Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (10 page)

"From prohibitions you
can tell what people normally do," Belbo said. "It's a way of
drawing a picture of daily life."

"Let's see," Diotallevi
said. "A Templar, annoyed at something the brothers said or did
that evening, rides out at night without leave, accompanied by a
little Saracen boy and with three capons hanging from his saddle.
He goes to a girl of loose morals and, bestowing the capons upon
her, engages in illicit intercourse. During this debauchery, the
Saracen boy rides off with the horse, and our Templar, even more
sweat-covered and dirty than usual, crawls home with his tail
between his legs. In an attempt to pass unnoticed, he slips some of
the Temple's money to the Jewish usurer, who is waiting like a
vulture on its perch..."

"Thou hast said it,
Caiaphas," Belbo remarked.

"We're talking in
stereotypes here. With the money the Templar tries to recover, if
not the Saracen boy, at least a semblance of a horse. But a fellow
Templar hears about the misadventure, and one night¡Xwe know that
envy is endemic in such communities¡Xhe drops some heavy hints at
supper, when the meat is served. The captain grows suspicious, the
suspect stammers, flushes, then draws his dagger and flings himself
on his brother..."

"On the treacherous
sycophant," Belbo corrected him.

"On the treacherous
sycophant, good. He flings himself on the wretch, slashing his
face. The wretch draws his sword, an unseemly brawl ensues, the
captain with the flat of his sword tries to restore order, the
other brothers snigger..."

"Drinking and
blaspheming like Templars," Belbo said.

"God's bodkin, in God's
name, ¡¥swounds, God's blood," I said.

"Our hero is enraged,
and what does a Templar do when he's enraged?"

"He turns purple," Belbo
suggested.

"Right. He turns purple,
tears off his habit, and throws it on the ground."

"How about: ¡¥You can
shove this tunic, you can shove your goddamn temple!' " I
suggested. "And then he breaks the seal with his sword and
announces that he's joining the Saracens."

"Violating at least
eight precepts at one blow."

"Anyway," I said,
driving home my point, "imagine a man like that, who says he's
joining the Saracens. And one day the king's bailiff arrests him,
shows him the white-hot irons, and says: ¡¥Confess, knave! Admit
you stuck it up your brother's behind!"Who, me? Your irons make me
laugh. I'll show you what a Templar is! I'll stick it up your
behind, and the pope's. And King Philip's, too, if he comes within
reach!' "

"A confession! That must
be how it happened," Belbo said. "Then it's off to the dungeon with
him, and a coat of oil every day so he'll burn better when the time
comes."

"They were just a bunch
of children," Diotallevi concluded.

We were interrupted by a
girl with a strawberry birthmark on her nose; she had some papers
in her hand and asked if we had signed the petition for the
imprisoned Argentinean comrades.' Belbo signed without reading it.
"They're even worse off than I am," he said to Diotallevi, who was
regarding him with a bemused expression. "He can't sign," Belbo
said to the girl. "He belongs to a small Indian sect that forbids
its members to write their own names. Many of them are in jail
because of government persecution." The girl looked sympathetically
at Diotallevi and passed the petition to me.

"And who are they?" I
asked.

"What do you mean, who
are they? Argentinean comrades."

"But what group do they
belong to?"

"The Tacuaras, I
think."

"The Tacuaras are
fascists," I said. As if I knew one group from the
other.

"Fascist pig," the girl
hissed at me. She left.

"What you are saying,
then," Diotallevi asked, "is that the Templars were just poor
bastards?"

"No," I said. "Perhaps I
shouldn't have tried to liven up the story. We were talking about
the rank and file, but from the beginning the order received huge
donations and little by little set up commanderies throughout
Europe. Alfonso of Aragon, for example, gave them a whole region.
In fact, in his will he wanted to leave the kingdom to them in the
event that he died without issue. The Templars didn't trust him, so
they made a deal¡Xtook the money and ran, more or less. Except that
instead of money it was half a dozen strongholds in Spain. The king
of Portugal gave them a forest. Since the forest happened to be
occupied by the Saracens, the Templars organized an attack, drove
out the Moors, and in the process founded Coimbra. And these are
just a few episodes. The point is this: Part of the order was
fighting in Palestine, but the bulk of it stayed home. Then what
happened? Let's say someone has to go to Palestine. He needs money,
and he's afraid to travel with jewels and gold, so he leaves his
fortune with the Templars in France, or in Spain, or in Italy. They
give him a receipt, and he gets cash for it in the
East."

