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

by Dan Jones

HE STORY OF THE TEMPLARS takes us across a broad sweep of times, territories and cultures.

THE TEMPLARS were holy soldiers. Men of religion and men of the sword, pilgrims and warriors, paupers and bankers. Their uniforms were emblazoned with a red cross, symbolizing the blood Christ had shed for mankind and that they themselves were prepared to spill in the Lord’s service. Although the Templars were only one among a host of religious orders that sprang up in medieval Europe and the Holy Land between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, they were by far the best known and the most controversial.

Their order was a product of the crusades, the wars instigated by the medieval Church, which took aim primarily, although not exclusively, at the Islamic rulers of Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, Egypt, northwest Africa and southern Spain.

As such, Templars could be found across a vast swath of the Mediterranean world and beyond: on the battlefields of the Near East and in towns and villages throughout Europe, where they managed extensive estates that funded their military adventures. The word “Templars”—shorthand for “the Poor Knighthood of the Temple” or, less frequently, “the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and t...

Even in their own lifetimes the Templars were semilegendary figures, featuring in popular stories, artworks, ballads and histories. They were part of the mental landscape of the crusades—a position they still occupy today. The Templars were founde...

From meager beginnings they became as mighty an outfit as existed during the later Middle Ages.

For many people they were not distant elites but local heroes.

Within a few years the order was shut down, wound up and dissolved, its members accused of a list of crimes designed specifically to cause outrage and disgust. The end came so suddenly and so violently that it only added to the Templar legend. Today, more than seven hundred years after their demise, the Templars remain the object of fascination, imitation and obsession.

Featured in numerous works of fiction, television shows and films, the Templars have been presented variously as heroes, martyrs, thugs, bullies, victims, criminals, perverts, heretics, depraved subversives, guardians of the Holy Grail, protectors of Christ’s secret bloodline and time-traveling agents of global conspiracy.

Part I, “Pilgrims,” describes the Templars’ origins in the early twelfth century, when they were founded as an order of Christian religious warriors by a French knight, Hugh of Payns, and (so it was later said) eight of his companions, who were looking for a purpose in Jerusalem in the turbulent aftermath of the First Crusade.

The initial intention of this little band was to form a permanent bodyguard for Western pilgrims following in Christ’s footsteps on the dangerous roads of the Holy Land. They took their lead in part from a group of volunteer medics who had established a hospital in Jerusalem around 1080, known as the Hospital of Saint John or the Hospitallers. Having received royal approval from the Christian king of Jerusalem, and papal blessing from Rome, the Templars quickly institutionalized and expanded. They set up headquarters in the Holy City in the al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount (known to Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif), sent emissaries to Europe to round up men and financial support and sought out famous patrons. Their spiritual guide was Bernard of Clairvaux, who helped write their rule, and early supporters included the leading crusaders of the day, such as the Plantagenet forefather Fulk, Count of Anjou, who with a little help from the Templars became king of Jerusalem.

Within a couple of decades the Templars were no longer nine penniless warriors in search of a cause: they were an ambitious organization with a clear purpose and the means to achieve it. The second part, “Soldiers,” shows how the Templars transformed themselves from a roadside res...

the crusaders attempted to conquer Damascus, one of the greatest cities in the Islamic world.

It also features some of the most extraordinary characters in the whole history of crusading: the pious but unlucky Louis VII of France, the suicidally proud Templar Master Gerard of Ridefort who helped lead the armies of God into an apocalyptic battle at Hattin in 1187, the miserably afflicted leper king of Jerusalem Baldwin IV and the most famous Muslim sultan who ever lived, Saladin, who made it his personal mission to wipe the crusaders off the map, and personally oversaw the execution of hundreds of Templar knights in a single day.

Having been nearly wiped out as a fighting force by Saladin, the Templars were rebuilt in the 1190s with the help of a brilliant and brutal king of England, Richard the Lionheart, whose trust in and reliance on the Templars’ leading officials suggested the direction the order would take during the thirteenth century.

