The Knights Templars

The Lord de Joinville, the friend of king Louis, and one of the bravest of the French captains, gives a lively and most interesting account of the campaign, and of the exploits of the Templars. During the march towards Cairo, they led the van of the christian army, and on one occasion, when the king of France had given strict orders that no attack should be made upon the infidels, and that an engagement should be avoided, a body of Turkish cavalry advanced against them. “One of these Turks,” says Joinville, “gave a Knight Templar in the first rank so heavy a blow with his battle-axe, that it felled him under the feet of the Lord Reginald de Vichier’s horse, who was Marshal of the Temple; the Marshal, seeing his man fall, cried out to his brethren, ‘At them in the name of God, for I cannot longer stand this.’ He instantly stuck spurs into his horse, followed by all his brethren, and as their horses were fresh, not a Saracen escaped.” After marching for some days, the Templars arrived on the banks of the Tanitic branch of the Nile, (the ancient Pelusiac mouth of the river,) and found the sultan encamped with his entire force on the opposite side, to prevent and oppose their passage. King Louis attempted to construct a bridge to enable him to cross the stream, and long and earnestly did the Templars labour at the task, “but,” says Joinville, “as fast as we advanced our bridge the Saracens destroyed it; they dug, on their side of the river, wide and deep holes in the earth, and as the water recoiled from our bridge it filled these holes with water, and tore away the bank, so that what we had been employed on for three weeks or a month they ruined in one or two days.” To protect the soldiers employed upon the construction of the bridge large wooden towers were erected, and chas chateils or covered galleries, and the infidels exerted all their energies to destroy them with the terrible Greek fire. “At night,” says Joinville, “they brought forward an engine called by them La Perriere, a dreadful engine to do mischief, and they flung from it such quantities of Greek fire that it was the most horrible sight ever witnessed… This Greek fire was like a large tun, and its tail was of the length of a long spear; the noise which it made was like to thunder, and it seemed a great dragon of fire flying through the air, giving so great a light with its flame, that we saw in our camp as clearly as in broad day.”

The military engines and machines were all burnt, and the Christians were about to yield themselves up to despair, when a Bedouin Arab offered, for a bribe of five hundred golden bezants, to show a safe ford. At dawn of day, on Shrove Tuesday, the French knights mounted on horseback to make trial of the ford of the Bedouin. “Before we set out,” says Joinville, “the king had ordered that the Templars should form the van, and the Count d’Artois, his brother, should command the second division after the Templars; but the moment the Count d’Artois had passed the ford, he and all his people fell on the Saracens, and putting them to flight, galloped after them. The Templars sent to call the Count d’Artois back, and to tell him that it was his duty to march behind and not before them; but it happened that the Count d’Artois could not make any answer by reason of my Lord Foucquault du Melle, who held the bridle of his horse, and my Lord Foucquault, who was a right good knight, being deaf, heard nothing the Templars were saying to the Count d’Artois, but kept bawling out, ‘Forward! forward!’ (‘Or a eulz! or a eulz!’) When the Templars perceived this, they thought they should be dishonoured if they allowed the Count d’Artois thus to take the lead; so they spurred their horses more and more, and faster and faster, and chased the Turks, who fled before them, through the town of Mansourah, as far as the plains towards Babylon.”127

The Arabian writers, in their account of the entry of the Templars into Mansourah, tell us that 2,000 horsemen galloped into the place sword in hand and surprised Fakho’ddin Othman, commonly called Ibn Saif, the Moslem general, and one of the principal Mamlook emirs, in the bath, and barbarously cut him to pieces as he was painting his beard before a glass.128 But the impetuous courage of the Count d’Artois and the Templars had led them far away from the support of the main body of the army, and their horsemen became embarrassed in the narrow streets of Mansourah, where there was no room to charge or manœuvre with effect. The infidels rallied; they returned to the attack with vast reinforcements; the inhabitants of the town mounted to their house-tops, and discharged stones and brickbats upon the heads of the christian knights, and the Templars were defeated and driven out of the city with dreadful carnage. “The Count d’Artois and the Earl of Leicester were there slain, and as many as three hundred other knights. The Templars lost, as their chief informed me, full fourteen score men-at-arms, and all their horsemen.” The Grand Master of the Temple also lost an eye, and cut his way through the infidels to the main body of the christian army, accompanied only by two Knights Templars. There he again mixed in the affray, took the command of a vanguard, and is to be found fighting by the side of the lord de Joinville at sunset.

