The Siege of Ascalon, as recounted by Casaubon, turns a grand crusading expedition into a swift and humiliating catastrophe. The attackers breach the city’s wall, but the Templars’ effort to enter first leaves forty of their men and their grand master dead, their bodies displayed by the defenders. The story makes martial confidence collapse into confusion, then into a spectacle of defeat.

The Assault on the City

Casaubon presents a coalition of rulers and churchmen setting out together: the king of France, the Holy Roman emperor, King Baudouin III of Jerusalem, and the grand masters of the Templars and the Hospitalers. A patriarch, priests carrying crosses and banners, and archbishops from Tyre, Nazareth, and Caesarea accompany them. The encampment, with tents, standards, and drums, resembles a festival as much as a military campaign.

Ascalon, however, is no easy prize. Its defenders command 150 towers, and the inhabitants have prepared each house for resistance by cutting slits into its walls, turning the city into a network of fortified positions. The attackers nevertheless build wheeled wooden towers and battering rams, using them to approach the walls while catapults throw rocks from a distance. When the Ascalonites try to burn the siege towers, the wind turns against them: their own walls catch fire, and one section collapses.

The Templars’ Failed Entry

The breach produces the reversal at the center of Casaubon’s account. The Templars’ grand master orders a cordon so that only his own men can enter the city. Casaubon gives two possible explanations: the grand master may have wanted to reserve the booty for the Templars, or he may have feared an ambush and intended his men to go in first. Neither possibility saves the operation from appearing disastrously misjudged.

Forty Templars run through the breach at full speed and cross the city. At the wall on the far side they stop amid a cloud of dust, apparently unsure what they have achieved or what to do next. They turn back, passing the Saracens, who attack with rocks and darts. The Templars are slaughtered, including their grand master. The defenders then close the breach, hang the corpses from the walls, and taunt the Christians with obscene gestures and laughter. A concentrated bid for control of the assault ends not in possession of the city but in a public display of defeat.

Framing and Significance

The episode is told in conversation rather than presented as a detached historical account. Belbo has just greeted Dolores with exaggerated ardor when she asks to hear the story of Ascalon; Casaubon narrates the siege, and Belbo and Diotallevi respond briefly afterward. Their remarks reduce the scene to judgments about cruelty and childishness, leaving the account’s central irony intact: a supposedly formidable military order charges into a city without a workable plan for what comes after the breach.

Within the novel’s recurring attention to the Templars and the histories later attached to them, this story offers a concrete counterweight to romanticized images of their prowess. Their defeat follows from confusion and possibly competing motives, while the victors’ treatment of the corpses turns military failure into humiliation. The siege is therefore remembered not as a clean triumph of strategy, but as a collapse of confidence at the moment when the attackers seemed to have succeeded.