Chapter 3
In This Chapter
● Defending against villains, thieves, and ugly mugs
● Standing alone: New knights against the tide
● Reclaiming Solomon’s Temple
● Reshaping Europe, Jerusalem, and the Catholic Church
In the Middle Ages, magical thinking was simply a normal part of life, a shared view of the world. People believed that witches would sink if you threw them into the water, that base metal could be turned to gold, and that comets were an ominous portent of some sort of disaster. They also believed that kneeling at the tomb of Jesus could cure disease or erase a past sin.
The concept of pilgrimage is an old one. It’s based on a human foible that may not make any sense, but it just comes with the rest of the equipment. People have a tendency to believe that an object or a place can hold within it some sort of ectoplasmic essence of a person or event. And nowhere is this more true than in regards to religious faith.
It was the misfortune of Christian pilgrims that so many of the important sites of the faith were in the perpetual war zone of the Middle East. There were about 50 understaffed years between the victory of the First Crusade that established the Latin States, and the arrival of reinforcements in the Second Crusade. There were very few knights to protect the cities they’d taken, much less to patrol the roads to get there. But the pilgrims kept coming, the numbers steadily increasing. They often carried all their wealth in their scrip, a sort of a backpack, to have access to money during a journey that could take a year and more. Sometimes they weren’t even certain of the route they should take to get there. But they trusted in God to protect them. In other words, they meandered into a war zone with a cross pinned to their breasts and a target painted on their backs.
This chapter discusses the plight of the pilgrims, and how, in 1119, a French knight named Hugues de Payen felt called by God to help them. He put together a force of nine knights who vowed to keep the roads of the Holy Land safe. They vowed as well to live as monks, promising poverty, chastity and obedience. It was an unprecedented act for warrior knights that would have enormous repercussions on history, when these nine impoverished soldiers were catapulted to the pinnacle of the medieval world. They would be known to history as the Knights Templar.
The Perils of Pilgrimage
The roads were dusty, the terrain was mountainous, and the climate was inhospitable. For anyone accustomed to the rolling green pastures of Sussex or the lush alluvial farmlands of the Loire, the landscape would have seemed as alien as the surface of the moon.
The passage east, with its bone-dry, crystalline air; its painfully blue sky; and its stunted and twisted scrub brush scattered across miles and miles of waste ground — this was the Route of the Pilgrims, the road from Jaffa on the coast to inland Jerusalem that most Christians took to reach the sites sacred to their faith. Far more about this place than just its climate was inhospitable. It was a supremely dangerous road to travel, alone and unarmed. It’s often said of any journey that the last mile is always the longest — nowhere was this truer than on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. After surviving the hazards of the barbarous roads of Europe and the perils of crossing the sea, after traveling thousands of miles, the last 40 miles were the most dangerous of them all.
There were two common routes for a pilgrim traveling from Europe to the East. One was a land route, which began by heading, from wherever you were, toward the Mediterranean, through the south of France and the north of Italy, up and around the coastline of the Adriatic, following the old Roman road along the Danube, then again southeast, through the Slavic nations to the Bosporus. From there it was a game of leapfrog: Nicomedia to Tarsus, Tarsus to Antioch, Antioch to Tripoli, then finally to Jerusalem. Most pilgrims would stop off at major points, particularly Constantinople, to see the dazzling sights of the “Rome of the East.” This path to Jerusalem, though long, was the one most commonly taken by the poorest pilgrims, because they could walk the entire way, without paying for passage. If one could afford it, a donkey was a great help on this route.
The other way from Europe to the East was by sea. Typically, pilgrims set out in the spring, heading for the coastal towns of Italy or southern France. After passage was arranged, they took a ship across the Mediterranean, usually island-hopping, stopping in at Sicily or Crete, then Rhodes or Cyprus, to take on water and supplies. The feluccas, with their distinctive triangular fore-and-aft sails, and other, smaller square-sailed ships that plied the Mediterranean were lean, lightweight, fast, and maneuverable, but they couldn’t carry enough water to make it all the way across the Mediterranean Sea. Their captains felt safer keeping land in sight.
Generally, they sailed directly east from Cyprus, and at Syria they turned south, moving down the coast until they docked at one of the common dropoff points — Acre, Jaffa, Beirut, or Tyre, depending on political and weather conditions at the moment, or the convenience of that particular ship. By the 13th century, the most common point from which to leave Europe was definitely Venice. The Venetians were by then the greatest commercial power on the Mediterranean, and there wasn’t anyone or anything that they wouldn’t take on to make a profit. In fact, though early pilgrims came to depend very much on the Knights Templar, who were the closest thing on this journey to a string of banks and travel agents, as the years passed, Venice stepped in to fill the breach. And they got it down to a fine art. Fifty golden ducats would buy you a package trip, including your fare from Venice to Jaffa and back, and tours of the most important sites on arrival.
The route by sea became more popular as the Crusades approached. The stretch through Asia Minor on the route by land had once belonged to the Byzantine Christians, but by the 11th century the Seljuq Turks were all over it, and of the many groups who were a potential threat to pilgrims, the Seljuqs were the worst.
Why bother?
So, you ask, why bother with the whole thing? A fair question.
Jerusalem is a holy city for all three of the world’s major monotheistic faiths — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. For the ancient Jews, the pilgrimage to Jerusalem for Passover each year was part of the bedrock of their faith. Remember that, in ancient times, most Jews did not live any farther from Jerusalem than the countryside surrounding it. In fact, it was forbidden to sacrifice anywhere but the Temple on the Mount. The Diaspora (the scattering of the tribes of Israel) changed Judaism to a great extent, making it more cerebral, less tied to a physical temple. Nevertheless, each year, devout Jews still prayed at their Passover Seder, “Next year in Jerusalem.”
Pilgrimage (the hajj) was also an ingrained idea for the Muslims. At least once in his lifetime, every devout Muslim was — and is — expected to travel to the city of Mecca, and take part in the Kaaba ritual there during the holy month of Ramadan; this is one of the five pillars of the Islamic faith. Apart from the hajj, any pilgrimage to any spot sacred to Allah is held to be a holy act for the faithful.
Christianity is the only one of the three religions that does not specifically lay out the need for pilgrimage in its rituals and dogma. Yet, pilgrimage was no less sacred to a medieval Christian. And Jerusalem was no less a holy city for the Christians. This was the land where Christ had walked. It was the city of his final ministry, of his crucifixion, burial, and resurrection. What it would mean for medieval Christians to stand in the holiest of holies, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the very tomb of their risen Lord, is difficult for the modern, secular mind to grasp fully.
St. Helena discovers it all
Christians had been making pilgrimages since before the Gospels were written down. But there’s no question that one very powerful and determined woman brought about the virtual exodus of Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem of later centuries. Her name was Flavia Iulia Helena, now known as St. Helena, the mother of the emperor Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor of Rome. She would leave an imprint on Christianity nearly as important as her son’s.
