Despite their clash with Amalric, the Templars remained influential figures in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and were integral to its military defence. Amalric was succeeded by his son, Baldwin IV, the gallant young leper-king. The Templars under Odo helped Baldwin to defeat a vastly superior force invading from Egypt under the Sultan Saladin, at Montguisard. The winning streak was not to last, however, for Saladin returned, this time from Syria, to take and destroy Baldwin's new castle at Jacob's Ford, and to slaughter its Templar defenders. At around this time Odo was captured in battle and afterwards died in a Saracen dungeon. William of Tyre recorded the event unsympathetically.
King Baldwin's leprosy was fatal for the kingdom. He was eventually succeeded by his sister Sibylla and her husband Guy de Lusignan. Guy rapidly fell under the influence of the bellicose warlord Reynald de Chatillon, whose may have become unhinged during long years in enemy captivity, and of Gerard de Ridefort, another hot-head who had managed to become Grand Master of the Knights Templar. These two persuaded Guy to to take the offensive and engage Saladin's army, which was again invading the realm. This flew in the face of more captious advice from Count Raymond III of Tripoli with whom Gerard had earlier quarreled. The tactic entailed a forced march across blistering desert. Saladin lured the parched Christians to the shores of lake Galilee (which he cut off from them) and then into battle in unfavourable terrain, on the slope of hill called Hattin, where, on 4 July 1187, the Muslims won a crushing victory. The Christians were particularly demoralize by the loss of the 'True Cross' for they had taken the relic with them into battle before and it had always seemed to bring victory against the odds. After Hattin, though Saladin spared the captured King of Jerusalem, he executed Reynald, and then massacred all the Templars and Hospitallers among his prisoners except for Gerard. So many Christian knights were killed or captured, that day, that there were few to defend Jerusalem, and its fall was inevitable. Many other castles and cities fell, too, emptied of defenders.
Europe had not lost its crusading enthusiasm, however. The Third Crusades restored portions of the Latin Kingdom, while plenty came to replace the fallen Templars, who were considered martyrs in a Holy cause. Templars played a key role in King Richard the Lionheart of England's victories over Saladin at the siege of Acre and the spectacular battle of Arsuf. When Richard's army was on the move, the Templars and Hospitallers defended the vanguard and the rear, sustaining and fighting off some of the fiercest attacks from the Turks.
For all its promise, however, the Crusade faltered due to internal divisions. Richard was ultimately advised to turn back from Jerusalem by the Templars and Hospitallers and the local barons who feared that even if it fell, then they would not have too few men to hold on to it. Division also cased problems for the Crusaders. Previously the Marquis Conrad of Montferrat had arrived in the east in time to prevent Saladin's capture of Tyre. Conrad claimed the throne of Jerusalem, seeking to oust Guy, who had meanwhile been freed and become Richard's ally. Conrad and the Duke of Burgundy (leading the French forces remaining after the premature departure of King Philip of France) offered little help to the English king, then striving to restore Ascalon, and even conspired with Saladin, until Richard accepted Conrad's claim to the royal title. No sooner, though, was Conrad acknowledged titular king of Jerusalem than he fell under Assassins' daggers. The crown, (and the hand of the fair heiress Isabella, whom Contad had snatched from her first husband) was passed to Count Henry of Champagne (who himself later met an untimely death tumbling from a balcony). This time around the Templars kept out of the political rivalries, which so distracted many of the Crusaders from the higher cause. Their marginal contribution was handing back the island of Cyprus to Richard, (who had seized it on his way east and then sold it to the Templars) so that Richard could pass it to Guy as compensation for his lost crown on the mainland.
The Third Crusade ended in truce between the war-weary faction. The undefeated Richard departed homeward, some say disguised as a Templar, leaving Jerusalem still in Muslim hands but open to Christian pilgrims. Fate delivered the king into the hands of Duke Leopold of Austria. Richard became a prisoner of an erstwhile crusading comrade, whom he had offended at Acre by casting the Duke's banner from the walls. This turn of events was not the last bitter irony that would reduce the story of the Crusades to a farce.
Pope Innocent III was keen to foster crusading, and soon initiated the preaching of the Fourth Crusade. The Crusaders ended up in financial debt to the Venetians, and being used by them against Christian enemies first in Dalmatia and then in Byzantium. The expedition dissolved after the brutal sack of Constantinople in 1204, and the near-destruction of the very civilization that the first crusaders had supposedly set out to safeguard from the Muslims. The Templars played little part in the Fourth Crusade and its controversial actions, nor in Innocent III's next crusading project, the 'Albigensian Crusade', against the Cathars of Southern France. The Pope's determination to stamp out the dissenting, neo-Gnostic Christian sect brought about a war waged by northern French barons against their southern counterparts who were accused of sheltering heretics. The main target was the count of Toulouse, Raymond VI, whose ancestor had been a primary leader of the First Crusade. The ensuing persecution of the Cathars led to massacres and mass burnings, and eventually (more significantly for the story of the Templars) to the creation of the original 'thought police', the Inquisition.
Having caused the ravagement of the Languedoc, Innocent III's thoughts turned again to Holy War against Islam. He prepared the way for the Fifth Crusade, but did not live to see it embark. (The titular king of Jerusalem at this time was John of Brienne, an aging, mediocre noble sent to marry Conrad of Montferrat's daughter by the king of France). After skirmishes in the Holy Land, John and the mustered crusaders launched an attack on Egypt. This was intended to strike at the heartland of the Ayyubid dynasty, Saladin's successors in the Middle East. The Templars played a major part in the siege of Damietta on the Nile delta, which surrendered to the Crusaders only after a long and tenacious resistance. The stubborn papal legate, Cardinal Pelagius of Albano, refused to hear talk of compromise, rejecting Ayyubid offers of exchanging Jerusalem for Damietta. Foolishly he led the Crusaders south towards Cairo just as the waters of the Nile rose for the annual flood, cutting off their path. The retreating forces were ambushed and not even Templar discipline could avert disaster. The Crusaders were forced to hand back Damietta in exchange for their lives, and to quit Egypt with no gain.
A few years later the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen recovered Jerusalem by means of diplomacy with the Sultan of Egypt, al-Kamil. As he entered it, the Latin Church places the Holy City under interdict. Frederick II had come as an excommunicate, and as a result of papal-imperial antagonism, Pope Gregory IX had done his best to sabotage this the Sixth crusade, ordering the Templars not to cooperate with the Emperor. Relations between Frederick II and the Templars became so bad, according to Matthew Paris (English monastic chronicler and grudging admirer of the Emperor), that the Templars attempted to collude with the Muslims to murder Frederick, setting him up for an ambush as he visited the River Jordan. The Sultan was not impressed, and neither was Paris. Neither was Frederick, who would confiscate the Templars' lands in his Italian realm, once he had returned and dealt with the Papal mercenaries who had invaded in his absence- under the command of Frederick's estranged father-in-law John of Brienne.
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