrance ritual, a custom which was common, with variations, in
every military elite since early antiquity. This was a secret rite of passage
after the formal ceremony, a compulsory test to which all new Temple brothers
had to submit, a peculiar tradition (modus ordinis nostri) which demonstrated
to the initiate the violence that the Templars were likely to suffer at the
hands of their Muslim captors, and how they would be compelled to deny Christ
and to spit on the cross. The aim of the test was to strengthen the souls of
recruits, and it took the form of a very realistic performance. To this first
part was added another test, that of kissing the master who had received him
on the lower spine, on the navel and finally on the mouth; its purpose was to
teach the novice that in all circumstances whatsoever he owed absolute
obedience to his superiors. This seems to have been the original and true form
of the ritual, but the local masters made changes, and in time this secret
ritual became quite coarse and sometimes even violent.” (Haag, 2010, p. 95)


“From 28 June to 1 July 1308 the seventy-two Templars were heard at Poitiers
by a special commission of cardinals and by the Pope himself. On 2 July
Clement granted absolution to the Templars, who had confessed and had asked
for the forgiveness of the Church. […] they also confessed to the Pope that at
their entrance ceremony they denied Christ and spat on the cross, though they
insisted that they had never consented to this in their souls and as soon as
possible had confessed to a priest and asked for absolution. The Pope found
these induction rituals too confused to be taken seriously; at one moment the
novice spat on the cross, but then kissed it in adoration; and the novice
denied the divinity of Christ saying, ‘You, who are God, I deny’, which was no
denial at all. If the Templars were heretics, they were the most inconsistent
and unconvincing adherents any heresy could have. The Templars had fallen into
peculiar ways and needed reform, but that, decided the Pope, was all. In fact
Clement had already heard something of these bizarre practises from James of
Molay himself when the two met at Poitiers in May 1307, five months before the
arrests. In the Pope’s words, the Grand Master had told him of ‘many strange
and unheard-of things’ which had caused Clement ‘great sorrow, anxiety and
upset of heart’. The Grand Master feared that these initiation ceremonies,
which had been going on for a century or more, were getting out of hand, and
the Pope agreed to instigate an inquiry to root out these practises before
they erupted into scandal.” (Haag, 2010, p. 94)


“In February 1308 Pope Clement suspended the Inquisitor William of Paris and
the whole French Inquisition. In reply the king’s officials tried to force the
Pope to reopen the trial by marshalling public and theological opinion in
France. The chief agent in this was William of Nogaret, who instigated a
campaign of libel, slander and physical intimidation against the Pope; Clement
was threatened with deposition and menaces were directed against his family.
But Clement stood his ground against the king, and to settle their differences
they met in May and June at Poitiers. There they agreed that the Pope would
set up two kinds of inquiry, one by a Papal commission to look into the
Templars as an institution, the other consisting of a series of provincial
councils, each supervised by the bishop of a diocese, to investigate the guilt
or innocence of individual Templars. For his part Philip finally consented to
release a number of Templars into the physical custody of the Church so that
they could be interviewed directly by the Pope. Philip chose seventy-two
Templars from among his prisoners in Paris and sent them, chained to one
another and under a military escort, by wagon to Poitiers. Most of these were
renegades or at best sergeants selected to make a poor impression on the Pope,
and with them he sent the Grand Master and four other high officers of the
Templar order. But suddenly when the convoy reached the royal castle of Chinon
the seventy-two were sent on to Poitiers but the leaders were detained, the
king claiming they were too ill to undertake the journey. This was an obvious
lie as Chinon lay not far from Poitiers. The king probably feared that if the
Pope interviewed the Templar leaders he would find them free of heresy and
grant them absolution.” (Haag, 2010, p. 94)


“Another Pope at another time might have excommunicated Philip. But Clement
was doubly vulnerable–after Philip’s coup against Boniface in Italy, and as a
resident on French soil. Instead Clement issued a bull, Ad Preclarus
Sapientie, which gave Philip a way out: it said that the king had acted
unlawfully and had tarnished the reputation of his grandfather Saint Louis,
but he could make up for his rashness by handing the Templars and their
possessions over to the Church. To achieve this, in November the Pope sent two
cardinals to Paris to take into custody the men and property of the Temple.
But the king had made himself absent and his counsellors refused access to the
Templars, let alone handing them over to the Church, arguing that a Papal
intervention was superfluous as they were self-confessed heretics. […] ten
cardinals threatened to resign if the Pope showed himself to be a puppet of
the French king. Clement was faced with replacing the cardinals at the cost of
causing a schism in the Church, or he could excommunicate Philip and fall
victim to a royal coup. But the Pope found another way and, acting with some
dexterity within the difficult constraints of his situation, he did what he
could to put himself in charge of events. First on 22 November 1307 he issued
a bull, Pastoralis Praeeminentiae, asking all the kings and princes of
Christendom to arrest the Templars in their lands and to hold their property
in safekeeping for the Church. In this way proceedings were initiated against
the Templars in England, Iberia, Germany, Italy and Cyprus–but in the name of
the Church. By doing this the Pope was delivering an implied ultimatum to King
Philip, that what was true in the rest of Europe must also be so in France. He
praised the French king for his good faith and religious zeal, but Clement was
making it clear that the case against the Templars was being removed from the
king’s authority and was now being taken into the hands of the Papacy. As for
the crisis that had arisen when the king’s officials rebuffed the two
cardinals, the Pope simply pretended that the incident had never happened.
Instead in December he sent the two cardinals back to Paris as if for the
first time. But now they brought with them the power, granted by the Pope, to
excommunicate Philip on the spot and to place the whole of France under an
interdict if the king persisted in his refusal to hand over the Templars. The
move was effective: on 24 December 1307 Philip wrote to the Pope that he would
hand over the Templars. On about 27 December 1307 the cardinals met James of
Molay and other leading Templars, who denied everything to which they had
formerly confessed. According to one source the Grand Master said that he had
confessed only under heavy torture, and he showed the wounds on his body,
though it is not clear if this source can be trusted. Nevertheless, retracting
the confessions was a risky move because under the rules of the Inquisition
relapsed heretics were handed over to the secular authorities to be burnt.
That the Grand Master and others took that risk shows that they were confident
that a great injustice was about to be overturned.” (Haag, 2010, p. 93)


“The further truth of the confessions was that they were gained quickly
because the Templars were accused of something that actually existed and to
which they could admit, though it had been distorted in the hands of the
Inquisitor. This was the fruit of the information gathered by the government
spies.” (Haag, 2010, p. 92)


“French government spies had joined the Templars to discover its inner
workings and to gather anything with which they could be slandered. The
sinister force behind this was William of Nogaret, who in 1303 had taken part
in the attempt to overthrow Pope Boniface VIII, since when he had remained
excommunicated. William’s family had suffered persecution because his
grandfather had been a Cathar, but by his cleverness and cynicism he had risen
in Philip’s court and was ennobled in 1299, becoming the king’s Keeper of the
Seals and his right-hand man. These facts may have contributed to William of
Nogaret’s contempt for the Papacy and his unscrupulous ambition to make France
the greatest power in the world. Many of those arrested were simple men, not
battle-hardened Templar knights, but ploughmen, artisans and servants who
helped keep the order running, and these would have succumbed to torture or
even the threat of torture fairly quickly.” (Haag, 2010, p. 92)


“He had already stolen from the Italian bankers and the Jews, he had debased
the currency, and it was his exactions from the clergy that provoked his first
confrontation with Boniface VIII. His wars against England and in Flanders had
cost him a great deal of money, and he had inherited a huge debt from his
father’s wars. The Templars were a tempting target, for unlike the
Hospitallers, whose wealth was entirely in land, the Templars from their
banking activities also had liquid wealth which the king could quickly and
easily grab. By accusing them of heresy Philip could turn the Templars into
reprehensible religious outsiders like the Jews, against whom persecution was
readily rationalised.” (Haag, 2010, p. 91)


“That Philip was able to arrest and charge the Templars was owed to a loophole
in the law going back to the time of the Cathars and their trials nearly
eighty years before. So serious was the spread of the Cathar heresy that in
1230 Pope Honorius III had bestowed extraordinary powers on the Inquisitor in
France, extending his reach even to the exempt orders, the Templars, the
Hospitallers and Saint Bernard’s Cistercians, whenever there was a suspicion
of heresy. After the Cathar heresy was eradicated this grant of powers was
forgotten by the Papacy, but it was never revoked. This meant that the
Templars, though otherwise untouchable, were vulnerable to the charge of
heresy–a discovery made by Philip IV’s assiduous lawyers, who now used it to
devastating effect. Heresy was the one possible charge that the king could
successfully level against the Templars, and so heresy it had to be. The royal
lawyers gathered information about the inner life of the Templar order with
the aim of selecting and extrapolating from their proper context those
elements which could be presented as crimes against religion. These were then
put together in such a form that they created the impression of a coherent
heretic creed. The royal lawyers then presented this evidence to the French
Inquisitor, a Franciscan called William of Paris who was in connivance with
the king, who denounced the Templars as heretics. The accusations against the
Templars were also calculated to exploit a degree of residual hostility
towards the order after the fall of Acre and the loss of the Holy Land in
1291, while the mere charge of heresy had the immediate effect of blackening
the order’s reputation. No time was wasted in mounting the propaganda campaign
against the Templars: the king’s minister William of Nogaret announced the
heresy before a large crowd in Paris, and the Franciscans spread the news in
their sermons under instructions from the Inquisitor, Brother William of
Paris.” (Haag, 2010, p. 90)


