The Templars and the Defence of the Holy Land

From the moment that the First Crusade arrived in the Middle
East, the Crusaders started building castles. As in Europe, they served as
residences and administrative centres, as well as having a military function.
But after the Second Crusade the Franks in Outremer found themselves on the
defensive and the military nature of castles became more important. Often large
and elaborate, and continuously improved by the latest innovations in military
science, the Franks built over fifty castles in Outremer. Geography, manpower
and the feudal system all explain this considerable investment in stone.

The Crusader states were long and narrow, lacking defence in
depth. The Principality of Antioch, the County of Tripoli and the Kingdom of
Jerusalem stretched 450 miles from north to south, yet rarely were they more
than 50 to 75 miles broad, the County of Tripoli perilously constricting to the
width of the coastal plain, only a few miles broad, between Tortosa
(present-day Tartus) and Jeble. The inland cities of Aleppo, Hama, Homs and
Damascus all remained in Muslim hands, while Mesopotamia and Egypt were
recruiting grounds for any Muslim counterthrust, as the campaigns of Saladin
and the Mamelukes would show. For the Crusaders the natural defensive line was
the mountains, and they built castles to secure the passes.

Stones more than soldiers were pressed to this purpose as
Outremer was chronically short of men. After the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099
most of the Crusaders returned to Europe; the Kingdom of Jerusalem was
thereafter defended by 300 mounted knights. Despite successive crusades, at no
time during the entire history of the Crusader states were they able to put more
than 2600 horse in the field. Moreover, though there was still a large local
Christian population, these were Orthodox while the Crusaders were a Latin
minority.

Outnumbered and insecure, the Franks of necessity housed
themselves in fortified towns or in castles. Nevertheless, if the Crusader
states were to survive they had to be a going concern, and the Franks set about
organising their possessions along familiar European feudal lines. Castles were
as much centres of production and administration as they were military
outposts–battlemented country houses, containing corn mills and olive presses,
and surrounded by gardens, vineyards, orchards and fields. Their lands in some
cases encompassed hundreds of villages and a peasantry numbering tens of
thousands. Wood to Egypt, herbs, spices and sugar to Europe, were important
exports; indeed throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Europe’s entire
supply of sugar came from the Latin East.

But in times of war, agriculture was always the first
victim. Were it not for Western subvention and the taxes imposed on trade
between the Muslim East and Europe as it passed through the Crusader states,
they would have collapsed sooner than they did. The Latin rulers were always
strapped for cash, the bulk of their revenues going towards the upkeep of
mercenaries, knights and castles. It was a vicious circle; insufficient land
and manpower making castles a necessity; the cost of knights and castles
greater than the productivity of the land could justify.

In this situation the military orders came into their own.
They had the resources, the independence, the dedication–the elements of their
growing power.

Structure of the Templars

THE TOP FIVE OFFICIALS of the Knights Templar were the Grand
Master, the Seneschal, the Marshal, the Commander of the Kingdom of Jerusalem,
and the Draper. Ultimately, the Order owed its allegiance to the Pope–and to no
other authority, spiritual or temporal.

 THE GRAND MASTER
Ruler of the order, the Grand Master was elected by twelve senior Templar
members, the number representing the twelve apostles, plus a chaplain who took
the place of Jesus Christ. The master had considerable but not autocratic
powers.

GRAND CHAPTER Comprised of senior officials. All major
decisions by the Grand Master–such as whether to go to war, agree a truce,
alienate lands, or acquire a castle–required that he consult with the chapter.

 SENESCHAL Deputy and
advisor to the Grand Master.

 MARSHAL Responsible
for military decisions such as purchase of equipment and horses; he also
exercised authority over the regional commanders.

 DRAPER The keeper of
the robes, the Draper issued clothes and bedlinen, removed items from knights
who were thought to have too much, and distributed gifts made to the order.

 REGIONAL COMMANDERS
These were the COMMANDER OF THE KINGDOM OF JERUSALEM, who acted as the order’s
treasurer and within the Kingdom had the same powers as the Grand Master; the
COMMANDER OF JERUSALEM, who within the city had the same powers as the Grand
Master; and the COMMANDERS OF ACRE, TRIPOLI AND ANTIOCH, each with the powers
of the Grand Master within their domains.

 PROVINCIAL MASTERS
France, England, Aragon, Poitou, Portugal, Apulia and Hungary each had a
provincial master who was responsible to the Grand Master.

 THE KNIGHTS,
SERGEANTS and other MEN AT ARMS were subject to these various officers and
their deputies.

A Power Unto Themselves

After the Second Crusade both the Hospitallers and the
Templars came to provide the backbone of resistance to the Muslims, but the
military impetus came from the Templars. The Hospitallers were still an
entirely pacific order when the armed order of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of
Christ came into being. But sometime in the 1120s the Hospitallers extended
their role from caring for pilgrims to protecting them by force of arms if need
be, becoming known as the Knights of the Hospital of Saint John, or Knights Hospitaller,
with Saint John no longer the Almsgiver but replaced by the more imposing
figure of Saint John the Baptist. The first recorded instance of Hospitallers
in combat dates from 1128, eight years or so after the founding of the
Templars; it was the example of the Templars that helped turn the Hospitallers
into a military order.

