Crusading was always tough…but the borders of the Frankish county of Tripoli were a military nightmare.
In the 1140s and 1150s the Templars had been pushed to within a sword’s width of complete collapse. The frontiers of Antioch were under continual pressure. The armies of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem were overstretched as they tried to defend against attacks from Damascus. The drain on the order’s manpower was shocking.
But there was one area of even greater vulnerability. Crucially for our story, there was a strip of territory that was uneasily close to both the new homelands of the Syrian Nizaris in the Jabal Bahra, and their Sunni Turkic enemies. This was the fragile, complicated crusader state whose loss would create a deadly wedge between the remaining Frankish settlements – the county of Tripoli was strategically vital but chaotic, deadly and hard to defend with the available military resources. Only those comfortable with the imminent prospect of a violent death could thrive in such a dystopian environment.
This was the perfect setting for the Templars and the Assassins to bounce off each other – and for over 100 years they played out an edgy, grotesque parody of landlord-tenant relationships along these dangerous mountain frontiers.
Tripolitan Frontiers
Detail from a map of the Crusader States – Image by MapKlimantas / Wikimedia Commons
The County of Tripoli had always been hard to defend, and the Templars had shed much blood in doing so. In 1137 they had participated in the campaign to defend the castle of Montferrand in the county of Tripoli from the armies of Zengi, the atabeg of Mosul. The crusading forces were heavily defeated. Only 18 Templars survived the carnage.
But the collapse of the County of Edessa in 1144 made an already difficult job almost impossible. The gradual consolidation of Muslim power forced the counts of Tripoli to undertake a radical defence review along their eastern frontiers. The ability of the local Frankish lords to hold onto their lands was looking increasingly doubtful.
This should have been good news for the Nizaris – and it was, at least in part. It had allowed them to move into the Jabal Bahra and build their castle network more easily. Chaos did not create a vacuum, but it had at least opened up opportunities.
But there was a problem. The region was too crowded, and too volatile, for things to ever fully stabilise. Ironically, it was the gradual centralisation of power by Muslim strongmen that changed the nature of the relationship between the Assassins and their crusader neighbours – and the Templars.
Increasing military threat forced the counts of Tripoli to take a hard look at the defensibility (or otherwise) of their eastern frontiers. Zengi was making significant inroads. He had captured the important fortified towns of Montferrand and Raphaniya in 1137. The long-term defence of the Tripolitan frontiers clearly needed more professional, more consistent, resources.
The Templars and the Hospitallers were the obvious solution. Only they had the money to build castles and garrison key fortifications without any immediate payback other than the fulfilment of their desire to defend Christendom.
This solution to the defence of the county of Tripoli – and it was only a decision borne out of desperation – was far less satisfactory from the Assassins’ perspective. Successive counts were forced to give much of their marcher-lands, and the castles and estates that went with them, to the military orders. Where there had been chaos, there was now order – and, ominously for the Assassins, that order was being imposed by ‘corporations’ rather than by noble families.
The Hospitallers gradually took over the defence of much of the north-east of the county. The first major grant took place in 1142, but its stipulations were so detailed and so far-reaching that it must have been the subject of extensive discussions for some time before. The Hospitallers were given what was in effect their own principality, including the fortress which was later rebuilt as the iconic Crac des Chevaliers. Their role was to create a defence bulwark against the threat of Sunni Muslim troops operating out of Homs and Hama.
Crac des Chevaliers – photo by peuplier / Wikimedia Commons
By the late 1140s and early 1150s, however, the military situation had deteriorated still further, and the Templars had to step in to take up a greater share of the burden of defence.
In 1152, in a telling indication of the changing balance of power within the crusader states, the Templars were given land in the coastal Tripolitan lordship of Tortosa to build a castle. The previous secular owner, Reynouard of Maraclea, had been unable to defend his castle from Muslim troops when they invaded – and when they left, he no longer had the money to rebuild it. The Templars stepped in because they were the only ones with the resources to do the job.