“The charge against the Templars was heresy. When being inducted into the
order, initiates were required to deny Christ, spit on the cross and place
obscene kisses about the body of their receptor. They were also obliged to
indulge in sexual relations with other members of the order if requested, and
they wore a small belt which had been consecrated by touching a strange idol
which looked like a human head with a long beard called Baphomet (possibly an
Old French distortion of Mohammed). The arrest and charging of the Templars
was unusual in that though authorised by the Papal Inquisitor in France, the
action was effected not by the Church but by the king. The normal procedure in
heresy cases at this time was for the Church to make the arrests and try the
accused heretics under Church law, only releasing them to the secular
authorities for punishment if this was the verdict of the court.” (Haag, 2010,
p. 90)


“The Templars were taken quite by surprise when Philip IV’s officers came for
them in the early hours of the morning of Friday 13 October 1307. They were
arrested simultaneously throughout France–about 2000 men in all, from knights
down to the most humble agricultural workers and household servants. There was
no resistance. Most of the Templars were unarmed and many were middle aged or
even elderly, and except for the Paris Temple their houses were unfortified.
The arrests were made in the name of the Inquisition and the Templars were all
brought to Paris where they were imprisoned in their own headquarters. The
efficiency of the operation probably benefited from previous raids when King
Philip struck against Italian bankers resident in France in 1291 and against
Jews in 1306, in each case arresting them, throwing them out of the country
and seizing their property and their money. A few Templars did escape, about
twenty-four it seems, though only one of any importance, Gerard of Villiers,
the master of France.” (Haag, 2010, p. 89)


“Philip’s order for the arrest of the Templar leadership in Paris and of every
Templar throughout France had been circulated secretly the month before: ‘A
bitter thing, a lamentable thing,’ went the opening lines of the order, dated
14 September, ‘a thing which is horrible to contemplate, terrible to hear of,
a detestable crime, an execrable evil, an abominable work, a detestable
disgrace, a thing almost inhuman, indeed set apart from all humanity.’” (Haag,
2010, p. 89)


“Competition between the Templars and the Hospitallers made the orders more
effective, he said, as it provided the stimulus for each to outdo the other;
nor did one duplicate the functions of the other, rather they were
complementaries, placing different emphases on providing alms, transporting
men and supplies across the sea, protecting pilgrims and Crusaders, and making
war against the infidel. Unfortunately, for the Templars there was no hope of
the sort of mass crusade envisioned by James of Molay. The Hospitallers had
shown a keener awareness of current realities by going for the lesser option,
one which all but guaranteed their survival by creating a state of their own
on Rhodes. The Templars once again were left in limbo and were now
increasingly the victims of attacks on their seeming idleness. The Templars,
wrote Rostan Berenguier, a poet of Marseilles at around this time, ‘waste this
money which is intended for the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre on cutting a
fine figure in the world; they deceive people with their idle trumpery, and
offend God; since they and the Hospital have for so long allowed the false
Turks to remain in possession of Jerusalem and Acre; since they flee faster
than the holy hawk; it is a pity, in my view, that we do not rid ourselves of
them for good.’” (Haag, 2010, p. 89)


“After the death of Boniface, the College of Cardinals elected a new Pope, but
he died within a year. After long deliberation and pressure from Philip IV,
the College produced a Frenchman who came to the Papal throne in 1305 as
Clement V. Never throughout his Papacy did Clement set foot in Rome nor indeed
Italy; instead he moved between Lyons and Poitiers until March 1309 when he
set up court at Avignon in Provence, which at that time technically lay
outside the jurisdiction of the kings of France. Clement then went on to pack
the College of Cardinals with Frenchmen; not surprisingly the next six Popes
all resided at Avignon, and all were French. […] Clement’s great ambition was
a new crusade, but it would need the collaboration and leadership of the
French king. The proposed venture had its difficulties, however, not least
because since the fall of Ruad the Mongols had converted en masse to Islam,
not to Christianity as had been hoped. […] Clement succeeded in persuading the
king to take the cross at the end of December 1305; he freed Philip from the
distraction of local conflict by negotiating a peace between the French king
and King Edward I of England; and he diverted 10 per cent of the Church’s
income in France to Philip’s coffers to finance the new crusade. But in
Philip’s view a prerequisite for a successful crusade was the merging of the
two military orders, the Templars and the Hospitallers. Moreover, Philip would
command the new order; it would become an instrument of France, for Philip’s
propagandists also insisted that eventually his command should pass to one of
his sons who likewise should succeed him as king of Jerusalem. Then again,
there was a large element of hypocrisy in these French plans; recovering the
Holy Land was not really Philip’s priority, rather his ambition was to conquer
the Christian Byzantine Empire and to establish himself on the ancient
imperial throne at Constantinople.” (Haag, 2010, p. 88)


“The age had truly begun of European nation states led, whatever their
religious claims, by secular leaders with secular aims.” (Haag, 2010, p. 88)


“Despite this setback in the East, Pope Boniface VIII was no less adamant
about his claims of Papal supremacy in the West, which he reinforced with a
bull in 1303 called Unam Sanctam. This asserted that there was only one holy
(unam sanctam) Catholic Church, and that to attain salvation it was necessary
to submit to the Pope in all matters both spiritual and material. The bull was
in response to various trespasses against the authority of the Church that had
been committed by King Philip IV of France, often known as Philip the Fair for
his golden locks if nothing else, who was forever in need of money to finance
the expansion of his kingdom and make war against Flanders and England, and so
imposed taxes against the clergy. To Philip this was no different to raising
taxes for a crusade, for he ruled with a divine mission; in 1297 he had
obtained a sainthood for his grandfather, the crusading Louis IX, and was
convinced that France was the chosen kingdom of God. In effect the conflict
was between the universalist claims of the Church and the new phenomenon of
nationalism as asserted by the king of France, both claiming to have God on
their side. The Pope might be the Vicar of God, but Philip, according to his
admirers, was ‘more than a man, wholly divine’, and ‘the most Christian king
of France’. When Philip still showed no sign of repentance nor of bowing to
the Pope’s will, Boniface prepared a bull of excommunication against the king
and his minister William of Nogaret. But before it could be published a force
of French soldiers led by William of Nogaret himself burst into the Pope’s
summer palace at Agnani in the hills southeast of Rome with the aim of taking
Boniface as prisoner back to France to stand trial on charges of heresy,
sodomy and the murder of the previous Pope. Boniface, who was guarded by only
a handful of Templars and Hospitallers, challenged his enemies to kill him
[…].” (Haag, 2010, p. 87)


“Being the 1300th anniversary of the birth of Christ, the Pope declared this
to be a jubilee year, promising full remission of sins to those who visited
the Basilica of Saint Peter in Rome. Two hundred thousand pilgrims answered
his call and were welcomed by a triumphant Pope Boniface sitting on the throne
of Constantine the Great and holding the symbols of temporal dominion, the
sword, the sceptre and the crown, and bellowing to the crowd, ‘I am Caesar!’
[…] In the summer of 1300 the Templars, together with the Hospitallers and the
king of Cyprus, launched a series of probing attacks against Alexandria and
Rosetta, and at Acre, Tortosa and Maraclea. These were preliminaries to a
planned joint operation with the Mongols, and they were followed up in
November by a combined Templar, Hospitaller and Lusignan force from Cyprus,
about 600 knights in all, which was landed on the island of Ruad opposite
Tortosa; this, together with Athlit, had been the last stronghold abandoned by
the Templars in 1291. From there they made further raids against Tortosa,
waiting for the Mongols to appear; instead in the face of a Mameluke threat
the Crusaders withdrew to Cyprus, and when the Mongols finally did appear in
February 1301 it was too late. Nevertheless, later in that year the Templars
returned to Ruad, this time establishing a considerable force on the island
and rebuilding its defences. In preparation for a serious assault on the
Syrian mainland, they garrisoned Ruad with 120 knights, 500 archers and 400
servants, almost half the number of Templar knights and auxiliaries as would
normally have defended the entire Kingdom of Jerusalem in the twelfth century.
Possibly they were waiting for the Mongols to return; instead they found
themselves isolated on their tiny island against which the Mamelukes sent a
fleet of sixteen ships in 1302. A prolonged siege and repeated attacks finally
wore down the starving Templars, who surrendered on condition of safe conduct,
a promise that was betrayed, the Templars being slaughtered or sold into
slavery.” (Haag, 2010, p. 87)


“Eager to take the initiative in recovering the Holy Land, in 1294 James of
Molay travelled from Cyprus to the West to promote the Templars as the
vanguard of a new crusade. He received encouragement from Pope Boniface VIII
in Rome and King Edward I in London and practical assistance too, with both
Pope and king making it easier for the Templars to raise new funds in Europe
in order to rebuild their forces after their terrible recent losses at Acre
and elsewhere in Outremer. Foodstuffs and treasure were shipped from European
ports to the Templars in Cyprus and galleys were bought from Venice, part of
the war fleet that the Templars would need to lead the attacks against the
Syrian and Egyptian coasts.” (Haag, 2010, p. 87)


