With a Grand Master, however, Saladin thought the situation was different. The Grand Masters of both the Hospitallers and Templars held all power in their hands; their brothers in the order had to obey their decisions, without question. A Grand Master might be valuable if they could convince him to cooperate.

But Saladin got nowhere with Odo de Saint Armand. The Grand Master referred merely to the Rule, which forbade ransoms for Templar knights, and so Odo de Saint Armand’s captivity in Damascus was brief. Within a year he was dead, though no one knew the cause.

It was most likely that the new Grand Master of the Templar order would be Arnoldo de Torroja, who held the next highest position as Jerusalem’s Master.

Because power in the Holy Land was divided among the court in Jerusalem, the two spiritual orders of knights, and the barons and landowners, it was of great importance who became Grand Master, and what sort of warrior, spiritual leader, and negotiator he was. It was even more important, of course, that he held a conciliatory attitude toward the Saracens, for the sake of peace in the Holy Land.

Arnoldo de Torroja had made a long career as a member of the Knights Templar in Aragon and Provence before he came to the Holy Land. He was much more of a businessman and wielder of power than his warlike predecessor Odo de Saint Armand.

Looking at these potential power shifts from Saladin’s point of view, the royal power in Jerusalem seemed on its way to landing in the clutches of an ignorant adventurer who would be little threat on the battlefield. And the mighty Order of the Knights Templar had in Arnoldo de Torroja acquired a leader who was more a man of compromise and negotiation than his predecessor, who was more like Count Raymond of Tripoli.

For Arn de Gothia, master of Gaza, Arnoldo de Torroja’s elevation to Grand Master had a more immediate effect. Arn was summoned to Jerusalem in order to assume without delay the office of Jerusalem’s Master.

For the two Cistercian monks, Father Louis and Brother Pietro, who at this time arrived at the center of the world as the special envoys of the Holy Father in Rome, their encounter with Jerusalem was a mixture of violent disappointments and pleasant surprises. But almost nothing was as they had expected.

Like all newly arrived Franks, secular or ecclesiastical, they’d imagined the City of Cities to be a wonderfully peaceful place with streets of gold and white marble. What they found was an indescribable tumult of teeming crowds and jabbered languages and narrow streets filled mostly with garbage. Like all Cistercians they had an image of their military brother organization the Knights Templar as a group of uneducated roughnecks who could scarcely spell their way through the Pater Noster in Latin. What they found first was Jerusalem’s Master, who addressed them in Latin. And almost immediately they all fell into an interesting discourse about Aristotle while waiting for the Grand Master whom they had come to meet in person.

The rooms of Jerusalem’s Master reminded them a good deal of a Cistercian monastery. There was none of the worldly and sometimes ungodly ostentation which they had seen at other places in the Templars’ quarter of the city. Instead there was a long arcade with a view over the city, much like a part of every Cistercian cloister, and all the walls were white and without sinful pictures. Their host served them an excellent meal despite the fact that there was nothing that originated from four-footed animals or other items that Cistercians could not eat.

Father Louis was a clear-sighted man, schooled from a very young age by the best teachers in the Cistercians at Cîteaux; for many years he had been the Cistercian order’s envoy from the Holy Father. So he was rather amazed how little he actually knew about the so-called Jerusalem’s Master, a title that seemed to Father Louis utterly grotesque in its presumption, and so ill suited to the man he assumed he would meet. They had told him that Arn de Gothia was a warrior of especially high repute, that he was the victor of the battle of Mont Gisard, when the Templars despite great inferiority in numbers had defeated Saladin himself. So Father Louis had probably expected someone comparable to the Roman commander Belisarius, in any case a military man who could barely speak of anything besides war. But if it were not for a number of white scars on the face and hands of this Arn de Gothia, Father Louis would have thought from his gentle demeanor and conciliatory manner of speaking that he was no different from a brother of Cîteaux. He couldn’t help plying Arn a bit with questions, and thought that he better understood at least one side of the matter when he learned that this Templar knight had actually been brought up in a cloister. Then it was like seeing the dream of blessed Saint Bernard fully realized: the warrior in the Holy War who was at the same time a monk. Father Louis had never imagined that he would ever encounter this dream in the flesh.

Nor could he avoid noticing that his host ate only bread and drank only water despite all the other food and drink that were on the table, provided for the pleasure of his guests. This high Templar knight was thus doing penance for something. But no matter how much Father Louis wanted to learn more about the matter, this first meeting was hardly the right time to inquire. He was the envoy of the Holy Father, and had brought a papal bull that might not be readily accepted. Besides, these Templar knights were known for their pride; the man who was Grand Master, whom they would soon meet, apparently viewed himself as next in rank only to the Holy Father himself. Which meant that the so-called Jerusalem’s Master would be considered no less than an archbishop. It would be reasonable to assume that such men did not view an abbé as possessing any great power. Nor could they be expected to understand the position of an abbé who worked directly under the Holy Father, acting as his advisor and envoy.

When the Grand Master himself at long last joined their meeting, all remnants of the meal had been cleared away and they were having a pleasant discussion about the divisions of philosophy into knowledge, learning, and faith. They were also talking about ideas as something that always had to be manifested in material objects; they could not exist solely in the higher pure spheres. This was precisely the sort of conversation that Father Louis never would have imagined having with a Templar knight.

Arnoldo de Torroja apologized for his tardiness by saying that he had been summoned by the king of Jerusalem. He also told them that he and Arn de Gothia would need to leave soon to meet with the king again. However, he did not want to allow the entire first evening to pass without meeting his Cistercian guests and hearing about their mission. According to Father Louis’s first impression, this Grand Master was a man like those he might have met among the emperor’s ambassadors in Rome, a full-fledged diplomat and negotiator. So he was no coarse Roman Belisarius either.

Father Louis thought it was a little awkward to proceed at once to the sensitive topic they had come to discuss, but his hosts did not leave him much choice. It would not be proper to do nothing but chat about superfluous matters at their first meeting, and then return the next day to present solemn decrees.

So he explained the matter directly and without any unnecessary digressions. His two hosts listened attentively, without interrupting and without revealing their thoughts by any change in expression.

Archbishop William of Tyrus had traveled from the Holy Land to the Third Lateran Council in Rome, and there he had presented serious charges against both the Knights Templar and the Hospitallers.

According to Archbishop William, the Knights Templar were in certain respects consistently counteracting the Holy Roman Church. If anyone was excommunicated in the Holy Land, he could be buried by the Knights Templar. And before his death he could even be admitted into their order. If a bishop imposed an interdict upon a whole city so that all the sinners were removed from the care of the Church, then the Knights Templar could send their own priests to take care of all churchly services. All these abuses, which gave the impression that the power of the Church was weak or even ridiculous, arose from the fact that the Knights Templar did not answer to any bishop and thus could not be excommunicated or even punished by the patriarch of Jerusalem. What made the situation especially serious, of course, was the fact that both Templars and Hospitallers accepted payment for these services. The Third Lateran Council and the Holy Father Alexander III had therefore decided that all such business transactions must cease immediately. However, Archbishop William had found no hearing for his proposal that various punishments should be imposed on the two orders of knights for these offences against the Church, which had supremacy over all people on the earth.