The Crusader States and the Military Orders

I. Four States

The First Crusade created four Latin states in the Near East. The county of Edessa was founded by Baldwin of Boulogne in 1098, when he took over the Armenian city of Edessa on the upper Euphrates. The principality of Antioch was founded by Bohemond of Taranto after the capture of Antioch in June 1098. The kingdom of Jerusalem was founded after the capture of the city in July 1099, when Godfrey of Bouillon became its ruler with the title of Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre; his brother Baldwin succeeded him as the first king in 1100. The county of Tripoli was established by the family of Raymond of Toulouse, and completed by the capture of Tripoli in 1109.

Together the states were known as Outremer, the land beyond the sea. They stretched along the coast of Syria and Palestine for some 500 miles, but they were never more than about 70 miles deep, and Edessa extended inland across the Euphrates. Their eastern frontier faced the Muslim cities of Aleppo, Hama, Homs and Damascus, and their southern frontier faced Fatimid Egypt.

The states were independent of each other, though the king of Jerusalem had a recognised precedence and often intervened in the north. Their rulers frequently quarrelled, and they sometimes allied with Muslim powers against each other.

II. Government and Law

The kingdom of Jerusalem was governed by a king with a council of his great vassals, the High Court. The kingdom was divided into royal domain and great fiefs, such as Galilee, Jaffa and Ascalon, Sidon and Transjordan, whose lords held them in return for military service. The legal customs of the kingdom were later written down by the jurists of the thirteenth century in the collection known as the Assizes of Jerusalem, which became a model of feudal law. The towns had courts of burgesses for the Latin non-noble population, and courts for the native population, the cour de la fonde, in which Syrians had a voice.

The church was organised on Latin lines, with a Latin patriarch of Jerusalem and of Antioch, and Latin archbishops and bishops replacing the Greek clergy in most sees. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was rebuilt by the crusaders and reconsecrated in 1149, and its basic form survives today.

The royal succession often passed through women, since many kings died young or without sons. Melisende, the daughter of Baldwin II, ruled jointly with her husband Fulk and then as regent for her son Baldwin III, and was one of the most powerful women of the twelfth century. Sibylla and Isabella, the daughters of Amalric, transmitted the crown to their husbands, Guy of Lusignan, Conrad of Montferrat, Henry of Champagne and Amalric of Lusignan.

III. The People of Outremer

The Franks, as the Latin settlers were called, were always a minority in the lands they ruled. They were concentrated in the towns and castles, and in some areas in rural settlements founded for western colonists. The majority of the population consisted of native Christians, Muslims and Jews.

The native Christians were of many communities. In Jerusalem and the south most were Greek Orthodox, using Greek or Arabic in their liturgy, and called Melkites. In the north there were Armenians, Syrian Jacobites, Nestorians and the Maronites of Lebanon, who entered into communion with Rome in the twelfth century. The crusaders, who had come to liberate the eastern Christians, often treated them with suspicion and replaced their clergy with Latins.

Muslims formed the majority in many rural areas, especially in the north and in Samaria and Galilee. They were peasants, paying rents and taxes to their Frankish lords, and they were generally allowed to practise their religion. The Spanish Muslim traveller Ibn Jubayr, who crossed the kingdom in 1184, noted that the Muslim peasants under Frankish rule were better treated than those under Muslim rulers, and warned that this was a danger to their faith.

IV. The Jews of Outremer

The crusaders' massacre of the Jews of Jerusalem in 1099 and the subsequent ban on Jews and Muslims living in the city meant that Jerusalem had no Jewish community for most of the twelfth century. Benjamin of Tudela, who visited about 1170, found only a few Jewish dyers in the city, who held a monopoly from the king. Larger Jewish communities lived in Tyre, Acre, Ascalon and Tiberias, and in the Galilee, where they maintained the traditions associated with the ancient rabbis.

