The Knights Templar E-Book

Michael Kerrigan

• Herausgeber: Amber Books Ltd
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 282

Beschreibung

The Templars, the Knights Hospitallers, the Teutonic Knights – the chivalric orders founded during the Crusades evoke romantic images of warrior monks who were fierce but spiritual, chaste and pious yet battle-ready. But what were they really like? How did their organisations form, rise and decline? And how much of what we think about them is myth? The Knights Templar tells the stories of the major and minor military orders from the 11th century to – in the case of the surviving orders – the present day. Organised chronologically, the book follows the fates of orders, from the foundation of the Knights of St Peter in 1053 to the major crusading era in the Holy Land in the 12th and 13th centuries, from the Teutonic Knights in the Baltic to the Reconquista in Iberia and on to the Hospitallers’ later ventures in the Mediterranean and even in the Caribbean. Full of surprising details, the book not only explores how the military and religious aspects of the orders were reconciled, but also looks more broadly at the orders’ work, from the Templars’ role in the development of modern banking to hospital, castle and cathedral building, from the Teutonic Knights’ treatment of non-believers to the Hospitallers’ battles against Barbary pirates. Illustrated with 180 colour and black-&-white photographs, artworks and maps, The Knights Templar is a fascinating history of about some of Europe’s most often misunderstood organisations.

Leseprobe

THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR

FROM CATHOLIC CRUSADERS TO CONSPIRING CRIMINALS

MICHAEL KERRIGAN

This digital edition first published in 2021

Published byAmber Books LtdUnited HouseNorth RoadLondon N7 9DPUnited Kingdom

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Copyright ©2021 Amber Books Ltd

ISBN: 978-1-83886-153-7

All rights reserved. With the exception of quoting brief passages for the purpose of review no part of this publication may be reproduced without prior written permission from the publisher. The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. All recommendations are made without any guarantee on the part of the author or publisher, who also disclaim any liability incurred in connection with the use of this data or specific details.

Other related titles include:

The Medieval Knight

by Phyllis G. Jestice

The Crusades

by Chris McNab

The Plantagenets

by Ben Hubbard

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Contents

Introduction

1. The First Knights

2. Sworn to Serve

3. Holy War, Unholy Shambles

4. Might and Mystique

5. Before a Fall

6. Siege Mentality

7. A Long Retreat

8. The Stuff of Legend

Bibliography

Index

Picture Credits

INTRODUCTION

As the scriptural scenes in this representation of Jerusalem’s Crusader capture (1099) make clear, the medievals saw nothing oxymoronic in the term ‘Holy War’.

Strange as it might seem, the idea of religious monks fighting as warriors made sense to a medieval Christendom that felt that its frontiers – and faith – were under siege.

LITERALLY a boy sent to do a man’s job, Baldwin IV (1161-85) hadn’t fared too badly in the circumstances. He’d been crowned King of Jerusalem in 1174, aged just thirteen. Starting as he meant to go on, he’d immediately mounted a large-scale attack on Damascus, availing himself of acrimonious divisions among the region’s Muslim leaders. Baldwin’s raid had been a triumphant success: he’d returned, his troops laden down with treasures – and the glory of having smashed the Saracens in their capital.

Ironically, the defeat he’d inflicted, compounding existing confusions and deepening rifts, had helped to sweep the charismatic Kurdish leader Salah ud-Din (1137-93) to power as sultan. In years of campaigning, ‘Saladin’ had already shown himself an inspirational leader and a general of flair and daring. Now he was the master of the Muslim Middle East. On the face of it, he was much more than a match for the most precocious teenage hero. Baldwin’s task was only going to get more challenging.

In any case, the Frankish ruler had other difficulties to contend with. He has gone down in history as the ‘Leper King’. Although his condition had been clear since his early teens, its more unsightly symptoms had been slow in showing. Gradually, though, they were beginning to take hold. By his sixteenth birthday, while his face was still for the most part clear, his other extremities were swollen and scabbed with weeping lesions. He was still a warrior-king, however; still resolute in leading his forces from the front – even if his feet and hands had to be bandaged up beneath his battle armour.

The seals of Latin Jerusalem’s King Baldwin IV.