In A.D. 327, at the spry age of 72 Helena traveled to the city of Jerusalem to see the Holy Places of her newfound Christianity before she died, guided by no less a personage than the patriarch of Jerusalem (some sources say she was as young as 53 or as old as 79). It is said that she consulted with many advisors, and then, like a Byzantine, post-menopausal Indiana Jones, set out to discover the site of Golgotha, the place of Christ’s crucifixion. Beneath the cistern of a pagan temple to Aphrodite, she uncovered the remains of three wooden crosses. According to legend, she determined which had been the crosses of the two criminals and which the cross of Christ by laying an old woman who was very ill on each one of them. Needless to say, the cross of Christ was the one that cured her.
Helena returned with the True Cross to Constantinople, where her son would put it in a place of honor, crowning the last of four enormous arches that led to the entrance of the new capital he was building. He also returned a piece of it to Jerusalem, to be placed in a new church, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, that he decided to have built over the spot. In fact, after hearing his mother’s tales of the holy sites she’d seen, he passed a decree opening the treasury for her use, and the dowager empress spread it across Palestine as seed money, to build churches in all the most important holy sites.
Wherever they landed, or from whatever direction they’d come, pilgrims ended up on the coast road of the Levant, funneled toward the city of Jaffa. And running north to south along that road, strung across the coast like pearls on a harem princess, were the legendary trading cities of the eastern Mediterranean. Most had been founded by the trading empire of the Phoenicians, ten centuries before Christ. There were the famed twin cities of Sidon and Tyre, as well as Beirut, Jaffa, Acre, and Tripoli. Here Christian pilgrims were met with what must have seemed every race and creed of mankind; Berbers of North Africa, Persians from the mythic East, Arabians and Greeks, Ethiopians and Turks, all of them part of the clamor of commerce that had been thriving there for centuries, through wars and plagues and various changes of ownership.
To someone who’d never been outside the confines of his village in France or Germany or England, it must have been an overwhelming experience.
These Christian dogs will buy anything! — The lucrative trade in "holy relics"
It all began with two famous remnants of the death of Christ. The first, the Holy Spear of Antioch, was found beneath the city's citadel by a monk named Peter Bartholomew who was certain it was the spear used to pierce Christ's side when he was on the cross. The Norman knights who'd just taken the city had more important things on their minds, but the monk wouldn't back down from his story. In fact, he believed it so strongly that he underwent a trial by fire to prove the spear was real — and died. Although, in the end, there are several Roman spears (at least four) that have as good a claim as any other of being the true spear. The second was the True Cross itself, object of endless conjecture, searching, and zealotry. Christian belief was absolute that touching the Cross could cure the sick and wipe away sin. At first, the sharpeyed Arab traders of Palestine were at least a little wary, though they soon discovered that gullible Christian tourists would shell out for just about anything — old lumps of iron that became nails from the cross, the toe bone of St. Catherine, the finger bone of St. James, the sandal strap of John the Baptist, the tassels of Salome.
When the greedy and unethical knights of the Fourth Crusade carved up the Byzantine Empire, one of the first things they got their hands on was the True Cross, breaking it up into as many pieces as possible, and distributing it, like everyone's fair share of the peanut brittle, to all the knights and bishops present. After that, there wasn't a toothpick from Belgrade to Hamburg that didn't come with a provenance claiming was it part of the True Cross. Actually, there is some fairly respectable scientific evidence that many of these are the genuine article. At the very least, the relics held in churches and museums and private collections the world over came, for the most part, from the same tree. Many religious scholars have attempted to prove that, if they were all put back together, they still would not constitute enough wood to form even one cross large enough to hang a man from. Yet, considering the loopier aspects of the relics trade, it's impossible not to laugh over the words of the Protestant reformer John Calvin. "There is no abbey so poor as not to have a specimen [of the True Cross] . . . if all the pieces that could be found were collected together, they would make a ship-load. Yet, the Gospels testify that one man was able to carry it."
When they reached Jaffa, pilgrims turned east to cover the short, final distance cross-country to Jerusalem. Their first view of the city would have been of the shimmering globe of the Dome of the Rock, which they could see from the crest at the monastery of St. Samuel, the hill that was known as Montjoie, the joyful hill at the journey’s end. The average pilgrim was particularly thrilled if he’d managed to survive the journey in one piece.
Medieval muggers
Brigandage, what nowadays we would call either a mugging or a carjacking, was a constant problem on the back roads of Europe. But that problem was unimaginably worse on the desert roads of Palestine. At one time, all of it had belonged to the Byzantine Empire, the surviving, eastern half of the Roman Empire, and a certain amount of order was kept by the legions and the city patrols of the emperor. But in 1071, a key year for the Templar story, the Byzantines were shown to the world to be a gilded and hollow shell of a once mighty empire, when they were annihilated at the Battle of Manzikert by the invading hordes of Seljuq Turks out of the steppes of Asia.
The Seljuqs were a violent tribe to begin with, before they conquered the city of Baghdad and were, in the process, converted to Islam in the late eighth century. Afterward, their radical Sunni brand of Islam went west along with them, combining religious fanaticism with an already characteristic mercilessness. When the Seljuqs swept westward out of Asia, even their fellow Sunni Muslims got out of the way.
After the arrival of the Seljuqs in Asia Minor, these incidents of brigandage were more numerous, and more deadly. Crusader forces kept Jerusalem safe, but when you were outside the city walls, all bets were off. Distant areas like Galilee, close to cities held by the Turks, were particularly dangerous. For example, in 1119, the year the Templars were formed, 700 pilgrims were attacked by Saracens on their way to visit the River Jordan at Easter. Three hundred were killed, and 60 more whisked off to the slave market. This was not a minor irritant — it was a major problem. And there’s a good chance that this was the final straw that led to the formation of the Knights Templars.
Due to the many upheavals of Palestine over the centuries, not to mention the persistent lack of any local authority to keep order, the roads of the Holy Land were always teeming with shady characters of every race, color, and creed. Small bands of out-of-work mercenaries hunted together, as well as deserters from the various armies who’d marched through over the years, the Persians and the Arabs, the Byzantines and the Crusaders. Throw in some cutthroats who’d jumped ship at one of the Levantine ports, a few local sheep herders who were looking for ways to augment their income, and then add just a dash of the bully boys who simply love their work, and you’ve got the most villainous witch’s brew of thugs, vandals, rapists, thieves, assassins, pickpockets, sadists, and reprobates to ever blacken the pages of history.
Just who is a Saracen, anyway?
When you read the journals and letters of medieval travelers to the Holy Land, you see the term Saracen a lot. To these Europeans, it was a blanket term, one that referred to Arabs, Turks, or Syrians, and just about anyone else who was a Muslim. Turk is another term that comes along often, especially a little later in history. Although modern scholars have sometimes tried to paint the word Saracen as some sort of racial slur, it really wasn't. These people didn't read the New York Times over coffee. They knew little enough about the geopolitical realities of their own countries, much less the complex weave of races and nations that made up the fabric of the Near East in this period.
Even if they’d wanted to go straight and turn over a new leaf, Palestine wasn’t the place to do it. No matter what the Bible says about the land of milk and honey, this was a land laid waste, crippled by poverty and drought. So why, you may ask, didn’t they roam off to look for greener pastures? Willie Sutton famously said, when he was asked why he robbed banks, “Because that’s where they keep the money.” For these sharks, the flow of pilgrims down the road to glory was a smorgasbord. These pilgrims were often old or weak, as well as naive and starry-eyed, carrying their cash and all the rest of their earthly possessions, their eyes fixed on the eastern horizon instead of their money belts. It was like ringing the dinner bell.