After Saladin's reconquest of Jerusalem in 1187, Jews were allowed to return to the city. In 1211 a group of some three hundred rabbis from France and England emigrated to the Holy Land, settling in Acre and Jerusalem. Acre became an important centre of Jewish learning in the thirteenth century. Nahmanides, the great Spanish scholar, arrived in Acre in 1267 and visited Jerusalem, where he found only two Jewish families and founded a synagogue. The site's pages on Maimonides, who passed through Acre in 1165, and on the Ben Asher Masoretes of Tiberias describe the earlier history of Jewish scholarship in the land.

V. Castles

The crusader states are famous for their castles, which were needed to compensate for the shortage of manpower. In the twelfth century the castles were mostly simple rectangular keeps or enclosures, but in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries the military orders and great lords built massive fortresses with concentric walls, round towers and elaborate defences.

The most famous is Krak des Chevaliers in the county of Tripoli, given to the Hospitallers in 1144 and rebuilt by them into a fortress that could hold a garrison of two thousand. T. E. Lawrence called it perhaps the best preserved and most wholly admirable castle in the world. Other great castles include Margat, also held by the Hospitallers, Castle Pilgrim at Athlit and Safed, held by the Templars, Montfort, the headquarters of the Teutonic Order, and Kerak in Transjordan. Many of these castles survive, though damaged by war and earthquake.

VI. The Founding of the Templars

About 1119 or 1120 a knight from Champagne, Hugh of Payns, and a few companions bound themselves by vows of poverty, chastity and obedience before the patriarch of Jerusalem to protect pilgrims on the roads to the holy places. Baldwin II gave them a residence in part of the royal palace in the al-Aqsa Mosque, which the crusaders believed to be the Temple of Solomon, and so they became known as the Poor Knights of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, or Templars.

At first the order was small and its purpose controversial. A knight who took monastic vows and continued to fight seemed a contradiction, since the church taught that monks should not shed blood. In 1129 Hugh of Payns attended the Council of Troyes, which approved a rule for the order based on Cistercian practice. Bernard of Clairvaux, the most influential churchman of the age, wrote a treatise In Praise of the New Knighthood, defending the Templars and contrasting them with secular knights, who fought for vanity and greed.

VII. In Praise of the New Knighthood

Bernard's treatise is a key document of crusading ideology. He argued that the knight of Christ could kill with a clear conscience, since in killing an evildoer he was not a homicide but a malicide, a killer of evil. He wrote that the death of a pagan was a glory to the Christian, since Christ was glorified by it, and that the knight who died in battle was certain of salvation.

Bernard described the Templars as men who lived in community without wives or possessions, who never sat idle, who cut their hair short and were dusty and sunburned, who despised jesters and hunting, and who went into battle with fierce courage. He contrasted them with secular knights, with their long hair, silk clothing and gilded spurs.

This ideal of the monk-knight had no foundation in the Greek Scriptures. Jesus said that those who take the sword will perish by the sword (Matthew 26:52). The Christian warfare described by Paul was against wicked spirit forces, fought with the armour of truth, righteousness and faith, and with the sword of the spirit, God's word (Ephesians 6:11-17). The early Christians did not serve as soldiers and saw their calling as one of peace.

VIII. The Growth of the Templars

With papal support and the advocacy of Bernard, the Templars grew rapidly. In 1139 Pope Innocent II issued the bull Omne datum optimum, which exempted the order from the authority of bishops and placed it directly under the pope. The order received gifts of land, money and churches throughout Europe, and organised a network of preceptories, or commanderies, which provided recruits and revenue for the east.

The order was organised in a hierarchy, headed by a master elected by the brothers, with a chapter, marshal, commander of the kingdom and other officers. The brethren were divided into knights, who wore white mantles with a red cross, sergeants, who wore black or brown, and chaplains. The order also employed many non-members, including mercenary soldiers, known as turcopoles.

The Templars became important bankers. Pilgrims could deposit money at a Templar house in Europe and withdraw it in the east. The Paris Temple served as the treasury of the French crown in the thirteenth century. The wealth of the order became a source of resentment.

IX. The Hospitallers

The Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem began as a hospice for pilgrims in Jerusalem, founded before the First Crusade by merchants of Amalfi. After 1099 its master, Gerard, organised it as an independent religious order, recognised by Pope Paschal II in 1113. Its principal work was the care of the sick and poor. The hospital in Jerusalem could care for hundreds of patients, and western visitors were amazed at its size and organisation.