“The Templars had established their new headquarters on Cyprus, and they still
held the tiny island of Ruad (Arwad) just two miles off the coast of Syria
opposite Tortosa […]. Already in 1291, while Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil was busy
fighting the Crusaders at Acre and elsewhere along the coast, Shia Muslims
living in the northern part of the Bekaa valley and in the mountains northeast
of Beirut had joined with Druze in an uprising against the Sunni Mamelukes
which was finally crushed only in 1308. Across Palestine, Syria and Lebanon,
the Christian denominations survived but were greatly diminished. Muslims
taunted the native Christians, saying that the failure of Christ to save them
against the Mameluke onslaught proved that he was just a man; so demoralised
were many Christians in the East that they converted to Islam. Things were
particularly difficult for the Maronites. They had been condemned by the
Church as heretics in the seventh century for their belief not in the single
nature of Christ, Monophysitism, but in the single will of Christ,
Monothelitism, but in 1182 the Crusaders helped bring them into communion with
the Catholic Church at Rome. Over fifty thousand Maronites were said to have
died fighting alongside the Crusaders during the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries to defend Outremer against the Muslims. When the Crusaders left,
some Maronites went with them to Cyprus, but those who remained never
surrendered their connection with Rome, despite persecution by the Mameluke
jihad. Instead they escaped into the mountains of northern Lebanon where
surnames such as Franjieh, meaning Frank, and Salibi, meaning Crusader, are
current to this day. Nor had the Mongols gone away. Since their defeat at the
hands of the Mamelukes in 1260 they had shown an interest in forming an
alliance with the Christians in the West, and indeed the conversion of two
Mongol emissaries at the Council of Lyons in 1274 had raised hopes that the
Mongols might convert wholesale to Christianity. Twice, in 1281 and 1299, the
Mongols advanced into northern Syria, and when news came from the West in 1300
of a new crusade, the Mongols offered the Christians the Holy Land if they
would help them beat the Mamelukes.” (Haag, 2010, p. 86)


“Though not unexpected, the fall of Acre came as a shock in the West. The sins
of the inhabitants of Outremer were blamed, as was the failure of the leaders
of European Christendom to provide ample and timely aid, and the Italian
merchant states which had traded with Mameluke Egypt, and the military orders,
Templars and Hospitallers alike. No one was exempt. But it was the Templars
who felt the loss most intensely. The defence of the Holy Land and the
protection of pilgrims was their raison d’être. For the Hospitallers the ethos
of their charitable work took precedence; they had never abandoned their
original function of caring for the sick. But the Templars were founded as a
knighthood, their role to fight against the infidel, and in that cause to
service crusades and direct the finances of Popes and kings. Now cast out from
the Holy Land, the Templars found themselves in limbo.” (Haag, 2010, p. 86)


“From Sidon, Theobald Gaudin sailed to Cyprus with the Templar treasure. His
intention was to bring back reinforcements. But Gaudin never returned. Instead
a message came from the Templars in Cyprus urging their brethren in Sidon to
abandon their castle there, and on the night of 14 July they put to sea.
Cyprus had long been a Frankish kingdom. A century earlier Richard the
Lionheart had seized it from the Byzantines, and after a brief period in
Templar hands, Richard sold it on again to Guy of Lusignan, the former King of
Jerusalem, whose dynasty would continue to rule Cyprus for nearly three
hundred years. Meanwhile the Templars and the Hospitallers had built castles
on Cyprus, and now as the Franks were being driven from the coast of Outremer
the island became a refuge for both military orders. In the Holy Land, after
the fall of Acre and Sidon, only Tortosa and Athlit remained in Christian
hands. Both were Templar strongholds, but as the Mamelukes gathered for the
kill, the knights slipped away to Cyprus from Tortosa on 3 August 1291 and
eleven days later from Athlit. […] Orchards were cut down and irrigation
systems wrecked, while native Christians fled into the Jebel al-Sariya. The
only castles left standing were those far back from the sea, and Margat, high
upon its mountain. Anything that might be of value to the Crusaders should
they ever attempt another landing was destroyed. Even four centuries after the
Franks were driven from this coast, the devastation wrought by the Mamelukes
was still apparent, in 1697 the English traveller Henry Maundrell recording
the ‘many ruins of castles and houses, which testify that this country,
however it be neglected at present, was once in the hands of a people that
knew how to value it, and thought it worth the defending’.” (Haag, 2010, p.
85)


“By the evening of 18 May all Acre was in the hands of the Mamelukes except
for the Templar fortress at the seaward extremity of the city. There they held
out, commanded by their marshal, together with civilians who had sought
protection within their walls, and were kept supplied by sea from Cyprus. On
25 May the Templar marshal agreed to surrender provided those inside were
granted safe passage out of Acre, but as the Muslims entered they began to
molest the women and boys, provoking the Templars to fight back. That night
the Templar commander Theobald Gaudin was sent out of the fortress with the
order’s treasure and sailed up the coast to Château de Mer, the Templars’ sea-
castle just off the coast at Sidon. The Templar fortress in Acre fell three
days later and at Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil’s command all those left alive were
led outside the walls where their heads were cut off, and the city was smashed
to pieces until almost nothing was left standing.” (Haag, 2010, p. 85)


“The Templar castle of Beaufort, overlooking the southern end of the Bekaa
valley in Lebanon, fell to Baybars in 1268 with the help of first-class
military engineers. They assembled something like twenty-six siege engines,
that is battering rams and siege towers as well as catapults, the wooden
frames and metal parts bought from Venetian merchants sailing into Egyptian
ports. In this case the Templars were overwhelmed by technology. But two years
earlier when the Templar castle of Saphet (Safad) fell to Baybars it had been
down to treason. Saphet was the castle in northern Galilee which the Templars
had spent a fortune rebuilding less than thirty years before […]. He did so
not by attack–he tried three times that year and failed–but by sowing dissent
between the small garrison of Templars and the much larger numbers of Syrian
Christian servants and native troops inside. He promised the latter free
passage and so many wanted to defect that the defence of the castle was called
into question. The Templars agreed to negotiate and a safe conduct was
arranged, for Templar knights and locals alike. But when the gates were
opened, Baybars grabbed all the women and children and sold them into slavery
and decapitated all the knights and other men. The willingness of the Templars
garrison at Saphet to negotiate points to another factor at work: a sense of
isolation and feeling overwhelmed, which seems to have played an important
part in the fall of the Templar castle of Chastel Blanc (Safita) and the
Hospitallers’ Krak des Chevaliers to Baybars within two months of one another
in 1271.” (Haag, 2010, p. 83)


“Pope Martin IV, who was himself French, now declared a crusade against the
Sicilian rebels and their supporters, the house of Aragon in Spain. Worse, he
ordered funds held at the Paris Temple and intended for Outremer to be
diverted to the house of Anjou in support of their war against fellow
Christians to regain control over Sicily. Christians throughout Europe and in
particular the Templars were outraged […].” (Haag, 2010, p. 82)


“In 1273 the Templars elected a new Grand Master, William of Beaujeu, a man
with considerable experience of fighting in the East and administering the
order. One of his first missions was to attend the Church Council of Lyons,
which was convened by the Pope in 1274 for the principal purpose of launching
a new crusade. At the council William spoke against a proposal to send 500
knights and 2000 infantry to the Holy Land as the vanguard of a mass levy like
that of the First Crusade, arguing that unruly hordes of enthusiasts would not
serve the needs of Outremer. Instead a permanent garrison was required which
would be reinforced from time to time by small contingents of professional
soldiers. And he also argued for an economic blockade of Egypt, the Mamelukes’
power base. Such a blockade would not be possible, however, as long as
Outremer depended on the ships of the Italian maritime republics, for these
were the very same merchant marines who traded so profitably with Egypt. The
Venetians, for example, supplied Baybars with the metal and timber that he
needed for his arms and siege engines, and the Genoese even provided him with
Mameluke slaves. Instead the Christians needed to gain the naval ascendancy in
the Eastern Mediterranean. William’s advice was accepted and the council
ordered the Templars and the Hospitallers to build their own fleets of
warships.” (Haag, 2010, p. 82)


“That same year Shagarat al-Durr openly declared herself sultan, basing her
claim to the succession on having borne al-Salih a son, though the child had
predeceased the father. The Abbasid caliph refused to recognise her, so she
married Aybek, one of her Mameluke slave warriors, and ruled through him
instead, then murdered him in 1257 when she suspected him of turning his
attentions to another woman. Purchased as a slave by al-Salih, then made one
of his concubines, Shagarat al-Durr had eventually become his wife, and then
became the first and last female ruler of Egypt since Cleopatra. Owing to her
courage and resourcefulness she had saved Egypt from the Seventh Crusade, but
she proved to be the last of the Ayyubid line. Aybek’s supporters killed her
and threw her naked body over the wall of the Citadel at Cairo to be devoured
by the dogs. The Mamelukes then made themselves the masters of Egypt in the
person of their first sultan, Qutuz. But it was the shock of the Mongol
invasion of the Middle East that established the Mamelukes as the legitimate
defenders of Islam against the infidels of East and West. In February 1258 the
Mongols, led by Hulagu, a grandson of Genghis Khan, captured Baghdad, put the
Abbasid caliph to death, then plundered and destroyed the city. In January
1260 they took Aleppo, and in March Damascus fell. The Mongols appeared to be
unstoppable. The Franks sent urgent letters westwards pleading for help; ‘a
horrible annihilation will swiftly be visited upon the world,’ went a message
carried by a Templar to London. But it was the Mamelukes who responded to the
threat. That summer when Mongol ambassadors arrived in Cairo demanding Egypt’s
submission, they encountered an adversary more ferocious than themselves;
Qutuz had them killed on the spot. And in September, after being allowed free
passage through Christian lands, a Mameluke army under Qutuz inflicted a
stunning defeat upon the Mongols in the battle of Ain Jalut southeast of
Nazareth.” (Haag, 2010, p. 81)