"A letter of credit,"
Belbo said.

"That's right. They
invented the checking account long before the bankers of Florence.
What with donations, armed conquests, and a percentage from their
financial operations, the Templars became a multinational. Running
an operation like that took men who knew what they were doing. Men
who could convince Innocent II to grant them exceptional
privileges. The order was allowed to keep its booty, and wherever
they owned property, they were answerable not to the king, not to
the bishops or to the patriarch of Jerusalem, but only to the pope.
They were exempted from all tithes, but they had the right to
impose their own tithes on the lands under their control...In
short, the organization was always in the black, and nobody had the
right to pry into it. You can see why the bishops and monarchs
didn't like them, though they couldn't do without them. The
Crusaders were terrible screwups. They marched off without any idea
of where they were going or what they would find when they got
there. But the Templars knew their way around. They knew how to
deal with the enemy, they were familiar with the terrain and the
art of fighting. The Order of the Temple had become a serious
business, even though its reputation was based on the boasting of
its assault troops."

"And the boasting was
empty?" Diotallevi asked.

"Often. Here again,
what's amazing is the gulf between their political and
administrative skill on the one hand and their Green Beret style on
the other: all guts and no brains. Let's take the story of
Ascalon¡X"

"Yes, let's," Belbo
said, after a moment's distraction as he greeted, with a great show
of lust, a girl named Dolores.

She joined us, saying,
"I must hear the story of Ascalon!"

"All right. One fine day
the king of France, the Holy Roman emperor, King Baudouin HI of
Jerusalem, and the grand masters of the Templars and the
Hospitalers all decided to lay siege to Ascalon. They set out
together: king, court, patriarch, priests carrying crosses and
banners, and the archbishops of Tyre, Nazareth, Caesarea. It was
like a big party, oriftammes and standards flying, tents pitched
around the enemy city, drums beating. Ascalon was defended by one
hundred and fifty towers, and the inhabitants had long been
preparing for a siege: all the houses had slits made in the walls;
they were like fortresses within the fortress. I mean, the Templars
were smart fighters, they should have known these things. But no,
everybody got excited, and they built battering rams and wooden
towers: you know, those constructions on wheels that you push up to
the enemy walls so you can hurl stones or firebrands or shoot
arrows while the catapults sling rocks from a distance. The
Ascalonites tried to set fire to the towers, but the wind was
against them, and they burned their own walls instead, until in one
place a wall collapsed. The attackers all charged the
breach.

"And then a strange
thing happened. The grand master of the Templars had a cordon set
up so that only his men could enter the city. Cynics say he was
trying to make sure that only the Templars would get the booty. A
kinder explanation is that he feared a trap and wanted to send his
own brave men in first. Either way, I wouldn't make him head of a
military academy. Forty Templars ran full steam straight through
the city, came to a screeching halt in a great cloud of dust at the
wall on the other side, looked at one another, and wondered what in
hell they were doing there. Then they about-faced and ran back,
racing past the Saracens, who pelted them with rocks and darts,
slaughtering the lot of them, grand master included. Then they
closed the breach, hung the corpses from the walls, and jeered at
the Christians, with obscene gestures and horrid
laughter."

"The Moor is cruel,"
Belbo said.

"Like children,"
Diotallevi added.

"These Templars of yours
were really crazy!" Dolores said with admiration.

"They remind me of Tom
and Jerry," Belbo said.

