The British paperback edition of The Tragedy of the Templars will be published on 26 June 2014. The following is the Prologue of the book, complete with endnotes.
* * *
ON FRIDAY 2 OCTOBER 1187, after a twelve-day siege, and less
than a century after the victorious climax of the First Crusade, the
inhabitants of Jerusalem surrendered their city under the terms allowed them by
Saladin. Those who could afford to pay their ransom were free to walk towards
the coast; those who could not pay were to be taken away as slaves. A few
Knights Hospitaller were permitted to remain to run their hospital for pilgrims
located in the heart of the city adjacent to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
The knights of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ were driven out altogether –
their headquarters had been the Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount. The Franks
believed that the Aqsa mosque had been built on the very site of the Templum
Solomonis, as they called it in Latin, and it was not long before the knights became
known as the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon; or,
simply and most famously, the Templars.
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| The Templars' Jerusalem headquarters was the Aqsa mosque, which they believed to be the palace of Solomon on the Temple Mount. |
Saladin’s order to purify Jerusalem ‘of the
filth of the hellish Franks’,1 in the words of his secretary
Imad al-Din, began with the Aqsa mosque, for the Templars had been ‘overflowing
with impurities’ so that ‘slackness in purifying it is forbidden to us’. 2 The
walls and floors of the Aqsa mosque and the nearby
Dome of the Rock were cleansed with rosewater and incense; then Saladin’s
soldiers went about the city tearing down churches or stripping them of their
decorations and converting them to mosques and madrasas, ‘to purify Jerusalem
of the pollution of those races, of the filth of the dregs of humanity, to
reduce the minds to silence by silencing the bells’. 3 Only the
Church of the Holy Sepulchre was spared, Saladin saying that it would pay its
way by charging Christian pilgrims an extortionate entrance fee. 4
To the Franks of Outremer – ‘the land across
the sea’, as the crusader states were called – the fall of Jerusalem was seen
as the terrible judgement of God. Saladin’s capture of the city even suggested
to some that Christianity was an inferior belief to Islam. ‘Our people held the
city of Jerusalem for some eighty-nine years’, wrote the anonymous author of
the De Expugnatione Terrae Sanctae per Saladinum. ‘Within a short time,
Saladin had conquered almost the whole Kingdom of Jerusalem. He exalted the
grandeur of Mohammed’s law and showed that, in the event, its might exceeded
that of the Christian religion.’5
 |
| The Temple Mount with the Aqsa mosque in the foreground and the Dome of the Rock at the centre. |
Frankish misery was more than matched by
Muslim exultation. ‘The victory of Islam was clear, and so was the death of
Unbelief’,6
wrote Imad al-Din, as though Christianity itself was destroyed that day.
For maximum effect, Saladin had waited until Friday 27 Rajab in the Muslim
calendar, the anniversary of Mohammed’s Night Journey from Jerusalem into
Heaven, to take possession of the city. ‘What a wonderful coincidence!’
