Crusade of Fire

Though it seems likely that the Order?s demise had more to do with jealousy and royal greed than from any real failing—other than naïveté, that the pope would protect them from their detractors—the fact remains that the Order kept its internal workings secret, and prospered with astonishing speed, and accrued enormous wealth and influence for which it was not answerable to anyone save the pope.

Just how this came to pass, we probably will never know for certain. Historical records of the Order are sketchy and often contradictory, but we can piece together many plausible speculations. Certain it is that in the first several decades following the First Crusade, just at the beginning of the twelfth century, the very notion of an order of warrior-monks was only just beginning to take shape in the mind of a French crusader knight called Hugues de Payens, a vassal of the Count of Champagne and kin to the counts of Troyes.

We don?t know a great deal about Hugues. He would have been a young man in his early twenties when he took the Cross and left on crusade—probably a widower, certainly with a son left behind in France. He probably had come in the army of Geoffrey de Bouillon in 1096 and, like many of his crusading partners, stayed on in the Holy Land when Jerusalem was taken by the crusader army and Geoffrey was elected its king—though Geoffrey had declined to wear a crown in the Holy City, taking instead the more pious title of Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre: king in all but name, if for barely a year. It was a nicety quickly set aside by his successor, his brother Baldwin, who had no such scruples. Baldwin, in turn, was to reign in oriental splendor for nearly twenty years, during which he attempted to consolidate and stabilize the four crusader states making up the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem.

To put this into perspective, we should consider the size of the Latin Kingdom, and the size of the Western population attempting to make it their own, and the fact that most crusaders, if they survived battle and the desert heat, went home to Europe upon finishing their campaigns. At its height, the area in question was roughly the size of the State of Maryland—perhaps 11,000 square miles, laid out roughly in a T-shape, with the stem stretched along the eastern end of the Mediterranean. Jerusalem and its environs lay at the bottom of the stem, with the Principality of Antioch immediately above it and the Counties of Tripoli and Edessa forming the crossbar.

Muslim emirates surrounded each of these states on all landward sides, and the countryside was populated with bands of desert marauders who preyed upon travelers. Outside the Christian-occupied cities, Muslim troops might move freely—often within bowshot of the Western-held cities, whose inhabitants were able to do nothing about it. Had the emirates been able to unite under a single leader, as even the great Saladin could not accomplish, it is unlikely that a Latin Kingdom could have been formed at all, much less survived for as long as it did. At the height of the Latin Kingdom?s power, the resident European population of the area probably never exceeded 20,000, with each state possessed of no more than 1,000 secular knights and barons, perhaps 5,000 serjeants, who were the fully armed infantry, and perhaps 1,000 clergymen.