And now, after Manzikert, the thieves, pirates, and cutthroats behind every rock and around every bend were reinforced by the Seljuqs, who were essentially organized and well-armed thieves, pirates, and cutthroats.
Where'd everybody go?
The First Crusade (see Chapter 2), called by Pope Urban II in 1095, was really the only Crusade that achieved its stated goal. The Crusaders had defeated the Turks and taken for themselves the territory of the Levant, which was the tactically and economically important coastline of the eastern Mediterranean. By the year 1100, the four Crusader States, or Latin States, of the Holy Land had been formed (see Figure 3-1). One of the most respected of the knights who’d fought the campaign, Godfrey de Bouillon, was made “Defender of the Holy Sepulchre,” essentially the king of Jerusalem in everything but title. Afterward, everybody had a good meal on Godfrey, and then decided they were ready to go home. Well, after all, they hadn’t come to do any nation-building.
All at once it dawned on the lords of the First Crusade that they had a dilemma: How were they going to hold this land they’d taken, so that it didn’t fall back into Turkish hands about 15 minutes after they hit the road? It was a continuing problem with warfare in the Middle Ages. Under the feudal system of the day, the knights who held fiefdoms under any particular lord were bound to give over a certain number of armed men for any of the lord’s campaigns, a number generally set by the size and wealth of the fief in question. But there was a time limit to this service, because the knight’s principle objective was to hold and work the land he’d been given. Very often, the amount of time owed for military service was a mere 40 days a year. That system was fine if your principal enemy was the duke whose lands adjoined yours. But for a Crusader knight, 40 days would just about have gotten him to the port of Brindisi in Italy. Clearly, this system wasn’t going to work very well in an expanding Christian universe.
Slowly, as kings became wealthier and more powerful, the professional standing army of paid mercenaries would be born. But at this time period, standing armies simply didn’t exist for the warlords of the First Crusade. In fact, when the Knights Templar came along, many historians consider them to have been the first standing army in Europe since the age of Rome. Of course, this standing army didn’t stand their ground because they were paid to. These men would give up their homes and commit themselves to loneliness, poverty, and perpetual warfare for their love of Christ and their hope of salvation.
After the mass exodus of Crusaders back to Europe, it’s estimated that as few as 300 knights and perhaps as many foot soldiers remained to garrison Jerusalem. For this skeleton crew who remained behind, it was to their good fortune that the Muslims of the period were too busy fighting one another to make a major, concerted attempt to dislodge the Christians. There was a grave and bloody line in the sand between the Sunni Muslims of the north and east, like the Seljuq Turks or the caliphs of Baghdad, and the Shiite Muslims of the powerful Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt. They despised one another as heretics, and the wars between them, both large and petty, kept them employed for the next 40 years. In fact, it seemed to successive rulers of the Crusader states that this dividing line between the Muslims to the northeast and the Muslims to the southwest would always serve to protect them, and they quite deliberately made various pacts with first one and then another Islamic lord, playing them off of one another. The Crusaders’ worst nightmare, an axis forming between the two Islamic worlds that could surround and strangle their new nation of Outremer (their term for the Latin States) was another century away.
Figure 3-1: The major cities, counties, and castles during the time of the Templars.
In fact, the four Latin States would have been there for nearly 50 years before the arrival of the first serious threat to their existence, in the form of the Muslim warlord Zengi of Mosul. At that point, around 1144, they sent out an SOS, and the Second Crusade was put together. They had taken Jerusalem in July of 1099, but the first major reinforcement of Crusader knights from Europe didn’t arrive in the Holy Land until 1147.
Yet, during this period between the First and the Second Crusades, the pilgrims came once again, not in dribs and drabs, but in waves. They were used to dangerous territory — it was the common experience of all Europeans who risked travel, but the treacherous roads of the East were even worse than the ones they’d left behind. For safety’s sake, they often traveled in groups, sometimes fairly large ones. But this really didn’t help much if they were part of a caravan of ragtag men with little or no battle training, herding their women and children with them — especially not in the face of a massed attack of ruthless Turkish warriors. Jerusalem was taken, and Jerusalem was held. But in reality it didn’t make much sense for the Crusaders to have bled to take the Holy City, not if the average pilgrim couldn’t survive the journey to get there.
A New Knighthood
Two fabled knights finally decided that something had to be done about it. They were Hugues de Payens, a noble knight from the Champagne region in France, and Geoffrey de St. Omer, a Flemish knight from northern France. Legend has it that the two knights were so poor upon their arrival in the Holy Land that they shared a horse, the origin of the famous symbol of the Knights Templar (see Chapter 4).
"The Poor Knights of Christ”
Between 1119 and 1120, Hugues de Payens and Geoffrey de St. Omer gathered about them seven fellow knights whose thinking was similar to their own. They called themselves the Poor Knights of Christ (or more formally, the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ), and their mission would be to protect pilgrims on the road to Jerusalem.
Their actions were not entirely without precedent. Across Europe in the 10th and 11th centuries, poverty and political anarchy — two forces that will always breed lawlessness and thievery — were widespread. By the late tenth century, it was becoming somewhat common for small confraternities of knights to take it upon themselves to support and guard a particular shrine or monastery that was in danger from the nomadic bands of outlaws that controlled the roads in the backcountry. They bound themselves to one another for the sake of their avowed purpose. This effort was a strictly volunteer one, something that a knight with the time or the opportunity undertook for the sake of his Christian faith. During the Crusades, this basic idea became even more popular, the creation of a shared fraternal experience that gave one particular group of knights a common identity.
This was essentially how the Poor Knights of Christ were born, in a volunteer effort to protect and to aid Christian pilgrims. But what made these men remarkable was the length to which they were willing to go for the sake of their faith. The natural desire to return to their homes was put aside. More importantly, they discussed it, and then took it upon themselves to swear to the vows of a monk as well as a knight. These were the vows of St. Augustine, promising poverty, chastity, and obedience. No church or brotherhood had asked this of them — it was a sacrifice to their faith that they made of their own free will.
Legend has it that Baldwin II, King of Jerusalem at that time, was quite taken with the idea, and the first two young French noblemen, Hugues and Geoffrey, took their vows before the king and the patriarch of Jerusalem on Christmas Day in 1119. A few weeks into the new year, all nine knights gathered together at the Council of Nablus, north of Jerusalem, and were formally accepted by the clergy meeting there.
The Knights Templar
King Baldwin was thrilled and handed over a portion of the Temple Mount, around the area of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, to the knights as their new home.
The Crusaders always called Al-Aqsa the Temple of Solomon, though whether from a stubborn denial of an Islamic presence there or simple ignorance that it had been built as a mosque is debatable. Regardless, the area given to the Poor Knights of Christ was believed to be the ruins of the temple, and they became known as the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple, or more simply, the Knights Templar.
It was sometimes said of the Poor Knights that their pride was their undoing, but in those first lonely years in the desert, there was no arrogance or vanity in this sacrifice. They had chosen a harsh and dangerous life, not to mention an ascetic one, and there was no one around to applaud. But as time passed and the legend grew, this additional sacrifice of taking holy orders was an act that would ennoble them in the eyes of their contemporaries. To voluntarily give up gambling and whoring, drinking and pillaging —the most cherished pastimes of any knight — was an act without precedence in the history of the faith.
