Templars and Hospitallers as Professed Religious in the Holy Land

2: COMMUNITIES

Chapter Two COMMUNITIES Recruits and Reinforcements When he was minister of the Franciscan province in the Holy Land Fidenzio of Padua was asked by the grand master of the Temple to provide two friars to assist as chaplains at the castle of Saphet. He recalled later that when Saphet fell to the Egyptians in 1266, after nearly six weeks of siege, the garrison of two thousand defenders had been reduced to only five hundred or six hundred exhausted men, many of whom were wounded.1 So three-quarters had perished. At about that time there were three hundred Hospitaller brothers stationed in the East2 and perhaps five hundred Templars. Confronting an enemy whose reserves of manpower allowed it to throw troops in headlong frontal assaults,3 the orders could face near annihilation. They suffered terribly in the battles of the Springs of Cresson and Hattin in the summer of 1187 and in the reduction of many of their strongpoints in the months that followed: their losses at their castles of Saphet and Belvoir, which held out until early in 1189, must have been severe.4 Even in a supposedly peaceful period, which stretched from 1200 to 1240, the Templars at Chastel Pèlerin were threatened as soon as the castle was built, and they lost one hundred out of one hundred and twenty brothers in a battle in the Amanus mountains in 1237. Hospitaller Crac des Chevaliers had to endure the attentions of the Muslims in 1207 and 1218 and Hospitaller Margat was besieged in 1206 and 25 1231.5 There were regular decimations as the pace of war increased from 1240 onwards. The Templars probably sacrificed three hundred brothers and the Hospitallers two hundred in the battle of La Forbie in 1244;6 it looks as though the orders had committed almost everyone available to the Christian army. The greater part of the Hospitaller central convent was lost in the fall of Arsur in 1265, when perhaps as many as eighty brothers were captured by the Egyptians.7 These men faced an unpredictable prospect because at times the Muslims would order the slaughter of all prisoners belonging to a Military Order.8 Although the orders usually adopted a relatively dispassionate tone with respect to their foes, which was a useful counter-balance to the theatrical rhetoric of crusade preachers,9 disasters like these generated impassioned appeals from them for help. On 16 June 1260 a Templar messenger arrived in London bringing letters for the king of England and the commander of the London Temple. He had broken all records, taking only thirteen weeks on the journey from Acre and a day to ride from Dover.10 Among the letters he carried was one describing the Mongol invasion of Syria, addressed to all the senior Templar officials in Europe by Grand Master Thomas Berard. It detailed the conquests of the Mongols, the size and potency of their armies, the preparations made by the rulers of Aleppo and Damascus to resist them and their approaches to Egypt for an alliance, the fall of Damascus and the flight of its ruler, the speed with which the king of Cilician Armenia and the prince of Antioch-Tripoli had come to terms, the poverty of the Christians, and the order’s obligations and the weight of its expenses.11 When forty Hospitallers fell at Tripoli in 1289, Master John of Villiers demanded replacements from every western priory, in order to repopulate his convent.12 Appeals to the European provinces usually evoked immediate responses . Judith Bronstein has shown how experienced officers from the West, together with a new cohort of the young, were rushed out to fill the places of the Hospitallers who had died in 1187.13 The heavy Templar casualties in the battle in the Amanus mountains in 1237 led to the mobilization in Europe of the brothers-at-arms of both orders, and thirty English Hospitallers were described riding out from their provincial headquarters in Clerkenwell, just to the north of London, on 26 Templars and Hospitallers their way to the sea.14 After the fall of Acre in 1291, in which the Templars believed that they had sacrificed three hundred brethren,15 the brother sergeant John Senaud was present at a chapter-general in Nicosia in Cyprus attended by four hundred, nearly all of whom must have been reinforcements.16 New brothers could therefore be posted...