“In April they retreated but were captured by the Mamelukes, along with King
Louis himself, who was released only after a huge ransom was paid to which the
Templars, who as bankers to members of the crusade had a treasure ship
offshore, refused to contribute.” (Haag, 2010, p. 81)


“Relief to Outremer came in the form of the Seventh Crusade, led by King Louis
IX of France […].” (Haag, 2010, p. 80)


“The Mamelukes as seen through the eyes of Ibn Khaldun, fourteenth-century
North African historian: It was God’s benevolence that he rescued the faith by
reviving its dying breath and restoring the unity of the Muslims in the
Egyptian realms, preserving the order and defending the walls of Islam. He did
this by sending to the Muslims, from this Turkish nation and from among its
great and numerous tribes, rulers to defend them and utterly loyal helpers,
who were brought from the House of War to the House of Islam under the rule of
slavery, which hides in itself a divine blessing. By means of slavery they
learn glory and blessing and are exposed to divine providence; cured by
slavery, they enter the Muslim religion with the firm resolve of true
believers and yet with nomadic virtues unsullied by debased nature,
unadulterated with the filth of pleasure, undefiled by the ways of civilised
living, and with their ardour unbroken by the profusion of luxury. The slave
merchants bring them to Egypt in batches, like sandgrouse to the watering
places, and government buyers have them displayed for inspection and bid for
them...Thus, one intake comes after another and generation follows generation,
and Islam rejoices in the benefit which it gains through them, and the
branches of the kingdom flourish with the freshness of youth.” (Haag, 2010, p.
80)


“al-Salih Ayyub […] could not rely on the regular army, but he had taken steps
to counter that by purchasing Mamelukes in large numbers. These military
slaves were mostly Kipchak Turks from the steppes of southern Russia […]. Also
al-Salih had bought the help of the Khorezmian Turks, ferocious mercenaries
then based in Edessa, who had been displaced from Transoxiana and parts of
Iran and Afghanistan by the expansion of the Mongols. In June the Khorezmian
horsemen, twelve thousand strong, swept southwards into Syria, but deterred by
the formidable walls of Damascus they rode on into Galilee, captured Tiberias,
and on 11 July broke through the feeble defences of Jerusalem and brutally
massacred everyone who could not retreat into the citadel. Six weeks later the
defenders emerged, having been promised safe passage to the coast. The
garrison together with the entire Christian population, six thousand men,
women and children, left the city but were cut down by Khorezmian swords, only
three hundred making it to Jaffa. For good measure the Khorezmians ransacked
the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, tore up the bones of the Kings of Jerusalem
from their tombs, set the place alight and burnt all the other churches of the
city, pillaged its homes and shops […].” (Haag, 2010, p. 79)


“the Templars remained opposed to the rapprochement between Outremer and Egypt
brought about by Frederick II, and with good reason: Templar emissaries sent
to Cairo in 1243 were held as virtual prisoners for six months, and the
Egyptians would still not return Gaza, Hebron and Nablus in accordance with
the truce. The Templars saw this as a delaying tactic by the new Egyptian
Sultan al-Salih Ayyub, giving him time to overcome Damascus and other Muslim
rulers, and then to overwhelm Outremer. Templar policy was to favour Damascus,
and this showed some results: the Christian kingdom gained by negotiation all
the land west of the Jordan except Hebron and Nablus, and the Franks were
given a free hand to celebrate Christian services in every former church
throughout Jerusalem, and to expel the Muslims from the Temple Mount and to
reconvert to Christian use the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock. When
war broke out again between Cairo and Damascus in spring 1244 the Templars
persuaded the barons of Outremer to intervene on the side of the Damascene
ruler Ismail.” (Haag, 2010, p. 79)


“On 29 March 1229 Frederick was crowned King of Jerusalem at the Church of the
Holy Sepulchre. The Patriarch had placed an interdict on the city, forbidding
church ceremonies while Frederick was in Jerusalem, and so with no priests to
crown him, and with the Templars and the Hospitallers keeping away, it was
left to Frederick to place the crown of Jerusalem on his own head. Calling
himself God’s Vicar on Earth, the title usually reserved for the Pope,
Frederick swore in the presence of the Teutonic Knights to defend the kingdom,
the Church and his empire. […] When Frederick returned to Sicily he seized the
property of the military orders there, released their Muslim slaves without
paying compensation and imprisoned the Templar brothers. Yet again the Pope
excommunicated him, and again Frederick ignored the Pope.” (Haag, 2010, p. 79)


“in 1225, when John of Brienne, the aged King of Jerusalem, came West seeking
a husband for his fourteen-year-old daughter Yolanda, whom he had crowned
queen at Acre, Frederick saw his opportunity. Marrying her at Brindisi,
Frederick broke his promise that John of Brienne could continue as regent;
instead Frederick claimed the right as Yolanda’s husband to become king, a
move that would confirm him, he imagined, as the supreme sovereign in the
Christian world. Now in 1228 at the age of thirty-six Frederick finally set
out for the Holy Land, but he fell ill en route and rested in Italy for a
while before continuing his journey. Pope Gregory IX, who distrusted
Frederick’s imperial intentions in Italy, excommunicated him at once, using
the excuse that this was yet one more instance of the Emperor’s failure to
fulfil his crusading vow. Then when Frederick eventually arrived at Acre in
September, the Pope again asserted his authority, excommunicating him again,
this time for attempting to go crusading without having first obtained Papal
absolution for his earlier excommunication. Frederick was not impressed, but
the barons and clergy in Outremer were, as were the Templars and the
Hospitallers who owed their allegiance to the Pope, only the Teutonic Knights
braving Papal wrath to support their fellow German. However, even before
Frederick had left Sicily, he and al-Kamil had been in secret negotiations
over the objects of this Sixth Crusade. Frederick wanted Jerusalem if only
because it would be useful in promoting himself as the supreme power in the
West. Al-Kamil was prepared to oblige provided Frederick helped him capture
Damascus. But by the time Frederick arrived in Outremer, al-Kamil had changed
his mind. Determined to gain Jerusalem, Frederick now made a feint towards
Egypt, in November leading his army from Acre towards Jaffa. The Templars and
Hospitallers followed a day behind, not wanting to seem part of a crusade led
by an excommunicant, but when Frederick placed the expedition under the
nominal authority of his generals, the orders abandoned their scruples
altogether and joined up with the main force. The show of unity did not last
long. Frederick’s advance was enough to make al-Kamil fear that he would have
to abandon his siege of Damascus, and he quickly agreed a deal with Frederick:
a ten-year truce and the surrender of Jerusalem to the Christians. It was a
sudden and sensational result and gave Frederick what he wanted, but it
outraged the Patriarch and the military orders. The walls of Jerusalem had
been torn down during the Fifth Crusade; if it was going to be given to them
then, the intention was that it should not be defensible, and that remained
the idea now, for part of the agreement was that the city should remain
unfortified, and its only connection to the coast should be a narrow corridor
of land. Moreover the orders were forbidden to make any improvements to their
great castles of Marqab and Krak des Chevaliers of the Hospitallers and
Tortosa and Chastel Blanc of the Templars. And then there was the galling
provision–a necessary face-saver for al-Kamil–that the Temple Mount should
remain under Muslim control and that the Templars were absolutely forbidden to
return to their former headquarters at the al-Aqsa mosque.” (Haag, 2010, p.
78)


“Frederick II did eventually appear in the East, but only eight years later,
by when he was openly at loggerheads with the Church. Crowned Holy Roman
Emperor in 1212 at Frankfurt, Frederick was also king of both Germany and
Sicily. He preferred to rule from Palermo, where he had been raised amid the
Norman, Byzantine, Jewish and Arab influences at the Sicilian court.” (Haag,
2010, p. 78)


“Returning to the object of regaining Jerusalem, in 1217 the Papacy launched
the Fifth Crusade, though the means of doing so was to attack Egypt. The
Templars were involved in this new crusade from the start, with the Templar
treasurer at Paris overseeing the donations that were to fund the expedition.
Forces under King Andrew of Hungary and Leopold, Duke of Austria, were joined
by men under John of Brienne, the King of Jerusalem, which included Templars,
Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights–the last being a new military order founded
along Templar lines by Germans who had been on the Third Crusade. With no
single outstanding leader among this mixed force, the Fifth Crusade was placed
under the authority of the Papal legate Pelagius, a man of no military
experience. Nevertheless, early in 1219 the Crusaders captured the port of
Damietta in the Nile Delta, thanks largely to the Templars, who not only
fought admirably on horseback but demonstrated a remarkable talent for
innovation, adapting their engineering and tactical skills from the arid
conditions of Outremer to the watery landscape of the Delta where they
commanded ships and built floating pontoons to win the victory. The loss of
Damietta so unnerved the Sultan of Egypt, Saladin’s nephew al-Kamil, that he
offered to trade it for Jerusalem. But the Templar Grand Master argued that
Jerusalem could not be held without controlling the lands beyond the Jordan,
and so the Crusaders rejected the offer and continued their campaign in Egypt.
Meanwhile they were awaiting the arrival at Damietta of another army led by
the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. Despite its failure to appear, the Papal
legate Pelagius impatiently urged the Crusaders to advance up the Nile towards
Cairo. United under the command of an experienced leader, the Fifth Crusade
might have been a success. But at Mansurah, al-Kamil cut off the Crusaders’
rear, opened the sluice gates of the irrigation canals and flooded the army
into submission. In 1221 Pelagius agreed to give up Damietta, not in exchange
for Jerusalem, but to save the lives of the Crusaders, who immediately
evacuated Egypt and returned to Acre.” (Haag, 2010, p. 77)