From the 1130s the Hospitallers began to take on military functions, at first employing mercenaries to defend castles and then admitting knights as brethren. By the late twelfth century they were a military order comparable to the Templars, though they never abandoned their hospital work. Their brethren wore black mantles with a white cross, and later red surcoats with a white cross in battle.

The Hospitallers held great castles, including Krak des Chevaliers, Margat and Belvoir. Like the Templars, they received extensive properties in Europe, organised in priories and commanderies.

X. The Teutonic Order

The Teutonic Order began as a hospital founded by German merchants from Bremen and Lübeck during the siege of Acre in 1190. In 1198 it was transformed into a military order with a rule based on that of the Templars for military matters and of the Hospitallers for its care of the sick. Its brethren wore white mantles with a black cross.

Under Hermann of Salza, master from about 1210 to 1239, the order grew rapidly with the support of the emperor Frederick II. In the Holy Land it built the castle of Montfort northeast of Acre. But its greatest achievements were in Europe. In 1211 the king of Hungary invited the order to defend the Burzenland in Transylvania against the Cumans, but expelled it in 1225 when it tried to make itself independent. In 1226 Duke Conrad of Masovia invited it to fight the pagan Prussians, and from 1230 it conquered Prussia, creating a state described in the site's page on the Prussian Crusade. In 1237 it absorbed the Livonian Sword Brothers, described in the page on the Livonian Crusade.

XI. The Orders in War

The military orders provided the most disciplined and experienced troops in the crusader states. Their brethren lived under rule, trained constantly, and fought according to strict regulations. The Templar rule laid down detailed procedures for the march, the camp and the charge, and forbade a brother to leave the field while the banner was still flying.

The orders held a growing share of the castles of the kingdom, since only they could afford to garrison and maintain them. By the thirteenth century they were the main defenders of the crusader states. But they were also independent powers, answerable only to the pope, and they pursued their own policies. The Templars and Hospitallers were rivals, and they often took opposing sides in the political conflicts of the kingdom. In the War of St Sabas in 1256–1258, a conflict between Genoa and Venice in Acre, the Templars supported Venice and the Hospitallers Genoa, and the streets of Acre became a battlefield.

XII. Hattin and the Orders

At the battle of Hattin in July 1187, the military orders suffered heavily. After the battle, Saladin had the captured Templars and Hospitallers, about two hundred men, beheaded by Sufis and scholars in his army, because they were the most dangerous enemies of Islam. Ibn al-Athir and Imad al-Din recorded that Saladin regarded the orders as the fiercest of the Franks. The master of the Temple, Gerard of Ridefort, was spared and later released.

The orders' reputation for fanaticism and their refusal to accept truces made them feared by the Muslims. Baybars and the later Mamluk sultans also executed members of the orders when they captured their castles. The site's page on the Third Crusade describes Hattin.

XIII. The Fall of the Crusader States

The crusader states declined gradually. Edessa was lost to Zengi in 1144, which prompted the Second Crusade. Most of the kingdom of Jerusalem was lost to Saladin in 1187, and only partly recovered by the Third Crusade. In the thirteenth century the kingdom was centred on Acre, and its rulers depended on the military orders, the Italian communes and occasional crusades from the west.

The Mamluk sultans of Egypt, beginning with Baybars, systematically conquered the remaining territory. Antioch fell in 1268, Krak des Chevaliers in 1271, Tripoli in 1289, and Acre in 1291. The site's page on the Fall of Acre describes the end. The Templars evacuated their last stronghold on the island of Ruad, off the Syrian coast, in 1302 or 1303.

XIV. After Acre

The fall of Acre left the military orders without their primary purpose. The Templars and Hospitallers moved their headquarters to Cyprus. The Teutonic Order moved its headquarters to Venice and then in 1309 to Marienburg in Prussia.