I felt a little guilty.
After all, I had been living with the Templars for two years, and I
loved them. Yet now, catering to the snobbery of my audience, I had
made them sound like characters out of a cartoon. Maybe it was
William of Tyre's fault, treacherous historiographer that he was. I
could almost see my Knights of the Temple, bearded and blazing, the
bright red crosses on their snow-white cloaks, their mounts
wheeling in the shadow of the Beauceant, their black-and-white
banner. They had been so dazzlingly intent on their feast of death
and daring. Perhaps the sweat Saint Bernard talked about was a
bronze glow that lent a sarcastic nobility to their fearsome smiles
as they celebrated their farewell to life...Lions in war, Jacques
de Vitry called them, but sweet lambs in times of peace; harsh in
battle, devout in prayer; ferocious to their enemies, but full of
kindness toward their brothers. The white and the black of their
banner were so apposite: to the friends of Christ they were pure;
to His adversaries they were grim and terrible.

Pathetic champions of
the faith, last glimmer of chivalry's twilight. Why play any old
Ariosto to them when I could be their Joinville? The author of the
Histoire de Saint Louis had accompanied the sainted king to the
Holy Land, acting as both scribe and soldier. I recalled now what
he had written about the Templars. This was more than a hundred and
eighty years after the order was founded, and it had been through
enough crusades to undermine anyone's ideals. The heroic figures of
Queen Meli-sande and Baudouin the leper-king had vanished like
ghosts; factional fighting in Lebanon¡Xblood-soaked even then¡Xhad
drawn to a close; Jerusalem had already fallen once; Barbarossa had
drowned in Cilicia; Richard the Lion-Heart, defeated and
humiliated, had gone home disguised as, of all things, a Templar;
Christianity had lost the battle. The Moors' view of the
confederation of autonomous potentates united in the defense of
their civilization was very different. They had read Avicenna, and
they were not ignorant, like the Europeans. How could you live
alongside a tolerant, mystical, libertine culture for two centuries
without succumbing to its allure, particularly when you compared it
to Western culture, which was crude, vulgar, barbaric, and
Germanic? Then, in 1244, came the final, definitive fall of
Jerusalem. The war, begun a hundred and fifty years earlier, was
lost. The Christians had to lay down their arms in a land now
devoted to peace and the scent of the cedars of Lebanon. Poor
Templars. Your epic, all in vain.

Little wonder that in
the tender melancholy of their faded, aging glory they lent an ear
to the secret doctrines of Moslem mystics, hieratic guardians of
hidden treasures. Perhaps that was how the legend of the Knights of
the Temple was born, the legend with which some frustrated and
yearning minds are still obsessed, the myth of a boundless power
lying unused, unharnessed...

Even in Joinville's day,
the saint-king Louis, at whose table Aquinas dined, persisted in
his belief in the crusade, despite two centuries of dreams ruined
by the victors' stupidity. Was it worth one more try? Yes, Louis
said. And the Templars were ready and willing; they followed him
into defeat, because that was their job. Without a crusade, how
could they justify the Temple?

Louis attacks Damietta
from the sea. The enemy shore glitters with pikes, halberds,
oriflammes, shields, and scimitars. Fine-looking men, Joinville
says chivalrously, who carry arms of gold struck by the sun. Louis
could wait, but he decides to land at any cost. "My faithful
followers, we will be invincible if we are inseparable in our
charity. If we are defeated, we will be martyrs. If we triumph, the
glory of God will be the greater." The Templars don't believe it,
but they have been trained to be knights of the ideal, and this is
the image of themselves they must confirm. They will follow the
king in his mystical madness.

Incredibly, the landing
is a success; equally incredibly, the Saracens abandon Damietta.
But the king hesitates to enter the city, fearing treachery. But
there is no treachery: the city is his for the taking, along with
its treasures and its hundred mosques, which Louis immediately
converts into churches of the Lord. Now he has a decision to make:
Should he march on Alexandria or on Cairo? The wise choice would be
Alexandria, thus depriving Egypt of a vital port. But the
expedition has its evil genius, the king's brother, Robert
d'Artois, a megalomaniac hungry for glory. A typical younger son.
He advises Louis to head for Cairo, the heart of Egypt. The
Templars, cautious at first, are now champing at the bit. The king
issues orders to avoid isolated skirmishes, but the marshal of the
Temple takes it upon himself to violate that prohibition. Seeing a
squadron of the sultan's Mamelukes, he cries out: "Now have at
them, in the name of God, for a shame like this I cannot
bear!"