But the Templars knew their way around. They knew how to deal with the enemy, they were familiar with the terrain and the art of fighting. The Order of the Temple had become a serious business, even though its reputation was based on the boasting of its assault troops.”
“And the boasting was empty?” Diotallevi asked.
“Often. Here again, what’s amazing is the gulf between their political and administrative skill on the one hand and their Green Beret style on the other: all guts and no brains. Let’s take the story of Ascalon—”
“Yes, let’s,” Belbo said, after a moment’s distraction as he greeted, with a great show of lust, a girl named Dolores.
She joined us, saying, “I must hear the story of Ascalon!”
“All right. One fine day the king of France, the Holy Roman emperor, King Baudouin III of Jerusalem, and the grand masters of the Templars and the Hospitalers all decided to lay siege to Ascalon. They set out together: king, court, patriarch, priests carrying crosses and banners, and the archbishops of Tyre, Nazareth, Caesarea. It was like a big party, oriflammes and standards flying, tents pitched around the enemy city, drums beating.
Ascalon was defended by one hundred and fifty towers, and the inhabitants had long been preparing for a siege: all the houses had slits made in the walls; they were like fortresses within the fortress. I mean, the Templars were smart fighters, they should have known these things. But no, everybody got excited, and they built battering rams and wooden towers: you know, those constructions on wheels that you push up to the enemy walls so you can hurl stones or firebrands or shoot arrows while the catapults sling rocks from a distance. The Ascalonites tried to set fire to the towers, but the wind was against them, and they burned their own walls instead, until in one place a wall collapsed. The attackers all charged the breach.
“And then a strange thing happened. The grand master of the Templars had a cordon set up so that only his men could enter the city. Cynics say he was trying to make sure that only the Templars would get the booty. A kinder explanation is that he feared a trap and wanted to send his own brave men in first. Either way, I wouldn’t make him head of a military academy.
Forty Templars ran full steam straight through the city, came to a screeching halt in a great cloud of dust at the wall on the other side, looked at one another, and wondered what in hell they were doing there. Then they about-faced and ran back, racing past the Saracens, who pelted them with rocks and darts, slaughtering the lot of them, grand master included. Then they closed the breach, hung the corpses from the walls, and jeered at the Christians, with obscene gestures and horrid laughter.”
“The Moor is cruel,” Belbo said.
“Like children,” Diotallevi added.
“These Templars of yours were really crazy!” Dolores said with admiration.
“They remind me of Tom and Jerry,” Belbo said.
I felt a little guilty. After all, I had been living with the Templars for two years, and I loved them. Yet now, catering to the snobbery of my audience, I had made them sound like characters out of a cartoon. Maybe it was William of Tyre’s fault, treacherous historiographer that he was. I could almost see my Knights of the Temple, bearded and blazing, the bright red crosses on their snow-white cloaks, their mounts wheeling in the shadow of the Beauceant, their black-and-white banner.
They had been so dazzlingly intent on their feast of death and daring. Perhaps the sweat Saint Bernard talked about was a bronze glow that lent a sarcastic nobility to their fearsome smiles as they celebrated their farewell to life…. Lions in war, Jacques de Vitry called them, but sweet lambs in times of peace; harsh in battle, devout in prayer; ferocious to their enemies, but full of kindness toward their brothers. The white and the black of their banner were so apposite: to the friends of Christ they were pure; to His adversaries they were grim and terrible.
Pathetic champions of the faith, last glimmer of chivalry’s twilight. Why play any old Ariosto to them when I could be their Joinville? The author of the Histoire de Saint Louis had accompanied the sainted king to the Holy Land, acting as both scribe and soldier. I recalled now what he had written about the Templars. This was more than a hundred and eighty years after the order was founded, and it had been through enough crusades to undermine anyone’s ideals.