The Hospitallers found a new role. Between 1306 and 1310 they conquered the island of Rhodes from the Byzantines and made it a base for naval warfare against the Turks. They held Rhodes until 1522, when the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent took it after a long siege, and then moved to Malta, which they defended against the Ottomans in the great siege of 1565. They ruled Malta until Napoleon took it in 1798. The order survives as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.

The Templars, however, failed to find a new role. Their wealth and privileges made them vulnerable, and they lacked a territorial base.

XV. The Arrest of the Templars

On Friday 13 October 1307 the officials of King Philip IV of France arrested all the Templars in France in a coordinated operation, including the master, James of Molay. They were accused of heresy, idolatry and immorality: that at their reception they were required to deny Christ and spit on the cross, that they worshipped an idol, and that they practised sodomy.

The charges were almost certainly false, invented or exaggerated by the king's ministers, especially William of Nogaret, who had earlier led the attack on Pope Boniface VIII. Philip's motives probably included the desire to seize the order's wealth, since he was deeply in debt, and to assert royal power over the church. He had expelled the Jews from France in 1306 and confiscated their property.

Under torture, many Templars confessed, including James of Molay. Pope Clement V, a Frenchman who lived at Avignon under Philip's influence, at first protested against the arrests but then ordered the arrest of the Templars throughout Christendom. Outside France, where torture was not used, few Templars confessed.

XVI. The Council of Vienne

The fate of the order was decided at the Council of Vienne in 1311–1312. Many of the bishops were unwilling to condemn the order without a proper hearing. But under pressure from Philip, who came to Vienne with an army, Clement issued the bull Vox in excelso on 22 March 1312, which suppressed the order not by a judgement of guilt but by an act of papal authority, on the grounds that its reputation had been irreparably damaged. Its property was transferred to the Hospitallers, though in practice much of it was kept by the kings.

In Spain and Portugal the Templar property went to new orders. In Portugal the Templars were reconstituted as the Order of Christ, which later supported the voyages of exploration of Prince Henry the Navigator.

XVII. The Burning of James of Molay

James of Molay and the preceptor of Normandy, Geoffrey of Charney, were brought before a commission in Paris in March 1314 to hear their sentence of life imprisonment. They publicly retracted their confessions, declaring that the order was innocent and that they had lied under torture. Philip ordered them burned that evening on an island in the Seine. According to later legend, James summoned the pope and the king to meet him before the judgement of God within a year. Clement died in April 1314 and Philip in November.

The trial of the Templars was one of the great injustices of the Middle Ages. It showed how the machinery of the church, including the Inquisition and the use of torture, could be used by a king to destroy a religious order for political and financial reasons. Many Templars died in prison or at the stake.

XVIII. Assessment of the Orders

The military orders were among the most characteristic creations of the crusading movement. They combined the monastic life with warfare, and they provided the crusader states with a permanent standing army. They also played a major role in the Iberian peninsula, where orders such as Santiago, Calatrava and Alcántara fought in the Reconquista, and in the Baltic, as described in the page on the Northern Crusades.

But the orders embodied a contradiction. Their members took vows to follow Christ and imitate his life, while devoting themselves to killing. The Greek Scriptures present Jesus as one who did not resist those who arrested him, and who taught his followers to return good for evil. Peter wrote that Christ left a model for his followers to follow his steps closely, and that when he was being reviled he did not revile in return (1 Peter 2:21-23).

XIX. Assessment of the Crusader States

The crusader states lasted nearly two centuries. They were a remarkable achievement of colonisation and government in a hostile environment. They produced a distinctive culture, mixing western and eastern elements, and they were a channel through which goods, ideas and learning passed between east and west.

Yet they were always fragile. They depended on a constant supply of men and money from the west, which declined in the thirteenth century. Their rulers were divided, their population was mixed and often hostile, and they faced powerful Muslim states that saw their elimination as a religious duty. Their foundation had been accompanied by massacres, and their existence provoked a militant response in the Islamic world that shaped relations between Christians and Muslims for centuries.

XX. Daily Life in Acre

In the thirteenth century Acre was the capital of the kingdom and one of the busiest ports of the Mediterranean, with a population of perhaps 40,000. Each of the great Italian cities, Venice, Genoa and Pisa, had its own quarter with its own church, market, warehouses and administration. The military orders had their own fortified compounds. The city was crowded with merchants, pilgrims, soldiers, clergy and refugees from the lost lands.