Aware of the increasing threat to the area, they built it bigger and better. The new Templar castle at Tortosa was said by the early thirteenth century pilgrim Wilbrand of Oldenburg to have been defended by no less than eleven towers, as well as a huge keep. This was a military commitment that most members of the nobility could only dream of.
Interestingly, the new Templar fortifications at Tortosa, which date to the late 1150s and 1160s, trialled many of the design features that were later to be incorporated into the ‘classic’ crusader castles of the 1170s and 1180s – they featured the double layers of walls of what later became known as a concentric castle. Each line of walls was protected by a moat, and other defensive features. The Templars were developing a blueprint for a new generation of state-of-the-art (and hugely expensive) fortifications. In the absence of sufficient manpower for large field armies, these castles would be needed very soon.
The Templars had been the natural choice when it came to finding new owners for Tortosa. Their castle of Chastel-Blanc, up in the mountains, was built shortly beforehand—this too was a formidable fortification and part of a broader network of castles. From the top of Chastel-Blanc, the garrison could see another important Templar castle at al-‘Arimah, and the famous Hospitaller castle at Crac des Chevaliers in the distance – the quantity of the fortifications spoke volumes about the intensity of the threat.
As in Antioch, this Templar presence was more than just military. They had created what amounted to their own mini-province in the south of the county of Tripoli. They controlled the population, the villages, even the churches. The benefits they brought to the local Franks were immense—without military help from the Templars and the Hospitallers, the entire county was barely a going concern. War in the Holy Land was being pushed to a level at which most of the old crusader nobility were barely able to compete. Like it or not, the military orders were the only organisations able to step in and take up the slack.
The massive programme of frontier castle-building meant that the Templars were almost unrecognisable from their early days. They had started as a fledgling operation, supplying small contingents to other peoples’ armies. They had fought in battles in which they had very little control over the final outcomes.
But now they had become hugely influential warlords in their own right. They had their own networks of castles, garrisons and armies – and they had become marcher lords in the county of Tripoli, uncomfortably close to their new neighbours, the Nizaris.
Frustration and Blood
The ruins of the Templar Chapel in the Citadel of Tartus / Tortosa. Photo by Dosseman / Wikimedia Commons
The Assassins knew that the Templars—disciplined and ferocious warriors—would make far less congenial neighbours and landlords than the distant and impecunious counts of Tripoli.
The Assassins were not happy with this new arrangement – and they had tangible ways of expressing their feelings on the matter. It was, the Nizaris thought, the fault of the count of Tripoli, the man who had invited the military orders onto his lands. The Assassins could not turn back the clock, and there was little to gain by taking personal revenge on the counts of Tripoli for doing so. But, as usual, revenge was a central feature of Nizari ‘foreign policy’. Their anger and frustration was unstoppable. If they could not take their revenge on the Templars, they could at least strike back at Count Raymond II of Tripoli—the man who had installed these mortal enemies so irritatingly close to their domains.
In 1152 they expressed their disapproval in the way they knew best. As Count Raymond was ‘entering the city gate [of Tripoli], without thought of evil mishap,’ wrote one Frankish chronicler, ‘he was struck down by the swords of the Assassins at the entrance to the gate between the barbican and the wall and perished miserably. With him was slain also that distinguished nobleman…Ralph de Merle, and one of his knights, both of whom had chanced to be with the count on that journey’.
Across the Middle East, killing innocent foreigners was the traditional response in the immediate aftermath of such an attack – it was emotionally satisfying, it gave vent to an underlying xenophobia and, importantly, once the victims’ property had been plundered, it was also very profitable. As news of the count’s murder spread, ‘the whole city [of Tripoli] was roused. The people flew to arms and without discrimination put to the sword all those who were found to differ either in language or dress from the Latins. In this way it was hoped that the perpetrators of the foul deed might be found’. The real culprits were, of course, long gone.
