faction, 'we have now great difficulty in believing.' Such records as that recounting the death of Jaqueline de Maillé rival in truth the battle scenes of the romance. Mounted on a white horse, surrounded by heaps of the slain, Jaqueline remains a lonely figure upon the field of carnage and slaughter, refusing surrender to the encircling foe. And the white horse, wounded sorely, sinks outworn beneath its rider, and covered with dust, stained with blood, pierced with multitudinous arrows, the Temple knight, lance in hand, charges once more the surging ranks of Moslems, and with every thrust sends an infidel to hell. Charging thus Jaqueline died. The Christians deemed he had descended from heaven, so mightily he fought. The Saracens saw in him Saint George, the saint of the sword, and they washed the blood from his body, and treasured the rags of his clothes and the splintered fragments of his war-harness, and venerated with awe his relics. So Jaqueline fell on the first day of May, 'when flowers and roses are gathered in the fields.' But for roses the Christians gathered nought save the bodies of their dead. These they buried in the Church of the Virgin with the chaunted lamentation of the prophet, 'Daughters of 'Galilee, put on your garments of mourning, and you, O ' daughters of Sion, weep.' The Grand-Master, Gerard de Riderford, and two knights of the Order alone escaped from the field of carnage [1187]. Nor in the great battle of Tiberias, fought in the sultry July weather of the same summer, when the heat, the drought, and the dust of the eastern plain heightened beyond bearing the sufferings of the European soldiers, does the scene centre less upon the Templars. Eastern writers have vied with Western in portraying the fortunes of that day. They tell of the strong wind which rose at dawn, covering the Christian host with blinding dust, of the firing of the dry grass by Saladin, of the gleam of swords through the smoke and flame, as the sons of Paradise and the children of fire fought out their quarrel beneath the blaze of the noonday sun; of the Holy Wood borne in the field, of the dauntless rallying of Templars and Hospitallers round the sacred standard. "The Franks 'flew round the cross as moths round light,' wrote Saladin himself when that cross lay captured and its despairing champions cast themselves on the weapons of the victors, courting a death which held no terror for hearts whose best

* Michaud, 7th Book, and Addison.

treasure had been wrenched from their hands. I saw the 'hills, valleys, and plains covered with dead,' Saladin's secretary testifies. Seeing the slain I deemed there were no captives; seeing the captives that there were no dead.' The defeat was followed by a scene which condenses the sharp contrasts of moral sentiment characteristic of the period. Three captives were brought to Saladin's tent: Guy de Lusignan, king of Jerusalem by right of his wife (his sometime mistress, Sybilla), fair indeed of face, but whose record of a coward stands almost alone among the records of those days of courage; Renaud de Châtillon, likewise commemorated for his singular beauty, a turbulent, lawless adventurer, loved and hated, the very type of the rapacious soldier of fortune, was the second prisoner; the GrandMaster of the Temple the third.* To Guy, in honour of his kingship, and to the Grand-Master, Saladin offers the snowcooled cup, the pledge of security; to Renaud, apostasy or death. That traitor,' said the victor, drinks not in my sight.' And at a signal the unarmed prisoner, with all the sins of his fierce past upon him, died a martyr to the creed of which the deeds of his life had been one long denial.

Nor did that multitude of nameless captives, 'whom the 'cords of the tents sufficed not to bind,' die less gallantly. The days when men held faiths for whose sake they counted it well to die were no less the days when men held faiths for whose love they counted it just to slay. How fair an ' ornament is the blood of the infidel!' cries the Eastern, and the cry was echoed from the adverse hosts of the West, and each in turn massacred his enemies in the name of his God. On the hill above Tiberias, as the sun set, the knights of the Temple and Saint John, weaponless and bound, were cut down by the noblest of Saladin's train. Emulous of their martyrdom, from the troops of the undistinguished many rose the challenge to a like honour, For we, too, are Templars.' For three nights, so tradition told, a radiance hung over that hillside of the slain; a heavenly illumination from the gates of paradise set wide open for the in-marching of that slaughtered host whose blood still discoloured the down-trodden grass. So ever in chronicle after chronicle, the Temple soldiery of 'le

* The name of the Grand-Master of that year is given by Du Puy as Thiery; by Addison as Gerard de Riderford, of whom Du Puy states that 'il ne gouverna que durant quelques mois. . . il fut tué le 4 oct. 1188.'

*

beau Sire Dieu,' the knights whose lives were lived between a battle and a dream, outrivalled the gallantries of secular hardihood. They were ever the first, as, except the dead, they were the last, upon the field. 'Non nobis, non nobis, Domine, sed nomini Tuo da gloriam,' was their battle-song, preluding the combat in which, according to their rule, none might turn him back.' The roll-call of their slain, recurring continually in summaries of victory or defeat, tells its own story. At the entry of Ascalon all' the Templars were slain. At Jacob's ford all were slain or taken, and at the firing of the Temple fortress the knights flung themselves into the flames or to death on the rocks rather than surrender. Odo de St. Amand, Grand-Master of the Temple (1170), the well-beloved son of Alexander III., who feared neither God nor man,' taken captive near Sidon, offers jeeringly, as ransom for his life, 'nought save his girdle 'or his knife,' and dies a prisoner, servant of a God who we may well believe held a free pardon for that brave sinner. At Acre, the Grand-Master, Fr. Gaultier, perished with all his knights. At Tiberias, 300 Templars perished. Again, on that disastrous day, when a Christian knight challenged destiny, heralding the battle with the rash cry 'Let God be neutral and the victory is ours,' the Templars and their leader were destroyed. At Mansourah, to come down to the thirteenth century, when the young Count of Artois, mocking Fr. Guillaume de Sonnac's warning, charged the foe, the Templars almost to a man fell, partners and victims of a lad's undisciplined folly, Fr. Guillaume le Guerrier escaping, blinded with his wounds, to die a few days later in a second battle. At the capture of Saphet 600 Templars were tortured and sent into the company ' of God, pour la Sainte Foi.' At Gaza, four only escaped alive.