In due course the military orders were put in possession of
the great castles, a task for which they were perfectly suited. The frontier
castles were remote, isolated and lonely places; they did not appeal to the
secular knighthood of Outremer. But the monastic vows of the military orders
suited them to the dour life of castles where the innermost fortifications
served as monasteries for the brothers. Their members were celibate, which made
them easy to control, and they had no outside private interests. Superbly
trained and highly disciplined, the Hospitallers and the Templars were led by
commanders of considerable military ability; the capabilities of the orders
generally stood in marked contrast to those of the lay institutions of
Outremer.

The orders owed direct responsibility to the Papacy, placing
them above not only local feudal quarrels but the antagonisms of nations and
their kings. As corporate bodies, the orders were everlasting, their numbers
undiminished by disease or death, and they were able to draw on an
inexhaustible supply of young men of noble families in Europe seeking to fulfil
the moral and religious obligations of knighthood. Also the Templars and the
Hospitallers received donations of property in Europe which soon made them
wealthy. Each order levied its own taxes, had its own diplomatic service and
possessed its own fleet of ships. In effect the Hospitallers and the Templars
were states within the state. Very quickly the under-manned and under-financed
Crusader states were selling or giving frontier fortresses to the orders, and
by 1166 there were only three castles in the Kingdom of Jerusalem which the
military orders did not control.

Costing the Templars

Every Templar was a highly trained and expensive mounted
knight. Such a knight in the second half of twelfth-century France required 750
acres to equip and maintain himself as a mounted warrior, and a century later
that cost had quintupled to 3750 acres.

For a Templar knight operating overseas in the Holy Land the
costs were even greater, as much had to be imported, not least horses. Each
Templar knight had three horses, and because they fell victim to warfare and
disease, and had a lifespan of only twenty years, they needed to be renewed at
a rate greater than local breeding allowed. The cost of horses rose six fold
from the twelfth to the thirteenth centuries. Moreover, horses consumed five or
six times as much as a man, and required feeding whether or not they were in
use. A bad harvest in the East, and urgent food supplies had to be shipped in
for men and horses alike.

Each Templar also had a squire to help look after the
horses. And in addition there were sergeants, more lightly armed than knights,
who each had a horse but acted as their own squires. Sergeants were often
locally recruited and wore a brown or black tunic instead of white. In fact for
every Templar knight there were about nine others serving in support, whether
as squires, sergeants or other forms of help. This is not much different from
modern warfare in which every frontline soldier is backed up by four or five
who never see combat, not to mention the many thousands of civilians producing
weapons and equipment and providing clothing, food and transport.

Growing responsibilities increased Templar costs immensely.
As secular lords found themselves unable to maintain and defend their castles
and their fiefs, they handed these responsibilities over to the military
orders. According to Benedict of Alignan, a Benedictine abbot visiting the Holy
Land in the 1240s, the Templars spent 1,100,000 Saracen besants in two and a
half years on rebuilding their castle of Saphet (Safad)–this at a time when a
knight in Acre could live well on 500 Saracen besants a year–and continued to
spend 40,000 Saracen besants in each following year on the day-to-day running
of the castle. Saphet had a complement of 50 Templar knights, 30 mounted
sergeants, as well as 50 mounted archers, 300 crossbowmen, 820 engineers and other
serving men, plus 400 slaves–1650 people, which in wartime increased to 2200,
all of whom had to be housed, fed, armed and kept supplied in various ways.

Only their vast holdings in Outremer and more especially in
the West permitted the Templars to operate on such a scale and recover after
losses and setbacks to continue the defence of the Holy Land.

Ruins of the castle of Baghras – a.k.a. Gastim – built in 1153 by the Templar Knights to control the Syrian [Belen] Gates, the mountain pass between Alexandretta and Antioch. It was forced to capitulate to Saladin in 1189. Retaken and restored in 1191 by the Armenians, the castle was returned to the Templars in 1216. In 1268, before having to surrender to the attack of Sultan Baibars, the Templars dismantled Gastim and set it on fire.

Templar Castles

When the First Crusade marched into the Middle East it came
over the Belen Pass, about sixteen miles north of Antioch, that same crossing over
the Amanus mountains that Alexander the Great had taken 1400 years before,
after crushing the Persian army of Darius III at the battle of Issus. Known
also as the Syrian Gates, the Belen Pass was the doorway into Syria and it was
also the northern frontier of Outremer. Sometime in the 1130s the task of
defending the pass was given to the Templars. Their key fortress was Baghras,
built high above the pass itself, and the Templars built several others in the
Amanus mountains. These castles formed a screen across the northern frontier
where the Templars ruled as virtually autonomous border lords, effectively
independent of the Principality of Antioch.

