Brethren: An Epic Adventure of the Knights Templar (60 page)

“You may approach the sultan,” said Kalawun at his side, making him start slightly.

Will did so, cautiously, his eyes respectfully downcast. His heart was drumming rapidly in his chest. When he reached the top step he bowed, then raised his head.

It was with a jolt that Will met the sharp blue eyes of Baybars, one of which had an odd gleam in it, caused by a white, star-shaped defect. As he stared into those eyes, a voice in his mind began chanting:
this man killed your father, you tried to kill this man.
The words sounded so clear and certain that for one terrible second Will thought he had said them out loud.

He was only feet away from the man who had ordered his father’s death, from the man the Assassins had tried and failed to kill. Will imagined reaching out, wrapping his hands around Baybars’s throat. Squeezing. He knew he would be dead before he touched the sultan, riddled with crossbow bolts. But it wasn’t that that stopped him. The image caused distaste to rise in him. Something that, only last year, he had dreamed fervently, constantly of, now seemed inapt, petty even. His need for revenge was truly dead. The realization surprised him.

All this whirled through Will’s mind in a matter of seconds, and then he was leaning forward, holding out the peace treaty.

Baybars didn’t move. Will hesitated, then retracted his arm slightly.

After a lengthy pause, during which he scrutinized Will acutely, Baybars finally spoke, his Arabic deep and rich. “What is your name, Christian?”

“William Campbell.”

Moments crawled by, filled with the rushing and dragging of the sea, before Baybars spoke again. “You have a treaty for me, William Campbell?”

Will passed over the scroll, feeling every eye in the cathedral on him. As Baybars took the case, their fingers touched briefly, skin grazing skin. The sultan opened it and unfurled the two scrolls that were rolled inside. He studied each closely, then gestured to a man wearing a green silk robe and a jeweled turban, who was standing to one side with a small group of others, similarly dressed. Will guessed they were advisors. The man walked over, took the scrolls, read them, then passed them back to Baybars with a nod. Another came forward, holding a glass tray upon which were a small vial and a quill. Will waited as the sultan signed the skins, then Baybars handed one scroll and the case back to him.

And there it was, a treaty of peace to last for ten years, ten months, ten days and ten hours, granting the Franks possession of the lands they still held and use of the pilgrim road to Nazareth.

Everyone seemed to relax as Baybars sat back and Will slid the scroll back inside the case.

Will heard a voice behind him. “Come,” said Kalawun, who had climbed the steps. “I will escort you back to your men.”

Will didn’t move, but remained standing there, staring at the sultan. The crossbowmen tensed. Will felt Kalawun place a warning hand on his shoulder.

Baybars frowned and leaned forward, his eyes narrowing in suspicion.

Will spoke quickly. “My Lord Sultan, I wish to be granted permission to travel unhindered to the fortress of Safed. My father was killed there during the siege and I wish to bury him and pay my respects. I know I have no right to ask this of you and that you have no cause to grant it, but…” He faltered, his confidence slipping, his tongue awkward around the foreign words. “But I have to ask.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Will noticed guards and advisors exchanging a mixture of surprised, amused and scornful glances. Beside him, Kalawun seemed to stiffen.

Baybars seemed to study Will with renewed interest for a few moments. Then he nodded. “I will grant your request,” he said into the quiet. “But you will go without your men and will be guarded by mine.” Without taking his eyes off Will, he gestured to two of the crossbowmen, who lowered their weapons and came forward. “Take him to Safed,” he said. “Then escort him back to Acre.”

“Thank you,” Will murmured.

“We are finished here,” replied Baybars, leaning back in his throne and grasping the lions’ heads. “You may go.”

Turning, Will walked from the throne, down the steps and out of the cathedral, his whole body humming with the release of tension.

Outside, it was almost fully dark and a yellow silver of moon was hanging above the city.

“That was a foolish thing to do,” said Kalawun quietly, as they neared the waiting company of knights, the two Bahri Baybars had chosen to escort Will following behind.

“I had to do it,” said Will, pausing to collect his falchion from the street where he had left it.

“I understand.” Kalawun inclined his head. “Peace be with you, William Campbell.”

“And with you.”

Kalawun walked away down the street.

“Did he sign it?”

Will turned as Robert came up behind him. “He did. I need you to make sure the treaty is taken safe to Acre.”