“More than ever Outremer relied on castles and on the military orders who
manned them, 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 after nearly
everything in the Holy Land was lost to Saladin. The West reacted with shock
to the loss of Jerusalem and responded by launching the Third Crusade in 1190.
In a remarkable series of victories first Philip II of France and Richard I of
England, known as ‘the Lionheart’, recovered Acre in July 1191, and then
Richard went on to take Jaffa and Ascalon as well, after defeating Saladin in
a great battle at Arsuf in September 1191 in which the military orders played
a leading role.” (Haag, 2010, p. 76)


“On 2 October 1187 […], the Muslims reoccupied Jerusalem. The Temple Mount was
surrendered to Saladin and the Templars were removed from their headquarters
at the al-Aqsa mosque. The cross erected by the Crusaders on the Dome of the
Rock was thrown down before the army of Saladin and in the presence of the
Frankish population. A great cry went up when it fell, of anguish from the
Christians, and of ‘Allah is Great’ from the Muslims, who dragged it round the
streets of the city for two days, beating it with clubs. The initial euphoria
of the victory was followed by a busy week during which the many structures
built by the Templars on the Temple Mount and the modifications they made
within the al-Aqsa mosque were demolished. Saladin himself oversaw these
works, ensuring that the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock were restored
to their earlier Islamic character. Finally both buildings were sprinkled with
rose-water to cleanse them of Christian pollution. Saladin joined the vast
congregation that gathered for Friday prayers on 9 October at the al-Aqsa
mosque where the cadi of Aleppo gave the sermon in which he compared Saladin’s
victory to Umar’s conquest of the city and other Muslim triumphs going back to
Mohammed’s battles at Badr against the Meccans and at Khaybar which led to the
expulsion of the Jews from the Arabian peninsula. ‘Jerusalem’, he continued to
the Muslims, ‘is the residence of your father Abraham, the place of ascension
of your prophet, the burial ground of the messengers and the place of the
descent of revelations. It is in the land where men will be resurrected and it
is in the Holy Land to which Allah has referred in the Koran.’” (Haag, 2010,
p. 75)


“Saladin consented that Jerusalem’s 20,000 Christians could leave the city if
they paid him ten dinars for each man, five for each female, and one for each
boy up to seven years old. But the poorest would be unable to ransom
themselves, and so Balian produced 30,000 dinars from public funds to pay for
the release of the poorest 7000 people.” (Haag, 2010, p. 75)


“Frankish nobles were ‘irresponsible, thoughtless, petty and covetous’,
thought al-Hawari who wrote a military treatise for Saladin, qualities which
allowed them to be manipulated to suit Saladin’s purposes; but the Templars
and Hospitallers were dangerous because ‘they have great fervour in religion,
paying no attention to the things of this world’. Two days after his victory,
wrote his secretary Imad al-Din, who was an eyewitness to the event, Saladin
‘sought out the Templars and Hospitallers who had been captured and said: “I
shall purify the land of these two impure races.” He assigned fifty dinar to
every man who had taken one of them prisoner, and immediately the army brought
forward at least a hundred of them. He ordered that they should be beheaded,
choosing to have them dead rather than in prison. With him was a whole band of
scholars and Sufis and a certain number of devout men and ascetics; each
begged to be allowed to kill one of them, and drew his sword and rolled back
his sleeve. Saladin, his face joyful, was sitting on his dais; the unbelievers
showed black despair.’” (Haag, 2010, p. 73)


“Saladin could be ruthless, and in the interests of policy he did not shrink
from bloodshed. He was a devout Muslim who abhorred free-thinkers, and though
he made many friends among the Christians, he never doubted that their souls
were doomed to damnation. […] In Cairo he ordered the crucifixion of his Shia
opponents, and he was not averse to mutilating and executing his captives, as
after the battle of Hattin when he slaughtered his Hospitaller and Templar
captives in cold blood. It seems to have been only the threat made by the
Frankish defenders of Jerusalem in 1187 that they would destroy all the sacred
places, everything atop the Temple Mount, that caused Saladin to prefer a
negotiated surrender to his original intention of purifying the city with
Christian blood.” (Haag, 2010, p. 69)


“Saladin came to admire the chivalrous code of the Frankish knights, and he
acted with courtesy and sometimes clemency in return. […] Saladin was
following the precepts of Islam’s own version of chivalry called futuwwa,
which roughly means nobility.” (Haag, 2010, p. 69)


“The Christian force comprised 450 knights, 80 of them Templars, and a few
thousand infantry, and they lost about 1100 men. But they inflicted on
Saladin’s forces an overwhelming defeat, killing 90 per cent of his army,
Saladin himself only narrowly managing to escape back to Egypt where to cling
to power he spread the lie that the Christians had lost the battle. The battle
of Montgisard had been a great victory and it saved the Kingdom of Jerusalem
for the moment, but it did not alter the fundamental situation. Against the
vast resources of Egypt on which Saladin could draw, the Franks were short of
men and it was dangerous to risk their army on offensive operations. Had
Baldwin the forces to pursue the enemy to Cairo or to make a sudden attack on
Damascus, he might have destroyed Saladin with a crushing blow.” (Haag, 2010,
p. 68)


“In 1164 when the bulk of Templar forces had been with Amalric on campaign in
Egypt, Nur al-Din had taken advantage by striking in the north, inflicting
heavy losses against the army of the prince of Antioch, which included the
deaths of sixty Templar knights and numerous more sergeants and Turcopoles,
precisely in the area where the Templars bore responsibility for manning
strategically sited castles that were part of the ultimate defence of
Outremer. The experience may have impressed upon the Templars the need to
husband their resources and concentrate them where they were most needed.
Certainly there were strong differences over military strategy between Amalric
and the Templars […]. an ‘impregnable cave’ had already fallen to Nur al-Din’s
general Shirkuh. The Templars may have thought that their garrison was out on
a limb too far. But outraged and confounded by the news, Amalric hanged twelve
of the Templars who had surrendered to Shirkuh. Add to this the story of the
Assassins’ envoy killed by the Templars in 1173, an event, according to
William of Tyre, that brought the kingdom to the edge of ‘irrevocable ruin’ as
it cost Jerusalem an ally against encircling Sunni power, and there is a
pattern of Templar wilfulness in military, political and religious matters.
The Hospitallers could be no less independent of secular authority, but their
image was softened by the alms and care they lavished on pilgrims, whereas the
image of the Templars rested more exclusively on their military prowess, and
then there was their involvement in financial activities.” (Haag, 2010, p. 67)


“The capture of Egypt by Nur al-Din’s forces was a strategic calamity for the
Franks. Why the Templars refused to participate in Amalric’s 1168 invasion has
been a matter of speculation and debate. […] the Templars were financially
connected with the Muslims and with the Italian merchants, who carried on a
greater trade with Egypt than with all the Crusader ports combined.” (Haag,
2010, p. 67)


“Amalric had large contingents of Templars in his army when he twice, in 1164
and 1167, forced Shirkuh to withdraw from Egypt and then withdrew himself. A
leading Templar also took part in the mission which negotiated the treaty of
alliance between Amalric and Shawar, the Fatimid vizier, prior to the Franks’
military intervention in 1167. But by then the fundamental weakness of the
Fatimid regime was obvious to both Nur al-Din and Amalric, and it was only a
matter of time before one of them would strike the coup de grâce. Amalric
struck first, marching into Egypt in 1168 with the intention of outright
annexationwithout the support of Templar forces. The Fatimids withdrew within
the walls of Cairo and burnt its suburbs to the ground, and they sent for help
to Nur al-Din. This time it was Amalric who was forced to withdraw, and Nur
al-Din’s Kurdish general Shirkuh entered Cairo, decapitated Shawar and
installed himself as vizier. His rule was not long; in March 1169 Shirkuh died
and was succeeded as vizier by his nephew Salah al-Din, better known in the
West as Saladin.” (Haag, 2010, p. 66)


“The one effective organisation against the Assassins was the Templars. Being
an undying corporate body, the Templars could not be intimidated by the death
of one of their members. […] In their hatred of the Sunni, the Assassins
sometimes found themselves in alliance with the Christians, and even under
trying circumstances they were tolerated by the Crusader states and the
Templars. After the Assassins murdered Raymond II, the count of Tripoli, in
1152–for no reason that anyone could figure out, unless they had been hired by
Raymond’s wife–the Templars threatened to go after the Assassins, who readily
agreed to pay an annual tribute of two thousand besants as a form of
protection money.” (Haag, 2010, p. 63)


“The Assassins used drugs (including hashish, from which the word ‘assassin’
derives) to convince novices destined to become self-destructive feddayin,
‘the self-sacrificers’, that they had entered a garden of delights where
fountains flowed with milk, honey and wine, and where houris, those maidens of
Paradise, were likewise on tap. Brought back to their normal state, the
initiates were told that they had indeed visited Paradise, which would
certainly be forever theirs provided they gave absolute obedience to the
commands of the Assassins’ imam. […] Among the Assassins’ Christian victims
were Raymond II, count of Tripoli, in 1152; Conrad of Montferrat, king of
Jerusalem, in 1192; and another Raymond, heir to the thrones of Antioch and
Tripoli […].” (Haag, 2010, p. 63)


