The Templars: The Rise and Spectacular Fall of God's Holy Warriors

by Dan Jones

THE KNIGHTS OF THE TEMPLE were founded in Jerusalem in 1119 and officially recognized at some point between January 14 and September 13 of the year 1120.1

In 1154 the Templars remained a vital component in the kingdom of Jerusalem’s military capability. Other than at Ascalon they maintained their discipline on the field, their rule insisting that commands were to be obeyed unerringly and that martyrdom was preferable to flight. Yet at the same time it also seems clear that while obedience and discipline within their own command structure was tight, the same was not necessarily true when it came to fighting with others. Templars owed allegiance to no one but God, the master and the pope. Neither kings nor patriarchs had any formal command over them, and though their able services were sought and willingly given, in the end the Templars were ultimately free from any effective oversight. They defended the idea of Christendom and the honor of Christ, but how they did so was technically a matter for their own instinct and judgment.18 For the most part, this made them an extremely agile and useful elite fighting force. At times, however, their independence made them dangerous, and they came to be suspected as much as they were admired by the secular rulers with whom they had to share the field of combat.

The Templars would find themselves right at the heart of these changes, fighting a desperate rearguard action as the crusading movement collapsed around them, while finding themselves increasingly under suspicion in the West. During the later decades of the thirteenth century the brothers found they had two deadly enemies ranged against them, both seeking their destruction. The first was the Mamluks, who rose from the banks of the Nile to extend their power across the Muslim lands of the Levant, seeking to achieve what not even Saladin had managed before: the total obliteration of Christian presence in the East. The second was Saint Louis’s grandson, Philip IV, king of France.

Principium fini solet impar sepe uidere. Often the end fails to equal the beginning. —Medieval proverb1

The usual pattern of recruitment was for the order to send its young and energetic entrants to the Holy Land, while old, less physically able members remained in the West.

Beyond this circle of high-ranking officers most of the men arrested were middle-aged and distinctly unwarlike. Most Templars in France were not warriors. They were agricultural managers, shepherds and pig farmers, carpenters or wine merchants.2 Only a tiny minority were knights, since by the early fourteenth century some preceptories were staffed entirely by sergeants: this was true in areas of Champagne, Picardy, Auvergne, Poitou and Limousin.3 Forty percent of those questioned were over fifty years old. A third were veterans of the order, having served in this apparent hotbed of sodomy and irreligion for more than twenty years without complaint.4

Between October 13, 1307, and March 18, 1314, the Templars were comprehensively crushed. Their property was impounded. Their wealth was taken. Their reputation was shredded. Their members were imprisoned, tortured, killed, ejected from their homes and humiliated. Those who survived this process either died in prison, were uprooted and sent to new homes or in a few rare cases redeployed to new military orders. Despite colorful myths of their survival as a secret society, by the third decade of the fourteenth century the order had ceased to exist in any meaningful sense. The Templar central archive, their most valuable possession in the East after their treasury, was preserved on Cyprus and taken over by the Hospitallers, but it was subsequently lost, most likely in the sixteenth century when Cyprus was conquered by the Ottomans. So in the end, the Templars’ bodies were taken by the French monarchy that had done so much to help establish the order and their memories were swallowed up by an Islamic enemy they had first been banded together to resist. “They were the fiercest fighters of all the Franks,” wrote Ibn al-Athir, who knew the order in its prime. In the end they could simply fight no more.