At the close of the long and bloody day, the Christians regained their camp in safety. King Louis, Joinville, and the Grand Master of the Temple had been fighting side by side during a great part of the afternoon; Joinville had his horse killed under him, and performed prodigies of valour. He was severely wounded, and on retiring to his quarters he found that a magnificent tent had been sent to him by the Grand Master of the Temple, as a testimony of regard and esteem. On the first Friday in Lent, Bendocdar, the great Mamlook general and lieutenant of the sultan of Egypt, advanced at the head of a vast army of horse and foot to attack the Crusaders in their intrenchments. King Louis drew out his army in battle array, and posted them in eight divisions in front of the camp. The Templars, under their venerable Grand Master, formed the fourth division, and the fate of their gallant chieftain is thus described by the lord de Joinville. “The next battalion was under the command of Brother William de Sonnac, Master of the Temple, who had with him the small remnant of the brethren of his order who survived the battle of Shrove Tuesday. The Master of the Temple made of the engines which he had taken from the Saracens a sort of rampart in his front, but when the Saracens marched up to the assault, they threw Greek fire upon it, and as the Templars had piled up many planks of fir-wood amongst these engines, they caught fire immediately; and the Saracens, perceiving that the brethren of the Temple were few in number, dashed through the burning timbers, and vigorously attacked them. In the preceding battle of Shrove Tuesday, Brother William, the Master of the Temple, lost one of his eyes, and in this battle the said lord lost his other eye, and was slain. God have mercy on his soul! And know that immediately behind the place where the battalion of the Templars stood, there was a good acre of ground, so covered with darts, arrows, and missiles, that you could not see the earth beneath them, such showers of these had been discharged against the Templars by the Saracens.”129

The command over the surviving brethren of the order now devolved upon the Marshal, Brother Reginald de Vichier, who, collecting together the small surviving remnant of the Templars, retreated to the camp to participate in the subsequent horrors and misfortunes of the campaign. “At the end of eight or ten days,” says Joinville, “the bodies of those who had been slain and thrown into the Nile rose to the top of the water. These bodies floated down the river until they came to the small bridge that communicated with each part of our army; the arch was so low that it prevented the bodies from passing underneath, and the river was consequently covered with them from bank to bank, so that the water could not be seen… God knows how great was the stench. I never heard that any who were exposed to this infectious smell ever recovered their health. The whole army was seized with a shocking disorder, which dried up the flesh on our legs to the bone; and our skins became tanned as the ground, or like an old boot that has long lain behind a coffer… The barbers were forced to cut away very large pieces of flesh from the gums to enable their patients to eat; it was pitiful to hear the cries and groans, they were like the cries of women in labour.”

The army attempted to retreat when retreat was almost impossible; the soldiers became dispersed and scattered; thousands died by the way-side, and thousands fell alive into the hands of the enemy, among which last were the king and Joinville. They were both attacked by the disease, and king Louis laid himself down to die in an Arab hut, where he was found and kindly treated by the Saracens. Reginald de Vichier, the Marshal of the Templars, and a few of his brethren, reached Damietta in safety, and took measures for the defence of the place. All those of the prisoners who were unable to redeem their lives by services as slaves to the conquerors, or by ransom, were inhumanly massacred, and a grim circle of christian heads decorated the walls and battlements of Cairo. The Egyptians required as the price of the liberty of the French monarch the surrender of all the fortresses of the order of the Temple in Palestine; but the king told them that the Templars were not subject to his command, nor had he any means of compelling them to give effect to such an agreement. Louis and his friend Joinville at last obtained their deliverance from captivity by the surrender of Damietta, and by the payment of two hundred thousand pieces of gold; and the liberation of the king’s brother, and of the other captive nobles and knights was to be purchased by the payment of a similar sum. The king immediately went on board the French fleet which was at anchor before Damietta, and exerted himself to raise the residue of the ransom; and all Saturday and Sunday were employed in collecting it together.

