SALADIN, WHO HAD TAKEN advantage of the Prophet’s permission to have multiple wives, left seventeen sons behind him, all of whom had to be provided for. The oldest, al-Afdal, who was twenty-two years old, got off to a bad start by calling Muslim nobles together to demand their sworn allegiance to him. They resented his requirement that they swear to divorce their wives and disinherit their children as a penalty for breaking their oaths of allegiance. His unbounded arrogance put them off.
His young brother al-Aziz was in Cairo, where he declared himself to be the sultan of Egypt. Another brother, az-Sahir, held the city of Aleppo, the former capital, and declared himself a sovereign ruler. The sons of Saladin regarded each other only with suspicion, which was well justified in the case of al-Aziz. He went so far as to take an Egyptian army to the very walls of Damascus, from which he withdrew only when al-Afdal agreed that al-Aziz could add Judea to his Egyptian empire. Of Saladin’s two surviving brothers, Toghtekin held Yemen and al-Adil controlled the recently conquered Christian county of Oultrejourdain. The Muslim lands that Saladin had welded into a single state were totally disintegrated, awaiting another leader strong enough to pull them together. Al-Afdal finally proved equal to the task, but it took him eight years to do it.
The turmoil in Islam should have meant an opportunity for the Crusader states to regain some of their lost territories, but the Christian leaders were just as divided as the Muslims.
At the end of the first year of his reign as king of Jerusalem, Henry discovered that the merchant colony of Pisa in the city of Tyre was plotting to seize the city and turn it over to Guy of Lusignan. They had loaned Guy funds with which to buy Cyprus, and he had been generous to them in trading concessions. Henry, on the other hand, had favored the merchants of Genoa. As for King Guy, he would be happy to have back any part of his old kingdom.
Henry’s response to the plot was to imprison the Pisan leaders and to eject the Pisan merchants from Tyre. Their answer was to raid the coastal settlements between Tyre and Acre, so Henry ejected the Pisans from Acre as well. Amalric of Lusignan, who many years before had schemed with Lady Agnes of Courtenay to bring his younger brother Guy from France, was still constable of the kingdom. He pleaded with Henry on behalf of the Pisans. That so angered Henry that he decided that if Amalric liked the Pisans so much, perhaps he would like to share their dungeon with them, and put him in chains.
The Knights Templar, who had been the political allies of the Lusignan family for a generation, now petitioned Henry for the release of their friend. Henry may have resented the Templars’ interference with the affairs of the kingdom, but he desperately needed the support of the military orders. When the Hospitallers joined in the plea, Henry had no choice, and he reluctantly let Amalric go free.
Once out of Henry’s prison, Amalric decided to get as far away from Henry as he could. He moved his family south to Jaffa. There he would be safe, because King Richard had made Amalric’s brother Geoffrey the governor of the city. When Geoffrey decided to go back to France, Amalric of Lusignan became lord of Jaffa.
While Henry was facing his problems in Acre and Tyre, there were more problems to the north in the principality of Antioch, where Prince Leo of Armenia had been encroaching. Two years earlier, during his march into Antioch, Saladin had captured the lofty castle of the Knights Templar at Baghras. Since he could not hold it, he had ordered his engineers to take it down. When Saladin’s engineers left, Prince Leo moved in with an army of workmen. Saladin’s men had dismantled the castle, but the foundations and the stones were still there. Leo had his people rebuild the castle, then took possession of it for himself, along with a sizable piece of the frontier lands of Antioch.
Prince Bohemond demanded that Baghras be returned to the Knights Templar. Armenians in that castle meant a threat to him personally, but Knights Templar in the castle would mean security, the same security he felt with the Templar control of the castle of Tortosa on the northern coast. The Knights Templar wanted the castle back as much as Prince Bohemond wanted them to have it, even to the point of discussing retaking it by force.
Such thoughts were put off by the sudden illness and death of Grand Master de Sablé in September 1193. Perhaps it was that event, which left the Knights Templar temporarily without a supreme commander, that prompted Prince Leo a month later to invite Prince Bohemond to Baghras to settle the matter of the ownership of the castle. Prince Behomond traveled in state, accompanied by his wife Sibylla. As soon as Bohemond and his party were inside the gate of Baghras, they were surrounded and made Leo’s prisoners. His price for their release was that Bohemond must recognize Leo as his feudal lord, giving Leo the ultimate authority over Antioch. Bohemond’s life was at stake, so he felt he had no choice but to agree.