“What do you mean?” Robert asked, frowning. “Where are you going?”

Will smiled as he handed Robert the scrollcase. “To lay a ghost to rest.”

I was aware from the initial concept for the novel, five years ago, that I wanted to tell the story of the Crusades from both the East and West’s points of view. The real men behind the enduring myths attached to the Templars fascinated me, but so too did the extraordinary rise of the Mamluk warrior, Baybars, who remains, in the Middle East, a hero to this day.

In the writing of the novel, I tried to remain as faithful to real events, characters and period detail as I could without sacrificing pace or plot, with the result that, at times, the novel is rooted in fact, at times it is pure imagination and, occasionally, it is a mixture of the two. Events at Ayn Jalut, Safed and Antioch, for instance, probably happened much as I have described them. The Anima Templi is my own invention, although I loosely based Everard’s Book of the Grail on a thirteenth-century Grail Romance, the
Perlesvaus
, an anonymous work filled with unorthodox imagery, thought, by some, to have been written by a Templar. Likewise, the attack on the Templar company at Honfleur is fiction, but King Henry III was forced to pawn the English crown jewels to the Order because of debts he was unable to pay.

For period detail I relied on over one hundred sources, most purely factual, some slightly more fantastical, many contradictory, all illuminating. But those I relied most heavily upon deserve a mention as they were invaluable and are certainly worth a read for anyone wishing to know more on this incredible period, the surface of which I have only been able to scratch at. These works are Steven Runciman’s stunning trilogy
A History of the Crusades
[Cambridge University Press];
The Templars
, Piers Paul Read [Weidenfeld & Nicolson];
The Knights Templar: A New History
, Helen Nicholson [Sutton Publishing];
The Wars of the Crusades
, Terence Wise [Osprey Publishing Ltd];
The Cross and the Crescent: A History of the Crusades
, Malcolm Billings [BBC Publications];
The Trial of the Templars
, Malcolm Barber [Cambridge University Press], and
History of Medieval Life: A Guide to Life from 1000 to 1500
AD
, David Nicolle [Chancellor Press].

I am grateful to have been granted permission to reproduce two lines from
The Song of Roland
, translated by Dorothy L. Sayers, Penguin Books, 1957. I must also credit historian Malcolm Barber, author of
The Trial of the Templars
, from which I have taken two quotes of Bernard de Clairvaux, and in which appears a translation of an eyewitness account of a Templar initiation which proved invaluable when it came to my own portrayal of the Order’s inceptions.

Robyn Young, August 2005

ACRE:
a city on the coast of Palestine, conquered by the Arabs in 640
AD
. It was captured by the Crusaders in the early twelfth century and became the principal port of the new Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Acre was ruled by a king, but by the mid-thirteenth century royal authority was disputed by the local Frankish nobles and from this time the city, with its twenty-seven separate quarters, was largely governed oligarchically.

AMIR:
Arabic for
commander,
also used as a title for some rulers.

ASSASSINS:
an extremist sect founded in Persia in the eleventh century. The Assassins were adherents of the Ismaili division of the Shi’ah Muslim faith and, over the following years, spread to several countries, including Syria. Here, under their most famous leader, Sinan, “the Old Man of the Mountain,” they formed an independent state, where they retained control until they were eventually subsumed into the Mamluk territories controlled by Baybars.

AYYUBIDS:
dynastic rulers of Egypt and Syria during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, responsible for the creation of the Mamluk (slave) army. Saladin was of this line and during his reign the Ayyubids achieved the height of their power. The last Ayyubid was Turanshah, who was killed by Baybars under the orders of the Mamluk commander Aibek, ending the Ayyubid dynasty and beginning the reign of the Mamluks.

BERNARD DE CLAIRVAUX, St.:
(1090–1153) abbot and founder of the Cistercian monastery at Clairvaux in France. An early supporter of the Templars, Bernard aided the Order in the creation of their Rule.

BEZANT:
a gold coin of the medieval period, first minted in Byzantium.

CALIPH:
title given to the rulers, civil and religious, of the Muslim community, considered to be Muhammad’s successors. The Caliphate was abolished in 1924 by the Turks.

