Holy Warriors Page 36
Baibars’s death did not mean the end of the Mamluk threat. In contrast to many previous successions in the Muslim world there was no civil war. After a brief reign by Baibars’s son, the former sultan’s chief emir, Qalawun, emerged in power. He was another former slave, nicknamed “al-Alfi,” the thousander, on account of the high price that he had fetched at auction. He served his master well and his daughter had married into the sultan’s family; he was also a highly experienced soldier. Soon he had to confront the Mongols because in 1280 they plundered Aleppo. A year later, at the Battle of Homs, two huge armies met and practically obliterated each other; the carnage was immense but Qalawun held the field and so the victory went to him.
By the late 1280s the pattern familiar from Baibars’s reign was repeating itself. Major Christian castles and cities fell with alarming regularity: Marqab in 1285, Latakia in 1287, and Tripoli in 1289. The Mamluks genuinely intended to erase the Frankish presence. Qalawun began to focus on Acre, the settlers’ capital city; it would be a huge challenge to breach its massive defenses, but if the sultan succeeded it would definitively break Christian power in the Holy Land. A truce was in operation but when a group of newly arrived crusaders killed Muslim farmers in Acre, the sultan had a casus belli. Since his success at Tripoli he had employed military inspectors to ensure that the castles near Acre were ready for war and he ordered the construction of special siege engines from Lebanese cedar wood. Before he could act, however, Qalawun was fatally poisoned. On his deathbed he was said to have urged his son, al-Ashraf, to take Acre and to avenge the blood of the Saracens slain by the crusaders.64
THE END OF THE FRANKISH EAST: THE FALL OF ACRE
In March 1291 al-Ashraf gathered a huge army, assembled from Egypt, Palestine, and Syria; meanwhile any Franks who lived in the countryside fled behind the walls of Acre. The city was crammed with refugees; perhaps thirty to forty thousand men, women, and children defended by around eight hundred knights and thirteen thousand footmen. Al-Ashraf sent a letter to the master of the Templars that conveyed unyielding menace:
The Sultan of Sultans, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, al-Malik al-Ashraf, the Powerful, the Dreadful, the Scourge of Rebels, Hunter of Franks and Tartars and Armenians, Snatcher of Castles from the Hands of Miscreants, Lord of the Two Seas, Guardian of the Two Pilgrim Sites. . . . We send you advance notice of our intentions, and give you to understand that we are coming into your parts to right the wrongs that have been done. We do not want the community of Acre to send us any letters or gifts for we will by no means receive them.65
On April 5, 1291, the siege began when al-Ashraf pitched his red tent with its entrance facing the city of Acre. Soon the Muslims brought forward enormous siege engines, mighty machines that could fire stones weighing about fifty kilograms each. One was called “Furious;” another, “the Victorious,” took one hundred wagons to transport it (in kit form) from its home at Krak des Chevaliers; two other huge machines are also known to have been used.
Boldly, the Franks took the initiative and charged out of the city gates to harass the Muslim camp. They also sent out ships from the harbor and landed troops near the enemy lines to fire bows and portable ballistas. One particularly heavy raid penetrated the Muslim camp and caused panic—an emir fell into the latrine pit and drowned—but a swift counterattack drove back the Christians with heavy casualties. Over the weeks, however, the pressure on the Franks increased; the Muslims hid behind huge padded wicker screens that deflected artillery fire and, protected by these devices, they moved up to the ditch outside the city. Such was their numerical superiority that they could work four shifts a day and still remain fresh.
The Christians gained some relief from the arrival of King Henry II of Cyprus and a cease-fire was declared. The king tried to negotiate but al-Ashraf was not prepared to leave without taking the city and would only offer free passage to the defenders and its inhabitants. Henry could never agree to this “because the people overseas would hold us to be traitors;” he did not want to be the man who had surrendered the capital of the Christian presence in the Holy Land.66 Under the cover of a heavy bombardment the Muslims mined the outer wall and the Tower of the King and created a breach of such dimensions that the defenders panicked. More and more women and children were evacuated to Cyprus—the dismal Mamluk navy meant that Christian shipping was fairly safe.