Beyond the Temple Mount, on the other side of Jerusalem’s eastern wall, lay a cemetery, and beyond that Gethsemane, where Christ had prayed with his disciples, and where he was betrayed by Judas on the night of his arrest. Farther on lay the Mount of Olives, where Jesus had spent many weeks teaching, and from where

he had eventually ascended to heaven.

The most holy place of all, and the real object of every Christian pilgrimage, lay within Jerusalem. It was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,

the prison cell where Jesus was kept after his betrayal; the spot where a fragment of the Cross had been found; a pillar against which the Lord had been bound when he was flogged by Roman soldiers and “the place where he was made to put on the purple robe and crowned with the crown of thorns” and Calvary, where Christ was crucified—here Saewulf examined the hole in which the Cross had been held, and a rock split in two, as had been described in the Gospel of Matthew.7 There were chapels dedicated to Mary Magdalen and Saint John the Apostle, to the Virgin Mary and Saint James.

was the great rotunda at the western end of the church, for here lay the Sepulchre itself: the tomb of Christ. This was the cave in which Jesus had been buried following his Crucifixion, before the Resurrection.

Nowhere on earth or in history was more sacred to Christians.

“I was on my way to Jerusalem to pray at the Lord’s tomb.” To stand before the Sepulchre was to venture to the cradle of Christianity,

From the seventh century until the end of the eleventh century, Jerusalem had been in Muslim hands.

Muhammad was brought on his “Night Journey,” when the angel Gabriel transported him from Mecca to the Temple Mount, from which they ascended together into the heavens.

Following a bitter and sustained war that raged between 1096 and 1099, major parts of the Holy Land had been conquered by the armies of what would come to be known as the First Crusade.

That is where the story of the Templars begins.

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.

In the year 1119 things were as bad as they had ever been, thanks to two particularly grave events. The first took place on Holy Saturday, March 29, following the miracle of the Holy Fire at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. In this yearly ritual an oil lamp kept beside the rock of Christ’s tomb would spontaneously burst alight on the eve of Easter; the sacred flame was then used to light the individual candles and lamps of faithful men and women who gathered to witness it.

On the face of it, Christianity was a faith rooted in peace. Jesus had admonished his disciples for resorting to violence even under the most extreme provocation—urging them to sheathe their weapons during his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, and saying “they that take the sword will perish by the sword.”

Nevertheless, in the context of the early months of 1120, this was significant indeed. The men who met in Nablus were not just working out a code of law and morality for the Holy Land. They were seeding in law a revolutionary idea, which would evolve before long into the notion—and fact—that religious men under arms might serve as a central plank in the defense of the crusader states.

They would be responsible, in the words of a charter produced in 1137, for “the defense of Jerusalem and the protection of pilgrims.”27 Part bodyguards, part paupers, a tiny brotherhood devoted only to arms and prayer: these were the men who became the first Knights of the Temple.

It was completed around 10 B.C. and was the center of Jewish life in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus’ ministry. Like Solomon’s original Temple, the Second Temple was destroyed by the wrath of an outside empire: wrecked by fire in A.D. 70 during the suppression of a Jewish revolt against the Roman emperor Titus. Sixty-five years later its ruins were demolished for good and pagan statues were erected on the site.

If these new knights were going to succeed in protecting Jerusalem’s Christian inhabitants, pilgrims and territories from the many enemies who threatened them, they would need to grow: to build up numbers, resources and wealth. What was more, they would need an identity. To improve their fortunes, Hugh of Payns’s men would have to look beyond their immediate surroundings and back to the world that had sent them to the Holy Land in the first place. They would have to appeal directly to the pope.

Bernard (known later as Bernard of Clairvaux, and later still simply as Saint Bernard)

would grow up to be one of the greatest churchmen of his age: a champion of monastic reform, a renowned scholar, a bombastic and tireless letter writer, a brilliant preacher and an early patron and founding father of the Knights Templar.1 His religious awakening would shape the direction of the Western Church in the first half of the twelfth century.