The Temple Mount: Ground zero for Jews, Christians, and Muslims
The Temple Mount, the low hill in Jerusalem, is the most sacred place on earth for the Jewish faith. It is also, without doubt, the most hotly contested, blood-soaked piece of ground on earth. It stands on the site upon which Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son's life for his faith, before God stayed his hand, and promised him the hill and beyond for a nation of his descendants. But after making war with the Babylonians, the Seleucids, and numerous other invaders, Jerusalem was stamped flat by the Romans in three major wars that strung out through the first and second centuries a.d. The Temple Mount stood barren and abandoned. At the Wailing Wall, the last remnant of the great temple, Jews mourn the loss of it to the present day.
In the century after the conversion of Constantine in a.d. 321, Jerusalem had been a Christian city. It remained one until the rise of the Persian Empire (modern-day Iran), which invaded Palestine, laying siege to Jerusalem and taking the city in a.d. 614. Roughly 60,000 Christians were slaughtered. The new young Byzantine emperor, Heraclius, defeated the Persians at the Battle of Nineveh in 627. The Persians had taken the remnants of the True Cross, as well as other Christian relics, back to their capital as prizes of war. Heraclius, in the year 630, rode through the gates of Jerusalem in triumph, returning the True Cross to its home in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
At this point, Jerusalem began to change hands more often than the government of Italy. In the seventh and early eighth centuries after Christ, a warrior of Mecca named Mohammed created a new religion and converted the whole of the Arabian peninsula, before he set out to conquer the rest of humanity, all in the space of ten years. After the death of Mohammed in 632, his followers poured out of Saudi Arabia, mowing down any armies, large or small, who got in
their way. To the astonishment of the world, both East and West, the armies of Islam stormed North Africa, knocked out the mighty Persian Empire, and then began to devour all the Near East — including Jerusalem. Jerusalem's conqueror, Caliph Omar, prayed on the Temple Mount and then ordered the construction of a mosque — later replaced by the Al-Aqsa Mosque — to honor Mohammed, who was said to have had a dream on this spot in which an angel promised him his ascent to heaven.
Still, for the next few centuries, as far as Jews and Christian pilgrims were concerned, the whole thing could have been a lot worse. It's true that the Muslims claimed the Temple Mount as Islam's possession, and proceeded to pave it over like a pork-barrel governor spending out a fat federal highway grant, only to lay out another, larger mosque, the Dome of the Rock. But for the time being, Christians and Jews living under Muslim rule could still go to their shrines and pray to their God. For Mohammed, the other three monotheistic faiths—the Jews, the Christians, and the Zoroastrians (the Persians had been Zoroastrians) — were called the People of the Book, and were treated better than pagans, who were killed at once. If the People of the Book chose not to convert, they had to live under a system called dhimmitude,a state of second-class citizenship in a Muslim country that included high taxes and some occasional, humiliating razzing. But they could still worship as they pleased.
But by the ninth and tenth centuries, the sun was setting on the once-powerful Umayyad Caliphate of Omar, which was followed by the Abbasid dynasty. The next overlord to take Palestine and southern Syria was one of history's complete nut cases, the ruler of the Fatimid Caliphate of Egypt, which was reaching its peak of power and dominance.
His name, in a very abbreviated version, was Abu Ali Al-Mansur, alias Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah (Arabic for "Ruler by God's Command"). He became the sixth caliph of the Fatimid Shiite dynasty of Egypt in 996. But Al-Hakim is far more commonly known as the "Mad Caliph," and with ample cause. If not an out-and-out psychotic, he was at the very least the worst sort of bipolar problem child. His mood swings were remarkable; sometimes he was doing the work of an enlightened ruler, feeding the poor and founding universities; other times, he was persecuting one faith or another, and ordering all the dogs in the nation to be killed because he was annoyed by the sound of barking.
Although he was raised by a Christian mother, he later converted to Islam. More surprisingly, the chief targets of his eccentric cruelties were Christians. For ten years he passed one vindictive ordinance after another against them, moving up to looting and burning at least 30,000 Christian churches in his realm. He topped it off in 1009 by burning the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which lies just to the west of the Temple Mount. He later magnanimously gave the Byzantine emperor permission to rebuild it. He hated Jews, as well, and his actions against them were in a similar vein.
However, in 1016, he committed a majorly dumb move — he declared himself to be a divinity, ordering all Shiite mosques to pray to him as they did to Allah. This one was more than the Sunnis could take. The Abbasids had faded, but Sunnism was experiencing an upsurge in power
under the rule of the Seljuq Turks. They were appalled at this apostasy by a Muslim ruler. As far as Al-Hakim was concerned, he was simply delivering the good news, and was miffed to no end by the reaction to his divinity of his Muslim brothers. In a snit, he rescinded all his laws against Christians and Jews and gave them freedom to worship once more. He even put Christians and Jews at his court and paid to rebuild some of the churches and synagogues he'd burned.
He had hoped, of course, to get under the skin of the Sunni Muslims. Unfortunately for him, he got a little too deep under their skin. Hakim disappeared without a trace while taking an evening stroll on February 13, 1021. Some said that he had ascended into heaven, but most of the more pragmatic sort believe that he was assassinated by his Sunni enemies, who had the help of his sister, the princess Sitt al-Mulk, who despised him. Luckily for Islam, this left him no time to turn on his new enemies and burn down the mosques on the Temple Mount.
Today the fighting continues over this small piece of real estate (about the size of two football fields). Muslims will allow no historical digging to take place on the site of either holy site. Recently, an attempt by Jewish archeologists to get round this by tunneling far beneath the Dome of the Rock, in search of remnants of Solomon's Temple, has caused nothing but street riots and bloodshed. For more on the Temple Mount, check tomorrow's newspaper.
Logic as well as history tells us that these men were extremely poor, living a marginal existence in the unforgiving backcountry of Palestine, disdaining any spoils of the victor of the sort their fellow knights had taken, before turning tail to head for home. The Templars would stay in the wilderness, like their hero John the Baptist. They would stay, and they would continue the fight.
Their force was small, but it’s important to remember that, at this junction of history, the mounted and armed knight was a formidable enemy, worth more than a dozen foot soldiers. However, despite the fabled power of a mounted knight, there’s no denying the fact that nine was a rather paltry force, especially to cover all the 40-odd miles of ground between Jerusalem and the Mediterranean coast.
Keeping their oath
So now, the Knights Templar, all nine of them, had taken upon themselves a job of unimaginable difficulty and complexity: They were going to keep the roads in and out of Jerusalem safe. To do it, they were going to need more than courage, skill, and money. There’s a certain naivete in this vow that’s heartwarming, but disturbing. It’s one thing to believe you have God on your side; it’s quite another to jump off the roof in order to test God’s fidelity. Jerusalem and its surrounding precincts had been the site of one calamity after another, including invasion, siege, civil war, religious conflict, blood feuds, brawls, mass executions, betrayals, sneak attacks, street riots, and a general level of incessant belligerence that would have made Saddam Hussein feel right at home.