Prince Leo immediately dispatched Armenian troops to take possession of the capital. The citizens of Antioch offered no resistance, because the Armenians were there with the approval of their ruler, Prince Bohemond. On religious grounds alone, though, the Armenians were not easy to accept. The Greeks in Antioch regarded the Separated Armenian Church as heretical since it had broken away from their own Greek Orthodox faith. The Latin Christians had been taught that their new Armenian overlords were heretics because they would not recognize the pope in Rome. The Knights Templar and the Hospitallers owed their allegiance to the pope alone and had never functioned outside Roman Catholic lands except in battle. The Italian merchants seldom had religious problems, but they were uncertain about what was going to happen to their lucrative trade concessions under Armenian domination.
It was religious animosity that triggered the solution. Saint Hilary was the patron saint of the palace chapel, which was served by a chapter of French monks. One day in a gathering at the palace an Armenian officer made such insulting remarks about the French saint that one of the French monks abandoned his benign humility to begin throwing stones at him. Armenian soldiers grabbed the monk, and in turn were jumped upon by Latin Christians. The fight quickly spread from the chapel into the rest of the palace as pent-up hatreds broke loose. The riot spilled from the palace into the streets, where hundreds more antagonists enthusiastically entered the battle.
The small band of Armenians was no match for the entire population of Antioch, so they were easily ejected from the city. As the Armenians fled back to the safety of Baghras, the leaders of Antioch gathered in St. Peter’s Cathedral. They elected a governing commune of prominent citizens, who convened to swear their allegiance to Prince Bohemond’s son Raymond for as long as his father was held captive by the Armenians. Letters were dispatched to Raymond’s brother Count Bohemond of Tripoli, as well as to King Henry of Jerusalem, asking their help to save the city from the ambitious Armenian ruler.
It was a time of great political stress, but the Knights Templar still had not met to elect a new grand master. Now the grand chapter felt the need to act. They decided to give the leadership to a man whose entire adult life had been one of service to the order. He had served as preceptor of Jerusalem, master of the Templars of Spain and Provence, and deputy grand master of the order. Passed over twice in the elections of Gerard de Ridfort and Robert de Sablé, his time had come. Gilbert Erail became the twelfth grand master.
Another election took place that year that would impact the Knights Templar and all other Christians in the Holy Land, but even had they known of it they would have denied that it could ever affect them. It was too far away, thousands of miles off to the east. In this year of 1194 a twenty-seven-year-old chieftain named Temujin was chosen as the khan, the “lord,” of all the Mongol clans. He was given the name Genghis, the “powerful.” No one gave him the name “Scourge of God.” He would earn that for himself.
In the spring of that year King Henry of Jerusalem decided that he must settle the threat of conflict between Antioch and Armenia. He proceeded north with a large armed escort and was met along the way by ambassadors of the new chief of the Assassins. With Sheikh Sinan dead, the new leader of the sect wanted to effect an alliance with the Latin Christians, who were less threatening to his followers than the Sunni sons of Saladin. Henry agreed to a meeting and was led to the principal Assassin castle, perched on a crag in the nearby Nosairi mountains. There he was entertained regally and found himself the recipient of many lavish gifts. Then came an “entertainment” that stunned him with disbelief.
The Assassin leader, holding forth on how valuable his friendship could be because of the extraordinary loyalty and obedience of his followers, pointed up to a group of young men gathered on the highest tower of the castle. At his signal, one of them climbed up on the parapet and flung himself to certain death on the rocks below. Moments later, another man followed him over the wall. Apparently they were all prepared to die just to help their leader demonstrate his point, but Henry pleaded with him to stop. Henry was now anxious to leave these crazy people, but not before the chief made one more gracious gesture to bind their new alliance. He offered to prove his good will toward Henry by arranging the murders of any of his opponents the Christian king would care to designate. Henry counted himself lucky to get out of the Assassin castle alive.
