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

by Dan Jones

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 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,

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.

Three horses were permitted to each knight, along with one squire whom “the b...

Bernard emphasized the profound difference between homicide—the sin of killing a man—and malecide—the act of killing evil itself, which God would consider a noble deed. Armed with this ingenious (if somewhat shaky) theological distinction, the Knights of the Temple could take on the very highest duty: more than simply being bodyguards for pilgrims, they were the defenders of the Holy Land itself.

Once again the Templars rode alongside the king, although this time the mood must have been strained, as the previous year Amalric had hanged twelve of the order’s brothers in a fit of rage.

One of the assets Philip brought to the order was a fortified desert cave.

Egypt had fallen into Nur al-Din’s hands. Its annexation by Sunni Syria was under way and the days of the Fatimid caliphs, who had sat in their exotic palaces in Cairo for more than two hundred and fifty years, were about to draw abruptly to an end.

The cost of this was borne by a windfall fund paid to the Church by Henry II as penance for his role in the murder of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral in December 1170. The funds were intended to pay for a new crusade, and held for safekeeping by the Templars, who chose to release them in this hour of emergency.

Hattin was a humiliating military defeat, a spiritual disaster and the beginning of the end for the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem.

Both King Richard and King Philip had been ill with a disease—probably scurvy—that made their hair and nails fall out, but Richard had remained defiant, and insisted on being carried out from his tent each day on a stretcher to shoot crossbow bolts at defenders patrolling the walls.

By night they lay in the dark listening to the crusaders chant pilgrim prayers into the blackness and enduring swarms of giant tarantulas that crawled into the camp and bit anyone not alert enough to scare them away.

Over Easter 1192 a steady stream of reports began to arrive from home, telling him that his kingdom was under threat from Philip Augustus, who was conspiring with Richard’s devious younger brother, John.

Indeed, Saint Francis’s appearance at Damietta in 1219 was a reminder of just how far the brothers fighting there had come from the way of life their founders had envisaged. It was exactly a century since Hugh of Payns had established the Order of the Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. Those one hundred years had seen the Templars transformed from indigent shepherds of the pilgrim roads, dependent on the charity of fellow pilgrims for their food and clothes, into a borderless, self-sustaining paramilitary group funded by large-scale estate management.

whom he suspected of being incarnations of Satan.