JERUSALEM IN JEOPARDY

Baldwin didn’t have much choice, in fact: the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, established in 1099 after the successful First Crusade, was directly threatened by the rise of Saladin. For any Islamic ruler in the region, the very existence of a realm like this was an irritant; Christian proprietorship over Jerusalem not just an anomaly but an affront. It had been from the top of the Temple Mount that the Prophet Muhammad had made his Mi’raj – his Night Journey to Heaven. The Al-Aqsa Mosque still marks the site of his ascent. Saladin’s hold over Egypt and Syria now firmly established, the re-taking of Jerusalem was his obvious next step. Piety, patriotism and the will to power all demanded it.

So it was that November 1177 saw Saladin once more on the move, with an army some 26,000 strong, heading for the fortified city of Ascalon (now Ashkelon, on the coast some 50km (30 miles) south of Tel Aviv). Baldwin, seeing his intentions, took several hundred knights to see to Ascalon’s preservation. Saladin simply switched his objective: realizing thatBaldwin’s dash to defend the coastal city had left Jerusalem itself unguarded, he turned in his tracks to advance upon the Holy City.

Baldwin was unfazed. Calling together his 370 European knights, he also marshalled anything up to 4000 infantrymen, and ‘ turcopoles’, raised from among the Christianized Arab population locally. Lightly-armoured cavalrymen, they matched the fighting style of the Saracens themselves, wielding scimitars or shooting arrows on the move. All in all, a significant force, then – though it was far outnumbered by Saladin’s, by now advancing on Jerusalem at a complacent stroll.

Baldwin knew he was outnumbered – by rational standards, impossibly so. But that doesn’t appear to have bothered him unduly. Ralph de Diceto (Ralph of Diss), who provided the most authoritative account that history has of these events, was a cleric himself, so wrote with a certain bias, it might be argued. Even so, his account of Baldwin’s leadership, and the implicit trust he placed in God’s support, still chimes with what we know of the young king.

Built around the height from which the Prophet Muhammad made his ‘Night Journey’, the Al-Aqsa Mosque ranks among Islam’s most sacred shrines.

Relying not on spears and swords, bows and arrows, but only on the aid of divine piety, armed and inspired similarly by the sign of the Lord’s cross, his men made haste by night to meet the Saracen; remembering that it is easy for a multitude to be pinned down by a few, and that in the eyes of God there is no difference between winning among many or among few.

The king and his crusaders caught up with the Saracens some miles inland at Montgisard, near modern-day Ramla. Saladin’s army seemed vast, spread out as it was across the open plain. The Franks appeared to be outnumbered a hundredfold. On the other hand, it was evident that no attack was anticipated. Rather than rushing forward to press the advantage of surprise, however, Baldwin called his army to a halt.

FALSE CONFIDENCE, TRUE CROSS

A chaplain walked out before Baldwin’s assembled force. All uncovered and bowed their heads while he held up the sacred reliquary in which a fragment of the ‘True Cross’ was reverently housed. Its ornate golden work blazed like the sun. The relic within, to all appearances, was nothing more than a wooden splinter. It was, however, believed to have come from the actual cross on which Jesus Christ, the Crusaders’ Saviour, had been crucified. No one could look upon it and remain unmoved.

Crusaders inspired by the True Cross, as imagined in the nineteenth century by Gustave Doré (the ‘real’ relic wasn’t much more than splinter-sized).

The Leper King knelt down, made the sign of the cross and gazed up devoutly at the blessed relic, uttering a pious prayer under his breath. He offered his own life – should it be required – in Christendom’s cause. He begged, however, that God would give him victory over the infidel, for the sake of his believers and his Church. With the Lord’s assistance, Baldwin and his forces would maintain and strengthen their hold over those Holy Places in Palestine in which – according to his sacred scripture – Christ had walked. Only when this devotional duty had been done did he at last order the attack upon the Saracens – who had now had several precious minutes to prepare.

No modern reader will be surprised to learn that Baldwin’s charge was readily rebuffed. The Saracens formed a solid front against their enemy’s advance. Vast as it was, however, Saladin’s force was still widely dispersed across a considerable area of country. It wasn’t really battle-ready; its leaders were comfortably at their ease. They didn’t expect to have to fight in earnest until they reached Jerusalem. They were quite unready for the attack that now took place.

Saladin fleeing the scene of his abject humiliation at Montgisard, by an unknown artist of the nineteenth century.