CRUSADES:
a European movement of the medieval period, spurred by economic, religious and political ideals. The First Crusade was preached in 1095 by Pope Urban II at Clermont in France. The call to Crusade came initially as a response to appeals from the Greek emperor in Byzantium whose domains were being invaded by the Seljuk Turks, who had captured Jerusalem in 1071. The Roman and Greek Orthodox Churches had been divided since 1054 and Urban saw in this plea the chance to reunite the two Churches and, in so doing, gain Catholicism a firmer hold over the Eastern world. Urban’s goal was achieved only briefly and imperfectly in the wake of the Fourth Crusade of 1204. Over two centuries, more than eleven Crusades to the Holy Land were launched from Europe’s shores.

DESTRIER:
Old French for
war horse
.

DOMINICANS:
the Order, whose rule was based on that of St. Augustine, was founded in 1215 by Dominic de Guzman in France. Guzman, who promoted an austere, evangelical style of Catholicism, used the new Order to aid the Church in eradicating the Cathar heretics. In England they were known as the Black Friars, in France the Jacobins. The Dominicans, whose order continued to grow rapidly after Guzman’s death, eschewed the luxuries enjoyed by many in the priesthood and were highly educated. In 1233 they were chosen by the Pope to root out heretics and official inquisitors were appointed. By 1252, inquisitors were permitted to use torture to obtain confessions and many Dominicans became active members of this newly established institution, which would become known as the Inquisition.

ENCEINTE:
fortifications enclosing a castle.

FRANKS:
in the Middle East the term Franks (
al-Firinjah
) referred to Western Christians. In the West, it was the name of the Germanic tribe that conquered Gaul in the sixth century, which thereafter became known as France.

GRAND MASTER:
head of a military Order. The Grand Master of the Templars was elected for life by a council of Templar officials and until the end of the Crusades was based at the Order’s headquarters in Palestine.

GRAIL ROMANCE:
a popular cycle of Romances prevalent during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the first of which was
Joseph d’Arimathie
written by Robert de Borron at the end of the twelfth century. From this time, the Grail, the concept of which is thought to be derived from pre-Christian mythology, was Christianized and adopted into the Arthurian legend, made famous by the twelfth-century French poet, Chrétien de Troyes, whose work influenced later writers such as Malory and Tennyson. The following century saw many more takes on the Grail theme, including Wolfram von Eschenbach’s
Parzival
, which inspired Wagner’s opera. Romances were courtly stories, usually composed in verse in the vernacular, which combined historical, mythical and religious themes.

GREAVES:
armor worn to protect the shins.

GREEK FIRE:
invented in Byzantium in the seventh century, Greek fire was a mixture of pitch, sulfur and naphtha that was used in warfare to set fire to ships and fortifications.

JIHAD:
meaning “to strive,”
Jihad
can be interpreted in both a physical and spiritual sense. In the physical it means holy war in the defense of and for the spread of Islam, in the spiritual it is the inner struggle of individual Muslims against worldly temptations.

KINGDOM OF JERUSALEM:
the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem was founded in 1099, following the capture of Jerusalem by the First Crusade. Its first ruler was Godfrey de Bouillon, a Frankish count. Jerusalem itself became the new Crusader capital, but was lost and regained several times over the following two centuries until it was finally reclaimed by the Muslims in 1244, whereupon the city of Acre became the Crusaders’ capital. Three other states were formed by the Western invaders during the early Crusades: the Principality of Antioch, and the Counties of Edessa and Tripoli. Edessa was lost in 1144, captured by the Seljuk leader, Zengi. The Principality of Antioch fell to Baybars in 1268, Tripoli fell in 1289, and Acre, the last principal city held by the Crusaders, fell in 1291, signaling the end of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and of Western power in the Middle East.

KNIGHTS OF ST. JOHN:
Order founded in the late eleventh century that takes its name from the hospital of St. John the Baptist in Jerusalem, where it had its first headquarters. Also known as the Hospitallers, their initial brief was the care of Christian pilgrims, but after the First Crusade their objectives changed dramatically. They retained their hospitals, but their primary preoccupation became the building and the defense of their castles in the Holy Land, recruitment of knights and the acquisition of land and property. They enjoyed similar power and status as the Templars and the Orders were often rivals. After the end of the Crusades, the Knights of St. John moved their headquarters to Rhodes, then later to Malta, where they became known as the Knights of Malta.

