Edessa falls, 24 December 1144

Zengi of Mosul took Edessa, the first crusader state, on 24 December 1144 after a siege of four weeks, and the news set the Second Crusade in motion.

Baldwin of Boulogne had made Edessa the first crusader state in 1098, a Latin county among Armenian and Syrian Christians beyond the Euphrates. In the autumn of 1144 Count Joscelin II marched out with almost all his men to help an ally against Aleppo. Zengi, atabeg of Mosul and Aleppo, came before the empty walls on 28 November. The Latin archbishop Hugh led the defence with the Armenian bishop John and the Jacobite bishop Basil, who kept the native Christians at their posts, while Joscelin waited at Turbessel for help from Jerusalem.

Zengi's miners dug under the wall near the Gate of the Hours, and on 24 December it came down. Many died in the crush at the citadel, the archbishop among them; Zengi halted the killing but had the Latin prisoners executed, and the citadel surrendered on 26 December. Zengi was murdered in 1146, and when Joscelin briefly retook the city that October, Zengi's son Nur ad-Din drove him out and the fleeing Armenians were massacred. In the West, Pope Eugenius III answered with the bull Quantum praedecessores on 1 December 1145.

The Assassins and their tribute to the Templars

The Nizari Ismailis, the Assassins, paid the Templars a yearly tribute that William of Tyre put at about 2,000 gold pieces; in 1173 a Templar killed their envoys to keep it.

The Assassins were the Nizari Ismailis of the Syrian mountains, a Shia sect at war with the Sunni powers, whose weapon was the killing of rulers. Their first known Christian victim was Count Raymond II of Tripoli, stabbed at the city gate in 1152, possibly in revenge for the Templars' new hold on Tortosa. The orders answered with force, and by the 1170s, William of Tyre writes, the Assassin villages near Tortosa paid the Templars about 2,000 gold pieces a year. In 1173 their leader Rashid ad-Din Sinan, the "Old Man of the Mountain", sent envoys to King Amalric offering an alliance in return for the end of the tribute. On their way home a Templar, Walter of Mesnil, ambushed and killed them. Master Odo de St Amand refused to hand him over, saying only the Pope could judge a brother, and Amalric had him seized and jailed at Tyre.

Jean de Joinville, who met Assassin envoys at Acre in the 1250s, explains the tribute as the Assassins saw it. Killing the Master of the Temple or the Hospital gained them nothing, because another as good would take his place at once; so they paid the two orders rather than risk their men. The orders were the one enemy their daggers could not frighten. Baybars ended the arrangement in 1266, when he made the tribute payable to Cairo.

The heater shield

From the late twelfth century the long kite shield was cut down to the heater shield, flat-topped and shorter, the shield of the thirteenth-century Templar and the shape of heraldry.

As mail grew longer and better and the great helm covered the face, a knight no longer needed a shield reaching to his knee. In the later twelfth century the kite was cut flat at the top and shortened, and by the thirteenth century the heater shield was the knight's shield across Europe: about three feet high, flat above, curving to a point below, light enough to use on horseback or on foot. It was made of thin wood covered in leather, often with canvas or parchment and gesso on the face, and was held by enarmes and slung by a guige like the kite before it.

Its broad, flat face was made for a coat of arms, which is why the shape still stands for heraldry. One of the oldest survivors is the Seedorf shield of about 1200, which hung over the tomb of Arnold von Brienz in Uri, with a silver lion on blue; it is in the Gallery today. The name is modern: Victorian antiquaries thought it looked like a flat iron, a "heater". By the mid-fourteenth century plate armour had made it smaller still, and it lived on mostly in the tournament.

• Thin wood and leather
• Flat top, pointed base
• About three feet
• Enarmes and guige
• Late 12th–14th century

The Templars and the Shroud of Turin

The Shroud's history begins at Lirey around 1354–55, forty years after the Order's end; no document puts it in Templar hands.

St Thomas keeps this card because he asked to see the evidence before he believed.

Draper

Draper: the Templar officer who kept the brothers' clothes and bedding, gave out the habits with their red crosses, and saw that no brother had more than the Rule allowed.

Old French drapier, from drap, "cloth" · DRAY-per · the keeper of the habits

In the Order's hierarchy the Draper of the convent ranked among the great officers, after the Commander of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. He gave each brother his mantle, robes, shirts and bedding, took back the old ones, and could take away anything too fine or more than a brother needed, since a Templar owned nothing of his own. The red cross on the mantle, granted in 1147, passed through his hands to every brother, and the houses of the provinces had drapers of their own.