Disparities of dates, displacements of names, localities, and incidents, numbers given we may divine almost at random, contradictions of facts, abound in these statements. But whether it were here or there, north or south, at Acre, Damietta, or Galilee, whether it were this man or another, a Fr. Gerard or a Fr. Thiery, a Fr. Gaultier or Fr. Robert, whether ten died or three scores of tens, beneath the confusions of legends time has transmuted into history, or of history which time has transfigured into legend, there lies

* Vertot in his 'Hist. des Chevaliers Hospitaliers' contradicts this

statement.

one consistent picture. It is of an impassioned, almost an unstained, fearlessness, of an invincible courage surviving the exhausted enthusiasms of monastic devotion, the spent ecstasies of asceticism, surviving the demoralising corruptions of early victories and later defeats, the enervating ambitions of political ascendency, the degradations of satisfied avarice, and the slow certitudes of a final despair; surviving too, to touch upon another phase of the story, those strange developements of secret and mystical faiths which a crude Catholicism denounced as apostasy, and a cruder Christianity misinterpreted as idolatry.

Hated they were, in truth, of many, as the documents published by Du Puy in his justification of their suppression prove. Fierce rivalries, the defiance of all authority, grew with the growth of their Order. As early as the grandmastership of Odo de St. Amand the action of Odo with regard to the murder by a Templar of an envoy sent by the sect of the Assassins was the signal for an outbreak of strife, and, according to Vertot, commença à 'affoiblir l'estime que l'on avoit alors pour tout l'ordre.' Shortly after Alexander was forced to issue a bull for the restoration of peace between Fr. Roger des Moulins, of the Hospital of St. John, and the Templars, Odo doubtless showing himself as little fearful of Roger as he was said to be of God, and as he proved to be of man. Under the rule of Gilbert Roral (1196-1198) similar exhortations bear witness to the continuance of the quarrel when Odo lay in a prisoner's grave, and five grand-masters— Arnold de Torroge, Fr. Thiery (slain in battle), Gerard de Riderfort (likewise slain), Fr. Gaultier, and Robert de Sablé -had reigned successively in his stead. A following bull indicates that the master and all his knights lay under sentence of excommunication. In 1199, when Pontius Rigaldus ruled, the Templars not only refused succour to the Christian King of Arménie, but violently invaded his territory; and when Philippe du Plessis sat in Pontius's seat he and his knights are upbraided for their contempt of the representative of Christ. Hermance de Perigord (1239–1245) incurred the opprobrium of Christendom for having permitted Moslems to celebrate their rites in buildings belonging to the Order. During the crusade of St. Louis, Renaud

'Le dessein des Messieurs du Puy étoient de justifier la mémoire de Philippe' (see Introduction to edition of 1751).

de Vichier, Grand-Master, refused treasure for the ransom of the Comte de Poitiers, and the coffers of the Order were violated by De Joinville to the amount of 30,000 livres on behalf of the king. In 1255 Aimery de la Roch being grandmaster, Alexander IV. refers to the abhorrence' in which some men begin to hold the Temple, and finds it necessary to prohibit à tout laïcq de les molester;' while the fair fame of Thomas Berard, Aimery's successor, suffered evil things in later days at the lips of tortured witnesses, and has come down as that of 'le mauvais grand-maître,' albeit his name, his fame, his date, and his sins are inextricably confused with those of a certain Grand-Maître Roncelin,' and likewise with those of Grand-Maître Thomas de Montaigu of a far earlier period. For neither in this nor in any other matter does the testimony evoked by Philip the Fair from racked victims or bribed traitors agree.

And amidst the cloud of hostile suspicions, of common slanders, slanders of estranged friendships, vindictive rivalries, and open antagonism, the untarnished record of their soldiership ends with the fall of Acre. No place could have served more fitly for the theatre on whose stage the last act of Christian dominion in Palestine should be played. The banners of almost every nation and creed had waved in turn from its battlements-the green and the saffron flags of Mahomet had alternated with the oriflamme of France, with the Teutonic eagle, with the royal standard of England; its war-battered ramparts recorded the heroic traditions and savage memories of the horrors of the long siege, when for two years it had withstood the assembled armies of Europe. At the end of the thirteenth century Acre had become the refuge of the retreating Christian population of the Holy Land. It was a city in which the sins of all nations had found themselves a home. The remnants and the refuse of armies, the fugitive garrisons of taken cities had congregated there. A lawless, rapacious, licentious mob starved, fought, robbed, drank, and sickened in the thronged streets of the town, whose luxuries, with its marble fountains, almond and orange groves, its gardens, its aqueducts and canopied walks, had been the byword of the East; a populace forming a sordid and brutal human background to the stately churches and austere fortresses built in older days. Polluted by its denizens, the city cried aloud for the purification of fire and sword and sea, a city where life defiled appealed for the restored 'virginity of death.'