The Templars, whose presence in the region had triggered the attack, now felt free to go on to the offensive—from this time onwards they started to raid the villages and Nizari settlements in the mountains and only refrained from doing so when the Assassins gave them an annual ‘protection money’ payment of 2,000 gold coins. A dangerous and long-standing precedent had been set.
Cults and Corporations
Maysaf Castle – photo by Ahmad Alhaj Ebraheem / Wikimedia Commons
Most importantly for these new and deeply unsatisfactory arrangements, the Templars were an organisation rather than a dynasty. This dramatically reduced the leverage which the Assassins could exert.
This strange dynamic persisted for over one hundred years. Even in the middle of the thirteenth century, when the crusader states had a mere shadow of their former power, the Assassins were still paying tribute to the military orders. As one Christian memoirist wrote in the 1250s, ‘the Old Man of the Mountain made tribute payments to the Hospital and Temple because they had no fear of the Assassins. The Old Man could not gain anything by having the master of the Temple or the Hospital killed because he understood clearly that if he had one of them killed, another man, just as able, would immediately replace him. Because of this he was unwilling to lose any of the [fidais] when he had nothing to gain by it’.
The military orders were the only groups amongst the crusaders who did not buy into the Assassins’ assiduously cultivated ‘cult of death’ image. They didn’t take their PR campaign seriously and, to a large extent, it was because it takes one to know one. The extreme, death-dealing Muslim Nizari sect seems, on the surface, unlikely to have much in common with an order of devout Catholic monks. But they were far more similar than either would have cared to admit.
The Templars had their own branding issues to contend with, and their own intuitively crafted reputational strategy. Like the Nizaris, they were a tiny but larger than life group – at their core, mirroring the impact of the fidais, were the brother knights, a small number of dedicated individuals whose reputation spread far beyond their obvious capabilities. Much of this, as with the Nizaris, was because of their well-deserved reputation for fanaticism. Stopping a small number of highly-motivated individuals is extremely difficult – both ‘cults’ exploited this strange truth, and thrived on their ‘living legend’ status.
The Assassins and the military orders, particularly the Templars, had one other vital characteristic in common – their corporatist outlook. And it was this ‘corporatism’ which made the Templars so dangerous. The Templars, not being a ‘family firm’, were hard to intimidate – and, if power was not a personal or familial asset, then the ability of the Assassins to hurt an individual was irrelevant. And, even if a succession of individual Templar masters were killed, power still resided in the order’s governing chapter which allowed them to make relatively seamless new appointments.
The logic which underpinned the Assassins’ power was that the leaders of such regimes were relatively easy to coerce or blackmail – provided you could persuade them that they were personally vulnerable. The military orders, however, Hospitallers as well as Templars, were the glaring exception to this logic. They were led by individuals rather than families, by appointees rather than warlords. And their governing structures were based upon merit, discipline and obedience rather than family ties. If you killed the master of the Templars, there would be another one, operating the same policies, in place by the end of the evening. As the Templars were not susceptible to personal threat, they were impervious to blackmail. In fact, on the contrary, the military orders had the men and the castles to turn the tables on the Assassins, and impose their own demands.
The similarities of outlook between the two groups sometimes meant that they were able to maintain an uneasy modus vivendi. An uneasy truce usually existed between them. The southern reaches of the Jabal Bahra were the heartlands of the Syrian Nizaris from the mid-1130s onwards, and remained so for most of the period of the crusades.
But the Assassins and the Templars were never going to be cosy companions. The Templars usually held the upper hand – they had resources flowing in from Europe to strengthen their position and they were impervious to the usual threats and intimidation which lay at the heart of the Assassins’ power. This was quantitatively reflected in the hard currency of cash. Poor as they were, the Assassins regularly paid tribute to the military orders, but the military orders never paid anything to the Assassins.
From the early years of the Nizari state based around Masyaf, the Templars assumed a supremely dangerous role—they were blackmailers to the world’s most famous extortionists.