TEMPLAR TIME

Ralph de Diceto describes what happened when at this point a unit of Knights Templar entered the fray. Though dressed and armed as mounted knights, they’d taken vows as monks, in token of which their steel cuirasses were covered by snow-white mantles, surmounted by the bright red cross of their religious order. There were 84 of them in Baldwin’s army, led by their Grand Master, Eudes de Saint-Amand (1110–79). At his command, they formed their four ranks up into a single wedge-shape as they cantered forward. Then:

Spurring all together, as one man, they made a charge, turning neither to the left nor to the right. Recognising the battalion in which Saladin commanded many knights, they manfully approached it, immediately penetrated it, incessantly knocked down, scattered, struck and crushed.

The Saracens, Ralph de Diceto continued, were ‘dispersed everywhere; everywhere turned in flight; everywhere given to the mouth of the sword.’ The impact of the Templars’ attack was as disproportionate as it was dramatic. ‘One chased 1000, and two put 10,000 to flight,’ Ralph says.

This engraving, based on Gustave Doré’s drawing, shows the Saracen army broken by the charge of Eudes de Saint-Amand’s Knights Templar.

Poise personified as a general rule, the Saracens’ leader was reduced to abject panic: ‘Saladin was smitten with admiration, seeing his men dispersed,’ we’re told. ‘He took thought for himself and fled, throwing off his mailshirt for speed, mounted a racing camel and barely escaped with a few of his men.’ For Saladin’s friend and biographer, Baha ad-Din (1145–1234), it was ‘a disastrous event, a terrible catastrophe’.

DIVINE INTERVENTION

With the benefit of so many centuries of hindsight, it’s easy enough for us to see how Eudes de Saint-Amand’s Knights Templar were in the right formation at just the right time. And how overconfidence – and the sloppy deployment it allowed – undermined the strength of what should have been a far superior Saracen force. Those involved don’t seem to have seen things that way, though.

If Baha ad-Din’s impersonal language of ‘event’ and ‘catastrophe’ appears calculated to shift at least some of the blame from Saladin himself, Christian accounts seem no more eager to credit Baldwin with ‘his’ victory. If they do bestow praise on the young Frankish king, it’s for the blessed favour he enjoyed in the sight of God: Montgisard was a triumph of strictly spiritual shock and awe. In their account, Baldwin’s pause to display and venerate the True Cross relic is not a blunder but the essential prelude to a pious victory.

In making sense of Baldwin’s win, we make calculations of psychology and tactical theory unavailable to a medieval mind that at the same time took the idea of divine involvement and intervention in its stride. These days, even devout believers by and large would not expect God to take a direct and immediate interest in such affairs of state or to enlist so obviously in forcing this or that outcome in the field of war. In the Middle Ages, it seemed natural enough that the God of Christendom would be a partisan for his forces on the ground, just as the Muslims sought and expected Allah’s backing. Hence the ‘catastrophic’ character of his defeat for Saladin – so much worse than a personal or political humiliation; a mark of divine displeasure, it must have seemed to him and to his men.

Baldwin’s biographer, his former tutor William of Tyre (c. 1130–86), was so concerned that God should have the glory of the victory, the modern scholar Michael Staunton notes, that he made a point of remarking on the absence of important Christian fighters from the field. Listing several major figures who hadn’t managed to make the battle – from the Prince of Antioch to the Counts of Tripoli and Flanders – he insists that this too had been divinely ordained. If they had been there, says William, the Christians might all too easily have concluded that ‘Our hand has triumphed; the Lord has not done all this.’

A symbol of revolt against religious repression, Judas Maccabeus became an inspiration for Christian Crusaders so many centuries later.

OF MYTHS AND MEN

This account, as Staunton says, makes Montgisard a re-run of Gideon’s triumph over the Midianites, in the biblical Book of Judges (chapters 6–8). There the Jewish leader’s 300 men prevail over an enemy many tens of thousands strong – a clear example of God’s favour towards his ‘Chosen People’. In comparing Eudes de Saint-Amand with Judas Maccabeus, leader of a famous Jewish rebellion against Persian domination in 167–60 bce, William was developing the same sort of parallel – even if Maccabeus belonged to the (mytho-)historical rather than the scriptural tradition.

If God was intervening so directly in the affairs of mortal men and women, then none of the normal rules could be expected to apply. It wasn’t just that the usual odds and probabilities were thrown into confusion so that there was ‘no difference between winning among many or among few’. All the conventional rules were under suspension: a boy-king could be a match – and more – for an experienced and accomplished general; a powerful army put to flight by a comparatively trivial attack.

