Ascalon

Ascalon is presented as a fortified city whose siege becomes a pointed example of the Templars’ difference between organizational competence and battlefield judgment. In Casaubon’s account, a breach in the walls seems to promise victory; instead, a restricted entry, an impulsive charge, and a failure to understand the space beyond the city turn the assault into a rout. The episode also anticipates the Templars’ repetition of the same mistake at Mansura, making Ascalon a place remembered not for conquest but for the consequences of misplaced confidence.

Setting and Siege

The siege begins as a grand Christian expedition. The king of France, the Holy Roman emperor, King Baudouin III of Jerusalem, and the grand masters of the Templars and the Hospitalers set out together, accompanied by court, patriarch, priests bearing crosses and banners, and archbishops from Tyre, Nazareth, and Caesarea. The scene is described as almost festive: standards fly, tents surround the city, and drums beat. That spectacle contrasts with the practical demands of taking a place prepared to resist them.

Ascalon is defended by 150 towers, and its inhabitants have made the houses into fortresses within the fortress by cutting slits in the walls. The attackers nevertheless build battering rams and wooden siege towers on wheels, meant to bring fighters close enough to throw stones and firebrands or shoot arrows while catapults attack from a distance. When the Ascalonites try to burn the towers, the wind turns against them; their own walls catch fire, and one section collapses. The breach appears to resolve the siege, but it merely opens the way to the next mistake.

The Assault and Rout

The grand master orders a cordon so that only Templars may enter the city. The narrator offers two possible explanations: cynics suspect the grand master wants the Templars to secure the booty, while a more charitable reading is that he fears a trap and wants his own men to go first. Whichever motive is correct, the order concentrates the danger in the force that enters first.

Forty Templars charge through the breach at full speed. They reach the wall on the far side of the city, stop in a cloud of dust, and, uncertain what they are doing there, turn around. Their retreat carries them past the Saracens, who bombard them with rocks and darts and slaughter them, the grand master among them. The defenders close the breach, hang the dead from the walls, and mock the Christians with obscene gestures and laughter. The account’s abrupt reversal—from a Christian opening in the wall to the display of the dead—makes the city’s defenses more than a physical obstacle: they expose the attackers’ failure to think through what victory would require.

Repetition at Mansura

Ascalon later becomes a precedent for a second disastrous charge. At Mansura, after crossing a ford and joining the Comte d’Artois in pursuit of the enemy, the Templars follow him into the city. They recognize that they have repeated the error made at Ascalon while the Christian force is occupied with looting the sultan’s palace; the defenders regroup and attack the now disorganized soldiers. The later catastrophe gives the earlier siege a continuing significance: Ascalon is not just an isolated military failure but the remembered pattern the Templars fail to avoid.

The two episodes sharpen the account’s central contrast. The Templars are described as capable in administration and familiar with the terrain and the art of fighting, yet their assault troops can act with courage without sound judgment. At Ascalon, the forty men run through the city without a workable understanding of what lies beyond the breach. At Mansura, the desire not to appear dishonorable and the pressure to prove themselves help draw the Templars into a renewed pursuit. The account therefore treats bravery as insufficient when it is separated from judgment and coordination.

Memory and Significance

The siege is narrated as a cautionary episode, not as a sustained reconstruction of the city’s later history. Its defining details are military and theatrical: the 150 towers, the wind that turns the attempted fire against the defenders’ own walls, the breach, the cordon, and the bodies hung above the city. Together they replace the celebratory image of a Christian host arriving with banners and drums with an ending of humiliation and defeat.

The account also resists treating defeat as a neat moral lesson recorded by every chronicler. The narrator notes that even Joinville did not record the Mansura disaster as a disgrace, concluding that it happened and that this is the beauty of war. Against that more unsettled view, Ascalon remains a sharply legible warning: a breach can look like an opening to triumph while concealing the danger on the other side. Its place in the story is secured by repetition, as the Templars later recognize too late that they have made the same mistake again.