The Templars also took charge of the Kingdom of Jerusalem’s
southern frontier with Egypt when they were made responsible for Gaza during
the winter of 1149–50. Gaza was uninhabited and ruinous at this time, but the
Templars rebuilt a fortress atop a low hill and slowly the Franks revived the
city around it. This was the first major castle in the Kingdom of Jerusalem
that the Templars are recorded as receiving, and its purpose was to complete
the blockade of Ascalon ten miles to the north, a small patch of territory on
the Mediterranean coast still held by the Fatimids. Ascalon had long been the
base for Muslim attacks on pilgrims coming up the road from Jaffa to Jerusalem
or descending to the river Jordan, and in 1153 the city finally fell to Baldwin
III, the king of Jerusalem. The Templars played a prominent part in this
triumph, for they were first into the breach when a section of the walls came
down, yet William of Tyre was predictable in turning this against them when he
claimed in his chronicle that their eagerness was due to their greed for
spoils. In fact the Templars lost forty or so knights in the attack, and their
Grand Master lost his life.

Another vital strategic site as well as an important spot
for pilgrims was Tortosa (present-day Tartus) on the Syrian coast. Said to be
the place where the apostle Paul gave his first mass, a chapel dedicated to the
Virgin Mary was built there in the third century, long before Christianity was
officially tolerated within the Roman Empire, and it contained an icon of the
Virgin said to have been painted by Saint Luke. To help the pilgrims who came
to pray, the Crusaders built upon this history with the construction of Our
Lady of Tortosa in 1123, an elegant cathedral which architecturally marks the
transition from the Romanesque to the Gothic. But in 1152 Nur al-Din captured
and burnt the city, leaving it deserted and destroyed; and as the County of
Tripoli lacked the means for its restoration, Tortosa was placed in the care of
the Templars, who greatly improved its defences, building a massive keep and
halls within a triple circuit of tower-studded walls, and with a postern in the
seawall enabling the city to be supplied from sea.

The strategic significance of Tortosa was that it stood at
the seaward end of an opening in the range of coastal mountains which runs back
into the interior towards the Muslim city of Homs. Towards the eastern end of
this Homs Gap, as it is called, and towering high above the route between the
interior and the sea, is the great castle of Krak des Chevaliers gained by the
Hospitallers in 1144, while in the mountains between Krak and Tortosa is the
castle of Chastel Blanc, now known as Safita, already in the hands of the
Templars some time before 1152. From the roof of the massive keep at Chastel
Blanc can be seen both Krak des Chevaliers to the east and the Templar castle
of al-Arimah to the west on the Mediterranean coast just south of Tortosa. In
short the Templars, together with the Hospitallers, entirely controlled the one
important route between the interior of Syria and the sea. Moreover, they did
so with sovereign rights within their territories, having been granted full
lordship over the population of their estates, the right to share in the spoils
of battle, and the freedom to have independent dealings with neighbouring
Muslim powers.

In the 1160s the Templars took over further castles, this
time across the Jordan river at Ahamant (present-day Amman) and in Galilee at
Saphet (also called Safad) to which was added Chastellet in 1178. Gaza,
Ahamant, Saphet and Chastellet were all within the Kingdom of Jerusalem but
close to its borders where they served defensive purposes. Chastellet covered
Jacob’s Ford, the northernmost crossing point of the river Jordan, previously a
weak point where Saladin came down out of Damascus and made easy raids against
the Christians. So alarmed was Saladin when the Templars installed themselves
at Chastellet that he immediately attacked, failing in his first attempt in
June 1179 but two months later storming the castle and taking seven hundred
prisoners whom he then slaughtered, although the Templar commander threw
himself to his death to avoid capture.

More centrally placed was La Feve at the crossroads of the
route between Jerusalem and Acre via Galilee. Acquired by the Templars in about
1170, it served as a major depot for arms, tools and food, and it housed a large
garrison. It was later the launching point for the expedition that led to the
disastrous defeat at the Springs of Cresson on 1 May 1187, a foreboding of the
catastrophe at Hattin.

As well as fighting in the defence of the Kingdom of
Jerusalem, the Templars continued to fulfil their original role of protecting
pilgrims coming up to the holy sites at Jerusalem from the ports of Acre, Haifa
and Jaffa, or going down from Jerusalem to the Jordan river. One of the duties
of the Templar commander in Jerusalem was to keep ten knights in reserve to
accompany pilgrims to the Jordan and to provide a string of pack animals to
carry food and exhausted travellers. The Templars had a castle overlooking the
site at the Jordan river where Jesus had been baptised, to protect not only
pilgrims but also the local monks after six of them were gratuitously murdered
by Zengi.

The acquisition of castles was accompanied by lands which
helped to support them, especially around Baghras, Tortosa and Saphet. In these
areas the Templars held many villages, mills and much agricultural land. The
details are lacking because of the destruction of the Templar archives on
Cyprus by the Ottoman Turks in the sixteenth century. But from what can be
pieced together it seems that the orders between them, the Hospitallers and the
Templars, may have held nearly a fifth of the lands in Outremer by the middle
of the century, and by 1188, the year of the Battle of Hattin, something like a
third.