“The Ismailis withdrew into that region of the coastal mountains, the Jebel
al-Sariya, girded by the great Templar and Hospitaller strongholds of Tortosa,
Chastel Blanc, Margat and Krak des Chevaliers, where the movement assumed its
militant and murderous form known as the Assassins. From such strongholds as
al-Ullayqa, Qadmus, Qalaat al-Kahf and especially Masyaf, headquarters of the
Assassins’ leader, the Sheikh al-Jebel, the Old Man of the Mountain, they
employed a strategy of assassination to influence and control anyone, mostly
Sunni Muslims but sometimes also Christians […].” (Haag, 2010, p. 62)


“the term Manichaean, the name some medieval French chroniclers gave to the
Cathars, was used by the Byzantines to describe the dualist ideas of Mani, a
third-century Persian, who drew on Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and Babylonian
Mandaeism, as well as Christianity. And so it was from several sources that
dualism made its appearance in Islam. Though dualism is fundamentally
incompatible with Islam, which teaches that God is the sole principle and is
good, the political unity of the Muslim world had long been in decay, allowing
for the manifestation of new religious tendencies. […] Among the Christians
there were the Jacobites, Maronites, Copts and Orthodox, and among the Muslims
the Sunnis and numerous heterodox groups that had evolved out of Shiism, among
these the Qarmatian, Alawi, Druze and Ismaili movements, which were not only
movements of belief but also initiatory secret societies with political aims
tending towards the apocalyptic. The Ismailis continued certain pre-Muslim
beliefs, in particular dualism, in which they saw evil not as the absence of
good but as part of the essence of both the world and its creator, who in turn
may have been an emanation of an ultimate and unknowable God. Like the
Gnostics they believed that man possesses slivers of the divine spark which,
given possession of the secret knowledge, can reunite man with the unknown
God. The Ismailis claimed to possess this knowledge. But after Zengi’s
conquest of Edessa in 1144 and the surrender of Damascus to his son Nur al-
Din, the Zengid dynasty imposed Sunni Islam on the entire Muslim population of
Syria, driving the Shia sects into inaccessible regions.” (Haag, 2010, p. 62)


“The origins of Cathar dualism lay in the East where it can be traced back to
the Christian Gnostics who flourished in the second and third centuries AD all
round the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean, in Egypt, Syria and Palestine,
and perhaps also in Asia Minor and Greece. Gnosis is Greek for knowledge, and
the Gnostics believed that salvation lay in their understanding of the true
nature of creation. They believed that there were two worlds, the material
world of evil and decay that had been made by an evil demiurge, the enemy of
man, and the world of light where the primal God resides. One of the most
prominent Gnostics was Valentinus, who flourished around AD 140 in Alexandria
and Rome. He claimed to possess the true knowledge of how the world had been
created and how evil had come into being, a story that he introduced to his
followers in terms of a cosmic myth. He conceived of a primal God, the centre
of a divine harmony, who sends out manifestations of himself in pairs of male
and female. Each pair was inferior to its predecessor, and Sophia, the female
of the thirtieth pair, was the least perfect of all. She showed her
imperfection not, like the angel Lucifer, by rebelling against God, but by
desiring too ardently to be united to him, so that she fell through love, and
the universe is formed out of her agony and remorse. As she fell she bore a
son, the Demiurge, who rules this world of sadness and confusion, yet is
incapable of realising anything beyond it. Mankind inhabits a catastrophe not
of God’s making, but the Gnostics said they knew the secret of salvation. At
the moment of the cosmic blunder, sparks of the divine light, like slivers of
shattered glass, became embedded in a portion of humankind. These people were
the elect, and the Gnostic aim was to lead them back to God. Cosmic
redemption, however, and not just personal salvation was necessary because the
whole of creation had been a mistake; it had nothing to do with God, who had
never intended that there should be a universe, indeed never intended man.
Creation was a defective work, and so man lived in a meaningless world or in
the iron control of evil powers; in any case he was caught in the trap of the
material world which was sundered from the spirit of God. Valentinus taught
his followers that they could free themselves by attempting to quell their
desires and by practising sexual abstinence. For in the polarity of the male
and the female was mirrored the division, the duality, of the universe, so
that the Last Judgement and the world's redemption would come–as Jesus says in
the Gnostic Gospel of the Egyptians–'when the two become one, and the male
with the female, there being neither male nor female'. Other Gnostics than
Valentinus also had their stories, and some, instead of practising abstinence,
promoted sexual licence, though the purpose was the same: to join the male and
the female in order to achieve the desired oneness of the world. The
crucifixion and resurrection has no place in these Gnostic stories; instead
the role of Jesus was to descend from the primal God and impart to his
disciples the secret tradition of the gnosis.” (Haag, 2010, p. 62)


“Some of these Templar patrons were renowned Cathar supporters. Catharism
first appeared in southern France sometime in the years following the First
Crusade. Its adherents quickly became numerous and well organised, electing
bishops, collecting funds and distributing money to the poor. But they could
not accept that if there was only one God, and if God was the creator, and if
God was good, that there should be suffering, illness and death in his world.
The Cathars’ solution to this problem of evil in the world was to say there
were really two creators and two worlds. The Cathars were dualists in that
they believed in a good and an evil principle, the former the creator of the
invisible and spiritual universe, the latter the creator of our material
world. All matter was evil because it was the creation of the devil, but the
ideal of renouncing the world was impractical for everyone, and so while most
Cathars lived outwardly normal lives, pledging to renounce the evil world only
on their deathbeds, a few lived the strict life of the perfecti. Because human
and animal procreation perpetuated matter, the perfecti abstained from eggs,
milk, meat and women. But both ordinary Cathars and the perfecti actively
shared in their belief that Christ was not part of this world of evil.
Therefore he was not truly born of the Virgin Mary, nor had he human flesh,
nor had he risen from the dead; salvation did not lie in his death and
resurrection, which were merely a simulation; instead redemption would be
gained by following Jesus’ teachings. By 1200 the Cathar heresy had become so
widespread that the Papacy was alarmed. Pope Innocent III said that the
Cathars were ‘worse than the Saracens’, for not only did Catharism challenge
the Church but by condemning procreation it threatened the very survival of
the human race. In 1209 a crusade was launched against them–the Albigensian
Crusade, as so many Cathars lived around Albi–and an inquisition was
introduced. In that year the core of Cathar resistance withdrew to the castle
of Montségur atop a great domed hill in the eastern Pyrenees, where they
withstood assaults and sieges until capitulating in 1244. Some two hundred
still refused to abjure their errors, were bound together within a stockade
below the castle and were set ablaze on a huge funeral pyre. The Templars
played no part in the Albigensian Crusade, which was bound to attack some of
their own patrons, who were likewise patrons of the Cathars.” (Haag, 2010, p.
61)


“During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Languedoc in southern France was
the centre of a rich and complex religious life in which both Christian
orthodoxy and heresy flourished. William of Puylaurens, the thirteenth-century
chronicler of the region, reported heretic communities of Arians, Waldensians
and Manichaeans. The Arians were the survival of that 900-year-old heresy that
began in Alexandria and tended towards undermining the divinity of Jesus
Christ, while the Waldensians were a new twelfthcentury movement that espoused
poverty, called for the distribution of property to the poor, rejected the
authority of the clergy and claimed that anyone could preach, saying their
literal reading of the Bible was all that was needed for salvation. According
to Peter of Les Vauz de Cernay, another thirteenth-century chronicler, the
Waldensians ‘were evil men, but very much less perverted than other heretics;
they agreed with us in many matters, and differed in some’. The ‘other
heretics’ were the Manichaeans, also known as Cathars, meaning ‘pure’.
Languedoc was a major source of Templar income and recruits.” (Haag, 2010, p.
61)


“for nearly two centuries the Templars were seen as paragons of faith, and
there was no suggestion that contamination had touched their souls. Moreover,
within a century of their founding the Templars had entered into the Western
imagination as the ideal of chivalry–and the guardians of the Holy Grail.”
(Haag, 2010, p. 60)


“during the 33-year reign of Philip II, which extended from the late twelfth
century well into the thirteenth, the king’s revenues were increased by 120
per cent thanks to Templar management. […] Only the Paris Temple presented a
truly formidable obstacle to a raid; Templar houses elsewhere in France were
raided by the king; the London Temple was raided by kings of England in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries when in desperate need; and in Spain the
kings of Aragon did the same. But these were passing events in desperate times
of need, and restitution was made. Ultimately the Templars’ best protection
was not the stone walls of their treasure houses but practical and moral
constraints.” (Haag, 2010, p. 60)


“King John was actually resident at the New Temple at the time of Magna Carta
in 1215 and was accompanied to his famous meeting with the barons at Runnymede
by the master of the London Temple. But while the kings of England entrusted
Templars with military, diplomatic and financial commissions, they were always
careful to keep the royal treasury as part of the royal household where it was
run by royal officials, so that at most the New Temple merely served to
provide additional safe-deposit space.” (Haag, 2010, p. 60)


“The Paris Temple was the Templar headquarters in France. Built on land
acquired by the Templars in the 1140s, nothing of it survives today and it is
remembered only by a street name in the Quartier du Temple, the northern part
of the Marais district of the city. But from the twelfth to the fourteenth
century it was one of the key financial centres of northwest Europe. […] in
the late thirteenth century the Templars added a powerful keep about 165 feet
high–nearly twice as high as the White Tower, the keep at the centre of the
Tower of London. This Templar keep in Paris was the heart of the Templar bank,
and it was also effectively the treasury of the kings of France. During the
French Revolution it served as a prison for Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette,
and it was from the keep that the king was led out to his execution. The
London Temple, or the New Temple as it was called, would have been comparable
to that of Paris, but only Temple Church, consecrated in 1185, remains today
[…].” (Haag, 2010, p. 59)