“In this religious order has flourished and is revitalized the order of knighthood,” claimed the rule, praising all those who joined the Templars, willing to offer up their souls to God “for our salvation and the spread of the true faith.” The notion that the Templars represented a new form of knighthood, which did not terrorize the weak, but dedicated itself to destroying evil, was one that Bernard of Clairvaux was developing at the time of the Council of Troyes, and which he would expound upon at length in the years to come.

The Templars’ new code bore the unmistakable stamp of his personal belief that knighthood could and should be reformed, Christianized, stripped of its earthly vanity and transformed into a calling of dignity, duty and godly purpose.

It was recognized that the Templars were killers. “This armed company of knights may kill the enemies of the cross without sinning,” stated the rule, neatly summing up the conclusion of centuries of experimental Christian philosophy, which had concluded that slaying humans who happened to be “unbelieving pagans” and “the enemies of the son of the Virgin Mary” was an act worthy of divine praise and not damnation. Otherwise, the Templars were expected to live in pious self-denial.

Alfonso the Battler, king of Aragón, set up camp outside the city of Fraga and commanded his servants to bring him his relics. He had quite an impressive collection.

Over the course of a long and colorful career the sixty-one-year-old king had acquired fragments of the bodies or belongings of the Virgin Mary, several apostles, a few early Christian martyrs and assorted other saints, all of which were housed in small ivory boxes leafed with gold or silver and studded with precious gems.

His finest relic of all was a piece of timber said to have come from the cross on which Jesus was crucified, which had been carved into a small crucifix and was kept...

But fame alone was not enough. The Templars were, after all, a band of holy knights. They were fighting men: warriors whose reason for being was to protect or to kill. And in 1147 the time for killing was upon them. Half a century after the original Western charge on the Holy Land, the Roman Church was preparing to sponsor another massive and combined military assault on the East. It became known as the Second Crusade, and this time the Templars were at its heart.

the pious French king Louis VII. Like many of his noblemen, Louis saw plenty to admire in the Templars and regularly made gifts to the order. (In 1143 and 1144 he assigned them the proceeds of rents levied on Paris’s money changers.)

King Louis did something quite astonishing: he signed over effective command of the entire mission to the Templar knights, allowing them to reorganize the military structure, take control of training and tactics and—most extraordinary of all—to temporarily enlist into the order every person in the vast royal following, from the meanest pilgrim to the mightiest knight. Suddenly the Templars were no longer a small but competent unit within the larger French army of the Second Crusade: they were effectively its leaders, and every man who followed them was, for a few weeks at least, a brother.

Louis was not the only Western crusader king looking to the Templars for help in the spring of 1148. Conrad III had also made his way to the Holy Land following a chastening experience in and around Constantinople, sailing first to Acre, before traveling south to Jerusalem, where he stayed at the Templars’ formidable headquarters on the site of the converted al-Aqsa Mosque. By the time of Conrad’s visit

In Otto of Freising’s words, the emperor therefore agreed, with the young king, the city’s Latin patriarch “and the Knights of the Temple to lead an army into Syria about the following July to take Damascus.”

What prompted Bernard of Tremelay to give the order that only his own men should storm the breach in Ascalon’s walls? He must surely have expected support from the rest of the army behind them. What is certain is that it was the last significant decision he ever made. Inside a city that had been under siege for six months, the Templars found themselves outnumbered by desperate men. The citizens picked up their weapons and moved in. Others dragged beams of wood toward the hole in the wall and started building barricades. The Templars were trapped. Even if there had been an escape route, their rule forbade them from fleeing the battlefield. Their fate was sealed.

Blocked into a hostile city with no chance of retreat or rescue, the Templars were massacred.

The Templars were not a missionary organization. They may have been God’s soldiers, but their purpose was not to bring enemies into the loving arms of Christ; it was to fight and kill them. They scorned those of their own number

By the middle of the 1150s the Templars had spread far and wide across the Latin Christian states in the Holy Land. They were a relatively small force—perhaps fewer than one thousand knights in the three remaining crusader states, although their numbers were multiplied by several times as many sergeants and auxiliary troops in the form of Syrian light horsemen, or turcopoles, whom the order hired as mercenaries in time of need.