In other words, what might seem on the surface a simple mission could, and did, get really tangled up by the grim political realities of the Holy Land. The Templars were idealists, but Jerusalem had swallowed up many an idealist before their time.
A Simple Mission Creates a Powerful Institution
Historians don’t know very much about the early years of the Templars. From their formation in 1119, they must have been at least attempting to increase their force; it simply stands to reason. Yet there is no record of how many knights patrolled the Route of the Pilgrims over the course of the next ten years. We do know that by 1125, when their founder, Hugues de Payens, set sail for France to seek money and converts, there were enough Templars for him to take a small number of knights with him, and to leave behind a force that would continue the job.
Digging in the temple
One of the prevailing stories told about the early days of the Knights Templar has to do with their headquarters on the Temple Mount. There is an area directly under the southeast corner of the mount, where the dirt falls away to reveal rooms carved into the rock itself. It is commonly referred to as Solomon’s Stables, but it is unlikely that it existed before Herod rebuilt the Temple. And it wasn’t really used as stables until the Crusaders arrived. In actuality, it’s sort of a subbasement to the Temple Mount, extending the support for the flat area above it. This area has been associated with the Templars and has been the source of much speculation in recent years.
Here’s the way this line of enquiry usually goes:
Nine knights could never credibly hope to protect the entire city of Jerusalem, so . . .
They had to have another reason for creating this cover story, so . . .
They arranged for the King of Jerusalem to give them this seemingly worthless bunch of rooms under the Temple, so . . .
They could dig up King Solomon’s buried treasure that the previous 2,000 years’ worth of invaders had never managed to find before them.
And, goes the rest of the theory, when they had the treasure in their grasp, Hugues trotted off to Rome to arrange for papal immunity from all secular laws; they cashed in on the vast wealth they found (or the mysterious secret knowledge they discovered — it’s told both ways). Whatever it was, it made them the most powerful force in the world.
Dan Brown, among other speculative researchers, has long claimed that the templar HQ was in Solomon’s Stables. The truth is that the Templars really did use the stables as, well, stables. Their living quarters and the offices of the order were above, in what is now the al-Aqsa Mosque.
We discuss the various permutations of this legend in Chapter 7. What’s important to this stage of the Templar’s real history is that no one actually knows just what did go on in the first decade of the their mission in the Holy Land.
A windfall of money and power
As any aspiring actor can tell you, sometimes, after years of fruitless labor in dinner theaters, performing in bit parts without recognition, it only takes meeting one important person at one important moment to create an “overnight” sensation. Sometimes it only takes a word in the right ear.
For the Templars, the right ear came along in 1120. Fulk V, the count of Anjou, was very definitely a player. Not only would he one day be king of Jerusalem himself, but he very cleverly arranged the marriage of his son, Geoffrey Plantagenet, to Matilda, daughter of the English King Henry I. After a very ugly civil war in England, his grandson would sit on the English throne as Henry II, first of the Angevin line of kings, more commonly called the Plantagenets. Between the holdings of his grandfather and his wife, Henry II would own more French territory than did France’s king. Count Fulk’s blood was bluer than blue, and he was a political force in both France and England.
Fulk came to Jerusalem in 1120, met Hugues de Payens, and was deeply impressed, both by the Order and its mission. He asked to be made an honorary Templar, and because the knights were desperately poor, he pledged them a yearly sum in support. The seed was planted. Through the influence of Count Fulk with his powerful friends, other nobles stepped up to the plate to help the Poor Knights. These friends included a man of great importance in the Templar story, Hugh, count of Champagne.
Hugh had visited the Latin States twice in the previous 15 years, and on the second occasion he’d been accompanied by Hugues de Payens as one of Count Hugh’s vassals. Hugh held court for Champagne in the city of Troyes, which would become something of a home city for the Templars. It’s very near Payens, and in fact, it’s been speculated but never proven that Hugues was also a kinsman of the count of Champagne. When the count returned to the Holy Land for the last time, in 1125, he himself became a Knight Templar.
For the Poor Knights, Hugues de Payens’s trip to France in 1127 would have great consequences. He was sent by the king of Jerusalem to achieve several diplomatic aims for him, as well as to secure for the Templars a more formal recognition by the Church. Hugues was successful in all his missions, but the most important thing to happen to him in France was his meeting with Bernard of Clairvaux.
Bernard of Clairvaux
Bernard was without doubt the most influential theologian of his day. He reformed the fledgling Cistercian Order and made it his own, an order with a structure different from any other in the monastic world. His stature as a theologian would see him canonized in 1174, and he is now more properly known as St. Bernard. He was a man of ecstatic, passionate faith, and apparently an accomplished public speaker, who swayed his audiences with the power of his beliefs. Bernard had a great friend and supporter in Hugh of Champagne, and through him gained a thorough understanding of the situation in the East. Bernard also understood the tactical situation for the Templars because it is probable that Andre de Montbard was not only one of the first of the nine Templar knights, but also Bernard’s uncle. With all his passion for the monastic life, Bernard did not kid himself into thinking that what the Latin States needed were more monasteries. He knew and understood the dangerous military situation.
For the next two years Hugues de Payens would travel in the highest circles of France and England, even attending the aforementioned wedding of Matilda to Geoffrey Plantagenet. Land grants and monies were coming at him from all sides — gifts of nobles both petty and great. In England, he established the first Templar preceptory in Europe, at what is now the north end of Chancery Lane, in an area of London that still bears the name Temple Bar. It’s not far from the magnificent Templar church inside the Inns of Court. Hugues also traveled as far as Scotland and Flanders, spreading the word about the Templars and seeking donations. Despite his successes, the upcoming Council of Troyes was always in his mind, as he attempted to prepare for the most important moment of his journey.
The Council of Troyes
By the opening of the Council of Troyes (the capitol of Champagne in France), in 1129, Hugues de Payens was a shoo-in. In fact, the Templars were a comet streaking across the medieval sky, absolutely unstoppable. Before the council of high churchmen, de Payens gave a straightforward speech about the founding of the Order, its goals, and the religious structure of its days — both at the Temple base and when they were abroad. Afterward, Bernard and his assistants drew up what came to be called the Latin Rule of the Templars, consisting of 72 regulations that would form the core of the Rule of the Templars, although it would be added to several times. With Bernard at the helm, the Rule followed many of the patterns set down in his own rule for the Cistercian Order of monks.
This original core is often referred to as the Primitive Rule, to separate it from later additions, especially the Hierarchical Statutes that were added around 1165, mostly dealing with obligations and privileges of Templar officers. In the end, it would come to 686 articles that covered every conceivable aspect of the Templars’ daily lives. (For more on the daily life of the Templars, see Chapter 4.) They were to wear white habits to signify their purity, while lesser officers, such as sergeants, squires, and other brothers in support positions, were to wear dark brown or black. The Primitive Rule was a handbook for a lifestyle that was extremely grim and austere, highlighted by silence at meals apart from Bible readings, no possession of any personal property, no visits from women, discouraged even if they were of the knight’s family, and incessant sessions of prayer based on the cycle of matins, prime, vespers, and so on, which was called the Hours, the structure for chapel in any monastery.