exclaimed Ibn Shaddad, Saladin’s biographer and friend.7 Saladin
radiated the triumph of jihad as he entered the city, sat upon a throne ‘which
seemed as if surrounded by a lunar halo’ and gave an audience to receive
congratulations. ‘His carpet was kissed, his face glowed, his perfume was
sweet, his affection all-embracing, his authority intimidating.’8 Saladin
carefully presented his capture of Jerusalem as a great victory for the jihad
for, like the ‘propagandistic posing’9 of purifying
the Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock, it gave out the message that he and
his family, the Ayyubids (from his father, Ayyub), were the effective rulers
and the protectors of Islam, not the caliph in Baghdad. To hammer home the
point, Saladin ordered that gold coins be struck describing him as ‘the sultan
of Islam and the Muslims’.10
 |
| The dome of
the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on the right; the church stands on a
hill overlooking the Dome of the Rock seen on the right. |
Yet since 1174, when Saladin became sultan
of Egypt and began his independent career, though notionally subject to the
Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, he had campaigned against the Franks for barely more
than a year; all the rest of his campaigns were directed against his fellow
Muslims, whom he defamed as heretics and hypocrites, and who in turn saw him as
‘a dynast who used Islam for his own purposes’.11 Indeed
right up until 1187, Saladin’s reputation in Muslim eyes amounted to nothing
more than ‘a record of unscrupulous schemes and campaigns aimed at personal and
family aggrandisement’. 12 Not surprisingly, when the news
of Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem reached Baghdad, the caliph was less than
happy, for he had been counting on the Franks to limit Saladin’s ambitions, and
the caliph let it be known through his advisers that ‘this man [Saladin] thinks
that he will overturn the Abbasid dynasty’.13 As the
caliph understood, by his conquest of Jerusalem, though it had no strategic
value, Saladin had won what he most needed to further his dynastic ambitions,
the acquiescence of Muslims to his rule; as Saladin’s adviser Al-Qadi al-Fadil
wrote, he ‘has become my master and the master of every Muslim’.14
As well as using the propaganda of jihad to
make his Muslim rivals submit to his authority or to eliminate them altogether,
Saladin also used jihad as an excuse for imposing Muslim rule on Christians,
who even at this time were still the majority of the population in Syria,
Palestine and Egypt.15 Jihad has its origins in the Koran, which enjoins
Muslims to ‘proclaim a woeful punishment to the unbelievers’16 and to
‘make war upon them: God will chastise them at your hands and humble them’.17 Defined
as a ‘divine institution of warfare’, the purpose of jihad is to extend Islam
into the dar al-harb – that is, the abode of struggle or disbelief (as
opposed to the dar al-Islam, the abode of peace, where Islam and sharia
law prevail); and jihad ends only when ‘the unbelievers have accepted either
Islam or a protected status within Islam’.18 Jihad is
also fought when Islam is in danger, so that when Christians reclaim Christian
territory from Muslim occupation, that too can be a reason for jihad. It was a
concept that perfectly suited Saladin’s ambitions, providing religious justification
for his imperialist war against Outremer.
 |
| The southwest corner of the Temple Mount, headquarters of the Templars. |
Saladin and his army conquered Jerusalem and
made war in the Middle East as an alien power – alien in religion from the
Christian majority and both ethnically and culturally alien from the indigenous
Greek-, Armenian-, Syriac- (that is, Aramaic-) and Arabic-speaking population.
Saladin himself was a Turkified Kurd who began his career serving the Seljuk
Turks, who were invaders from Central Asia, and his army at Jerusalem was Turkish,
though with a Kurdish element.19 The Turks looked down on the
Arabs whose rule in the Middle East they had replaced, and the Arabs viewed the
Turks with bitter contempt; nor is there much evidence ‘of the Arab knights
learning Turkish, the language of their military overlords, nor that the Turks
learned much Arabic’.20 Being alien also meant being indifferent, so that
after his capture of the city Saladin acknowledged that the Franks had ‘turned
Jerusalem into a garden of paradise’;21 yet he himself neglected
Jerusalem and caused it to decline,22 just as he destroyed
everything he could along the coast, regardless of the welfare of the native
population. This was no war of liberation, of reclaiming lost lands; it was the
continuance of previous aggression, of Islamic imperialism driven by Saladin’s
dynastic ambitions.
