The Glory of the Crusades (14 page)

Defense of the Latin East

The security of the Crusader States was always precarious. The one constant in the Holy Land was a lack of sufficient manpower to police, govern, and defend the 600-mile region.

In order to compensate for this lack of manpower, an intensive castle-building campaign was undertaken from 1115–1150. Castles were sited in strategic locations in order to control the surrounding territory and were used as forward operating bases for incursions into Muslim territory. The shortage of manpower “demanded fortifications so strong they could be garrisoned with comparatively small bodies of men.”
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The celebrated castle Krak des Chevaliers is a great example. It was built in Syria (near the modern-day border with Lebanon) in the County of Tripoli and had an inner wall a hundred feet thick as well as an outer wall fixed with round towers. It enclosed a 390-foot-long Great Hall, quarters for soldiers, stables for horses, several wells and cisterns, and had windmills to process corn and sugar cane. Krak des Chevaliers was virtually impregnable and withstood multiple attacks including one by Saladin in 1188. The Mamluk general Baybars captured it finally in 1271 after more than a yearlong siege.

As beneficial as castles were to the Crusaders, they were costly to maintain. Even if built efficiently, they required manpower to defend and utilize. To garrison these castles and defend the Latin East, the rulers of Outrémer turned to an innovation in the spiritual life of the Church.

The Warrior-Monks

Crusading was originally a temporary action undertaken for a specified goal. With the establishment of the military religious orders in the twelfth century, that “temporary act of devotion became warfare as a devotional way of life.”
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The development of these religious orders, whose members took a vow to live the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience with the added vow of military service for Christ and the Church, can be traced to those warriors who came to the Holy Land after the First Crusade. The founding of their orders, like the founding of most religious orders throughout Church history, was not a planned event; rather it “was the completely spontaneous response of some Christians to the problems facing them in the Holy Land. The pilgrims had to be protected and the sick and needy among them cared for, and above all else, the safety of the captured holy places had to be assured.”
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Over time, four main groups of warrior-monks developed: the Hospitallers, the Templars, the Teutonic Knights, and the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre. Believing that “fighting was a charitable activity,” members of these orders “said the office and then rode out to kill their enemies.”
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Some questioned whether these orders were in keeping with the dictates of the gospel of Christ, but the reality of life in the twelfth century was such that “if the mendicant brothers preached the gospel, the military brethren defended it.”
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The Hospitallers

The Hospitallers began as an independent religious order founded in 1113 by Bl. Gerard Tenque, whose initial role was caring for sick pilgrims in a hospital. Recognized by Pope Paschal II, these monks followed the Rule of St. Augustine, wore a black cloak with a white cross, and were especially devoted to St. John the Baptist. Their official name, the Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, reflected this devotion. The Hospitallers served the poor, considering themselves “serfs of the poor of Christ.”
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The Grand Master of the order was called “the guardian of the poor” and the brothers were allowed to wear only humble clothing because “our lords the poor . . . go about naked and meanly dressed. And it would be wrong and improper for the serfs to be proud and the lord humble.”
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The Hospitallers cared for the sick in the most luxurious manner possible in their Jerusalem hospital, which was a world-class facility that admitted patients regardless of illness (except leprosy), nationality, or sex. Not only did they admit Jews and Muslims but they accommodated their dietary laws.

The hospital in Jerusalem was a massive facility with a maximum capacity of 2,000 separate beds, and in overflow situations the brothers’ dormitory was used by the sick while the brothers slept on the floor. Patients were provided excellent food and care including meat portions three times a week and white bread—quantity and quality foreign to all but the noblest members of medieval society. Four surgeons and physicians attended at the hospital and practiced Western medicine based on the techniques taught at the medical school in Salerno. When the kingdom’s army mobilized, the doctors attended in the field.

The Templars

King Baldwin II supported a group of knights organized by the Frenchman Hugh of Payns and gave them part of his royal palace in the Temple enclosure as their quarters. Accordingly, the religious order originally known as the Poor Knights of Christ became known as the Knights of the Temple, or the Templars.

Hugh and eight companions including Andrew of Montbard (the uncle of St. Bernard of Clairvaux) founded the Templars. They lived by the Cistercian rule and took vows to live the evangelical counsels, adding a special vow to protect Christian pilgrims traveling from the port of Jaffa to Jerusalem.

The order received recognition in 1128 from Pope Honorius II (1124–1130), and over time grew in prestige and influence through the granting of large amounts of land from the nobility of Christendom. The Templars were known for their discipline in battle and strict obedience; a Templar was not allowed even to adjust his stirrup without permission from his superior!
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Templars lived by the five major rules of the order: 1) to fight to the death for the holy places of Christendom; 2) to refuse to be ransomed if captured; 3) to accept every combat regardless of the odds; 4) to refuse quarter or ransom to Muslim prisoners; and 5) to give their lives to defend any Christian attacked by a Muslim.
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Despite the strictness and difficulty of Templar life, many were drawn to it. St. Bernard helped recruitment through his general support and the writing of a treatise,
On the Praise of the New Knighthood
, in which he highlighted the meritorious aspect of fighting for Christ with the potential for martyrdom: “Life indeed is fruitful and victory glorious, but according to holy law death is better than either of these things. For if those are blessed who die in the Lord, how much more blessed are those who die for the Lord?
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The order grew in membership, prominence, and influence in the Holy Land and Europe. By 1150, the Templars could muster 600 knights, which combined with the Hospitallers amounted to half the total available knights in the Latin East.
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Their power in Christendom was rooted in the 9,000 feudal lordships and manors they owned, providing a large base of resources and financial influence.
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Templar houses became known as important financial centers in Europe and served as places of deposit for Crusaders traveling to the Holy Land. This, in turn, inaugurated the first primitive system of ATMs, since those who deposited funds in a Templar house in Europe could withdraw that amount minus a fee at Templar houses in the Latin East.

