of the order in Europe.[1] Stephen of England granted them the manors of Cressing and Witham in Essex, and his wife Matilda that of Cowley, near Oxford. Eugenius III., Louis VII., and 130 brethren were present at the Paris chapter (1147) when Bernard de Balliol granted the order 15 librates of land near Hitchin; and the list of English benefactors under Stephen and Henry II. includes the noble names of Ferrers, Harcourt, Hastings, Lacy, Clare, Vere and Mowbray. Spiritual privileges were granted to them by the popes as lavishly as temporal possessions by the princes and people. Pope Adrian IV. allowed them to have their own churches; Eugenius III. added to these the right to have churchyards; and churches and churchyards, as in the case of the order generally, were exempted from the operation of ordinary excommunications and interdicts. Thus a person dying excommunicated, refused burial elsewhere, sometimes—like Geoffrey de Mandeville[2]—found a resting-place in the consecrated ground of the Templars. Eugenius III. also granted the Templars the right to have interdicted churches opened twice a year for the purpose of making their collections. They were, moreover, as defenders of the Church, exempted from the payment of tithes. Finally, they were exempted from the action even of general censures and decrees of the popes, unless mentioned in them by name. Very soon the order refused to submit in any way to the ordinary jurisdiction of the diocesan bishops and formed in effect a separate ecclesiastical organization under the pope as supreme bishop. The result was that, scarce twenty-five years after its foundation, the order was at open feud with bishops and parish priests, and the popes found it necessary to issue decree after decree to protect it from violence and spoliation. The complaints of the secular clergy, on the other hand, came to a head in 1179 at the Lateran Council, when even Pope Alexander III. had to consent to a series of decrees directed against the abuse of its privileges by the order (Prutz, p. 41).
So long, however, as the attention of the papacy and of Christendom was fixed on the problem of recovering and safeguarding the Holy Land, the position of the Templars was unassailable and all efforts to curb the growth of their power vain. The order as such had no European policy;[3] the whole of its vast organization was maintained for the purpose of feeding the holy war against the infidels with recruits and with money; and its ultimate fate depended on its success or failure in the East. (W. A. P.)
After the council of Troyes Hugues de Payns came to England and induced a number of knights to follow him to the Holy Land. Among these was Fulk, count of Anjou, who would thus seem to have been a Templar before assuming the crown of Jerusalem in 1131. Hugues de Payns died about the year Early grand masters. 1136 and was succeeded by Robert de Craon, who is said to have been Anselm’s nephew. Everard de Barris, the third master, was conspicuous in the second crusade. In the disastrous march from Laodicea to Attalia his troops alone kept up even the show of discipline; and their success prompted Louis VII. to regulate his whole army after the model of the Templar knights. In the French king’s distress for money the Templars lent him large sums, ranging from 2000 silver marks to 30,000 solidi. When Conrad III. of Germany reached Jerusalem he was entertained at their palace (Easter 1148); and in the summer of the same year they took part in the unsuccessful siege of Damascus. The failure of this expedition was ascribed by a contemporary writer to their treachery—a charge to which Conrad would not assent. This is the first note of the accusations which from this time were of constant recurrence.[4]
Henceforward for 140 years the history of the Templars is the history of the Crusades (q.v.). In 1149 the Templars were
appointed to guard the fortress of Gaza, the last Christian
stronghold on the way towards Egypt. Four years later the
new master, Bernard de Tremelai, and forty of his followers,
bursting into Ascalon, were surrounded by the Saracens and
cut off to a single man. William of Tyre has preserved the
scandal of the day when he hints that they met a merited fate
in their eagerness to possess themselves of the city treasure.