The heroic figures of Queen Melisande and Baudouin the leper-king had vanished like ghosts; factional fighting in Lebanon—blood-soaked even then—had drawn to a close; Jerusalem had already fallen once; Barbarossa had drowned in Cilicia; Richard the Lion-Heart, defeated and humiliated, had gone home disguised as, of all things, a Templar; Christianity had lost the battle.
The Moors’ view of the confederation of autonomous potentates united in the defense of their civilization was very different. They had read Avicenna, and they were not ignorant, like the Europeans. How could you live alongside a tolerant, mystical, libertine culture for two centuries without succumbing to its allure, particularly when you compared it to Western culture, which was crude, vulgar, barbaric, and Germanic? Then, in 1244, came the final, definitive fall of Jerusalem.
The war, begun a hundred and fifty years earlier, was lost. The Christians had to lay down their arms in a land now devoted to peace and the scent of the cedars of Lebanon. Poor Templars. Your epic, all in vain.
Little wonder that in the tender melancholy of their faded, aging glory they lent an ear to the secret doctrines of Moslem mystics, hieratic guardians of hidden treasures. Perhaps that was how the legend of the Knights of the Temple was born, the legend with which some frustrated and yearning minds are still obsessed, the myth of a boundless power lying unused, unharnessed….
Even in Joinville’s day, the saint-king Louis, at whose table Aquinas dined, persisted in his belief in the crusade, despite two centuries of dreams ruined by the victors’ stupidity. Was it worth one more try? Yes, Louis said. And the Templars were ready and willing; they followed him into defeat, because that was their job. Without a crusade, how could they justify the Temple?
Louis attacks Damietta from the sea. The enemy shore glitters with pikes, halberds, oriflammes, shields, and scimitars. Fine-looking men, Joinville says chivalrously, who carry arms of gold struck by the sun. Louis could wait, but he decides to land at any cost. “My faithful followers, we will be invincible if we are inseparable in our charity. If we are defeated, we will be martyrs. If we triumph, the glory of God will be the greater.” The Templars don’t believe it, but they have been trained to be knights of the ideal, and this is the image of themselves they must confirm. They will follow the king in his mystical madness.
Incredibly, the landing is a success; equally incredibly, the Saracens abandon Damietta. But the king hesitates to enter the city, fearing treachery. But there is no treachery: the city is his for the taking, along with its treasures and its hundred mosques, which Louis immediately converts into churches of the Lord. Now he has a decision to make: Should he march on Alexandria or on Cairo? The wise choice would be Alexandria, thus depriving Egypt of a vital port. But the expedition has its evil genius, the king’s brother, Robert d’Artois, a megalomaniac hungry for glory.
A typical younger son. He advises Louis to head for Cairo, the heart of Egypt. The Templars, cautious at first, are now champing at the bit. The king issues orders to avoid isolated skirmishes, but the marshal of the Temple takes it upon himself to violate that prohibition. Seeing a squadron of the sultan’s Mamelukes, he cries out: “Now have at them, in the name of God, for a shame like this I cannot bear!”
The Saracens dig in beyond the river near Mansura. The French try to build a dam and create a ford, protecting it with their mobile towers, but the Saracens have learned the art of Greek fire from the Byzantines. Greek fire is a barrel-like container with a kind of big spear as a tail. It is hurled like a lightning bolt, a flying dragon. It burns so brightly that in the Christian camp at night one can see as clearly as if it were day.
While the camp burns, a Bedouin traitor leads the king and his men to a ford in exchange for a payment of three hundred bezants. The king decides to attack. The crossing is not easy; many are drowned and swept away by the current, while three hundred mounted Saracens wait on the other side. When the main body of the attack force finally comes ashore, the Templars, as planned, are in the vanguard, followed by the Comte d’Artois. The Moslem horsemen flee, and the Templars wait for the rest of the Christian army. But Artois and his men dash off in pursuit of the enemy.
The Templars, anxious to avoid dishonor, then join in the assault, but catch up with Artois
