j 72 THE KNIGHTS TEMPLARS
Emperor like Frederick II might flout the Temple, but
rarely would any King of Jerusalem engage in war without
the support of one or other of the military Orders. The
Temple had its own navy at Tyre and Acre, as well as its
garrisons in most parts of the Christian possessions, and it had
the financial resources which the kingdom so often lacked.
Everything combined to feed the pride of the Temple and
the Hospital in the East—the Teutonic Knights never
achieved the position of the two older-established institutions.
Christians and Moslems alike acknowledged the power of
the fighting monks.
The charges made against the Templars were not only that
the members of the Order lived in a luxurious and extrava-
gant manner inconsistent with their vows, or that they
exhibited a pride and arrogance at variance with what was
expected of soldiers of Christ, but that they had grown tepid
in war. Almost anything might have been excused if the
Templars had maintained the fight against the Moslem with
the vigour and fanaticism of their forerunners. Only on
two or three occasions in all their history did the brethren
show cowardice in the face of the enemy or a lack of
endurance in a campaign, though sometimes their direction
of military expeditions was reprehensible. It was admitted
that when the Templars fought their skill and courage were
unsurpassed; but the criticism was that the Order did not
fight often enough and that it sought to avert wars instead
of making them.
It was undeniable that the Temple in the thirteenth
century frequently threw its influence on the side of peace.
In the occupation of the Holy Land, the Franks had at first
been in the ascendant and had then more often been the
attacker than the attacked. With the rise of Saladin, how-
ever, the Christians had been on the defensive. After his
death, the advantage had for a time been with the Christians
again, but the balance had after a few years decisively turned