There were only two meals per day, meat no more than three times per week, an overwhelming emphasis on work and prayer, and admonitions of any laughter, horseplay, close friendships, or even the sight of the opposite sex. Vanity was discouraged to such a degree that the Rule even discussed the limit on permitted decorations on a knight’s arms or bridle. One of the calls to prayer, matins, even broke the sleep of the Templars in half, calling them to appear at chapel at 4 a.m., and then return to their beds for a little more sleep. All in all, it must have been a joyless, oppressive existence, like one interminable dirge.
Division of tabors
The hierarchy of the Order was also established at the Council:
● Grand Master: Elected by the Order, not appointed. The Grand Master was answerable only to the pope.
● Knights Templar Masters: Sort of the area vice presidents of the Order. There was a Master for each nation or regional area.
● Preceptors: Four or five were assigned to assist the Grand Master and the “regional” Masters. It is the Latin word for “commander.”
● Priors: The fighting knights themselves.
In addition, each knight had a sergeant assigned to assist him in combat, who rode into battle sharing the knight’s horse. In a battle, the sergeant was to dismount and act as a foot soldier to protect his assigned knight. Sergeants and each knight’s personal priest wore black or brown robes. All other members of the Order wore white.
Battle rules
The Templar knight went into battle in state-of-the-art protective gear: a chainmail coif over his head, a steel helmet or cap, a shield, a straight broadsword, a mace, a lance, a dagger, and sometimes a smaller knife.
The knights would ride to the scene of the battle with their sergeant. The sergeant would dismount, and the knights would then charge the enemy with a lance in one hand and a shield in the other. At the last minute, the lance would be thrown at an oncoming enemy, and the sword would be drawn for closer combat.
Behave yourselves
The Order had strict rules of conduct (see Chapter 4). No one was forced to remain in the Order, but anyone who quit had to turn over his Templar robe within two days, so he could no longer dress like one of them. Templar proceedings and rules were kept secret (not unusual for the period — the Knights Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights of the same period had similar rules). No scandals were tolerated. When punishments were meted out, they were frequently done in public, so the citizenry could see that proper justice was done.
Opposition to the Templars
Despite their sacrifices in the name of grace, many conservative theologians wrote passionate treatises against the notion of monks who were also warriors.
The ups and downs of medieval warfare
Their force was small, but it's important to remember that, at this juncture of history, the mounted and armed knight was a formidable enemy, even without the support of foot soldiers. Men who were not well-trained soldiers, but rather the dregs of the desert, would not have wanted to face a Frankish knight wielding an axe or broadsword; they were cautious warriors, but skilled and fearless. The Frankish warriors were justifiably famous for their ability to carefully arrange horse and foot soldiers on the battlefield, which is one reason the Turks loved the tactic of attacking from the rear and upsetting their carefully organized apple cart. The Franks were well versed in the tactics of the heavy charge with drawn lances, but the Turks had faster, lighter horses and their archers could pick off the knights from a distance.
Over the course of the next three centuries, the tactical advantage of armored knights would begin to fade throughout the world, as archers became more skilled and their arrows more deadly. Historians often cite the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 as the finish of mounted and armored knights. In that battle, Henry V of England, who was invading France to put forward his claim to the French crown, won a stunning victory over the French, deploying his 6,000 men against a force of over 20,000. Though his tactics were brilliant throughout, it was the power and skill of his deadly archers that won the day. Like the dropping of the atom bomb or the first use of artillery, it was one of those turning points in military history that was quite a shock to the system. Dirty and ignorant English peasants had brought down the cream of the French nobility, and warfare would never be the same again. Still, this growth of the power of archers was already happening by the 13th century, as can be seen in the tactical disaster of the Battle of Hattin, a major loss for the Templars.
Mounted Frankish knights could fire arrows, but the Turks were much better at it, with an incredible rate of fire, even turned backward in their saddles to take out pursuers—the origin of the term "parting shot." (For more on the Battle of Hattin, see Chapter 4.)
A monk was a person who was never, under any circumstances, permitted to arm himself. When sent on a mission to convert pagans, he was expected to die rather than take up arms, even in self-defense, and thereby show with his courage the truth of his Christian message. In response to all the grousing, Bernard wrote In Praise of the New Knighthood, outlining the virtue of holy war with a persuasiveness that’s a little chilling.
In spite of the rhetorical eloquence of Bernard’s tract, remnants of opposition remained. They wouldn’t just be checkmated. In fact, they were about to be slam-dunked.
The Explosion of the Order
After the Council of Troyes, something remarkable happened. The 12th century was not exactly the communication age. It was a time when Crusaders’
letters to loved ones could take months to arrive, if they arrived at all, a time when pilgrims could be swallowed up by the East, never to return, with the folks back home never knowing what had become of them. Yet, in this age of isolation and lack of information, the legend of the Poor Knights who guarded the pilgrims to the Holy Land sped across Europe with astonishing speed. There is little doubt that a great deal of this was due to the unceasing work of Bernard of Clairvaux, who preached the Templar cause wherever he went. But there was really more to it than that. In the medieval world, people loved a good story, especially one that contained epic elements of faith, revenge, courage, and the eternal struggle of the everyman to choose between good and evil. The story of the Poor Knights had it all, and it was a tale that gripped the imagination of 11th-century Europe.
New gifts
In short order, Europe turned into a five-alarm love-fest for the Templars. The nobility of Europe lined up to give lavish gifts to the Templars:
● England donated lands in Herefordshire, Essex, Lincolnshire, and Buckinghamshire
● King Lothar III (“the Fat”) gave a castle at Supplingenberg in northern Germany
● Spanish counts in the frontier region of Urgel gave castles in Granena and Barbera in Catalonia
● French nobles gave over land in Baudiment, Carlat, Dole, Foix, Laon, La Rochelle, Nice, and Richereches.
France’s King Louis VI got so concerned at the amount of property being tossed to the Templars that he finally put his foot down and proclaimed that French towns and castles could no longer be signed over to the Order, no matter who owned them.
Eyes of the pope
When Bernard of Clairvaux was on the move, the Templars experienced an explosion of growth that was stunning to the Christian world. From 1139 to 1145, six different popes issued a series of pronouncements that gave the Templars remarkable and singular powers.
The popes of the 10th and early 11th centuries were a pretty sorry lot, including “holy men” like the teenaged John XII, called the “Caligula of the Papacy.” He gambled, spent money like water, turned the Lateran Palace into a whorehouse, and was killed by a jealous husband when caught in bed with the wife in question. Worse, many of these tenth-century popes had been violent men; in fact, between 872 and 1012, a third of the popes who ruled the Holy See met a violent end, often at the hand of the next pope in line. Many popes of the great families of Italy had bastard children who followed them onto the papal throne as if they’d been Hapsburgs or Windsors.
Pope Gregory XII, St. Gregory, set out to change all that. He went to work on lust, luxury, and simony in the Lateran Palace. But because of the scandals of the past, theologians were very sensitive about the subject of violence committed in the name of Christ.
Yet, the purity and purpose of the Templars won over a long line of popes. When Hugues de Payens died in 1136, he left behind an Order far more prosperous, respected, and famous than the one he’d founded. It fell to the next Templar Grand Master, Robert de Craon, also known as Robert the Burgundian, to consolidate and increase those gains. And brother, did he manage it neatly and quickly. Apparently, he believed in going straight to the top. The powers he envisioned being granted to the Templars could only be the gift of the pope of Rome.
