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

by Dan Jones

The word “Templars”—shorthand for “the Poor Knighthood of the Temple” or, less frequently, “the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Jerusalem”—advertised their origins on the Temple Mount in Christianity’s holiest city.

To the followers of Islam, it was the third-holiest city in the world, after Mecca and Medina. Muslims recognized it as the location of al-Masjid al-Aqsa (the Furthest Mosque), the place where, according to the Qur’an, the Prophet 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.

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.”15 But during the decades immediately following his death, Saint Paul had exhorted the Ephesians to arm themselves with “the breastplate of righteousness,” “the helmet of salvation” and “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.”16 The warfare Paul advocated was spiritual rather than physical, but the terms of Christian ideology drew directly from the language of war.

the Assassins did not generally bother to target the order, as Templars were by their nature replaceable, and individual brothers mattered far less than the order as a whole.

peacemongers like Amio were in short supply and even shorter demand.

Among Map’s other grumbles was his objection to the inherent contradiction of the new knighthood, in which men “take the sword to protect Christendom, which Peter was forbidden to take to defend Christ.” At root, he simply loathed the idea that the Holy City of Jerusalem was defended by homicidal knights. “There Peter was taught to ensue peace by patience: who taught these [Templars] to overcome force by violence I know not.”10

The crusades in which the Templars had played a leading role did not end with the order’s disappearance. The idea of sanctified war was deeply ingrained in the minds of Europe’s faithful, and even if it had become practically impossible to raise the sorts of armies that had marched on Jerusalem, Damascus and Damietta between 1096 and 1250, the dream of reconquering the Holy Land lived on.