While all the other Franks were impoverished through loss of lands and revenue, being dependent upon their resources in the Levant alone, the military Orders were secure. They had their firm bases in Europe, their lands and houses and income deriving from areas which were secure whatever disasters might befall in the East. It was this strength that was to preserve the Order of St John through all the centuries that were to follow. The wills of dying men, the revenues of their own properties, the gifts of protected pilgrims and of the sick who had been cured in their hospitals, these were to ensure an economic backbone which spelled survival.

 

 

 

Chapter 6

AN END AND A BEGINNING

 

After the disastrous Fourth Crusade in 1204 the writing was plain on the wall—Outremer could not long survive when Christendom itself was so criminally divided. The Crusade had been inspired by Pope Innocent III, and it had been designed to strike at the heart of Moslem power in Egypt. Deflected by the cunning and cupidity of the Venetians, and in particular Doge Dandolo, the crusaders had first of all sacked the Dalmatian city of Zara, which belonged to the Christian King of Hungary. This in itself was bad enough, but far worse was to follow. Encouraged by the claims of a pretender to the throne of Constantinople (who promised them money and ships to take them to Egypt) and duped by Doge Dandolo, the crusaders found themselves in the position of investing the capital of Eastern Christendom. Weakened by the stupidities and excesses of a recent sequence of bad rulers who had ransacked the Treasury and allowed the imperial navy to fall into decline, Constantinople fell to the army of the Fourth Crusade and was sacked and plundered. It was one of the most miserable events in history. Not only was a great and wonderful city, rich in nine centuries of culture and civilisation, destroyed by these barbarous knights and their followers, but the whole fabric of the Byzantine Empire was shattered. And it was the Byzantine Empire which had been the shield of western Europe. It had provided the springboard from which the most successful Crusade, the First, had been launched, and it had been a buttress behind the Latin kingdom in Outremer.

On hearing the news Pope Innocent condemned the crusaders outright. Any hopes that he may have had of effecting a reconciliation between the Western and Eastern Churches were utterly shattered. He saw too as a statesman how detrimental an effect it must have upon Christian interests in the East. In religious terms its principal effect was to continue that division between the two main bodies of the Christian Church which has hardly been eliminated to this day. In secular terms it provided the fatal opportunity for the Latin barons to carve out for themselves small kingdoms and principalities in the prostrate land of Greece. Here they could build their castles, engage in their intrigues and feuds against one another, go hunting, drink the Greek wine—and forget all about the Holy Land.

With this diversion of Latin interest into the lands and islands of the former Byzantine empire Outremer received a fatal blow. Who would wish to go campaigning against hardened Moslem warriors, and especially the increasingly powerful forces of Egypt, when they could become rulers over comfortable estates in Greece? In any case, although further Crusades were yet to follow, the old crusading spirit was already on the wane. Even among the Hospitallers and the Templars the old ideals were being increasingly forgotten and a growing secularisation—due almost entirely in the case of the Order of St John to the dominance of the military caste—was making itself felt. Evidence for this can be found in the fact that, in 1236, the Hospitallers together with the Templars were threatened with excommunication on the ground that they were about to form an alliance with the notorious Moslem sect known as the Assassins.

The latter were a fanatical branch of the secret Moslem sect of the Ismailis, who believed that all actions were morally indifferent, They eliminated their opponents by ‘assassination’, and were said to induce a blind frenzy among their supporters by the use of hashish, the hemp plant, from which their name derives. It is little wonder that the Pope was indignant at the idea of his ‘Soldiers of Christ’ coming to any terms with such a despicable branch of Islam. The fact remained that the Hospitallers and the Templars (like the Byzantines before them) had found out that, to survive under the conditions obtaining in the East, it was often necessary to conclude treaties of friendship with the Moslems. In 1238 the Pope issued a bill accusing the Hospitallers of living scandalous lives, including among his charges that they were no longer faithful to their vows of chastity and poverty. They were, he said, greedy and corrupt, in communication with members of the unorthodox Eastern Church, and abusing many of the privileges which their special status gave them. There can be little doubt that many of these charges were true, but the fact was that the Order was so rich and powerful that it could, even while paying lip service to the ruling Pope, more or less afford to disregard the words that were issued in Rome. The seeds of the desire to suppress these wealthy independent Orders were sown as early as the thirteenth century. It was to lead in 1314, to the burning of the last Grand Master of the Templars, Jacques de Molay, to the torture and death of many of them on the ground of heresy, and to the sequestration of their lands and property. The Hospitallers were to be more fortunate. By that time they would have found another role.

The decline of the Christian cause, always abetted by the rivalry and dissension between the Hospitallers and the Templars, was even further accentuated by the added peril of the Tartar invasions from the north and the steadily increasing militancy of Egypt to the south.