Most of the Templars’ imports such as horses, iron and wheat came by sea. At first the Templars contracted with commercial shippers and agents, but early in the thirteenth century they began building up a fleet of their own. They had a substantial presence at all the important ports of Outremer-at Caesarea, Tyre, Sidon, Gibelet (ancient Byblos and present-day Jubail), Tripoli, Tortosa, Jeble and Port Bonnel north of Antioch. But their principal port was Acre, a walled city built on a tongue of land offering good
Protection for its double harbour.
All the major powers of the Kingdom of Jerusalem were represented at Acre, but in 1191, after the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin, the city became the Templars’ new headquarters in the Holy Land. According to the thirteenth-century chronicler known as the Templar of Tyre, The Temple was the strongest place of the city, largely situated along the seashore, like a castle. At its entrance it had a high and strong tower, the wall of which was 28 feet thick.’ He also mentions another tower built so close to the sea that the waves washed up against it, ‘in which the Temple kept its treasure’.
After 1218 the Templars supplemented their facilities at Acre with a new fortress of their own thirty miles to the south; known today as Atilt, the Templars called it Chastel Pelerin because it was built on a rocky promontory with the help of pilgrims (pelerin in French). This castle, said a German pilgrim who visited in the early 1280s, ‘is sited in the heart of the sea, fortifed with walls and ramparts and barbicans so strong and castellated, that the whole world should not be able to conquer it.’
From their ports in Outremer the Templars’ ships sailed to the West. Their major port of call in France was Marseilles from where they shipped pilgrims and merchants to the East. Italy’s Adriatic ports were also important, especially Brindisi, which had the added advantage of being near Rome. Bari and Brindisi were sources of wheat and horses, armaments and cloth, olive oil and wine, as well as pilgrims. Messina in Sicily acted both as a channel for exports from the island and as an entrepot for shipping arriving from Catalonia and Provence. The Templars also built ships in European ports, everywhere between Spain and the Dalmatian coast.
The White Slave Trade
Another Templar cargo was white slaves. They were transported in considerable numbers from East to West where they were put to work helping to run Templar houses, especially in southern Italy and Aragon. The Hospitallers also engaged in the trade and the use of slaves; indeed the trade in white slaves was a flourishing business for everyone, including the Italian maritime powers, especially Genoa, and most of all the Muslim states in the East.
The centre of the slave trade in the late thirteenth century was the Mediterranean port of Ayas in the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia. Marco Polo disembarked at Ayas in 1271 to begin his trip to China at about the same time that the Templars opened a wharf there. The slaves, who were Turkish, Greek, Russian and Circassian, had been acquired as a result of intertribal warfare, or because impoverished parents decided to sell their children, or because they were kidnapped, and they were brought to Ayas by Turkish and Mongol slavers.
The pick of young strong males from the South Russian steppes or the Caucasus generally went to Egypt where they were converted to Islam and served as elite slave soldiers known as Mamelukes. In 1250 the Mamelukes seized power in Egypt for themselves-and led the final jihad that drove the Franks out of Outre me r.
World History