James of Vitry, bishop of Acre from 1216, described the city as a monster with nine heads, each fighting the others. He complained of its luxury, its crime and the indifference of its inhabitants to religion. Yet Acre was also a centre of culture. Its scriptorium produced illuminated manuscripts that mixed western and Byzantine styles, and its lawyers wrote some of the most sophisticated legal treatises of the Middle Ages. It had a Jewish community of scholars and a Muslim population that traded with the interior.

XXI. Pilgrimage

The crusader states depended on pilgrimage. Every spring and autumn fleets brought thousands of pilgrims from the west to Jaffa and Acre, who visited the holy places and then returned home. The pilgrims brought money, and the Italian ships that carried them profited greatly. The military orders were founded to protect and care for them.

Pilgrims followed a prescribed route through the sites associated with the life of Jesus: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Mount of Olives, Bethlehem, the Jordan, Nazareth and the Sea of Galilee. Guidebooks described the sites and the indulgences available at each. Many of the identifications were traditional rather than historical, and some were invented for the benefit of pilgrims. The crusaders built or rebuilt churches at almost every site. The pilgrims' devotion to places reflected a form of piety that the Greek Scriptures do not require, since Jesus taught that worship did not depend on a particular place (John 4:21-24).

XXII. The Italian Communes

The Italian maritime cities were essential to the survival of the crusader states. Their fleets transported crusaders and pilgrims, supplied the cities and blockaded Muslim ports. In return they received privileges: quarters in the coastal cities, exemption from customs duties and their own courts. Venice received a third of Tyre after helping to capture it in 1124.

But the Italians pursued their own interests. They traded with the Muslims as well as the Franks, selling timber, iron and slaves to Egypt in defiance of papal bans. Their rivalries, especially between Venice and Genoa, divided the kingdom. In the War of St Sabas the Genoese were expelled from Acre and moved to Tyre. The communes were among the first to leave when the end came in 1291, and some of their ships charged high prices to carry refugees to Cyprus.

XXIII. Cyprus

The kingdom of Cyprus was founded after Richard I of England took the island from the Byzantine ruler Isaac Komnenos in 1191, during the Third Crusade. Richard sold the island to the Templars, who returned it, and then to Guy of Lusignan, the deposed king of Jerusalem. Guy's brother Amalric became the first king of Cyprus in 1197, receiving his crown from the emperor Henry VI.

The Lusignan kingdom of Cyprus lasted until 1489, when it passed to Venice. It became a base for the crusader states and a refuge after 1291. The kings of Cyprus also claimed the crown of Jerusalem. The majority of the population was Greek Orthodox, and as elsewhere a Latin hierarchy was imposed on the Greek church, causing long tensions. In 1231 thirteen Greek monks of Kantara were burned as heretics for refusing to accept the Latin use of unleavened bread in the Eucharist.

XXIV. The Assassins and the Orders

The Nizari Ismailis of Syria, known to the crusaders as the Assassins, lived in castles in the mountains of the county of Tripoli, near the Hospitaller and Templar castles. They were feared by both Muslims and Christians for their use of assassination. Yet the military orders were able to force them to pay tribute, since the Assassins knew that killing a master of an order would achieve nothing, as a new master would be elected.

In 1173 the leader of the Syrian Assassins, Rashid al-Din Sinan, the Old Man of the Mountain, sent an envoy to King Amalric proposing an alliance and suggesting that his people might become Christians, if they were freed from the tribute to the Templars. The Templars murdered the envoy on his way home, and Amalric was furious. The episode shows the independence of the orders and their willingness to act in their own interests.

XXV. Women and the Orders

Although the military orders were primarily for men, women also took part in them. The Hospitallers had houses of sisters from an early date, who lived a contemplative life or cared for the sick. The Teutonic Order also had sisters. Some women became associate members of the Templars, giving their property to the order in return for its spiritual benefits. In Spain, the order of Santiago had female convents.

