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
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