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

by Dan Jones

Both Baldwin’s funeral and Amalric’s coronation took place at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

He would cause the Franks in general, and the Templars in particular, more trouble than they had experienced in seven decades of occupation. To his admirers he was “one of the great heroes, mighty in spirit, strong in courage and of great firmness, terrified of nothing.”18 To those who suffered the worst of his wrath he was “the rod of [the Lord’s] fury,” sent “to rage and exterminate the obstinate people.”19 His name was Saladin.

the learned abbot Isaac of l’Etoile, a Cistercian monk from Poitou, saw the Templars as a creeping perversion of the Cistercian ideal. Saint Bernard had praised the Templars as “a new knighthood.” Isaac begged to differ. “A new monstrosity” was his verdict.12 Fortunately, this view was not

Templar knights were to be found among the inner circle of every pope after the accession of Alexander III in 1159, serving the Holy Father in his private rooms as chamberlain. Alexander III also employed a pair of Templars named Bernardo and Francone to look after his financial affairs: testament to the business know-how for which the order was becoming famous.13

Pope Innocent III. Born Lotario dei Conte di Segni, Innocent assumed the papacy on January 8, 1198, before his fortieth birthday, and ruled over the Church with all the force of his outsized personality until his death in 1216. He was a great Church reformer, the scourge of those monarchs (like King John of England) who did not fully respect the authority of the Holy See, and a wholehearted advocate of the Church’s militant mission in the East. Encouragingly for the Christians, Saladin died at dawn on March 3, 1193, following a “bilious fever” that lasted for around a fortnight.

By the time Innocent died in 1216 the Templars were stronger, richer and better connected than at any time in their history.

On February 18, 1229, al-Kamil formally agreed to give up the Holy City and the Holy Sepulchre to Christian governance in exchange for a ten-year truce. Both Christians and Muslims were to be allowed access to the city, and the Christians were to be recognized as the legitimate rulers of Bethlehem, Nazareth, Sidon, Jaffa and Acre.

The most important place in Jerusalem to Christians was the Holy Sepulchre, for in that magnificent church lay the tomb of Christ, covered with a thick slab of marble and venerated by every pilgrim who came to the Holy Land.

Certainly, regaining Jerusalem was an important as a matter of pride; and of course, like any other major city in the eastern Mediterranean, it had commercial benefits for Christian traders. The Sepulchre, though, mattered most. Yet for the Templars there was another very significant site: the al-Aqsa Mosque, which they called the Temple of Solomon, where their order had been created, and where it had been housed between 1119 and 1187. The Temple was their home, from which they had been exiled. Its return was a matter of profound and defining importance to their dignity as an order, but that had not factored into Frederick’s negotiation.

As the middle of the thirteenth century approached, then, the Templars had reached extraordinary maturity as an organization.

In mid-December 1244 Louis IX lay on his deathbed. Pale and thin, the thirty-year-old king of France was literally wasting away. He had dysentery, a wretched and painful ailment that could grip even the strongest soldiers by the gut and drag them rapidly to the grave. Louis had been suffering on and off for two years, ever since contracting the disease during

King Louis opened his eyes, then his mouth, and asked them to bring him a crusader’s cross.

Louis also owned a fragment of the True Cross, a piece of the holy sponge from which Jesus drank vinegar during his Crucifixion and the iron head of the lance that a Roman soldier had plunged into Christ’s side. But architecture, splendor and relic accumulation alone was not the measure of a great Christian monarch. Louis’s recovery was a personal miracle,

and it convinced him that his mission as an adult king was to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather, Philip II Augustus, and great-grandfather, Louis VII.

He would leave France to lead a crusade to...

Ever since the earliest years of the thirteenth century, the whole world had trembled at the name of the Mongols. Their story began when an orphaned warlord by the name of Temüjin rallied together the nomadic tribes of the northeast Asian steppe and began to strike out at the ruling dynasties all around him. After a series of initial successes Temüjin took the name Genghis Khan (sometimes rendered as Chinggis Khan, loosely meaning Great Ruler). He and his descendants built the largest land empire in history, stretching from the East China Sea to Poland, uniting millions of people under a rule that was in many ways enlightened and tolerant, but was founded on the principles of total warfare. After Genghis’s death, his sons and grandsons continued his conquests.

For nearly two years at the start of the fourteenth century, the Templars reoccupied part of the Holy Land. It was a sliver—but for a time it was enough to suggest that more was possible. Under James of Molay they had been slowly expanding their naval capability, ordering new galleys from Venice in preparation for a war that would have to be fought as much at sea as on dusty land.

Then, in 1306 James was summoned by a new pope. At first this seemed promising. It turned out to be anything but. In fact, this was the moment when darkness began to fall on the Templars.

benefit to the Holy Land it is desirable and

The dynasty claimed ultimate descent from Charlemagne. Their long history and recent sharp expansion had bred in successive generations of kings a pronounced sacerdotal self-importance.

The wide-scale inquiry set up by the pope now swung slowly into motion. Across France and throughout the Catholic world, bishops began to establish commissions to examine the conduct of the Templars in their dioceses, with the aim of inducing confessions, which could then be followed by absolutions and penance.

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.

The crusades in which the Templars had played a leading role did not end with the order’s disappearance.

ETWEEN 1200 AND 1210 the German writer Wolfram von Eschenbach composed a romantic poem called Parzival. Tens of thousands of lines long, it drew on the legends of King Arthur, which had been wildly popular across Europe for decades.

The Templars had been transformed for the first time from a crusader militia into the guardians of the mythical Holy Grail.

That writers were beginning to fictionalize the Templars even in their own times was not surprising. By the first decade of the thirteenth century the order was well known.

To be fair, the Templars were different from the other major international military orders. Uniquely, from the beginning they were knights who took up a religious calling, rather than servants of a hospital that added a paramilitary wing. This gave them a certain quality that was useful for medieval romance: they corresponded exactly to the archetype of the truly chivalrous men—violent but chaste, tough but pure of heart, merciless but godly. They were the ideal that all knights in Arthurian legend strove toward.

The popular pseudohistory Holy Blood, Holy Grail, first published in 1983, suggested and popularized the idea that the Templars were linked to a corporation known as the Priory of Sion, established to guard a secret bloodline of kings descended from Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. Dan Brown’s bestselling The Da Vinci Code, published in 2003 and subsequently made into a successful movie, presented broadly similar ideas faux-seriously, adding greatly to the novel’s success but leaving readers to work out for themselves whether or not the author’s hypotheses had some basis in fact.

One of the supposed Templar survivalist bolt-holes, Oak Island in Nova Scotia, has been put forward

century self-consciously sought to emphasize their ancient roots. Prominent masons in Scotland, France and Germany deliberately linked the movement with the history of the Templars, claiming a connection with the twelfth-century crusaders who lived in the “Temple of Solomon” and implying a continuum of nobility, wisdom and religious inside knowledge that was alluring even if bogus.

Today many people are still members of masonic societies, while others belong to legitimate orders of nobility including the various incarnations of the Hospitallers, including the Knights of Malta, whose indirect relation to the historical Templars has already been described. Others claim to be members of the revived Order of the Temple itself.