Indeed, if what was at issue was the greatness of God – rather than the drabber details of what we would now understand as history – then the weaker the instrument, the greater the glory to the Lord. The ‘human factor’ was all but absent. In allegorizing the achievements of men like Baldwin and Saint-Amand, the chroniclers may have been building up their heroic stature – but they were also, paradoxically, robbing readers of any real sense of these characters as men.

William of Tyre’s chronicles reflected his role as tutor to the boy-king Baldwin IV. He later developed a bias against the military orders.

HOLY GHOST?

SEVERAL ONLOOKERS, shocked to see the Saracen army so unceremoniously routed at Montgisard, swore they’d seen them driven headlong by the mounted figure of St George. The dragon-slaying knight-atarms was reputed to be buried not far away at Lydda (now Lod): why wouldn’t he have risen from the dead to lend his assistance in this sacred cause?

His military valour, and his connections with the Holy Land, made George the obvious patron saint for the Crusaders. He was typically represented in art as a medieval-style knight. Longer-standing legends had always represented him as a Roman soldier – though by background he was believed to have been Greek. A convert to Christianity, he had supposedly been martyred for his faith at Lydda in an early persecution by the Emperor Constantine. Constantine the Great (c. 272–33) had of course himself later been baptized and made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. St George’s shrine at Lydda had been built during his reign. (This great basilica still stands – though since the middle of the thirteenth century it’s been a mosque.)

St George and the Dragon, as shown in a mosaic at Maloula, Syria.

That men and women in the twelfth century saw things very differently than we do goes without saying. The depth of those differences is easily underestimated, even so. What are we to make, for example, of the Knights Templar, whose charge behind Eudes de Saint-Amand appears to have turned the tide at Montgisard? How do we account for their existence, even – a religious order, upholding Christian teaching, yet at the same time a company of knights? Highly trained, tightly disciplined and ready at a moment’s notice to fight to the death for the Saviour who had blessed the ‘peacemakers’?

As this colourful – but bewilderingly violent – thirteenth-century miniature makes clear, the Middle Ages were a time of widespread war.

IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE SCRIPTURE

Christ had of course been quite explicit in instructing his disciples to reject violence. ‘Do not resist an evil-doer’, he’d told his followers (Matthew 5, 39). ‘If someone strikes youon the right cheek, offer him the other too’ (Matthew 5, 39). A few lines later, he’d summed up his doctrine in the form of a new commandment: Love your enemies (Matthew 5, 44). He had, of course, as unambiguously asserted that ‘I bring not peace, but the sword’ – even if most scriptural scholars assumed he was here speaking figuratively, referring to doctrinal contention rather than to military conflict.

It was all a matter of interpretation, of course. The ‘truth’ of the Christian scriptures may never have been up for doubt, but that didn’t mean complete and uncontested agreement about what specifically they meant. Even the most honest and pious readers could see things differently. The more learned they were, indeed; the more complex and sophisticated their scholarly perspective, the more difficulties they tended to discern. Centuries of exegesis, far from clarifying things, had underlined the ambiguity of all linguistic utterance, the provisionality of the most apparently definitive assertion.

EVEN THE MOST HONEST AND PIOUS READERS COULD SEE THINGS DIFFERENTLY.

As for the moral universe: that was still less stable and secure. In a real world in which evil didn’t just exist but thrive, some degree of compromise seemed called for. Christ’s injunction to ‘love our enemies’ might make sense as a rule for the individual’s conduct of personal interactions – demanding as it was. But could it seriously be said to be adequate as an approach to social organization or statecraft? Was a Christian kingdom really supposed to give free rein to murderers or violent brigands, or allow itself – or its neighbours or allies – to be invaded?

WORD AND DEED

‘In the beginning was the Word …’ says St John’s Gospel (1, 1). Where, however does the Word end and action for a Christian (or a Christian polity) begin? Christ himself had highlighted the problem: ‘By their fruits shall you know them,’ he’d said of the ‘false prophets’ he expected to tempt his followers. What mattered ultimately wasn’t what they said but what they did. Those actions had to take place in the real world, which meant some recognition on the Christians’ part of how that real world worked. But the argument for a practical, realistic faith could quite clearly be an excuse for over-comfortable compromise. With its rich and powerful papacy and its far-reaching network of alliances with temporal rulers, the Church of Christ could be criticized on just these grounds. Even at this time, some argued for a more wholesale and whole-hearted rejection of ‘the world’.

