Renaud de Vichiers

Renaud de Vichiers grand master's coat of arms

Renaud de Vichiers († January 20, 1256 ) was the nineteenth Grand Master of the Knights Templar from July 1250 until his death .

He was a French nobleman from Vichy in Provence . He joined the Knights Templar and served it first as a Preceptor in Acre , Master of the Order in France and finally as Grand Marshal .

In the latter office he took with Grand Master Guillaume de Sonnac on the Sixth Crusade under King Louis IX. from France to Egypt . After the Grand Master had fallen in the fighting off al-Mansura on February 11, 1250, Renaud took over the provisional leadership of the order as the highest-ranking Templar. In May 1250, the Templar Comtur d'Otricourt refused Sire Jean de Joinville to hand over the property he had carried with him, which was supposed to serve as a ransom for the king who was captured by the Mamluks . He justified this with the argument that the money on a galley in Damiette did not belong to the order, but had only been entrusted to it by a client. Renaud, however, declared himself ready not to stand in the way of the Sire if the latter wanted to confiscate the property by force. He just had to swing his ax and he would give him the keys to the galley, as he did in the end.

After his release, Louis IX went. to Acre to take over the government of the Kingdom of Jerusalem . According to Jean de Joinville, the king campaigned there in July 1250 for the election of Renaud de Vichier as the new Templar Grand Master. During the presence of King Louis IX. in the Holy Land the order seems to have been under the influence of the king under Renaud. In 1251, the order marshal Hugues de Jouy had to answer to the king in Caesarea after he had concluded a trade agreement with the Ayyubid Sultan of Damascus , an-Nasir Yusuf , on behalf of Renaud and without the knowledge of the king . The agreement was politically explosive because the Ayyubids of Damascus were enemies with the Mamluks in Egypt and Louis IX. wanted to avoid unnecessarily provoking the Mamluks. Renaud then had to banish the marshal from the kingdom.

literature

• Alain Demurger: The last Templar. The life and death of the Grand Master Jacques de Molay . CH Beck, Munich 2005 ( ISBN 3-406-52202-5 )

Footnotes

1. ↑ Joinville , II, §16, ed. by Ethel Wedgwood (1906)
2. ↑ Joinville , III, §1, ed. by Ethel Wedgwood (1906)
3. ↑ See Joseph R. Strayer: The Crusades of Louis IX. In: Robert L. Wolff / Harry W. Hazard: The later Crusades, 1189-1311. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 1969. pp. 506 f. (English)
4. ↑ Joinville , III, §7, ed. by Ethel Wedgwood (1906)

predecessor	Office	successor
Guillaume de Sonnac	Grand Master of the Templar Order 1250–1256	Thomas Bérard