Continuing his northward march, Henry entered Armenian territory and went to Leo’s capital at Sis. He found Leo with no desire for open warfare and anxious to negotiate. Leo agreed to release Prince Bohemond from captivity and to abandon his claim to the overlordship of Antioch. In exchange, Henry agreed that Leo could keep Baghras and the lands around it, which would henceforth be recognized as Armenian territory. To bind the treaty and to someday combine Armenia and Antioch under a single ruler, it was agreed that Leo’s heiress and niece, the princess Alice, would marry Prince Bohemond’s son Raymond. An impediment to the plan was that Alice was already married to an Armenian noble named Hethoum. Henry had no way to eliminate that barrier to the alliance, but the problem went away a few days later when Hethoum was murdered. Henry may have thought that his new Assassin allies were already at work for his benefit, but he chose not to investigate.
Henry returned to Acre to receive the praises of his subjects for achieving the peace, but he received none from the Knights Templar. Henry had traded away their claim to the castle of Baghras to achieve a political goal of his own, and the Templars were angry. Henry also had to be aware that the Templars had developed tighter bonds with their old ally Guy of Lusignan and had been rewarded with more lands on Cyprus. The same was true of many of Henry’s former vassals, the landless barons who went to Cyprus to serve King Guy in exchange for lands to replace those they had lost to Saladin. Henry had regarded Guy of Lusignan as his most dangerous rival, but Guy stopped being a threat when he died in May of that year, 1194. Henry felt that as the king of Jerusalem he should have a strong say in the choice of a successor, but the barons of Cyprus disagreed with him. They wanted someone who would put the interests of Cyprus first. The barons sent to Jaffa for Guy’s older brother, Amalric. He quickly agreed to be their king, and now there was no question that Henry would have to swallow a little pride and seek a spirit of friendly cooperation with a man he had once imprisoned. The Knights Templar were pleased, because Amalric had been their friend and ally since the days before the fall of Jerusalem.
Henry and Amalric met, and the solution they worked out to resolve the destructive rivalry of their two kingdoms was the same solution Henry had used to settle the differences between Armenia and Antioch: They would set their thrones on a path that would someday combine them in a single heir. Amalric’s three young sons would be betrothed to Isabella’s daughters Maria, fathered by Conrad of Montferrat, and Philippa and Alice, daughters of Henry of Champagne.
For now, Amalric was concerned about confirmation of his kingship and a formal coronation. To a Latin Christian such confirmation could only come from a pope or an emperor. He certainly could not turn to the emperor of Byzantium, who considered the kingdom of Cyprus to be property stolen from him. He was afraid of the pope, who might decree that he could only be king if he would agree to be subservient to the kingdom of Jerusalem. That left the German emperor, Henry. In 1195 Amalric sent an ambassador to the emperor to plead his case.
As it happened, the emperor was in a receptive frame of mind because he was still disturbed by the pathetic contribution of the Germans to the Third Crusade. It could be said that their failure resulted from the untimely death of his father, Frederick Barbarossa, but Emperor Henry felt a residue of personal humiliation. He was considering another Crusade, to be led by himself, and a vassal state in the Middle East could be of great value. He agreed to bestow the crown of Cyprus on Amalric and sent him a royal scepter as a pledge of the coming coronation.
Emperor Henry’s brother, Philip of Swabia, was eager to go on Crusade with him. Philip, married to a daughter of the Byzantine emperor, Isaac Angelus, had received word that his father-in-law had been deposed. Isaac Angelus was known everywhere for having built the most opulent personal lifestyle in all the world, and perhaps in the whole history of the world. It took twenty thousand personal servants—eunuchs, slaves, and domestics—to operate his household. It was said to cost four million gold bezants a year to cover Isaac’s personal expenses, a statistic no Greek citizen would question, as ever-increasing taxes were forced on them to maintain the constantly escalating living standard of the money-mad emperor.