“On Sunday evening,” says Joinville, “the king’s servants, who were occupied in counting out the money, sent to say that there was a deficiency of thirty thousand livres. I observed to the king that we had better ask the commander and Marshal of the Temple, since the Master was dead, to give us the thirty thousand livres. Brother Stephen d’Otricourt, knight commander of the Temple, hearing the advice I gave to the king, said to me, ‘Lord de Joinville, the counsel you give the king is not right nor reasonable, for you know that we receive every farthing of our money on our oaths;’ and Brother Reginald de Vichier, who was Marshal of the Temple, said to the king, ‘Sire, it is as our commander has said, we cannot dispose of any of the money intrusted to us but for the means intended, in accordance with the rules of our institution, without being perjured. Know that the seneschal hath ill advised you to take our money by force, but in this you will act as you please; should you, however, do so, we will make ourselves amends out of the money you have in Acre.’ I then told the king that if he wished I would go and get the money, and he commanded me so to do. I instantly went on board one of the galleys of the Templars, and demanded of the treasurer the keys of a coffer which I saw before me. They refused, and I was about to break it open with a wedge in the king’s name, when the Marshal, observing I was in earnest, ordered the keys to be given to me. I opened the coffer, took out the sum wanting, and carried it to the king, who was much rejoiced at my return.” King Louis returned with the Templars to Palestine; and was received with great distinction by the order at Acre, where he remained four years!

In the year 1251 a general chapter of Knights Templars being assembled in the Pilgrim’s Castle, the Marshal, Brother Reginald de Vichier, who had commanded with great skill and prudence in Egypt after the death of Brother William de Sonnac, was chosen to fill the vacant dignity of Grand Master. Henry III., king of England, had assumed the cross shortly after intelligence had been conveyed to England of the horrors and atrocities committed by the Carizmians in the Holy City. Year after year, he had promised to fulfil his vow, and the pope issued numerous bulls, kindly providing for the tranquillity and security of his dominions during his absence, and ordered prayers to be offered up to God for the success of his arms, in all the churches of Christendom. King Henry assembled a parliament to obtain the necessary supplies, and fixed the 24th day of June, A. D. 1255, as the period of his departure. His knights and barons, however, refused him the necessary funds, and the needy monarch addressed the military orders of the Temple and the Hospital in the following very curious letter. “As you are said to possess a well-equipped fleet, we beseech you to set apart for our own use some of your strongest vessels, and have them furnished and equipped with provisions, sailors, and all things requisite for a twelvemonth’s voyage, so that we may be able, ere the period for our own departure arrives, to freight them with the soldiers, arms, horses, and munitions of war that we intend to send to the succour of the Holy Land. You will also be pleased to provide secure habitations and suitable accommodation for the said soldiers and their equipage, until the period of our own arrival. You will then be good enough to send back the same vessels to England to conduct ourselves and suite to Palestine; and by your prompt obedience to these our commands, we shall judge of your devotion to the interests of the Holy Land, and of your attachment to our person.”130

King Louis, in the mean time, assisted the Templars in repairing the fortifications of Jaffa and Cæsarea. The lord de Joinville who was with him tells us that the scheik of the assassins, who still continued to pay tribute to the Templars, sent ambassadors to the king to obtain a remission of the tribute. He gave them an audience, and declared that he would consider of their proposal. “When they came again before the king,” says Joinville, “it was about vespers, and they found the Master of the Temple on one side of him, and the Master of the Hospital on the other. The ambassadors refused to repeat what they had said in the morning, but the Masters of the Temple and the Hospital commanded them so to do. Then the Masters of the Temple and Hospital told them that their lord had very foolishly and impudently sent such a message to the king of France, and had they not been invested with the character of ambassadors, they would have thrown them into the filthy sea of Acre, and have drowned them in despite of their master. ‘And we command you,’ continued the Masters, ‘to return to your lord, and to come back within fifteen days with such letters from your prince, that the king shall be contented with him and with you.’” The ambassadors accordingly did as they were bid, and brought back from their scheik a shirt, the symbol of friendship, and a great variety of rich presents, “crystal elephants, pieces of amber, with borders of pure gold,” &c., &c. “You must know that when the ambassadors opened the case containing all these fine things, the whole apartment was instantly embalmed with the odour of their sweet perfumes.”