The beating of a huge drum “which had a horrible and mighty voice,” as one eyewitness characterized it, signaled a general onslaught. The Muslims advanced on foot; first came shield-bearers, behind them men hurled Greek fire, and next came javelin-throwers and archers. They spread out between Acre’s inner and outer walls and concentrated on two gates that barred the city. William of Beaujeu, the master of the Templars, left his own tower and rushed toward the Gate of Saint Anthony. The Muslims continued their terrible bombardment of Greek fire, arrows, and spears; when the knights charged at them “it seemed as if they hurled themselves against a stone wall.”67 In the middle of the engagement William was grievously wounded when a javelin hit him under the armpit. When the standard-bearer saw him turn his horse away he followed, assuming that William was leading a retreat, but others called out for the master not to leave or else the city would fall. William revealed his wound and collapsed forward, almost falling from his mount. Men rushed to hold him in the saddle and then eased him onto a shield and carried him to the Templar headquarters inside the citadel. He lived one day longer, asking only to be left to die in peace.
The Muslims poured into the city and took tower after tower. The French regiment founded by Louis IX fought bravely but nothing could withstand the onslaught. King Henry and the master of the hospital saw that all was lost, boarded boats, and fled to Cyprus; May 18, 1291, was an inauspicious day for the Latin hierarchy. Not everyone was so fortunate; women and children remained and many were soon slaughtered. The Templar compound was the last place of refuge, the strongest location of all. At last an agreement of safe conduct was made. A group of Muslim horsemen came in and, according to Muslim and Christian sources, started to molest the female prisoners. Furious, the Franks attacked and killed them. Al-Ashraf claimed to accept responsibility for this incident and he asked to talk to the senior Templars. Once they were in his possession, however, he beheaded them all; in response, five Muslim prisoners were precipitated from the walls. For the surviving knights and citizens in the Templar tower there was no hope of escape. After ten days a corner in the complex was mined, and as the defenders surrendered it collapsed, killing Muslims and Christians alike. More carnage ensued—Franciscan and Dominican friars, female mendicants (the Poor Clares) were slain, while long lines of women and children were led off into slavery. Thus the city of Acre fell. The Christian capture of Jerusalem in 1099 and the Muslim victory at Acre in 1291 bookended the crusader presence in the Holy Land with massacres of exceptional savagery. Within a short time Sidon, Beirut, Athlit, Jubail, and Tyre capitulated as well. On August 3, 1291, when the last group of knights left Tortosa for the tiny isle of Ruad, just over a mile off the Syrian shore, it marked the end of Christian rule on the mainland. Almost two hundred years after the First Crusaders had achieved an improbable victory at Jerusalem, their successors fled for their lives, or died. The Franks had fought hard but their penchant for ruinous political infighting, the failure of Louis’s crusades, and the lack of further meaningful help from the West, coupled with the focus and strength of their Mamluk opponents, meant the end of an era. Al-Ashraf had fulfilled Saladin’s ambition at last. As the Muslim writer Ibn al-Furat wrote in a panegyric to his successful sultan:
Because of you no town is left in which unbelief can repair, no hope for the Christian religion! Through al-Ashraf the lord sultan, we are delivered from the Trinity, and Unity rejoices in the struggle! Praise be to God, the nation of the Cross has fallen; through the Turks the religion of the chosen Arab has triumphed!68
FROM THE TRIAL OF THE TEMPLARS TO FERDINAND AND ISABELLA, COLUMBUS, AND THE CONQUEST OF THE NEW WO
RLD
THE TRIAL OF THE TEMPLARS
As dawn broke on Friday, October 13, 1307, royal officials smashed their way into Templar priories and commanderies across France and arrested hundreds of knights.1 The men were accused of a series of profane reception rituals that included: the denial of Christ’s divinity, saying that he was a false prophet; spitting on the cross; kissing the officiating knight on the mouth, navel, and genitals; worshipping false idols; and engaging in further homosexual acts.2 This was a very contentious move on the part of the French crown because the Templars were the most feared and formidable warriors in Christendom; in modern terms it would be comparable to a claim that the U.S. Marines were disloyal to the American government and then, within years, disbanding them.
