Guillaume de Sonnac was the 18th grand master of the Knights Templar. He was a man who suffered terrible back luck. Blinded in one eye at the Battle of Mansourah, during the Seventh Crusade. That was bad enough. But in the following Battle of Fariskur, he managed to lose the remaining good eye – and his life.
The Seventh Crusade was led by King Louis IX of France, an intensely religious monarch who was later canonised as Saint Louis. Despite his piety, Louis rebuked De Sonnac for attempting to find a diplomatic solution to the conflict with the Muslim rulers in the Middle East. The king wanted an all-out war to reclaim Jerusalem, which had been lost to the Saracens. His strategy was to strike at Egypt, the centre of Islamic power in the region. But things didn’t quite go to plan.
Louis landed in Egypt in 1249 with 18,000 troops that included 2,500 knights. He was brimming with confidence. Further boosting his belief in the mission was news that the sultan in Cairo was dying, if not dead already. With surprising ease, the crusaders took the Egyptian city of Damietta. Then Louis, against the advice of his military advisers decided to march on Cairo – the capital.
DISCOVER: Isaac of Stella attacks the Knights Templar
The one-eyed Templar meets his end
De Sonnac had reservations about this military action but went along with the king’s wishes. The Templars didn’t want to look as if they lacked bravery. So when it came to attacking a town called Mansourah, they broke through the walls, swinging their swords with bravado. But they were sucked into a warren of streets in the Arab medina. De Sonnac saw all but two of his 280 knights slaughtered before one of his own eyes was lost by an enemy head blow.
The one-eyed Templar now returned to Louis with a massively depleted force. The following day saw another bloody confrontation with the Ayyubid Muslim enemy and this time, De Sonnac lost his remaining eye – and his life. The one-eyed Templar was dead.
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I found the Nat’l Geographic special interesting, but somewhat sensationalistic. The producers depicted the sacking of Jacob’s Ford as “the beginning of the end” for the Order – only 60 years after the Templars were founded…! The Order had not yet grown to be the medieval “multinational corporation” that it ultimately became. Reputable Templar scholars like Malcolm Barber and Helen Nicholson barely give Jacob’s Ford a footnote. The good folks at NG overstated the case significantly, for dramatic purposes. The on-site archeologists weren’t much better – who was to say that the skeletons they found were Templars, as opposed to Muslim casualties…? Let’s see how long it takes before the NG channel is overrun by shows like “Pawn Stars” and “American Pickers” like the History Channel, if they’re going to produce such shoddy scholarship.
There is a tendency to talk about the ‘twilight’ of the Templars before they’d even begun – I agree with you. As you say, after Jacob’s Ford the Order still had the whole of the thirteenth century to get through. I was only reading today of just how wealth the Templars in France were by the 1290s when the crusades were all but over. In spite of the loss of the Holy Land, the Order was all but bankrolling the French monarchy.
As regards the History Channel – I call it the Mystery Channel. When I saw a programme speculating on whether NASA’s moon rocket technology had been learned from aliens, I stopped watching. In the UK, BBC Four has made some excellent history programmes of late – interesting without being sensationalist. I would strongly recommend ‘Story of England’, a programme which tells the whole history of England through the eyes of one village, Kibworth. Michael Wood is an excellent historian who brings to life medieval history through contemporary records. It’s interesting without resorting to cheap tricks. I recommend. Click here – http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tw231