Knights Templar prepare to attack Jerusalem, from an eleventh-century manuscript.

That same continuing tension has exerted its pull throughout the whole of Christian history. For many, Christ’s message has seemed at its heart to be anarchistic in its tendency – a turning away from the great structures of conventionally established state and society, with all the inequalities and injustices that attend on them. Seeing the pomp and opulence surrounding so many religious leaders, Christians have often found themselves drawn to the idea of a stripped-down, ‘back-to-basics’ faith that would be closer to the Gospel ideal.

The Church, as through the Middle Ages it grew in worldly wealth and political power, clearly compromised the integrity of the creed of Christ. There’s no disputing that many of its leaders displayed immense hypocrisy and cynicism, enriching and empowering themselves at the expense of their believers – and, ultimately, with the Reformation, of their faith.

A WAR FOR PEACE

If religion was to make a difference in the world, it had to engage with worldly issues and institutions. Those movements – pure in spirit as they may have been – that sought to opt out of society and its everyday affairs were by their very nature exceptional. Their viability arguably depended on the existence of a more conventional and socially-conformist Christianity to kick against. Where they didn’t dwindle quickly away, disappearing into utter irrelevance, it was by making some sort of accommodation with the ecclesiastical status quo. Hence the enduring influence of St Francis of Assisi (1182–1226). His mendicant ‘Franciscan’ friars rejected all the status and comfort available to the wider clergy of the time, but never challenged the authority of the Church.

CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS

CHRISTIANITY’S coming-of-age, the emergence of what had been a strange little Jewish sect as a great religion, had famously come under the Emperor Constantine the Great. Roman power may have been well past its height by the time he ascended the throne, but he still reigned over the world’s greatest state – which was still the centre of a vast and mighty empire.

The Roman mindset had remained a military one, then, and it had indeed been the promise of victory in battle that had inspired Constantine’s conversion. The night before the Battle of Milvian Bridge (312), it was said, he’d seen a vision of a great gold cross spanning the heavens above him, with the glowing legend in hoc signo vinces – ‘in this sign you will prevail’. Loving one’s neighbour was all very well, but ancient rulers were naturally disposed to judge their deities by their ‘talismanic’ strength – their ability to bring good fortune, or victory in war.

Constantine’s adoption of Christianity as the official state religion of the Roman Empire may have ‘made’ it as a creed, but it also locked it in to a particular relationship with temporal power. That relationship was to remain in force throughout the Middle Ages – and arguably, in some societies, down to the present day.

A sixteenth-century representation of the Battle of Milvian Bridge.

Right: St Augustine articulated a famous theory of the ‘Just War’.

Nowhere did the tensions between the idealist and the realist strands in Christianity show more starkly than in the question of war, its rights and wrongs. How could it ever be justified?, asked the idealists. How could it not be?, the realists retorted. ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ the Old Testament commanded (Exodus, 20, 13); return good for evil, Christ had urged – but, many Christians now reflected, to let wickedness thrive was a wicked act itself.

The first and most influential attempt to formulate a coherent jus ad bellum (law of warfare) was made in the fifth century by St Augustine (354–430), the Bishop of Hippo, a coastal city in North Africa. Most famous for his Confessions (380), and for the contribution of a dark, unsparingly self-critical strand to Christian consciousness, Augustine also explored a wide range of other issues.

Writing at a time when the Empire’s capital, Rome, was under attack from a succession of barbarian invaders, he argued (in De Civitate Dei, c.420) that the spiritual City of God was similarly beleaguered. Like the individual conscience, besieged by a host of selfish, sinful desires, the Christian faith was being constantly assaulted too. Although Augustine saw the danger as coming as much from the Church’s own internal enemies – heretics and reckless reformers – he saw foreign paganism as a threat as well. And while his deep spirituality and theological sophistication can’t seriously be disputed, neither can the stark simplicity of his conclusion: Christian orthodoxy had to be defended fiercely, if necessary by force.