 |
| Detachments of
Templars protected pilgrims as they made their way along the wilderness
road from Jerusalem to the site of Jesus' baptism in the river Jordan. A
crusader castle stands on the right. |
The disaster had been anticipated by the
Frankish chronicler William of Tyre, who died in 1186, the year before Jerusalem
fell, but who, in recounting how Saladin had begun tightening the noose round
the kingdom of Jerusalem with his seizure of Damascus in 1174, analysed why the
Franks seemed unable to rise to the threat. ‘The question is often asked, and
quite justly, why it was that our fathers, though less in number, so often
bravely withstood in battle the far larger forces of the enemy. [...] In
contrast to this, the men of our times too often have been conquered by
inferior forces.’ William gave three reasons for this situation. First, ‘our
forefathers were religious men and feared God. Now in their places a wicked
generation has grown up.’ The second reason was that, until the advent of
Saladin, the Franks in Outremer had enjoyed a ‘long-continued peace’ with their
Muslim neighbours, so that now ‘they were unused to the art of war, unfamiliar
with the rules of battle, and gloried in their state of inactivity’. But only
with his third reason did William of Tyre identify what in fact was the
fundamental problem. ‘In former times almost every city had its own ruler’, but
now ‘all the kingdoms round about us obey one ruler, they do the will of one
man, and at his command alone, however reluctantly, they are ready, as a unit,
to take up arms for our injury. Not one among them is free to indulge any
inclination of his own or may with impunity disregard the commands of his
overlord.’23
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| The Templars bring a party of pilgrims safely to Jerusalam. |
But in those autumn days of 1187 after
Jerusalem had fallen, neither the faith nor the fighting spirit of the Franks
was entirely overwhelmed. The kingdom of Jerusalem had suffered a comprehensive
defeat from which no feudal monarchy could have emerged with its powers
unimpaired, but the military orders survived and became more important than
before. This was particularly true of the Templars, whose single-minded policy
and purpose was to preserve, to defend and now to regain Jerusalem and Outremer
from the full might of the Turks.
Endnotes
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| Paperback cover for The Tragedy of the Templars. |
1
Imad al-Din, in Gabrieli, Arab Historians of the Crusades, p. 163.
2
Imad al-Din, as quoted by Abu Shama in the Recueil des Historiens
des
Croisades, Historiens Orientaux, vol. IV (Paris, 1898), p. 333, and
translated and reproduced in Hillenbrand, Crusades, p. 301.
3
Imad al-Din, in Gabrieli, Arab Historians of the Crusades, p. 147.
4
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was closed to pilgrims for five
years,
only opening in 1192 and then at a charge of 10 bezants.
5
Anonymous, De Expugnatione Terrae Sanctae per Saladinum; repr.,
trans. Brundage, The Crusades: A Documentary History, p. 163. The
author of De Expugnatione, though anonymous, is thought to have been an
Englishman in the service of Raymond of Tripoli.
6
Imad al-Din, in Gabrieli, Arab Historians of the Crusades, p. 156.
7
Ibn Shaddad, in Hillenbrand, Crusades, 189.
8
Imad al-Din, in Gabrieli, Arab Historians of the Crusades, p. 160.
9
Tyerman, God’s War, p. 353.
10
Hillenbrand, Crusades, p. 180.
11
Lyons and Jackson, Saladin, p. 240.
12
Ehrenkreutz, Saladin, p. 237.
13
Lyons and Jackson, Saladin, p. 280.
14
Ibid., pp. 275–6.
15
See for example Tyerman, God’s War, p. 52: ‘The question of
the
extent of Arabisation and Islamicisation of conquered lands remains obscure and
vexed, but it appears that the process was slow, uneven and, by the eleventh
century, still incomplete. It is not certain whether there was even a Muslim
majority in Syria or Palestine when the crusaders arrived in 1097.’ The
evidence for a Christian majority is far greater than Tyerman admits and will
be dealt with later in this book.
16
Ibid., sura 9, verse 4.
17
The Koran, trans. Dawood, sura 9, verse 14.
18
See Cyril Glassé, The Concise Encyclopaedia of Islam, Stacey
International, London 1991.
19
Hillenbrand, Crusades, p. 444.
20
Ibid., p. 333.
21
Lyons and Jackson, Saladin, p. 276.
22
Ibid., p. 361.
23
William of Tyre, A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea, pp.
406–8.