Within three years, he’d secured from Pope Innocent II the first of three papal bulls (documents stating the pope’s position on some subject or other, given the weight of a command under canon law) that would give the Templars unprecedented powers and independence. Omne datum optimum, the first and most important of these bulls, was issued on March 29, 1139. It basically put the Templars above the mortal strain, making them answerable in their actions only to the pope. It recognized their officers and system of governance, approved the gifts given them, and exempted the knights from paying any tithes. It allowed them their own inner clergy of priests, chaplain brothers who were there strictly to hear their confessions and perform mass. They were permitted to hear the divine office in their own chapels. Templar knights had the power to give the last rites and absolve sin, even of a priest.
This bull was the foundation. Two more, from two upcoming popes, simply added to those powers. The bull of Pope Celestine in 1144 urged priests to raise money for the Templars and offered penances for any person or organization that gave money to the Templars. A year later, Pope Eugenius III’s bull for the most part backed up the other two, with a few perks added. Eugenius was making it clear where he stood. And one more thing — if Templars were accused of having committed a crime, they could not be tried by the secular authority of any nation, but only by an ecclesiastical court.
The Templars had become “untouchable.”
International Bankers
In the Middle Ages, and for some reason most particularly in the 10th and 11th centuries, many scandals rocked the Catholic Church, scandals that were very often sexual in nature. If they weren’t sexual, then they prominently featured that other devil’s tool, money. It would be the 15th century and the arrival of the Borgia popes before the Holy See was brought as low as it was by some of the 10th-and 11th-century popes mentioned earlier in this chapter. Apart from that, nearly every major Catholic order, from the Benedictines to the Franciscans, had some sort of scandal, large or small.
All but the Templars. No matter what was said about other orders, the Templars had a reputation for purity, purpose, and rigid self-restraint. It was for this reason that the accusations that rained down on the Templars out of the blue in 1307 — charges of heresy, sodomy, and extortion — were so difficult for most people to believe. There was really only one gripe that people had with the Templars: that they were money-grubbing. They always, always had a hand out, palm up, pleading for more donations. However, in defense of the Templars, one thing really needs to be said. Apart from the enormous and impressive Templar Commanderies in the capitals of Europe, their other Commanderies and Preceptories were generally fairly modest, although expensively numerous. Most of the money was being poured into holding the Latin States. It paid for the construction of the enormous Templar fortresses that ran all along the hostile borders of the four major Crusader states. Their avowed purpose — to defend Christianity and to protect its pilgrims — got more and more expensive with each passing year. Running an international operation of this size and scope was incredibly costly.
We must make one more point about the Templars as bankers for the sake of fairness: The fact was, they’d gotten involved in the banking business to begin with in order to help pilgrims to the East. This was a world in which, if you needed enough gold or silver to last you through a six-month or a yearlong journey, you had no choice but to carry it with you, and pray you had the wherewithal to guard it. Otherwise, you were likely to find yourself in the middle of nowhere, thousands of miles from home, begging for your supper. Not a pretty picture.
But the Knights Templar came up with an absolutely brilliant solution to this constant problem. And the structure of this solution is one of the reasons they needed such a large number of Preceptories in Europe and the East. The Romans had some interesting systems of money transfer, and yet it’s more than fair to say that it was the Knights Templar who invented the idea of international banking. It was a godsend to any and all who were traveling for any reason, and especially those traveling on a pilgrimage. The beauty of the system was its simplicity.
Check, please
Anyone, knight or squire, merchant or pilgrim, could take the money he’d put together to go East and deliver it into the hands of the nearest Templar pre-ceptory. There, he would be given a piece of paper stating the amount of his deposit. Then, whenever the need for money arose, he could present this paper at the preceptory nearest him, and withdraw some or all of it, receiving a new paper stating the adjusted amount he had with the Templars. In later chapters, we discuss the Templar use of secret codes and ciphers. For the time being, it’s interesting to note that even these cheques were written in a code based on Latin. This way, even if the cheque were to fall into the hands of a thief, he would be exposed as such the moment he tried to present it at a Templar commandery and claim the money as his own. It was a brilliant system, and it worked like gangbusters, solving a major problem for those on the road East. Essentially, it was an American Express traveler’s cheque. And for God’s sake, you didn’t dare leave home without it.
From the highest to the lowest born, money in coin was a hard-won commodity in the Middle Ages. Even today, people are aware of the amount in their savings account or the size of their paycheck, and would notice any suspicious discrepancy on the spot. But for two centuries, the people of Europe, of every rank, handed their money over to the Templars without thinking twice. This fact in and of itself is a powerful argument for the esteem in which these knights were held. No one doubted that his money would be in good hands when dealing with these noblest of Christ’s soldiers.
Building boom
A vow of poverty is one thing, but there’s no denying that as their reach extended across the Holy Land and Europe, the Templars needed to have castles and fortifications to protect the money pilgrims deposited, to house their growing numbers. As a result, the Templars hired indigenous stonemasons to help them design and build these great castles and chapels, a few of which survive today.
The knights, like most who went off to the Crusades, were generally illiterate, and there were no skilled architects or masons among them. So, the Templars would hire local builders, who introduced Byzantine and Muslim design into their projects. The distinctive round churches for which the Order became famous was said to be a copy of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which was, in turn, a Byzantine design.
When the Templars fanned out across Europe, they had no desire to train new architects and foremen, so they undoubtedly brought these foreign building types and methods to a largely rough and rugged Western countryside.
Imitation, the Sincerest Form of Flattery
The Templars were unlike any religious or military order that had existed before it, and their eventual lofty position as “the untouchables” within the politics
of the Roman Church was unmatched. It didn’t take long for other knights to seek similar privileges and powers.
The Knights Hospitaller
A Benedictine abbey had been established in Jerusalem by merchants from the Amalfi area of Italy in 1050. Thirty years later, a hospice was opened next to the abbey for the care and comfort of pilgrims. A soldier (or merchant — accounts vary) named Gerard Thom arrived in the Holy City in about 1100 and was placed in charge of the hospice. The Blessed Gerard, as he came to be known, is credited as the founder and first Grand Master of the Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, or more simply, the Knights Hospitaller.
In 1121, the Hospitallers’ second Grand Master, Raymond du Puy de Provence, peddled his strong family influences with Rome into new prestige for the Order. Over time, as the riffraff went home, leaving dedicated knights behind to protect and defend the Holy Land, the mission of the Hospitallers expanded to include not just running a hospital, but the creation of a well-trained and disciplined fighting force as well. Raymond built an infirmary next to Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, along with transforming the growing Order into a respected military force. Thus began a rivalry with the Knights Templar that would last until the Templars’ fall, and beyond it.
The Hospitallers adopted a uniform that was the inverse opposite of the white mantles of the Templars. They wore black surcoats, emblazoned with the eight-pointed Amalfi cross (later called the Maltese cross when the Knights moved their headquarters to the Island of Malta; see Chapter 4).
What made the Hospitallers unusual was the division of duties within the Order. Some knights engaged in military battles and the defense of the Holy Land, but others were dedicated to healing the sick and wounded. Like the Templars, they were given the extraordinary position of being answerable only to the pope, and misbehaving members of the Order could only be tried in papal courts, making them essentially immune to the laws of the countries in which they resided.