It had to stop somewhere, and Isaac’s brother Alexius decided to do the stopping. He sent his personal guards to arrest Isaac, who had just enough warning to get away. Alexius’s men pursued Isaac for fifty miles into the mountains before they caught up with him and sent him back in chains. Alexius was deaf to his brother’s pleas and ordered him into a tower dungeon. There the royal executioner was ordered to blind Isaac by piercing his eyeballs with a red-hot silver awl. No one could predict the impact of that cruel act on the entire future of the crusading concept.
Isaac’s twelve-year-old son, also named Alexius, was made a prisoner but spared the brutality inflicted on his father. He was held in a kind of house arrest, from which he would ultimately escape to act as a pawn in one of the greatest crimes of rape and murder in Christian history.
Leo of Armenia learned of Amalric’s petition to Emperor Henry to legitimize his crown, and Leo decided to do the same. He wanted the security of being a vassal of the greatest monarch in Europe, but he got no answer beyond the point that the emperor would consider the request when he got to the Holy Land. Leo then turned to the pope in Rome. Well aware that it was pure fantasy to imagine that the Roman pope would authorize the coronation of a king who did not recognize papal supremacy, Leo hinted that he might bring the whole Armenian people into the Roman fold. That approach accelerated a decision from Emperor Henry, who sent a message that he would grant a crown to Leo in exchange for the recognition of the Holy Roman Emperor as the overlord of Armenia. Henry wanted no expansion of papal power anywhere.
In August 1197 the first of Emperor Henry’s German Crusaders reached the Holy Land. The troops came to Acre, but the imperial chancellor Conrad of Hildesheim, with the papal legate Archbishop of Mainz and the German nobles, put in first at Cyprus, following the orders of Emperor Henry to officially crown King Amalric and receive his homage.
The German troops assembling at Acre without their leaders didn’t know and didn’t care about the intricacies of local politics. They had come to fight the infidel and were ready to march into battle. Nor did any of them care that Henry of Champagne was opposed to any acts of war at this time. Henry had successfully maneuvered Saladin’s sons into antagonistic positions against each other and wanted no war to force them to come together in common defense.
The Germans ignored him and marched off into Galilee to show the infidel the might of German arms. As King Henry had feared, al-Adil responded with a call to all Muslim potentates to cast aside their differences and unite against this fresh wave of unbelievers. Without waiting for the others, al-Adil took to the field and led out his mounted army, which showed its vast numbers to the Christian invaders from the hillcrests around them. With no real plan and no real leadership, surprised to find themselves so disastrously outnumbered, the Germans did not know how to react. No one gave the order, but the Germans suddenly broke to flee back to Acre. The foot soldiers marched as fast as they could, but they could not keep up with the mounted knights and sergeants galloping off ahead of them. The infantry was suddenly stranded alone and confused in the desert.
When King Henry got the news he hastily assembled his own knights and rode out to take charge of the leaderless German infantry. He placed them in line of battle and prepared to receive the cavalry of al-Adil.
The Muslim troops were ready to fight, but al-Adil had no intention of wasting them on a meaningless encounter in the open field. More constructively, he took his army on a wide sweep to the south and appeared on the coast before the walls of Jaffa.
In September, while on Cyprus Amalric was busy receiving his crown and scepter from the imperial chancellor, Henry in Acre was frantically assembling forces for the relief of Jaffa. He had made peace with the merchants of Pisa and now asked them to provide troops and ships to combat al-Adil. While waiting to welcome a Pisan delegation in a high room in his palace, Henry stood on the sill of a large window, watching his own troops being assembled in the courtyard below. He turned when the Pisan leaders entered the room. Still standing on the windowsill, Henry put one foot behind him to assume the posture of a courtly bow, but the foot went down on open air. As Henry started to fall backward his jester, a dwarf named Scarlet, grabbed his master to save him. The big man pulled the little one out the window with him, and they both crashed to their deaths on the stone pavement of the courtyard.
Henry’s sudden death was understandably a shock. There was an active Muslim army in the field, and even with the help of a growing force of German Crusaders the kingdom of Jerusalem could not be allowed to remain leaderless for long. The obvious answer was the earliest possible wedding for Queen Isabella, who, still in her twenties, was now facing the prospect of a fourth husband being selected for her by men who wouldn’t dream of asking her opinion.