Steve Tibble, an honorary research associate at Royal Holloway, University of London, has a new book out – Assassins and Templars: A Battle in Myth and Blood – from Yale University Press. It tells the true history behind the hugely popular video game Assassin’s Creed and the medieval world’s two most extraordinary organisations, tracing their origins, strategies, violent clashes, and enduring legacy in myth and memory.
You can get your copy of Assassins and Templars: A Battle in Myth and Blood through
By Steve Tibble
Crusading was always tough…but the borders of the Frankish county of Tripoli were a military nightmare.
In the 1140s and 1150s the Templars had been pushed to within a sword’s width of complete collapse. The frontiers of Antioch were under continual pressure. The armies of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem were overstretched as they tried to defend against attacks from Damascus. The drain on the order’s manpower was shocking.
But there was one area of even greater vulnerability. Crucially for our story, there was a strip of territory that was uneasily close to both the new homelands of the Syrian Nizaris in the Jabal Bahra, and their Sunni Turkic enemies. This was the fragile, complicated crusader state whose loss would create a deadly wedge between the remaining Frankish settlements – the county of Tripoli was strategically vital but chaotic, deadly and hard to defend with the available military resources. Only those comfortable with the imminent prospect of a violent death could thrive in such a dystopian environment.
This was the perfect setting for the Templars and the Assassins to bounce off each other – and for over 100 years they played out an edgy, grotesque parody of landlord-tenant relationships along these dangerous mountain frontiers.
Tripolitan Frontiers
The County of Tripoli had always been hard to defend, and the Templars had shed much blood in doing so. In 1137 they had participated in the campaign to defend the castle of Montferrand in the county of Tripoli from the armies of Zengi, the atabeg of Mosul. The crusading forces were heavily defeated. Only 18 Templars survived the carnage.
But the collapse of the County of Edessa in 1144 made an already difficult job almost impossible. The gradual consolidation of Muslim power forced the counts of Tripoli to undertake a radical defence review along their eastern frontiers. The ability of the local Frankish lords to hold onto their lands was looking increasingly doubtful.
This should have been good news for the Nizaris – and it was, at least in part. It had allowed them to move into the Jabal Bahra and build their castle network more easily. Chaos did not create a vacuum, but it had at least opened up opportunities.
But there was a problem. The region was too crowded, and too volatile, for things to ever fully stabilise. Ironically, it was the gradual centralisation of power by Muslim strongmen that changed the nature of the relationship between the Assassins and their crusader neighbours – and the Templars.
Increasing military threat forced the counts of Tripoli to take a hard look at the defensibility (or otherwise) of their eastern frontiers. Zengi was making significant inroads. He had captured the important fortified towns of Montferrand and Raphaniya in 1137. The long-term defence of the Tripolitan frontiers clearly needed more professional, more consistent, resources.
The Templars and the Hospitallers were the obvious solution. Only they had the money to build castles and garrison key fortifications without any immediate payback other than the fulfilment of their desire to defend Christendom.
This solution to the defence of the county of Tripoli – and it was only a decision borne out of desperation – was far less satisfactory from the Assassins’ perspective. Successive counts were forced to give much of their marcher-lands, and the castles and estates that went with them, to the military orders. Where there had been chaos, there was now order – and, ominously for the Assassins, that order was being imposed by ‘corporations’ rather than by noble families.
The Hospitallers gradually took over the defence of much of the north-east of the county. The first major grant took place in 1142, but its stipulations were so detailed and so far-reaching that it must have been the subject of extensive discussions for some time before. The Hospitallers were given what was in effect their own principality, including the fortress which was later rebuilt as the iconic Crac des Chevaliers. Their role was to create a defence bulwark against the threat of Sunni Muslim troops operating out of Homs and Hama.
By the late 1140s and early 1150s, however, the military situation had deteriorated still further, and the Templars had to step in to take up a greater share of the burden of defence.
In 1152, in a telling indication of the changing balance of power within the crusader states, the Templars were given land in the coastal Tripolitan lordship of Tortosa to build a castle. The previous secular owner, Reynouard of Maraclea, had been unable to defend his castle from Muslim troops when they invaded – and when they left, he no longer had the money to rebuild it. The Templars stepped in because they were the only ones with the resources to do the job.