Also like the Templars, the Hospitallers had massive holdings throughout the Holy Land and Europe. Their London headquarters were just up the road from the Templars, and they too had Commanderies and Priories.
When the Templars were arrested, tried, and disbanded in the 1300s, their rivals, the Knights Hospitaller, were the principal beneficiaries of their misfortune: The Hospitallers were handed the vast majority of Templar property, though not the Templar gold. (For more about the Hospitallers’ later role in the Templars’ fate, see Chapter 5.)
The Knights Hospitallers were eventually forced from the Holy Land, moving their headquarters first to the Greek island of Rhodes, and then to the
Mediterranean island of Malta, where they became known as the Knights of Malta. They survive today as a modern chivalric organization (see Chapter 9).
The Teutonic Knights
The Order of the Teutonic House of Mary in Jerusalem, or more simply, the Teutonic Knights, arrived later on the scene in the Holy Land than the Templars and the Hospitallers. Mostly made up of German knights and priests, the Order was formed in 1190 in the port city of Acre. Their mission was to establish a hospital for German pilgrims during the Third Crusade, the bloodiest period in the entire history of the Crusades. Christian forces lost 7,000 men in the first major battle against Saladin at Acre in 1189, and the city was under siege for another two years. The curative brothers of the Teutonic Knights and their hospital had their work cut out for them.
In 1198, the Knights received new marching orders from the pope. They were to take on a more militaristic mission and defend Jerusalem. Though never as far-reaching or rich as the Templars or Hospitallers, the Teutonic Knights were still a force to be reckoned with, and their holdings included vast lands in Italy, Greece, and especially Germany. When the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II was crowned King of Jerusalem in 1225, the Teutonic home team from Germany was raised to new prestige.
As sort of a cross between the garments of the Templars and the Hospitallers, the Teutonic Knights wore a white surcoat with a black cross on the breast.
Because the Templars and Hospitallers were answerable only to the pope, the Teutonic Knights wanted similar status, and in 1224 their Hochmeister (Grand Master) petitioned Pope Honorius III for just such a position. Unlike the Templars and the Hospitallers, the Teutonic Knights turned into swords-for-hire in Europe and became embroiled in politics, military actions, and forced Christian conversions in Hungary, Poland, and Prussia. They took their role of religious knights seriously and set about converting or killing pagan Slavs, Poles, and Prussians. They even attempted an invasion of Russia in an attempt to convert the Orthodox Catholics there to Roman ones.
In 1237, they absorbed the Livonian Brothers of the Sword (see the following section), and their sovereign rule extended over Prussia, Latvia, Estonia, and the costal areas of Poland — essentially most of the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea.
The Teutonic Knights clung to their vast holdings and power right up until the 16th century, long after their mission in the Holy Land was forgotten. In 1525, the last Hochmeister of the Order embraced the Protestant movement of Martin Luther in Germany, converted to Lutheranism. The newly named Duchy of Prussia became the first Protestant state. Interestingly, the Order survived and allowed both Catholic and Protestant members. (For more information about the modern Teutonic Order, see Chapter 9.)
Livonian Brothers of the Sword
The trouble with being a big, successful, international group of warrior monks is that everybody thinks they can do it, too. Such was the case of the Brothers of the Army of Christ of Livonia, which loosely based its rules on the Templar model. The difference was that this group ditched all that bothersome reverence and piety stuff and just concentrated on the more exciting killing bits.
Formed in 1202 in Estonia, the Brothers of the Sword didn’t mess with marching to the Holy Land. They sprung up to convert pagans in northern Europe in the area around the Baltic Sea. Unfortunately, they didn’t have the discipline of the other more famous orders, and they certainly didn’t have the pope’s immunity from secular authority. They were for all intents and purposes slaughtered in 1236 by a large force of Lithuanians, and the Order was absorbed into the Teutonic Knights after a brief 34-year lifespan. The Order managed to remain its own self-governing division within the Teutonic Knights into the 1500s.
Up Where the Air Is Thin: The Templars Reach Their Zenith
By the 12th century, the Templars were one of the most popular organizations for the nobility to endow, either in life or in death. In fact, in a coup that left people gap-jawed and stunned, the Templars had become so close to King Alphonso I of Aragon that, when he died without an heir in 1131, he willed a third of his kingdom to the Templars, and a third to the Knights Hospitaller. The Reconquista, the battle of Catholic Spain to take back the Iberian peninsula from the Moors, was a battle that had gone on for centuries, ever since the Arabs had swept across the Straights of Gibralter in 711 to invade Spain.
It had gone very well for Alphonso since about 1118, so much so that he was having difficulties protecting the land he’d gained from being reconquered right back again by the Moors. He set up several confraternities of knights to aid him in this effort, though none was expected to take holy orders. He hadn’t had a great deal of success with this plan, and so hoped that the powerful knights of the Latin States could cope with the problem.
But let’s face it — when people start leaving their kingdoms to you, there’s bound to be some jealousy and backbiting, human nature being what it is. Like the tale of a legal nightmare in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, the legal wrangling over such a bequest went on for nine years. The Templars settled for less than they’d been bequeathed, just in order to get on with the thing. But it was still an unprecedented windfall, causing resentment on the part of some of the crowned heads of Europe and the East.
All three papal bulls concerning the Templars were important, but there was one small exemption that, in the end, proved far more powerful than the others.
Templars were given a papal exemption for the purpose of moneylending. For several centuries, Jews had been the principle moneylenders in Europe, for two reasons:
● The Catholic church of the Middle Ages had declared usury to be a sin.
● The Jews were a people apart, object of ceaseless prejudices, one of them being that Jews were not allowed to join any of the medieval labor guilds.
As the Templar banking organization grew, helping pilgrims to travel more safely to the Holy Land, they began taking on other banking tasks, as well. Their squeaky-clean ethics and their meticulous record keeping were a big plus in this endeavor. Not only merchants and knights, but nobles and kings began borrowing from the Templars, or using their vaults to store valuables during unstable times. Just sentimental little things, like the Crown Jewels of England. For the Second Crusade, Louis VII borrowed money for the mission from the Templars. From there it grew into a family tradition, until, by the late 12th century, the Templars were the de facto treasurers of the French royal family. Other kings began to depend on them, though not to the degree of the French kings.
The pope, too, depended heavily on the financial services of the Templars. It was an admirably modern system, with careful records kept, receipts given, and regular statements sent out to important clients. The Templars got innumerable perks in return, and in many cases were trusted to both collect various taxes and to take them to the Holy Land. Apart from actually being a pope or a king, they were about as high as high ever gets.
They say when you sup with the devil, eat with a long spoon. We would suggest that when conjugating with royalty, you’d be safer with an even longer sword. The power given over to the Templars was staggering, unmatched by any other medieval organization. But with wagonloads of money changing hands, it was probably only a matter of time before the Templars came to grief. Royalty of the Middle Ages had a persistent habit of making promises they had no intention of keeping, while they resented the poor schmuck left holding the promise — not to mention their discomfort with anyone who was the keeper of too many dangerous royal secrets.