The crackdown was sudden and largely unexpected. The decision to persecute the Templars can, in part, be explained by the personality of their chief adversary, King Philip IV “the Fair” (a reference to his good looks, rather than his character) of France (1285–1316). Philip was an austere man of high moral tone and it is possible that he saw some truth in the allegations and felt justified in moving to end the pollution of a religious order. Yet other, less lofty, ideals were in evidence too: expensive wars against England and Flanders meant that Philip owed the Templars massive sums of money and the need to repair his ailing finances was strongly rumored to underlie his actions. Recent events had rendered the order strangely susceptible to these accusations and to leap from the Templars’ arrest to their complete destruction in only five years demonstrates peculiar vulnerability in a group hailed by many as the bravest of the brave. One trivial indication of the Templars’ customary standing was their central role in Parzival, the popular story of the Holy Grail, composed in the first decade of the thirteenth century: who, other than the Templars, were fit to be the guardians of this most sacred object? Yet there had been complaints about the Templars’ wealth, and sometimes their greed, for decades. Churchmen, in particular, grumbled about their substantial landholdings in western Europe (over nine thousand properties) and resented their exemptions from ecclesiastical taxes. Such corporate riches were a long, long way from the simple and rigorous path of founding father Hugh of Payns and his eight companions back in 1120, but this stupendous accumulation of property reflected their long-lasting popularity among lay donors, grateful for the Templars’ protection during pilgrimages and their efforts in fighting the Muslims. In any case, these vast resources were vital because of the phenomenal cost of developing and holding spectacular castles such as Krak des Chevaliers. By 1307, however, the Templars’ prime problem was one of perception. With the expulsion of the Christians from Acre in 1291 many felt that the order had failed in its primary task, the defense of the Holy Land, and for this reason it became far more open to criticism than before. The Templar master, James of Molay, had a rather different perspective: to him, the Holy Land fell because of the indifference of western Europe and it was in an attempt to gather new crusading armies that he happened—fatefully for him—to be in France during late 1307.
Long before 1291 there had been discussions about a merger between the Templars and the other great Military Order, the Hospitallers. The latter’s medical vocation gave them an additional and important raison d’être, and it was intimated that the united order would follow a rule closer to the Hospitallers’ charitable way of life with less of the Templars’ more militaristic focus. James vociferously opposed the plan because he feared his organization would be absorbed into the Hospitallers and, more seriously, that the new entity would come under the dominance of one of the scheme’s most enthusiastic advocates, Philip of France.3 Crucially—and again, an issue of circumstance—one prime source of protection for any religious order was particularly feeble at this time: the frail Pope Clement V (1305–14) was based in Poitiers rather than Rome and there were times when he seems to have been bullied by the same French churchmen responsible for his election to the papal crown.4
Once Philip had the order in his sights he moved extremely fast: Templar property was seized and the crown initiated a vicious and wide-ranging propaganda campaign against the knights. The king gave his officers a sweeping mandate to discover the “truth.” He wrote of “the strength of the presumptions and suspicions” raised and he described the Templars as “enemies of God, religion and nature, those opponents of human society.” Philip acknowledged that some of the men might be innocent, but argued that it was still appropriate they “should be tested in the furnace like gold and cleared by due process of judicial examination.”5 The king had convinced himself of the knights’ guilt and he mandated torture as an entirely legitimate way to extract a confession.6 Inquisitors used a variety of horrific techniques, including the application of fire to a prisoner’s feet; a process accelerated by smothering the feet in fat before they were placed in the flames. To allow further questioning a board could be placed between the feet and the fire and on occasion the torture was so extreme that some of the victim’s foot bones dropped out. The rack, a triangular-shaped frame onto which the detainee was tied, was another option open to the