War as an end in itself was evil, but as the promotion of a better outcome it was not just defensible but vital. ‘We do not seek peace in order to be at war,’ he said, ‘but we go to war that we may have peace.’ The ‘Just War’, he argued, was one ‘that avenges wrongs, when a nation or state has to be punished, for refusing to make amends for the wrongs inflicted by its subjects, or to restore what it has seized unjustly.’

An angel leads the Crusaders towards Jerusalem, in a Gustave Doré-inspired engraving.

As such it was the earthly instrument of a general, divinely originating morality – one which owed nothing to personal resentments or prestige. ‘True religion’, wrote Augustine, ‘looks upon as peaceful those wars that are waged not for motives of aggrandisement, or cruelty, but with the object of securing peace, of punishing evil-doers, and of uplifting the good.’

The motive to war should, for Augustine then, be as far as possible impersonal. Those who fought should do so for principle rather than for pique or pride. An exacting standard morally maybe – but, as the modern theological scholar John Langan suggests, once met, one that absolved the individual fighter of real responsibility. There’s little sense of Augustine’s finding any dissonance in the idea of the Christian soldier killing in Christ’s name. Basically, the Christian duty to ‘turn the other cheek’ is trumped by the higher cause of being instrumental in the enactment of the will of God. The let-off is especially striking given Augustine’s notorious severity over personal morality, his belief that the individual soul is mired in sinfulness unless saved by God.

FOUNDED IN FAITH

OUTSIDE ORPHIR, on Orkney’s windswept mainland, stand the ruins of a once-magnificent church, originally constructed in the early years of the twelfth century. Round in plan, it is known to have been inspired by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem – itself believed to have been built over the last earthly resting place of Jesus Christ.

In 1111, Earl Haakon Paulsson had quarrelled with his neighbour Earl Magnus. The pagan Viking was, it’s reported, angered as much by Magnus’ Christian piety as by his refusal to give up his lands. In his fury, Haakon had given the order to his men to murder Magnus, who was accordingly to be revered as a martyr for his faith.

Haakon himself was so remorseful when he saw what he had done that he converted to Christianity himself and embarked on a pilgrimage to expiate his guilt. His journey took him from one end of the medieval world to the other, from Christendom’s northernmost frontier to the Holy Land. He had this church built in commemoration on his return.

In a way we can only vaguely apprehend, the medieval spiritual order seems to have been constructed spatially. We see this in everything from the idea of pilgrimage (a geographical journey that in some sense enacts a personal, moral and spiritual one) to the ordering of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven in Dante’s Divine Comedy (1320). Within this religious geography, Jerusalem clearly had a special place: its defence was seen as one of Christianity’s central tasks. Haakon’s pilgrimage to foreign climes had in its way been a sort of homecoming, his Orphir church a sacred souvenir.

It’s easy enough to see how, confronted with such arguments, the medieval believer might come to see such military service as redemptive in itself. How a young man in the Middle Ages might even feel positively impelled to enlist in what historians have described as ‘penitential warfare’. There’s no doubt that medieval knights did see service in the Holy Land as a kind of quasi-pilgrimage, their departure on crusade a spiritual quest.

A priest rallies the ranks of the Crusaders.

PILGRIM SOULS

Modern scholars have rightly been concerned to strip away some of the myth-making that surrounded the Crusades in their own time and the idealizing views of a predominantly Eurocentric historiography in the centuries since. But if some degree of cynicism about these ventures is appropriate, the cruder debunkings of our day go much too far. Claims that they represented an ‘imperialist’ project on a par with nineteenth-century European colonialism rest on hopelessly caricatured views of both episodes. The suggestion that, in any meaningful way, they anticipated the twenty-first century’s alleged ‘wars for oil’ in the Middle East appear even more ludicrously far-fetched.

In any case, whatever underlying economic or political purposes we may imagine really motivated the West, we have no reason to doubt the authenticity with which the Crusaders thought they acted. Christian believers really did believe – not necessarily literally, to the letter of the Gospel Word, but in what they saw as its spirit they believed intensely. They appear to have believed implicitly that, their own eternal salvation being at stake, any sacrifice in the earthly life was well worth making.

Although it would be perverse to imagine that medieval men and women were any ‘better’ than us, or less prone than we are to self-serving cynicism or hypocrisy, we’d surely be wrong to doubt the deep conviction of their faith. That they didn’t succeed in living up to their Christian ideals in all the details of their daily lives doesn’t make their grander gestures of piety or penitence insincere.