Count Hugh of Tiberias suggested his younger brother Ralph, but the Knights Templar and the Hospitallers voiced their strong objections. Ralph could bring nothing to the throne. His family’s lands in Galilee, along with their capital city of Tiberias, had been lost to Saladin after the battle at the Horns of Hattin. Now they had nothing but their titles and their proud lineage. Ralph would act as king not to serve the people, but to replenish the lost fortunes of his own family.
The Knights Templar were much happier with the suggestion from the papal legate, who had just come from the coronation of Amalric. Knowing that the pope would much prefer a united Christian government, he suggested that Queen Isabella marry the widowed King Amalric of Cyprus. The Templars immediately threw their support behind the papal legate’s recommendation, because in Amalric they would have an old friend and ally ruling both kingdoms.
The Germans gave their support because Amalric had just given homage to Emperor Henry VI. If Amalric also ruled the mainland kingdom, it could only increase the influence of the German emperor, whose personal Crusade was just beginning. Only Isabella resisted. She had fallen in love with Henry of Champagne after their marriage and now was truly in mourning. She was pressured to put her duty ahead of her personal feelings, and the papal legate freely gave his dispensation from the one year of mourning required by the Church.
Amalric didn’t wait for the marriage vows to set his own policies in motion. The new capital city of Acre was separated from the Christian county of Tripoli by the port cities of Sidon and Beirut, still in Muslim hands. In October 1197 Amalric turned to the Germans to solve that problem. With al-Adil occupied before Jaffa to the south, he encouraged the duke of Brabant to lead a German army north to take the coast between Acre and Tripoli. The troops found the city of Sidon still in a state of ruin, with no defenses, and simply walked in. The Muslims scurried out to seek refuge in the suburbs and surrounding small towns, where no one bothered them.
Beirut had been occupied by a Muslim pirate, who used it as a base from which to attack Christian ships. He was the real target of the expedition. Saladin’s men had torn down the walls of Beirut, and the pirate chief did not have the manpower to rebuild them. As the Germans approached, he loaded his men and his treasure on his ships and sailed away. The coast had been restored to Christians and the Crusader lands were united again. For the Germans, there had been loot and victory with practically no fighting, so they were eager to do more. Led by their archbishop, the German Crusaders decided that they were ready to retake Jerusalem. Within a month of the conquest of Beirut they marched into Galilee again, this time to lay siege to the town and castle of Toron.
In January of 1198 Prince Leo of Armenia finally got his crown, and he was overwhelmed by the importance of the visitors who came to witness his coronation. It appeared that everyone wanted his friendship. An envoy from the emperor of Byzantium sent Leo a golden crown. The emperor Henry had sent a royal scepter. The religious rite of the coronation was performed by an Orthodox archbishop, a Roman archbishop, and the Jacobite Christian patriarch. Even Muslims were there, with gifts from the caliph of Baghdad. Now it appeared that the Knights Templar could never expect to recover their castle of Baghras.
During the same month another great pageant celebrated the marriage of Queen Isabella to King Amalric of Cyprus. Those who thought that there would be just one Christian kingdom in the Middle East were disappointed when Amalric made it very clear that the two kingdoms would be ruled separately, and that no one should expect that the revenues of Cyprus would ever be used for the defense of the mainland. The crown of Cyprus was his by personal right, and the crown of Jerusalem only by reason of his marriage to Isabella. Amalric wanted no future problems with the succession of his own domain.
With the Germans still engaged in the siege of Toron, the Knights Templar finally got some encouraging news. Upon the death of Pope Clement III, Cardinal Lothair, a close personal friend of Grand Master Gilbert Erail, had been elected to the Throne of Peter and had taken the papal name of Pope Innocent III.
In their besieging camps before the walls of Toron the German Crusaders got the news of the death of their emperor Henry VI. Problems of imperial succession could have a heavy impact on the future of any noble house, so the leaders discussed the wisdom of going home. Then the flames of fear were fanned by news that civil war had broken out in Germany. That information had far more impact on the German barons than the news that a Muslim army was coming at them from Egypt. As the army of al-Aziz approached Toron, word ran through the tents of the German knights and soldiers besieging the city that the imperial chancellor and the great lords were gone.
