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July 4 marked the anniversary of the Battle of Hattin, one of the most catastrophic defeats of Christian by the forces of Islam in history. This battle led directly to the fall of Crusader-held Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187.
A far lesser-known but equally horrific event took place after that: the ritual beheading of the warrior-monks of Christendom. Unlike the average captured Crusader, these knights were denied ransom. In fact, Saladin went so far as to “ransom” 300 Templars and Hospitallers from their Muslim captors for 50 dinars apiece, simply to ensure he could personally witness their slaughter if they rejected his “magnanimous” offer: Any knight willing to utter the words of the Islamic profession of faith would be spared and welcomed into the ummah as a brother.
He then sent them to a makeshift desert prison to contemplate their fate.
An Offer They Could Refuse
That night, amid the howls and jeers of their captors, the brethren of the Temple and Hospital did not panic or plead. Instead, they reconfirmed their vows to Christ and prepared for what they saw not as doom, but martyrdom.
As the contemporary Itinerarium Peregrinorum records:
A certain Templar named Nicholas had been so successful in persuading the rest to undergo death willingly that the others struggled to go in front of him, and he only just succeeded in obtaining the glory of martyrdom first — which was an honor he very much strove for.
Nineteenth-century historian Charles G. Addison vividly describes their final passion:
The warlike monks of the Temple and of the Hospital, the bravest and most zealous defenders of the Christian faith, were, of all the warriors of the cross, the most obnoxious to zealous Muslims… Accordingly, on the Christian Sabbath, at the hour of sunset… the Moslems were drawn up in battle array… and, at the sound of the holy trumpet, all the captive knights… were led to the eminence above Tiberias, in full view of the lake of Gennesareth… There, as the last rays of the sun were fading from the mountaintops, they were called upon to deny Him who had been crucified… To a man they refused, and were all decapitated in the presence of Saladin.
Both Christian and Muslim chroniclers agree why Saladin executed the orders.
The Itinerarium Peregrinorum bluntly states that he: “Decided to have them utterly exterminated because he knew that they surpassed all others in battle.”
Bravest of the Brave
Ibn al-Athir, a contemporary Muslim historian, echoed the same:
These two groups were especially selected for execution because they had the greatest valor of all the Franks… He [Saladin] wrote to his deputy in Damascus ordering him to kill all who fell into his hands… It was [Saladin’s] custom to execute the Templars and Hospitallers because of their fierce enmity towards the Muslims and their great courage.
The eyewitness Imad al-Din — Saladin’s own court official — records the most detailed account. After the battle, he heard Saladin declare: “I will purify the earth of these two filthy races [Templars and Hospitallers], for they will certainly not desist from aggression and they will not serve in captivity.”
So Saladin, he continues,
Ordered that they should be beheaded, choosing to have them dead rather than in prison. Many of the sultan’s men — especially the expounders of sharia — begged to be allowed to kill one of them. They drew their scimitars, rolled up their sleeves. Saladin, his face joyful, was sitting on his dais.
Bloody Business
Imad recounts how some executioners “slashed and cut cleanly,” while others made a mess of things. Eventually, some faltered, unable to stomach the labor. But Imad exalts one zealous slayer — possibly Saladin himself — who:
Killed unbelief [kufr] to give life to Islam… I saw the man who laughed scornfully and slaughtered, who spoke and acted; how many promises he fulfilled, how much praise he won, the eternal rewards he secured with the blood he shed, the pious works added to his account with a neck severed by him.
Interestingly, the slaughter of the knights of the Temple and Hospital, which is copiously recorded in both Christian and Muslim accounts, has for some odd reason never made it in any of the big-budget Hollywood films that otherwise revolve around Saladin’s “magnanimity,” most notably Ridley Scott’s 2005 Kingdom of Heaven.
Meanwhile, this incident, being so well documented and celebrated in Muslim sources, continues to inspire modern-day jihadist organizations. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has made several films intentionally modeled after Saladin’s beheading of the knights of the military orders, the most notorious being ISIS’s decapitation of 21 Coptic Christians in Sirte, Libya, in 2015.
The point is that the knights of the Temple and Hospital committed themselves so powerfully to fighting Islamic aggression that when the time came, they chose martyrdom over life.
And yet today, many soft, secularized Western Christians — virtually indistinguishable from their atheistic counterparts — sit back in worldly comfort while condemning these men for not being “true” Christians.
To learn more about these forgotten defenders of the faith, check out my new book, The Two Swords of Christ: Five Centuries of War between Islam and the Warrior Monks of Christendom.
Raymond Ibrahim, author of Defenders of the West and Sword and Scimitar, is the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and the Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.