Templar Knight, Superstar

Templars pt. 1: Origins

Templars pt. 2: Rise

Skill in armed combat never automatically guarantees victory in battle, and despite the legends which remain, evidence suggests that the Templars had some serious shortcomings when it came to strategy. Partly, this can be put down to their indoctrination. When your soldiers will die in battle rather than retreat should a position turn bad, a lot of strategic flexibility is sacrificed. The Knights devoutly believed that God was with them, and that righteousness would prevail – in other words, they were fanatics.

There are various accounts of Templars dismissing battlefield intelligence, warnings, strategic advice and even other force commanders’ battle orders on the grounds that God would see them through. Their primary strategy was to charge in, confident in their superior arms, training and piety – a strategy which was often used against them to great effect. The brilliant Arab leader Saladin, in particular, was known for ordering his lines to retreat if the Knights charged, drawing them in, and then close and surround the cavalry once they were isolated. It was a tactic which repeatedly proved deadly. Other times however, the Templars proved perfectly adequate architects of their own disasters.

At the siege of Ascalon in 1153, King Baldwin III of Jerusalem led a combined force consisting of his own armies bolstered with Knights Templar and knights from the two other militant crusader orders that had come into existence, the Knights Hospitaller and the Teutonic Knights. The siege had been dragging on for some three months when the defenders unwisely set fire to a siege tower during a high wind. The flames turned back on a fortified tower in the wall, and a chunk of the tower collapsed. According to William of Tyre, a chronicler of the times, the Grand Master of the Knights Templar, Bernard de Tremelay, decided this was an opportunity too good to miss.

De Tremelay, who had been Grand Master just four years, gathered a pack of some forty of his strongest Knights and announced his intention to breach the wall. Baldwin’s men tried to convince de Tremelay that the idea was dangerous, but he refused to listen. The leaders of the Hospitallers and the Teutonics made similar protests against the plan, but they too were unable to get de Tremelay to change his mind. Finally, de Tremelay actually stood guard over the gap whilst his men went in, so as to prevent anyone else from attempting to join the group, and then follwed them into Ascalon city. No more was heard from the men until their severed heads were laughingly displayed on the battlements the following morning.

Crusaders play chess during a seige, from William of Tyre's _History_

Another notably stupid escapade resulted in a Templar slaughter near Antioch in 1237AD. The Preceptor of the Antioch chapter house, Guillaume de Montferrat, led a large force against the castle of Darbsak, which was controlled by the Sultan of Aleppo. The Knights prepared a camp on a nearby plain, drew into battle formation, and approached the castle. As they got close, Christian prisoners chained near the castle screamed warnings to the Knights, trying to inform them that the Sultan was waiting for them with an entire province-worth of soldiers, and that a mighty ambush had been prepared. Guillaume’s response was immediate – he hurled insults back at the prisoners, calling them traitors and apostates for trying to sap his men’s morale.

Not all of the Templars were quite so sanguine. The raiding band wasn’t huge, and there were a lot of enemies in the area. A contingent of Knights approached Guillaume, pointing out that the prisoners had no reason to lie, and saying that it might be prudent to at least scout out the area to investigate the enemy’s strength. Guillaume declared them cowards and false knights, and announced that he was not prepared to allow such craven men to share in a great victory. Adding, as an afterthought, that he didn’t want to be fighting alongside such gross cowards anyway, he banished the entire contingent back to the chapter house.

With everyone who had questioned him sent off the field, Guillaume marched confidently up to the castle, and was then astonished when a huge tide of enemy warriors descended on his men. Incredibly, Guillaume broke the core Templar rule and fled the scene. His force was duly slaughtered against the castle walls – more than one hundred Knights, something like another hundred sergeants, three hundred crossbowmen and an infantry force of hundreds more men. It is a testament to the Templars’ training that they took almost five times as many Turks with them. Guillaume himself was caught in flight and cut to pieces, but not before he’d killed sixteen men outright, and lethally wounded at least twenty more.

There were some Templar successes of course, particularly early on. Baldwin II of Palestine attacked Damascus in 1129, shortly after the Templars first became a force. The Knights managed to broker a deal with the infamous Ishmaelian sect of Islam, the Hashishim, but even the help of the notorious Assassins wasn’t enough to swing the battle Baldwin’s way. Even so, the Templars were largely to thank for preventing the defeat from becoming a fatal rout. Similarly, King Louis VII of France openly acknowledged that it was only the wisdom and sense of the Templars that saved the disastrous Second Crusade (1147-8AD) from being a total massacre before the Europeans even reached Palestine.

In general though, the Templars – along with the other orders militant – proved remarkably ineffective in helping to protect and maintain the crusader states. The kingdoms themselves hit their peak quickly; by 1145AD things were already starting to go wrong. From 1170AD onwards, the Muslims were carrying the fight back to the Christian invaders, fired by the brilliance of their general and leader, Saladin. Jerusalem fell in 1187AD, and although the Crusaders battled on doggedly for another century and the militant orders continued operations, the last piece of invaded territory, the city of Acre, fell in 1291AD.

Templars pt. 4: Templar, Inc.