KNIGHTS TEMPLAR:
Order of knights formed early in the twelfth century after the First Crusade. Established by Hugues de Payns, who traveled to Jerusalem with eight fellow French knights, the Order was named after the Temple of Solomon where they had their first headquarters. The Templars, who were formally recognized in 1128 at the Council of Troyes, followed both a religious rule and a strict military code. Their initial raison d’être was to protect Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land, however, they far exceeded this early brief in their military and mercantile endeavors both in the Middle East and throughout Europe, where they rose to become one of the wealthiest and most powerful organizations of their day. There were three separate classes within the Order: sergeants, priests and knights, but only knights, who took the three monastic vows of chastity, poverty and obedience, were permitted to wear the distinctive white habits that bore a splayed red cross.

LEONARDIE:
an unknown disease which had symptoms similar to those of scurvy, including severe lethargy, the peeling or wasting of the skin and hair loss. Richard the Lionheart is said to have suffered from it.

MADRASAH:
a religious school dedicated to the study of Islamic law.

MAMLUKS:
from the Arabic, meaning “slave,” the name was given to the royal bodyguard, mainly of Turkish descent, bought and raised by the Ayyubid sultans of Egypt into a standing army of devout Muslim warriors. Known in their day as “the Templars of Islam,” the Mamluks achieved ascendancy in 1250 when they assassinated Sultan Turanshah, a nephew of Saladin, and took control of Egypt. Under Baybars, the Mamluk Empire grew to encompass Egypt and Syria, and they were ultimately responsible for removing Frankish influence in the Middle East. After the end of the Crusades in 1291, the Mamluks’ reign continued until they were overthrown by the Ottoman Turks in 1517.

MARITIME REPUBLICS:
Italian mercantile city-states of Venice, Genoa and Pisa.
MARSHAL:
in the Templar hierarchy, the chief military official.

MONGOLS:
nomadic tribespeople who lived around the steppes of eastern Asia until the late twelfth century when they were united under Genghis Khan, who established his capital at Karakorum and set out on a series of massive conquests. When Genghis Khan died, his empire extended across Asia, Persia, southern Russia and China. The Mongols’ first great defeat came at the hands of Baybars and Kutuz at Ayn Jalut in 1260, and their empire began a gradual decline in the fourteenth century.

OUTREMER:
French word meaning “overseas,” referring to the Holy Land.

PALFREY:
a light horse used for normal riding.

PARLEY:
a discussion to debate points of a dispute, most commonly the terms of a truce.

PRECEPTORY:
Latin name for the administrative houses of military Orders, which would have been like manors, with domestic quarters, workshops and usually a chapel.

QUINTAIN:
a precision training device used for jousting practice, consisting of a wooden frame mounted on a pole, which the knight would strike at with his lance, or a ring hung from a cord, which the knight had to snare on the lance’s tip.

RICHARD the LIONHEART:
(1157–99) son of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard ruled as king of England from 1189 to his death in 1199, but spent very little time in the kingdom. Along with Frederick Barbarossa and Philip II of France, he led the Third Crusade to recapture Jerusalem, which had fallen to Saladin.

RULE, THE:
the Rule of the Temple was drawn up in 1129, with the aid of St. Bernard de Clairvaux, at the Council of Troyes, where the Temple was formally recognized. It was written as part religious rule, part military code and set out how members of the Order should live and conduct themselves during their daily lives and during combat. The Rule was added to over the years and by the thirteenth century there were over six hundred clauses, some more serious than others, the breaching of which would mean expulsion for the offender.

SADEEK:
Arabic, meaning “friend” (male).

SALADIN:
(1138–93) of Kurdish origin, he became sultan of Egypt and Syria in 1173, after winning several power struggles. Saladin led his army against the Crusaders at Hattin and dealt the Franks a devastating blow. He reclaimed most of the Kingdom of Jerusalem created by the Christians during the First Crusade, leading to the launch of the Third Crusade, which saw him pitted against Richard the Lionheart. Saladin was a hero throughout the Islamic East, but was also admired, and feared, by the Crusaders for his courage and gallantry.

SARACEN:
in the medieval period, a term used by Europeans for all Arabs and Muslims.

SENESCHAL:
the steward or chief official of an estate. In the Temple’s hierarchy, the Seneschal held one of the highest positions.

SIEGE ENGINE:
any machine used to attack fortifications during sieges.