The response to that news was panic, as the leaderless Germans decamped in haste and didn’t stop moving until they were back in Tyre. If their leaders had gone home, they would go home, too, and for weeks every available ship left the Holy Land loaded with Germans who had abandoned the Crusade.
A few landless German knights decided to stay, only because there was nothing for them at home. They tended to gather around a German hostelry that had been established in Acre during the previous German Crusade, and they decided that here they had the beginnings of a separate military order for Germans. Calling themselves the Teutonic Knights, they petitioned the new pope for official recognition, which was granted later that year. They patterned their Rule after that of the Knights Templar, and they angered the Templars by copying their distinctive white robe. They also took the distinctive Templar cross, changing only its color. Instead of the brilliant red of the Templars, the Teutonic cross would be black. Later, after they had conquered pagan tribes in northeast Europe and turned their lands into the state of Prussia, their cross lived on into modern times as the German military Iron Cross. Their group was small at its founding, and it was permitted to occupy quarters at Acre in the tower at the Gate of St. Nicholas, on the opposite side of the city from the castle fortress of the Templars.
With the aggressive Germans out of the way, Amalric and al-Adil, neither of whom had wanted a war, now had no trouble arriving at a six-year treaty. Amalric agreed that the Muslims could have Jaffa, and al-Adil ceded Beirut and Sidon to the Christians. Al-Adil was still trying to regain his father’s empire and needed no Christian enemies at his back while he faced the aggressively independent members of his own family. As for Amalric, he was especially happy to have the treaty in place when the antagonistic al-Aziz died later that year and the much more tractable al-Adil moved in quickly to take control of Egypt.
The Knights Templar were having no success with their petitions to the pope asking him to demand the return of Baghras. Grand Master Erail sent one letter after another to his friend Innocent III, seemingly unable to grasp the pope’s point of view. The pope already had total control of the Knights Templar, with no fear of losing their allegiance. Leo of Armenia, on the other hand, had still not been able to deliver the submission of the Armenian people to the supremacy of the Roman pontiff. Innocent III did drop hints to Leo about Baghras, but in the turmoil of the struggle for the succession of the rule of Antioch, he refused to make an issue of it. To soothe the feelings of the group he saw as his own private army, he did reaffirm the Templars’ rights and privileges as outlined in the prior bull Omne Datum Optimum, and he even sent a gift of gold for the Templars’ use. He wanted them to remain loyal, but the whole nation of Lesser Armenia was more important to him than one Templar castle.
In all other matters he did support the Templars, and there came a time in 1199 when they needed that support. A prior bishop of Tiberias had deposited thirteen hundred bezants with the Templars for safekeeping, and now the present bishop wanted the money returned. Perhaps the records had been lost during the disastrous wars with Saladin, but for whatever reason, the Templars did not return the money. It was decided to put the matter to the bishop of Sidon for arbitration.
The bishop’s idea of arbitration was not to patiently hear both sides of the issue, but rather to summarily demand that the payment be made to his fellow bishop within three days, or he would excommunicate the entire order of the Knights Templar. Though they had no fear of the bishop actually carrying out that illegal threat, the Templars made good on the deposit and returned the money.
It could only have been with complete disbelief that the Templars learned that the bishop of Sidon, in spite of the payment, had formally and publicly decreed the excommunication of every member of the Templar order. Grand Master Erail dispatched messengers to the pope in Rome to declare that if the Knights Templar were excommunicated, their vows were wiped out, and every man would be free to do as he wished.
The pope exploded at the idea that a lowly bishop in an obscure diocese would take it upon himself to disband the pope’s private army. The bishop of Sidon was relieved of his bishopric, and all clerics everywhere were warned that the same disciplinary measure awaited any man who dared to interfere with a holy order responsible to the pope alone. The pope’s fast action in their defense confirmed the Templars’ power and privilege, but widened the substantial gap that already existed between them and the Latin clergy.
The last decade of the century had seen the rescue of the Holy Land and the preservation of the crusading ideals. The first decade of the new century would witness those crusading ideals corrupted and desecrated in a great blood orgy that put greed for gold before the glory of God on a scale never seen before.