The treaty entered into between king Louis and the infidels having been violated by the murder of the sick at Damietta, and by the detention, in a state of slavery, of many knights and soldiers, as well as of a large body of christian children, the Templars recommenced hostilities, and marched with Joinville and the French knights against the strong castle of Panias, and after an obstinate resistance, carried the place sword in hand. The sultan of Damascus immediately took the field; he stormed the Temple fort Dok, slaughtered the garrison, and razed the fortifications to the ground; the castle of Ricordane shared the same fate, and the city of Sidon was taken by assault, (A. D. 1254,) whilst the workmen and artificers were diligently employed in rebuilding the walls; eight hundred men were put to the sword, and four hundred masons and artificers were taken prisoners and carried off to Damascus. After residing nearly two years at Acre, and spending vast sums of money upon the defences of the maritime towns of Palestine, king Louis returned to France. He set sail from Acre on the 24th of April, with a fleet of fourteen sail, his ship being steered by Brother Rèmond, the pilot of the Grand Master of the Temple, who was charged to conduct the king across the wide waters in safety to his own dominions. On his arrival in France, Louis manifested his esteem for the Templars by granting them the château and lordship of Bazèes, near Bauvez, in Aquitaine. The deed of gift is expressed to be made in consideration of the charitable works which the king had seen performed amongst the Templars, and in acknowledgment of the services they had rendered to him, and to the intent that he might be made a participator in the good works done by the fraternity, and be remembered in the prayers of the brethren. This deed was delivered on the day of Pentecost to Brother Hugh, Grand Preceptor of Aquitaine, in the cathedral church of Angouleme, in the presence of numerous archbishops, bishops, counts, and barons.131

At the period of the return of the king of France to Europe, Henry the Third, king of England, was in Gascony with Brother Robert de Sanford, Master of the Temple at London, who had been previously sent by the English monarch into that province to appease the troubles which had there broken out. King Henry proceeded to the French capital, and was magnificently entertained by the Knights Templars at the Temple in Paris, which Matthew Paris tells us was of such immense extent that it could contain within its precincts a numerous army. The day after his arrival, king Henry ordered an innumerable quantity of poor people to be regaled at the Temple with meat, fish, bread, and wine; and at a later hour the king of France and all his nobles came to dine with the English monarch. “Never,” says Matthew Paris, “was there at any period in bygone times so noble and so celebrated an entertainment. They feasted in the great hall of the Temple, where hang the shields on every side, as many as they can place along the four walls, according to the custom of the order beyond sea…” The Knights Templars in this country likewise exercised a magnificent hospitality, and constantly entertained kings, princes, nobles, prelates, and foreign ambassadors at the Temple. Immediately after the return of king Henry to England, some illustrious ambassadors from Castile came on a visit to the Temple at London; and as the king “greatly delighted to honour them,” he commanded three pipes of wine to be placed in the cellars of the Temple for their use, and ten fat bucks to be brought them at the same place from the royal forest in Essex. He, moreover, commanded the mayor and sheriffs of London, and the commonalty of the same city, to take with them a respectable assemblage of the citizens, and to go forth and meet the said ambassadors without the city, and courteously receive them, and honour them, and conduct them to the Temple.132

During the first and second years of the pontificate of pope Alexander IV. ten bulls were published in favour of the Templars, addressed to the bishops of the church universal, commanding them to respect and maintain the privileges conceded to them by the holy see; to judge and punish all persons who should dare to exact tythe from the fraternity; to institute to the ecclesiastical benefices of the order, all clerks presented to them by the preceptors, without previously requiring them to make a fixed maintenance for such clerks, and severely to punish, all who appropriated to their own use the alms gifts and eleemosynary donations made to the brotherhood. By these bulls the Templars are declared to be exempt from the duty of contributing to the travelling expenses of all nuncios and legates of the holy see, under the dignity of a cardinal, when passing through their territories, unless express orders to the contrary are given by apostolic letters, and all the bishops are required earnestly and vigorously to protect and defend the right of sanctuary accorded the houses of the Temple.133