“King John of England borrowed from the master of the Temple in London around
the time of Magna Carta in 1215. After the Fourth Crusade, in which Latins
overthrew the Byzantine emperors and put a Frenchman on the throne instead,
the Latin Emperor Baldwin II borrowed an immense sum which was secured against
the True Cross. As part of their integral relationship with the European
financial system, the Templars also became involved in the web that Italian
merchants and bankers had spun across Europe and the Levant. In return for
these services the Templars received various privileges and concessions. By
Papal bull and the decrees of French and English kings, the Templars were
given full jurisdiction over their estates and their inhabitants. They also
obtained royal consent to organise weekly agricultural markets and annual
fairs which formed a focus for local trade and brought much income to the
order both from the dues paid by those taking part and through boosting the
local economy generally. Combining agriculture with capital the Templars were
notably successful in the commercial exploitation of their estates, as in
sheep-farming in England, for example, which in combination with the Templars’
ability to provide credit turned them into major suppliers of wool. Not least
among the benefits they obtained was the unimpeded export of goods and funds
from the West to Outremer. Additionally the Templars made profits on currency
conversions and imposed charges on their services. Though not always openly
stated in documents, they charged interest on loans, sometimes under the name
of expenses to get round medieval scruples against interest, though sometimes
they felt bold enough to declare that too. In 1274, for example, Edward I of
England repaid the Templars the sum of 27,974 livres tournois together with
5333 livres, 6 sous, 8 deniers for ‘administration, expenses and interest’–the
total cost of the loan approaching 20 per cent.” (Haag, 2010, p. 59)


“The Templars operated treasure ships offshore from which campaigning knights
and nobles and kings could make emergency withdrawals. The Templars also
provided loans, for example to Louis VII, the king of France, during the
Second Crusade. This was the beginning of the Templars’ close financial
association with the French monarchy, effectively becoming its treasurers.”
(Haag, 2010, p. 59)


“Individual monasteries had traditionally served as secure depositories for
precious documents and objects, but during an age of greater movement owing to
the Crusades and the growth of trade and pilgrimages the Templar network in
the West of preceptories, that is houses and estates, could offer a better
service. The Templars developed a system of credit notes whereby money
deposited in one Templar preceptory could be withdrawn at another upon
production of the note, a procedure that required the meticulous and
scrupulously honest record-keeping at which they excelled. Whether at Paris or
Acre or elsewhere, the Templars kept daily records of transactions, giving
details of the name of the depositor, the name of the cashier on duty, the
date and nature of the transaction, the amount involved and into whose account
the credit was to be made. These daily records were then transferred to a
larger register, part of a vast and permanent archive. The Templars also
issued statements several times a year, giving details of credits and debits
and stating the origin and destination of each item.” (Haag, 2010, p. 58)


“Another Templar cargo was white slaves. They were transported in considerable
numbers from East to West where they were put to work helping to run Templar
houses, especially in southern Italy and Aragon. The Hospitallers also engaged
in the trade and the use of slaves; indeed the trade in white slaves was a
flourishing business for everyone, including the Italian maritime powers,
especially Genoa, and most of all the Muslim states in the East. The centre of
the slave trade in the late thirteenth century was the Mediterranean port of
Ayas in the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia. Marco Polo disembarked at Ayas in
1271 to begin his trip to China at about the same time that the Templars
opened a wharf there. The slaves, who were Turkish, Greek, Russian and
Circassian, had been acquired as a result of intertribal warfare, or because
impoverished parents decided to sell their children, or because they were
kidnapped, and they were brought to Ayas by Turkish and Mongol slavers. The
pick of young strong males from the South Russian steppes or the Caucasus
generally went to Egypt where they were converted to Islam and served as elite
slave soldiers known as Mamelukes. In 1250 the Mamelukes seized power in Egypt
for themselves–and led the final jihad that drove the Franks out of Outremer.”
(Haag, 2010, p. 58)


“Most of the Templars’ imports such as horses, iron and wheat came by sea. At
first the Templars contracted with commercial shippers and agents, but early
in the thirteenth century they began building up a fleet of their own. They
had a substantial presence at all the important ports of Outremer–at Caesarea,
Tyre, Sidon, Gibelet (ancient Byblos and present-day Jubail), Tripoli,
Tortosa, Jeble and Port Bonnel north of Antioch. But their principal port was
Acre, a walled city built on a tongue of land offering good protection for its
double harbour. All the major powers of the Kingdom of Jerusalem were
represented at Acre, but in 1191, after the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin, the
city became the Templars’ new headquarters in the Holy Land. According to the
thirteenth-century chronicler known as the Templar of Tyre, ‘The Temple was
the strongest place of the city, largely situated along the seashore, like a
castle. At its entrance it had a high and strong tower, the wall of which was
28 feet thick.’ He also mentions another tower built so close to the sea that
the waves washed up against it, ‘in which the Temple kept its treasure’. After
1218 the Templars supplemented their facilities at Acre with a new fortress of
their own thirty miles to the south; known today as Atlit, the Templars called
it Chastel Pelerin because it was built on a rocky promontory with the help of
pilgrims (pelerin in French). This castle, said a German pilgrim who visited
in the early 1280s, ‘is sited in the heart of the sea, fortifed with walls and
ramparts and barbicans so strong and castellated, that the whole world should
not be able to conquer it.’ From their ports in Outremer the Templars’ ships
sailed to the West. Their major port of call in France was Marseilles from
where they shipped pilgrims and merchants to the East. Italy’s Adriatic ports
were also important, especially Brindisi, which had the added advantage of
being near Rome. Bari and Brindisi were sources of wheat and horses, armaments
and cloth, olive oil and wine, as well as pilgrims. Messina in Sicily acted
both as a channel for exports from the island and as an entrepôt for shipping
arriving from Catalonia and Provence. The Templars also built ships in
European ports, everywhere between Spain and the Dalmatian coast.” (Haag,
2010, p. 58)


“The Templars became Europe’s first bankers, a development unintended and
unforeseen yet one that arose naturally out of their situation. From their
inception the Templars were an international organisation. Their purpose was
in the Holy Land but their support came from Europe where they held land,
collected tithes and received donations from the pious. They organised markets
and fairs, managed their estates and traded in everything from wool and timber
to olive oil and slaves. In time they built up their own formidable
Mediterranean merchant fleet capable of transporting pilgrims, soldiers and
supplies between Spain, France, Italy, Greece and Outremer. Disciplined,
honest and independent, the Templars were trusted throughout medieval society,
and their experience in commerce and finance made them the ideal bankers to
Popes and kings. Yet in their success as bankers and financiers lay a chief
cause of their fall. The Templars, like the Church and like the Crusades, were
international in conception, but the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were
a time when national states were being constructed by European kings,
especially by the kings of France. Just as the Templars raised money to defend
the Holy Land with their arms, so they also provided money for the new
nationalism arising in the West. But the nation state of France would in turn
‘nationalise’ the Templars and destroy them.” (Haag, 2010, p. 57)


“castle of Saphet (Safad) […] had a complement of 50 Templar knights, 30
mounted sergeants, as well as 50 mounted archers, 300 crossbowmen, 820
engineers and other serving men, plus 400 slaves–1650 people, which in wartime
increased to 2200 […].” (Haag, 2010, p. 55)


“Each Templar also had a squire to help look after the horses. And in addition
there were sergeants, more lightly armed than knights, who each had a horse
but acted as their own squires. Sergeants were often locally recruited and
wore a brown or black tunic instead of white. In fact for every Templar knight
there were about nine others serving in support, whether as squires, sergeants
or other forms of help. This is not much different from modern warfare in
which every frontline soldier is backed up by four or five who never see
combat, not to mention the many thousands of civilians producing weapons and
equipment and providing clothing, food and transport.” (Haag, 2010, p. 55)


“Every Templar was a highly trained and expensive mounted knight. Such a
knight in the second half of twelfth-century France required 750 acres to
equip and maintain himself as a mounted warrior, and a century later that cost
had quintupled to 3750 acres. For a Templar knight operating overseas in the
Holy Land the costs were even greater, as much had to be imported, not least
horses. Each Templar knight had three horses, and because they fell victim to
warfare and disease, and had a lifespan of only twenty years […]. horses
consumed five or six times as much as a man […].” (Haag, 2010, p. 55)


“Each order levied its own taxes, had its own diplomatic service and possessed
its own fleet of ships. In effect the Hospitallers and the Templars were
states within the state. Very quickly the under-manned and under-financed
Crusader states were selling or giving frontier fortresses to the orders, and
by 1166 there were only three castles in the Kingdom of Jerusalem which the
military orders did not control.” (Haag, 2010, p. 55)


“sometime in the 1120s the Hospitallers extended their role from caring for
pilgrims to protecting them by force of arms if need be, becoming known as the
Knights of the Hospital of Saint John, or Knights Hospitaller, with Saint John
no longer the Almsgiver but replaced by the more imposing figure of Saint John
the Baptist. The first recorded instance of Hospitallers in combat dates from
1128, eight years or so after the founding of the Templars; it was the example
of the Templars that helped turn the Hospitallers into a military order. […]
the monastic vows of the military orders suited them to the dour life of
castles where the innermost fortifications served as monasteries for the
brothers. Their members were celibate, which made them easy to control, and
they had no outside private interests. Superbly trained and highly
disciplined, the Hospitallers and the Templars were led by commanders of
considerable military ability […]. As corporate bodies, the orders were
everlasting, their numbers undiminished by disease or death, and they were
able to draw on an inexhaustible supply of young men of noble families in
Europe seeking to fulfil the moral and religious obligations of knighthood.”
(Haag, 2010, p. 54)


