This is too much. The Templars must prove that they are second to none. They charge into the city and chase the enemy all the way to the wall on the opposite side. Then suddenly the Templars realize that they have repeated the mistake of Ascalon. While the Christians are busy sacking the sultan’s palace, the infidels reassemble and fall upon the now unorganized group of jackals.
Have the Templars allowed themselves to be blinded once again by greed? Some say that before accompanying Artois into the city, Brother Gilles spoke to him with stoic lucidity: “My Lord, my brothers and I are not afraid. We follow you. But great is our doubt that any of us will return.” And indeed, Artois was killed, and many good knights died with him, including two hundred and eighty Templars.
It was more than a defeat; it was a disgrace. Yet not even Joinville recorded it as such. It happened and that is the beauty of war.
Joinville’s pen turns many of these battles and skirmishes into charming ballets. Heads roll here and there, implorations to the good Lord abound, and the king sheds tears over a loyal follower’s death. But the whole thing is Technicolor, complete with crimson saddlecloths, gilded trappings, the flash of helmets and swords under the yellow desert sun, and an azure sea in the background. And who knows? Perhaps the Templars really lived their daily butchery that way.
Joinville’s perspective shifts vertically, depending on whether he has fallen from his horse or just remounted. Isolated scenes are sharply focused, but the larger picture eludes him. We see individual duels, whose outcome is often random. Joinville sets off to help the lord of Wanon. A Turk strikes him with his lance, Joinville’s horse sinks to its knees, Joinville falls over the animal’s head, he stands up, sword in hand, and Chevalier Erard de Siverey (“may God grant him grace”) points to a ruined house where they can take refuge. They are trampled by Turks on horseback.
Chevalier Frédéric de Loupey is struck from behind, “which made so large a wound that the blood poured from his body as if from the bunghole of a barrel.” Siverey receives a slashing blow in the face, so that “his nose was left dangling over his lips.” And so on, until help arrives. They leave the house and move to another part of the battlefield, where there are more deaths and last-minute rescues, and loud prayers to Saint James.
In the meantime, the good Comte de Soissons, wielding his sword, cries, “Seneschal, let these dogs howl as they will. By God’s bonnet, we shall talk of this day yet, you and I, sitting at home with our ladies!” The king asks for news of his brother, the wretched Comte d’Artois, and Brother Henri de Ronnay, provost of the Hospitalers, answers that he “has good news, for certainly the count is now in Paradise.” “God be praised for everything He gives,” says the king, big tears falling from his eyes.
But it isn’t always a ballet, angelic and bloodstained. Grand Master Guillaume de Sonnac dies, burned alive by Greek fire. With the great stink of corpses and the shortage of provisions, the Christian army is stricken with scurvy. Saint Louis’s men are finally routed. The king is so badly racked by dysentery that he cuts out the seat of his pants to save time in battle. Damietta is lost, and the queen has to negotiate with the Saracens, paying five hundred thousand livres tournois to ransom the king.
The crusades were carried out in virtuous bad faith. On his return to Saint-Jean-d’Acre, Louis is hailed as a victor; the whole city comes out in procession to greet him, including the clergy, ladies, and children. The Templars, seeing which way the wind is blowing, try to open negotiations with Damascus.
Louis finds out and, furious at being bypassed, repudiates the new grand master in the presence of the Moslem ambassadors. The grand master has to retract the promises he made to the enemy, has to kneel before the king and beg his pardon. No one can say the knights haven’t fought well—and selflessly—but the king of France still humiliates them, to reassert his power. And, half a century later, Louis’s successor, Philip, to reassert his power, will send the knights to the stake.
In 1291 Saint-Jean-d’Acre is conquered by the Moors, and all its inhabitants are put to the sword. The Christian kingdom of Jerusalem is gone for good. The Templars are richer, more numerous, more powerful than ever, but they were born to fight in the Holy Land, and in the Holy Land there are none left.
They live in splendor, isolated in their commanderies throughout Europe and in the Temple in Paris, but they dream still of the plateau of the Temple in Jerusalem in their days of glory, dream of the handsome church of Saint Mary Lateran spangled with votive chapels, dream of their bouquets of trophies, and all the rest: the forges, the saddlery, the granaries, the stables of two thousand horses, the cantering troops of squires, aides, and turcopoles, the red crosses on white cloaks, the dark surplices of the attendants, the sultan’s envoys with their great turbans and gilded helmets, the pilgrims, a crossroads filled with dapper patrols and outriders, and the delights of rich coffers, the port from which instructions and cargoes were dispatched for the castles on the mainland, or on the islands, or on the shores of Asia Minor….
All gone now, my poor Templars.
That evening, at Pilade’s, by then on my fifth whiskey, for which Belbo was paying, insisted on paying, I realized that I had been dreaming aloud and—the shame of it—with feeling. But I must have told a beautiful story, full of compassion, because Dolores’s eyes were glistening, and Diotallevi, having taken the mad plunge and ordered a second tonic water, was seraphically gazing toward heaven—or, rather, toward the bar’s decidedly noncabalistic ceiling. “Perhaps,” he murmured, “they were all those things: lost souls and saints, horsemen and grooms, bankers and heroes….”
“They were remarkable, no doubt about it” was Belbo’s summation. “But tell me, Casaubon, do you love them?”
“I’m doing my thesis on them. If you do your thesis on syphilis, you end up loving even the Spirochaeta pallida.”
“It was lovely,” Dolores said. “Like a movie. But I have to go now. I have to mimeograph the leaflets for tomorrow morning. There’s picketing at the Marelli factory.”
“Lucky you. You can afford it,” Belbo said. He raised a weary hand and stroked her hair. Then he ordered what he said was his last whiskey. “It’s almost midnight. I say that not for normal people, I say it for Diotallevi’s benefit. But let’s go on. I want to hear about the trial. Who, what, when, and why.”
“Cur, quomodo, quando,” Diotallevi agreed. “Yes, yes.”
He declares that he saw, the day before, five hundred and four brothers of the order led to the stake because they would not confess the abovementioned errors, and he heard it said that they were burned. But he fears that he himself would not resist if he were to be burned, that he would confess in the presence of the lord magistrates and anyone else, if questioned, and say that all the errors with which the order has been charged are true; that he, if asked, would also confess to killing Our Lord.
—Testimony of Aimery de Villiers-le-Duc, May 13, 1310
A trial full of silences, contradictions, enigmas, and acts of stupidity. The acts of stupidity were the most obvious, and, because they were inexplicable, they generally coincided with the enigmas. In those halcyon days I believed that the source of enigma was stupidity. Then the other evening in the periscope I decided that the most terrible enigmas are those that mask themselves as madness. But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
With the collapse of the Christian kingdoms of the Holy Land, the Templars were left without a purpose. Or, rather, they soon turned their means into an end; they spent their time managing their immense wealth. Philip the Fair, a monarch intent on building a centralized state, naturally disliked them. They were a sovereign order, beyond any royal control. The grand master ranked as a prince of the blood; he commanded an army, administered vast landholdings, was elected like the emperor, and had absolute authority.
The French treasury was located in the Temple in Paris, outside the king’s control. The Templars were the trustees, proxies, and administrators of an account that was the king’s only in name. They paid funds in and out and manipulated the interest; they acted like a great private bank but enjoyed all the privileges and exemptions of a state institution. The king’s treasurer was a Templar. How could a ruler rule under such