As the number of transactions grew so did the Templar coffers. Their financial holdings and power became the envy of royalty and nobility throughout Europe, but especially in France. This situation would incite the jealousy of the despotic Philip IV “the Fair” of France in the fourteenth century, who arrested the master of the order and other knights on false charges. The king convinced Pope Clement V to order the suppression of the Templars, which occurred at the Council of Vienne in 1311. Despite their inauspicious ending, during their existence the Templars faithfully served Christendom, especially through the witness of the 20,000 brothers who gave their lives for their fellow Christians.
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Knights of the Holy Sepulchre

Godfrey de Bouillon, the hero of the First Crusade, founded the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre in 1099 as the military guard for the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. In 1138 Pope Innocent II (r. 1130–1143) approved their religious charism as canons of the Church embracing the evangelical counsels. The order also contained knights living a secular life who vowed to defend the tomb of Christ.
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Operating so closely with the kings of Jerusalem initially made the order a powerful institution, but it steadily became a ceremonial and service organization. In 1847, the order was reconstituted, reorganized, and modernized by Pope Bl. Pius IX, who took on the role of grand master. The Knights of the Holy Sepulchre continue to serve the Church through their spiritual devotion to the Holy City and their assistance to Christians in the Holy Land.

The Teutonic Knights

The Teutonic Knights of St. Mary’s Hospital of Jerusalem originated through the actions of German merchants at the siege of Acre in 1190, during the Third Crusade. They began by simply establishing a hospital in the Crusader camp to care for the sick, wounded, and dying combatants, but within a decade their focus shifted to military matters. Like the other military religious orders, they bound themselves in service to Christ and the Church. They embraced a personal identification with the Savior, evidenced by the adoption of the motto, “Who fights us, fights Jesus Christ.”
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Although never influential in the Holy Land, the Teutonic Knights became a powerful political and military force in Eastern Europe. In spite of this, they were decisively defeated by Polish forces at the Battle of Tannenberg on July 15, 1410. The devastation wrought by this defeat severely limited their influence and effectiveness. Although their numbers dwindled through the centuries, they continued to exist as a small order of nobility centered in Austria. Already limited in activity, they suffered even greater loss when twelve knights were hanged in 1944 by the Nazi German government for their role in the assassination plot against Adolf Hitler.
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Military Orders and the Church

The modern Catholic may wonder why the Church recognized and supported the creation of religious orders whose members lived the evangelical counsels but also fought in combat. The same question was also raised by some Catholics during the twelfth century, but the Church rightly emphasized the difference between killing an innocent person and an enemy soldier. St. Bernard used the term “malecide”—the killing of evil; it was “the extermination of injustice rather than of the unjust, and therefore desirable.”
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The military religious orders were a unique spiritual innovation in the life of the Church. While the Crusades gave the medieval warriors of Christendom a temporary outlet for spiritual benefits through the use of their martial skill, the military orders provided a permanent place for the knight in monastic life: “The warrior, a strong man, taking pride in his strength, was asked to use this strength and his sword in the service of the weak, to step out of his own world and become a monk, yet keep his sword by his side and his lance in his hand.”
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The Rise of Zengi

The Islamic world in the east was fractured in the late eleventh century with competing caliphs in Baghdad and Cairo. The call to
jihad
after the First Crusade to force the Christians out of Outrémer was centered in Damascus through the preaching of Ali as-Sulami (1039–1106). A year before his death, as-Sulami gave a series of public lectures in the Great Mosque in Damascus, which were published as a book entitled
Kitab al-jihad
or
The Book on Holy War
. As-Sulami argued that the solution to disunity among Muslims was the expulsion of the Outrémer Christians through
jihad
. His contemporaries paid little heed to as-Sulami’s exhortations, but fifty years later Nur al-Din would lay the groundwork for the famous general Saladin to implement the plan of as-Sulami to destroy the Latin East.

Imad al-Din Zengi was the ruler of Mosul and Aleppo and struck a fearful figure; he was “a sadistic monster, at the sight of whom one man was supposed to have dropped dead from fright, [and] who crucified his own troops found marching out of line and trampling crops.”
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Zengi desired to unify the Muslim cities and create an empire for himself. He also desired to expand his holdings by pushing the Franks out of the Holy Land through
jihad
.

A great opportunity came to Zengi when King Fulk of Jerusalem died unexpectedly in 1143 from a horrific head injury sustained while hunting. His oldest son, Baldwin, was too young to assume the throne outright but was proclaimed king under the regency of his mother Queen Melisende. Seizing on the political weakness in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Zengi marshaled his army for an attack on the Crusader State of Edessa.

Once his army arrived at Edessa, Zengi’s engineers began the task of undermining the walls by digging tunnels. Four weeks after their arrival, on Christmas Eve, they brought down a portion of the walls and poured into the city.

The defenders and populace of Edessa made a mad dash for the citadel in the hopes of survival; Archbishop Hugh was accidentally crushed to death by the fleeing masses.
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Zengi’s army rampaged through the fallen city, pillaging, plundering, raping, and massacring 6,000 Christian men, women, and children.
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