THEIR OWN ETERNAL SALVATION BEING AT STAKE, ANY SACRIFICE IN THE EARTHLY LIFE WAS WELL WORTH MAKING.

CONFLICTS AND CONTRADICTIONS

Hence the readiness of so many young men to enlist in military orders like the Knights Templar – and their society’s willingness to recognize this as a meaningful vocation. If from our perspective their lifestyle may seem self-evidently un-Christian, that view would quite clearly have disturbed and baffled them.

All the indications are, for that matter, that it would have been equally surprising to their Muslim enemies, for whom the duty of Jihad (‘struggle’) was freely assumed to include military resistance against un-belief. Modern Islamic scholars are at pains to point out that the word encompasses more intellectual and spiritual strivings too, and that it isn’t a straightforward endorsement of the idea of ‘holy war’. There’s no doubt though, that since the Prophet’s proclamation of his Islamic faith in the years following his first revelation of 610, his message had been carried far and wide through a succession of Arab conquests. By the end of the millennium, the Islamic world had extended from east to west through Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and all the way up the Iberian Peninsula to the Pyrenees – and at times beyond.

The Christian West was bound to define itself, politically and culturally, against this ‘Other’ – just as the Islamic world feared and scorned the Christian kafir (‘infidel’). Even when the two rival camps weren’t openly and violently in conflict, a state of something like ‘Cold War’ was to prevail between them into early-modern times. The success of Geoffrey de Bouillon’s First Crusade (1096–9) in reconquering Jerusalem had only intensified the enmity between Islam and Christendom.

If the Knights Templar’s purpose seems contradictory, then, that’s in large part because they embodied the contradictions of their time, one in which there was real fighting to be done in the name of a real faith. That the worldview they represented was profoundly problematic and ultimately unsustainable doesn’t mean they didn’t have a role in their historic moment – even if it helps explain the troubles they would encounter in the longer term.

Christ was the implicit inspiration for every crusade. Here we see him literally leading, with sword and scripture.

1

THE FIRST KNIGHTS

Spiritual and secular authority come together in the person of Baldwin I – seen here entering Edessa, 1098.

Intriguing parallels between the chivalric and the clerical vocations made their combination almost inevitable in time.

A KNIGHT ther was, and that a worthy man …’, wrote the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales, c. 1390: ‘That fro the tyme that he first bigan/To riden out, he loved chivalrie,/Trouthe and honour, fredom [the word here means ‘nobility’] and curtesye.’ Knighthood is for us the stuff of literature and legend, but it was the stuff of history as well – even if the real thing didn’t measure up to the romance in all respects. Chaucer’s ‘verray parfit, gentil knight’ did assuredly exist – though there was much more to him than immediately met the poet’s eye.

It’s easier for us to appreciate this other, darker side of his than it was for medieval witnesses, perhaps. The purported magnanimity and generosity of the chivalric elite is shown up ironically by what we all too clearly see as the systematic exploitation and oppression of the masses. Enormous economic inequality – and a system pretty much devoid of democratic freedom for the populace at large – would have had to underwrite the sort of social relations that helped to produce Chaucer’s paragon. But we’d be wrong to write off his admirable qualities as merely made-up or mythic: there genuinely was a chivalric tradition in which valour and skill in war went along with courtesy.

Formidably strong in the field of war but kind and courteous in his manner, Chaucer’s Knight embodied the ideals of chivalry.

KNIGHTLY VIRTUES

Days drilling in sword- and shield-play; practice in the saddle with lance and mace; their skills regularly tested in tournaments, if not actually in battle … Knights were professional soldiers, highly trained. But they were also supposed to be superbly well versed in a range of softer, more sociable accomplishments. The word ‘gentle’ itself was cognate with ‘genteel’ and ‘gentility’; just as ‘courtesy’ came directly from the ‘court’ – that little social circle clustering around a king or leading lord. By the same token, ‘chivalry’ (from the French word chevalier, meaning ‘horseman’, or knight) towards women was also seen as a mark of superior breeding – both in upbringing and in ancestry. Again, the assumption was that the knight’s courage and accomplishment in arms were what enabled him to exercise mercy, compassion and politeness, his mild-manneredness a measure of his strength.

The knight was supposed to be the protector of all the weak, but of women especially. Naturally enough, this had important implications for relations between the sexes. Chivalric society wasn’t just about long evenings feasting and carousing with