Women also played a role in the defence of the crusader states. Noble widows held castles, and the chroniclers record women fighting on the walls during sieges and bringing water and stones to the defenders. The queens of Jerusalem, notably Melisende, governed in their own right or as regents.

XXVI. The Lepers of St Lazarus

One unusual military order was the Order of St Lazarus, which originated in a leper hospital outside the walls of Jerusalem. Its members included knights who had contracted leprosy, which was relatively common in the crusader states, and who joined the order to continue fighting. The Templars and Hospitallers transferred brethren who contracted leprosy to St Lazarus. King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem, who suffered from leprosy from his childhood and died of it in 1185 at the age of twenty-three, was not a member of the order but was its most famous leper.

The lepers of St Lazarus fought at La Forbie in 1244 and at Gaza in 1253, where they were almost all killed. The order shows how far the idea of fighting as a religious duty had spread in the crusader states. The lepers, excluded from ordinary society, found in the order a community and a purpose. The Greek Scriptures record how Jesus touched and healed lepers (Mark 1:40-42), showing compassion to those whom society shunned.

XXVII. William of Tyre

The principal historian of the crusader states was William, archbishop of Tyre, who was born in Jerusalem about 1130, studied for some twenty years in France and Italy, and returned to serve the kingdom as a diplomat, tutor to the future Baldwin IV, chancellor and archbishop. His history of the kingdom from the First Crusade to 1184, written in Latin, is one of the finest works of medieval historical writing. He used documents, interviewed eyewitnesses and wrote with balance and insight, and he could read Arabic and Greek.

William was critical of many of the Frankish leaders and of the military orders, which he regarded as arrogant and disobedient to the church. He discovered as tutor that the young Baldwin did not feel pain when the other boys pinched him, the first sign of the leprosy that would kill him. William's history was translated into French and continued by other writers to the mid thirteenth century, and it was widely read in the west. He died about 1186, shortly before the disaster of Hattin, which he did not live to record.

XXVIII. Usama ibn Munqidh

The Syrian emir and poet Usama ibn Munqidh, who lived from 1095 to 1188, left a memoir that is the most vivid Muslim account of daily contact with the Franks. He knew Templars in Jerusalem, whom he called his friends, and he describes how they allowed him to pray in a small mosque beside the al-Aqsa. When a newly arrived Frank seized him and turned him to face east, saying that was the way to pray, the Templars apologised, explaining that the man was a newcomer who did not know local ways. Usama's memoir shows that long residence in the east made some Franks more tolerant, while newcomers from the west brought a harsher attitude.

XXIX. The Templar Legends

The suppression of the Templars gave rise to legends that have grown ever since. In the eighteenth century some Freemasons claimed descent from the Templars, and in modern times the order has been linked with the Holy Grail, hidden treasure and secret knowledge. None of these claims has any historical basis. The real history of the order, a religious community devoted to war, wealthy, proud and destroyed by a king, is remarkable enough without them.

XXX. Chronology

In 1098 the county of Edessa and the principality of Antioch were founded, and in July 1099 the kingdom of Jerusalem. In 1109 Tripoli fell. In 1113 the Hospitallers were recognised. About 1119–1120 the Templars were founded. In 1129 the Council of Troyes was held, and in 1139 Omne datum optimum was issued. In 1144 Edessa fell and Krak des Chevaliers was given to the Hospitallers. In 1187 Hattin was fought and Jerusalem lost. In 1190 the German hospital was founded at Acre, and in 1198 the Teutonic Order was established.

In 1226, by its traditional dating, which is disputed, the Golden Bull of Rimini was issued, and in 1230 the Teutonic Order entered Prussia. In 1256–1258 the War of St Sabas was fought. In 1268 Antioch fell, in 1271 Krak des Chevaliers, in 1289 Tripoli and in 1291 Acre. In 1302 Ruad was lost. From 1306 to 1310 the Hospitallers conquered Rhodes. On 13 October 1307 the Templars were arrested. On 22 March 1312 Vox in excelso was issued. In March 1314 James of Molay was burned.

XXXI. Bibliography

The following studies, editions and reference works underlie this account.