Aware of the increasing threat to the area, they built it bigger and better. The new Templar castle at Tortosa was said by the early thirteenth century pilgrim Wilbrand of Oldenburg to have been defended by no less than eleven towers, as well as a huge keep. This was a military commitment that most members of the nobility could only dream of.
Interestingly, the new Templar fortifications at Tortosa, which date to the late 1150s and 1160s, trialled many of the design features that were later to be incorporated into the ‘classic’ crusader castles of the 1170s and 1180s – they featured the double layers of walls of what later became known as a concentric castle. Each line of walls was protected by a moat, and other defensive features. The Templars were developing a blueprint for a new generation of state-of-the-art (and hugely expensive) fortifications. In the absence of sufficient manpower for large field armies, these castles would be needed very soon.
The Templars had been the natural choice when it came to finding new owners for Tortosa. Their castle of Chastel-Blanc, up in the mountains, was built shortly beforehand—this too was a formidable fortification and part of a broader network of castles. From the top of Chastel-Blanc, the garrison could see another important Templar castle at al-‘Arimah, and the famous Hospitaller castle at Crac des Chevaliers in the distance – the quantity of the fortifications spoke volumes about the intensity of the threat.
As in Antioch, this Templar presence was more than just military. They had created what amounted to their own mini-province in the south of the county of Tripoli. They controlled the population, the villages, even the churches. The benefits they brought to the local Franks were immense—without military help from the Templars and the Hospitallers, the entire county was barely a going concern. War in the Holy Land was being pushed to a level at which most of the old crusader nobility were barely able to compete. Like it or not, the military orders were the only organisations able to step in and take up the slack.
The massive programme of frontier castle-building meant that the Templars were almost unrecognisable from their early days. They had started as a fledgling operation, supplying small contingents to other peoples’ armies. They had fought in battles in which they had very little control over the final outcomes.
But now they had become hugely influential warlords in their own right. They had their own networks of castles, garrisons and armies – and they had become marcher lords in the county of Tripoli, uncomfortably close to their new neighbours, the Nizaris.
Frustration and Blood
The Assassins knew that the Templars—disciplined and ferocious warriors—would make far less congenial neighbours and landlords than the distant and impecunious counts of Tripoli.
The Assassins were not happy with this new arrangement – and they had tangible ways of expressing their feelings on the matter. It was, the Nizaris thought, the fault of the count of Tripoli, the man who had invited the military orders onto his lands. The Assassins could not turn back the clock, and there was little to gain by taking personal revenge on the counts of Tripoli for doing so. But, as usual, revenge was a central feature of Nizari ‘foreign policy’. Their anger and frustration was unstoppable. If they could not take their revenge on the Templars, they could at least strike back at Count Raymond II of Tripoli—the man who had installed these mortal enemies so irritatingly close to their domains.
In 1152 they expressed their disapproval in the way they knew best. As Count Raymond was ‘entering the city gate [of Tripoli], without thought of evil mishap,’ wrote one Frankish chronicler, ‘he was struck down by the swords of the Assassins at the entrance to the gate between the barbican and the wall and perished miserably. With him was slain also that distinguished nobleman…Ralph de Merle, and one of his knights, both of whom had chanced to be with the count on that journey’.
Across the Middle East, killing innocent foreigners was the traditional response in the immediate aftermath of such an attack – it was emotionally satisfying, it gave vent to an underlying xenophobia and, importantly, once the victims’ property had been plundered, it was also very profitable. As news of the count’s murder spread, ‘the whole city [of Tripoli] was roused. The people flew to arms and without discrimination put to the sword all those who were found to differ either in language or dress from the Latins. In this way it was hoped that the perpetrators of the foul deed might be found’. The real culprits were, of course, long gone.