In the year 1257, Brother Reginald de Vichier, the Grand Master of the Temple, fell sick and died, at an advanced age. He was succeeded by the English Knight Templar Brother Thomas Berard. Shortly after his election the terrible Moguls and Tartars, those fierce vagrant tribes of shepherds and hunters, whose victorious arms had spread terror and desolation over the greater part of Europe and Asia, invaded Palestine, under the command of the famous Holagou, and spread themselves like a cloud of devouring locusts over the whole country. The Templars, under the command of Brother Etienne de Sisi, Grand Preceptor of Apulia, hastened to meet them, and were cut to pieces in a sanguinary fight. The Tartars besieged and took the rich and populous cities of Aleppo, Hamah, Hems, Damascus, Tiberias, and Naplous, and at last entered in triumph the holy city of Jerusalem.134 The Grand Master Brother Thomas Berard wrote a melancholy letter to king Henry the Third for succour. “With continual letters and many prayers,” says he, “has our poor Christianity on this side the sea besought the assistance of the kings and princes of this world, and above all, the aid and succour of your majesty, imploring your royal compassion with sighs and tears, and a loud sounding voice, and crying out with a bitter cry in the hope that it would penetrate the royal ear, and reach the ends of the earth, and arouse the faithful from their slumbers, and draw them to the protection of the Holy Land.”135 The king of England, however, was in pecuniary embarrassments, and unable to afford the necessary succour. He was reduced, indeed, to the cruel necessity of borrowing money in France upon the security of his regalia and crown jewels, which were deposited in the Temple at Paris, as appears from the letter of the queen of France “to her very dear brother Henry, the illustrious king of England,” giving a long list of golden wands, golden combs, diamond buckles, chaplets, and circlets, golden crowns, imperial beavers, rich girdles, golden peacocks, and rings innumerable, adorned with sapphires, rubies, emeralds, topazes, and carbuncles, which she says she had inspected in the presence of the treasurer of the Temple at Paris, and that the same were safely deposited in the coffers of the Templars.136

In the mean time the Mamlooks, “who had breathed in their infancy the keenness of a Scythian air,” advanced from the banks of the Nile to contend with the Tartars for the dominion of Palestine. Under the command of Bendocdar, the Mamlook general, they gained a complete victory over them in the neighbourhood of Tiberias, and drove back the stream of hostility to the eastward of the Euphrates. Bendocdar returned to Egypt the idol of his soldiers, and clothed with a popularity which rendered him too powerful for a subject. He aspired to the possession of the throne which he had so successfully defended, and slew with his own hand his sovereign and master Kothuz, the third Mamlook sultan of Egypt. The Mamlooks hailed him with acclamations as their sovereign, and on the 24th day of October, A. D. 1260, he was solemnly proclaimed sultan of Egypt, in the town of Salahieh in the Delta. Bendocdar was one of the greatest men of the age, and soon proved the most formidable enemy that the Templars had encountered in the field since the days of Saladin. The first two years of his accession to power were employed in the extension and consolidation of his sway over the adjoining Mussulman countries. The holy cities of Mecca and Medina acknowledged him for their sovereign, as did Damascus, Aleppo, Hems, and Jerusalem. His sway extended over Egypt, Nubia, Arabia, and Syria; and his throne was defended by twenty-five thousand Mamlook cavalry. His power was further strengthened by an army of one hundred and seven thousand foot, and by the occasional aid of sixty-six thousand Arabians.

After receiving the homage and submission of the rulers and people of Aleppo, Bendocdar made a hostile demonstration against the vast and wealthy city of Antioch; but finding the place well defended, he retired with his army, by way of Hems, Damascus, and Tiberias, to Egypt. The next year (A. D. 1264) he crossed the desert at the head of thirty thousand cavalry, and overran all Palestine up to the very gates of Acre. He burned the great churches of Nazareth and Mount Tabor; and sought to awaken the zeal and enthusiasm of his soldiers in behalf of Islam by performing the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and visiting with great devotion the Mosque of Omar. He then retired to Cairo with his troops, and the Templars and Hospitallers became the assailants. They surprised and stormed the castle of Lilion, razed the walls and fortifications to the ground, and brought off three hundred prisoners of both sexes, together with a rich prize of sheep and oxen. On the 15th of June, they marched as far as Ascalon, surprised and slew two Mamlook emirs, and put twenty-eight of their followers to the sword. They then turned their footsteps towards the Jordan, and on the 5th of November, they destroyed Bisan or Scythopolis, and laid waste with fire and sword all the valley of the Jordan, as far as the lake of Tiberias.