“MARSHAL Responsible for military decisions such as purchase of equipment and
horses; he also exercised authority over the regional commanders. […] DRAPER
The keeper of the robes, the Draper issued clothes and bedlinen, removed items
from knights who were thought to have too much, and distributed gifts made to
the order. […] REGIONAL COMMANDERS These were the COMMANDER OF THE KINGDOM OF
JERUSALEM, who acted as the order’s treasurer and within the Kingdom had the
same powers as the Grand Master; the COMMANDER OF JERUSALEM, who within the
city had the same powers as the Grand Master; and the COMMANDERS OF ACRE,
TRIPOLI AND ANTIOCH, each with the powers of the Grand Master within their
domains. […] France, England, Aragon, Poitou, Portugal, Apulia and Hungary
each had a provincial master who was responsible to the Grand Master.” (Haag,
2010, p. 54)


“THE TOP FIVE OFFICIALS of the Knights Templar were the Grand Master, the
Seneschal, the Marshal, the Commander of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and the
Draper. Ultimately, the Order owed its allegiance to the Pope–and to no other
authority, spiritual or temporal. […] Ruler of the order, the Grand Master was
elected by twelve senior Templar members, the number representing the twelve
apostles, plus a chaplain who took the place of Jesus Christ. […] All major
decisions by the Grand Master–such as whether to go to war, agree a truce,
alienate lands, or acquire a castle–required that he consult with the chapter.
[…] SENESCHAL Deputy and advisor to the Grand Master.” (Haag, 2010, p. 53)


“Castles were as much centres of production and administration as they were
military outposts–battlemented country houses, containing corn mills and olive
presses, and surrounded by gardens, vineyards, orchards and fields. Their
lands in some cases encompassed hundreds of villages and a peasantry numbering
tens of thousands. Wood to Egypt, herbs, spices and sugar to Europe, were
important exports; indeed throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
Europe’s entire supply of sugar came from the Latin East. But in times of war,
agriculture was always the first victim. Were it not for Western subvention
and the taxes imposed on trade between the Muslim East and Europe as it passed
through the Crusader states, they would have collapsed sooner than they did.
The Latin rulers were always strapped for cash, the bulk of their revenues
going towards the upkeep of mercenaries, knights and castles. It was a vicious
circle; insufficient land and manpower making castles a necessity; the cost of
knights and castles greater than the productivity of the land could justify.
In this situation the military orders came into their own. They had the
resources, the independence, the dedication–the elements of their growing
power.” (Haag, 2010, p. 53)


“the Franks built over fifty castles in Outremer.” (Haag, 2010, p. 52)


“In the West the failure of the crusade came as a shock because it had been
led by the powerful kings of Germany and France and had been preached by
Bernard of Clairvaux, the greatest spiritual figure of the age. Some blamed
the Franks of the East, who had previously been in alliance with the ruler of
Damascus; some German chroniclers, anxious to protect Conrad, blamed the
Templars, saying that they had deliberately engineered the retreat; the
anonymous Wurzburg chronicler wrote of Templar greed, and of betrayal by
taking a massive bribe. The French did not make the same accusations, having
been supported by the Templars throughout. […] The problem was that the more
the Franks of Outremer relied on Western subsidy and military aid, the more
critical the West became if things went wrong; the enthusiasm was there, but
only for victories that came easily and cheap. From now on, the defence of the
Holy Land would depend on its network of castles, largely built and commanded
by the knights of the military orders.” (Haag, 2010, p. 52)


“Damascus was not seized by the First Crusade. Then the momentum was with the
Franks, who had the men to do the job, but their ideological fixation on
Jerusalem obscured the strategic reality. As it was, the Crusader states
formed a long thin line along the Mediterranean coast from the Amanus
mountains in the north to the Gulf of Aqaba in the south, but they had no
depth: the Crusaders never controlled the hinterland to the east where
Damascus sits on the desert fringe. Eastwards of this hinterland lay nothing
but barren desert, not easily traversed by large armies. If the First Crusade
had taken Damascus it would have cut the Muslim world in two; instead this
hinterland became a highway for Muslim forces […].” (Haag, 2010, p. 52)


“Without even fighting a battle the Second Crusade was defeated, ending in a
whimpering fiasco. Six years later Damascus fell to Nur al-Din, and the
encirclement of Outremer by a united Muslim power began.” (Haag, 2010, p. 51)


“With his army on the verge of disintegration, King Louis surrendered his
responsibilities to Everard des Barres, the Templar master, who divided the
force into units, each under the command of a Templar knight whom they swore
to obey absolutely. Thanks to the boldness and organisational skills of the
Templars, the army was led to safety at Attalia (modern Antalya) on the
Mediterranean. But their ordeal was not yet over, for the expected Byzantine
fleet was too small to take them all to the Holy Land, so only Louis and part
of his army sailed east. The rest attempted to march overland through Seljuk
lands, and most of them died on the way. […] Abandoning his intention of
retaking Edessa, Louis instead led his army southwards via Tripoli to
Jerusalem where he fulfiled his pilgrim’s vow, meanwhile despatching Everard
des Barres to Acre where he raised enough money from Templar resources to
cover the cost of the French expedition–a sum that was more than half the
annual tax revenue of the French state.” (Haag, 2010, p. 51)


“on 27 April 1147 King Louis VII and Pope Eugenius III came to the Paris
Temple–which had become the European headquarters of the order–to discuss
plans for the Second Crusade. Also in attendance were four archbishops and 130
Templar knights, with at least as many sergeants and squires. Here, it was
agreed that the Templars would accompany the French army to the East […]. The
Pope also appointed the Templar treasurer to receive the tax that had been
imposed on all Church goods to finance the crusade. It was the start of a
fateful relationship, that would last for over a century and a half, with the
Paris Temple serving in effect as the treasury of France. […] the Byzantines
were at war with Roger II, the Norman king of Sicily, and to cover their backs
had recently agreed a treaty with the Seljuks.” (Haag, 2010, p. 50)


“Bernard broadcast his message farther, travelling into the north of France
and to Flanders, and addressing a letter to the people of England […]. News of
the crusade had also reached Germany where it touched off anti-Semitic pogroms
along the Rhine. Bernard hastened to Germany to condemn the atrocities on the
spot. ‘The Jews’, he said, ‘are not to be persecuted, killed or even put to
flight. The Jews are for us the living words of Scripture, for they remind us
always what the Lord suffered.’ And then to control and give direction to the
popular feeling, Bernard preached the crusade to the reluctant King Conrad III
of Germany himself, finally persuading him to take the cross at Christmas
1146.” (Haag, 2010, p. 49)


“Louis arranged that Bernard of Clairvaux should speak at Vezelay. Not only
was Bernard the friend of Popes and kings (Eugenius had been a monk at
Clairvaux and the king’s brother had recently joined the Cistercians there),
but his asceticism, conviction and eloquence combined to make him the most
formidable spiritual figure of the age. At word that Bernard would speak, such
a crowd of aristocrats and admirers from all over France were drawn to Vezelay
that, as at Clermont when Pope Urban called for the First Crusade, the
cathedral was not big enough to contain the throng and a platform was erected
in the fields outside the town. This was an age like no other, Bernard told
the crowd. God had found new ways to save the faithful. The fall of Edessa was
a gift from God. It was an opportunity created by God to save men’s souls.
‘Look at the skill he is using to save you. Consider the depth of his love and
be astonished, sinners. This is a plan not made by man, but proceeding from
the heart of divine love.’” (Haag, 2010, p. 48)


“The count of Edessa, Joscelyn II, was at odds with the prince of Antioch; the
count of Tripoli was only vaguely interested in events so far to the east; and
in Jerusalem King Fulk had just died, leaving the government in the hands of
Queen Melisende as regent for Baldwin III, their thirteen-year-old son.
Consequently, Zengi found his attack opposed only by the negligible forces of
Edessa itself. The other Crusader states fringed the Mediterranean, but Edessa
was landlocked; it lay beyond the Euphrates, a day’s ride east of the river.
Its population was made up of Christians of the East, Chaldeans and Armenians,
who were more devoted to trade than skilled in the use of arms.” (Haag, 2010,
p. 48)


“In 1138 the Arab diplomat and chronicler Usamah ibn Munqidh was sent by the
Turkish governor of Damascus, Muin al-Din Unur, to Jerusalem to discuss with
King Fulk the possibility of an alliance against Zengi […]. Of one knight in
the army of King Fulk whom Usamah got to know well, he wrote, ‘He was of my
intimate fellowship and kept such constant company with me that he began to
call me “my brother”. Between us were mutual bonds of amity and friendship.’”
(Haag, 2010, p. 47)


“Zengi, a Seljuk Turk, who began his career in 1127 when on behalf of the
moribund Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad he made himself atabeg, or governor, of
Mosul in northern Iraq. […] Zengi’s greatest victory was his conquest of the
County of Edessa in 1144. The first state founded by the Crusaders, Edessa was
the first to fall, and Arab chroniclers later looked back on this triumph as
the start of the jihad that would drive the Franks from the East. In the West
the loss of Edessa touched off the Second Crusade, a huge campaign by sea and
land, this time led by two European kings. But the crusade may never have
reached the Holy Land at all had it not been for the Templars, and when
unexpectedly it failed they became convenient scapegoats.” (Haag, 2010, p. 47)