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

by Dan Jones

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.