The Templars, whose presence in the region had triggered the attack, now felt free to go on to the offensive—from this time onwards they started to raid the villages and Nizari settlements in the mountains and only refrained from doing so when the Assassins gave them an annual ‘protection money’ payment of 2,000 gold coins. A dangerous and long-standing precedent had been set.
Cults and Corporations
Most importantly for these new and deeply unsatisfactory arrangements, the Templars were an organisation rather than a dynasty. This dramatically reduced the leverage which the Assassins could exert.
This strange dynamic persisted for over one hundred years. Even in the middle of the thirteenth century, when the crusader states had a mere shadow of their former power, the Assassins were still paying tribute to the military orders. As one Christian memoirist wrote in the 1250s, ‘the Old Man of the Mountain made tribute payments to the Hospital and Temple because they had no fear of the Assassins. The Old Man could not gain anything by having the master of the Temple or the Hospital killed because he understood clearly that if he had one of them killed, another man, just as able, would immediately replace him. Because of this he was unwilling to lose any of the [fidais] when he had nothing to gain by it’.
The military orders were the only groups amongst the crusaders who did not buy into the Assassins’ assiduously cultivated ‘cult of death’ image. They didn’t take their PR campaign seriously and, to a large extent, it was because it takes one to know one. The extreme, death-dealing Muslim Nizari sect seems, on the surface, unlikely to have much in common with an order of devout Catholic monks. But they were far more similar than either would have cared to admit.
The Templars had their own branding issues to contend with, and their own intuitively crafted reputational strategy. Like the Nizaris, they were a tiny but larger than life group – at their core, mirroring the impact of the fidais, were the brother knights, a small number of dedicated individuals whose reputation spread far beyond their obvious capabilities. Much of this, as with the Nizaris, was because of their well-deserved reputation for fanaticism. Stopping a small number of highly-motivated individuals is extremely difficult – both ‘cults’ exploited this strange truth, and thrived on their ‘living legend’ status.
The Assassins and the military orders, particularly the Templars, had one other vital characteristic in common – their corporatist outlook. And it was this ‘corporatism’ which made the Templars so dangerous. The Templars, not being a ‘family firm’, were hard to intimidate – and, if power was not a personal or familial asset, then the ability of the Assassins to hurt an individual was irrelevant. And, even if a succession of individual Templar masters were killed, power still resided in the order’s governing chapter which allowed them to make relatively seamless new appointments.
The logic which underpinned the Assassins’ power was that the leaders of such regimes were relatively easy to coerce or blackmail – provided you could persuade them that they were personally vulnerable. The military orders, however, Hospitallers as well as Templars, were the glaring exception to this logic. They were led by individuals rather than families, by appointees rather than warlords. And their governing structures were based upon merit, discipline and obedience rather than family ties. If you killed the master of the Templars, there would be another one, operating the same policies, in place by the end of the evening. As the Templars were not susceptible to personal threat, they were impervious to blackmail. In fact, on the contrary, the military orders had the men and the castles to turn the tables on the Assassins, and impose their own demands.
The similarities of outlook between the two groups sometimes meant that they were able to maintain an uneasy modus vivendi. An uneasy truce usually existed between them. The southern reaches of the Jabal Bahra were the heartlands of the Syrian Nizaris from the mid-1130s onwards, and remained so for most of the period of the crusades.
But the Assassins and the Templars were never going to be cosy companions. The Templars usually held the upper hand – they had resources flowing in from Europe to strengthen their position and they were impervious to the usual threats and intimidation which lay at the heart of the Assassins’ power. This was quantitatively reflected in the hard currency of cash. Poor as they were, the Assassins regularly paid tribute to the military orders, but the military orders never paid anything to the Assassins.
From the early years of the Nizari state based around Masyaf, the Templars assumed a supremely dangerous role—they were blackmailers to the world’s most famous extortionists.
You can get your copy of Assassins and Templars: A Battle in Myth and Blood through
Yale University Press website
Amazon.com
Amazon.ca
Amazon.co.uk
To learn more about Steve, please visit his website or follow him on Instagram
Top Image: Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 76 F 5
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