interrogators. A windlass was attached to the ropes that bound the prisoner’s ankles and wrists and when it was turned their joints dislocated. Finally, there was the strappado, a procedure in which a prisoner’s hands were tied behind his back and attached to a rope passed over a ceiling beam. Weights could be attached to his testicles or feet before the knight was hoisted high off the ground and then allowed to plummet down, the rope stopping him inches from the floor and the violent deceleration causing excruciating pain. In October and November 1307, 138 knights were questioned and in the face of such a terrifying array of machinery only four failed to confess to some or all of the crimes alleged. The testimony of James of Molay was damning—he admitted to the denial of Christ (although like many colleagues he claimed to have spoken such words without meaning them in his heart) and spitting on the cross; other Templars confessed to kissing on the mouth and stomach. James was made to repeat his disclosure before the scholars of Paris University, thus providing vital publicity for King Philip’s case.7
By Christmas, however, Clement had begun to stand his ground a little, furious at Philip’s uncompromising and extensive interference in Church matters. Soon he suspended the French Inquisition and sent his own cardinals to see the Templars; unsurprisingly they all retracted their statements and claimed they were given under extreme duress. By 1308 Clement established a papal commission and many of the knights continued to plead their innocence. Brother Ponsard of Gizy stated that “if he continued to be tortured he would deny everything he was now saying and would say whatever any man wanted. While he was prepared to suffer death by decapitation, fire or boiling water for the honour of the Order, he was incapable of bearing such long torments as he had suffered in the more than two years he had been in prison.”8 The recent discovery of a document hidden for centuries in the labyrinthine Vatican archives sheds fascinating new light on the ebb and flow of these proceedings. In spite of Philip’s continued obstruction, a papal commission managed to meet the Templar leaders at the castle of Chinon on the River Loire in August 1308. In the presence of the pope’s representatives the master and his companions denied the charges against them and were duly absolved of heresy—an intriguing development that showed, at this point, Clement’s unwillingness to accept certain of the accusations directed at the order.9
James of Molay began to make a positive case for his brethren: he emphasized their religiosity and frequent veneration of proper relics; he also noted their generosity to the poor in alms-giving and their willingness to risk life and limb in their vocation of fighting the Muslims.10 While Molay’s efforts were of limited effect, the defense mounted by Brother Peter of Bologna, a man trained in canon law, was considerably more powerful. He challenged the jurisdiction of Philip’s churchmen and also raised what was, arguably, the most telling factor in this whole inquiry: the progress of other investigations across Christian Europe. As he indicated: “O
utside the kingdom of France no brother of the Temple can be found in whatever country on earth who tells or has told these lies; hence it is plainly obvious why these lies were told in the kingdom of France, namely because those who told them were corrupted by fear, persuasion or bribery when they made their depositions.”11 In complete contrast to Philip the Fair, King Edward II of England and King James II of Aragon flatly refused to countenance the idea that the Templars were guilty, and in Germany and Cyprus—without the use of torture—the inquisitors secured no confessions at all.12 In fact, in the case of Cyprus, for which a manuscript of the trial hearings survives, numerous non-Templar witnesses testified to the good faith and charity of the brothers.13 The only other areas where confessions were made were Navarre and Naples—both regions ruled by relatives of the Capetian royal house.
Philip’s response to the Templars’ show of defiance was swift and effective. In May 1310 the archbishop of Sens, a close associate of the crown, convoked a council to judge the individual charges against the Templars in his custody. He pushed aside objections from Peter of Bologna and rejected the idea that his process was running counter to the papal inquiry. On May 12 he ordered fifty-four knights, all hopelessly protesting their innocence, to be loaded onto carts and burned to death in a field near the convent of Saint Antoine outside Paris. By this brutal display of force Philip broke the resistance of many of the brothers and more began to make confession and seek absolution.14