Next year the rumour went abroad that they had sold a noble
half-converted Egyptian prince, who had fallen into their hands,
to chains and certain death for 60,000 aurei. In 1166 Amalric,
the Latin king of Jerusalem, hanged twelve Templars on a
charge of betraying a fortress beyond the Jordan to an amir
of Nūr al-Dīn of Damascus. The military power of Nūr al-Dīn
(1145–73) was a standing menace to the Christian
Relations with
Nūr al-Dīn.
settlements in the East. Edessa had fallen to the
prowess of his father (1144–45); Damascus was conquered
by the son (1153), who four years earlier had
carried his depredations almost to the walls of Antioch, and in
1157 laid siege to the Christian town of Paneas near the sources
of the Jordan. In the disastrous fight that followed for the
safety of the fortress of the Hospitallers, Bertrand de Blanquefort,
the master of the Templars, and Odo de St Amand, one of his
successors, were taken prisoners. Bertrand was released later
when Manuel was preparing to march against Nūr al-Dīn. The
Templars do not seem to have opposed Amalric’s early expeditions
against Egypt. It was Geoffrey Fulcher, the Templar
correspondent of Louis VII., who brought back (1167) to
Jerusalem the glowing accounts of the splendour of the caliph’s
court at Cairo with which Gibbon has enlivened his great work.
Nor was the order less active at the northern limits of the Latin
kingdom. Two English Templars, Gilbert de Lacy and Robert
Mansel, “qui Galensibus praeerat,” starting from Antioch,
surprised Nūr al-Dīn in the neighbourhood of Tripoli and put
him barefooted to flight. But jealousy or honour led the
Templars to oppose Amalric’s Egyptian expedition of 1168;
and the wisdom of their advice became apparent when the renewed
discord on the Nile led to the conquest of Egypt by Asad
al-Dīn Shīrkūh, and thus indirectly to the accession
Relations with Saladin.
of Saladin, in 1169. In 1170 they beat Saladin back
from their frontier fortress of Gaza; and seven years
later they shared in Baldwin IV.’s great victory at Ascalon.
Meanwhile Saladin had possessed himself of Emesa and Damascus (1174–75), and, as he was already lord of Egypt, his power hemmed in the Latin kingdom on every side. In July 1173 Amalric was succeeded by his son Baldwin. IV., a boy of twelve. Raymond III., count of Tripoli, a man suspected of being in league with the Saracens, was appointed regent, although in 1176 the masters of the Templars and the Hospitallers united in offering this office to the newly arrived Philip of Flanders. The construction of the Templar fortress at Jacob's ford on the upper Jordan led to a fresh Saracen invasion and the disastrous battle of Paneas (1179), from which the young king and the Holy Cross escaped with difficulty, while Odo de St Amand, the grand master, was carried away captive and never returned.
During Odo’s mastership the Old Man of the Mountains sent to Amalric offering to accept the Christian faith if released from the tribute he had paid to the Templars since (according to the
- ↑ In August 1279, Philip IV. ceded to the Templars within the precincts of the Temple at Paris (vicus Templi), i.e.. the whole fortified quarter on the right bank of the Seine, the right to exercise higher and lower justice (alta et bassa justicia), to retain all property usually escheated to the crown, and to guard their fortress “night and day” by means of their own servientes without interference. The king undertook, for himself and his successors, not to endeavour to levy any taille or other tax nor to exact any of the customary feudal services within the Temple. Text in Prutz, Templerherrenorden, p. 298.
- ↑ Illo autem, in discrimine mortis, ultimum trahente spiritum, quidam supervenere Templarii qui religionis sacre habitum cruce rubea signatum ei imposuerunt (Mon. Ang., iv. 142). There must be a slight error here on the part of the chronicler; for Geoffrey died in 1144 and the red cross was not granted to the Templars until the following year. This does not, however, affect the main fact that Geoffrey, though excommunicated, was buried in consecrated ground at the New Temple in London. This was in 1163, twenty-two years before the consecration of the Temple Church now standing. See Round, Geoffrey de Mandeville, p. 224.
- ↑ Finke, p. 42. Individual Templars, of course, acted from time to time as diplomats or as royal advisers; but they in no sense represented the order.
- ↑ Hist. Pontific., ap. Pertz, xx. 535–536.
