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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Dan Jones
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June 1 - June 22, 2018
“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. But
The Templars were founded in 1119 on the principles of chastity, obedience and poverty—the last of which was memorialized in the master’s official seal, showing two armed brothers sharing a single horse.
The order helped finance wars, loaned money to pay kings’ ransoms, subcontracted the financial management of royal governments, collected taxes, built castles, ran cities, raised armies, interfered in trade disputes, engaged in private wars against other military orders, carried out political assassinations and even helped make men kings.
not distant elites but local heroes. The
guardians of the Holy Grail, protectors of Christ’s secret bloodline
His arrest of every Templar in France on Friday, October 13, was the start of an entirely self-interested move to wind up the order and seize its assets.
Jerusalem was understood to be a place where the heavenly was made manifest, and the power of prayer magnified by the presence of relics and holy sites. It was not just seen, but felt: a visitor could personally experience the sacred details of biblical stories, from the deeds of the Old Testament kings to Christ’s life and Passion.
Greek Orthodox priests in Jerusalem were tortured until they revealed the location of some of their finest relics, including a fragment of wood from the True Cross on which Christ had died, embedded in a beautiful gold, crucifix-shaped reliquary.
a sign of God’s displeasure at divisions in the Muslim world and a call to all the faithful to rise in arms to fight back against the invaders.
Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, called for a united effort from across the Islamic world—Turks and Arabs, Sunni and Shi’a—to pull together and wage jihad, or holy war, to achieve “the taking back of what [the Franks] took from the country of the Muslims [and] the displaying of the religion of Islam in them.”
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 1120.1
trees. From time to time strange eclipses stained the moon and the sky bloodred.
Field of Blood.*
Yet out of it came the germ of an idea that would lie at the heart of Templar ideology.
In the words of Walter the Chancellor, “the clergy . . . acted the part of military service wisely and vigorously, inside and outside, and with God’s strength kept the city intact from the enemy.”13 It was a taste of what lay ahead.
The notion that churchmen might go into battle armed not only with prayer but with deadly weapons was hardly new.
“they that take the sword will perish by the sword.”
The idea of Christian existence as an act of cosmic, spiritual battle—a fight against the devil—dominated the worldview of many of the great Christian thinkers of the classical world, such as Saint Ambrose and Saint Augustine of Hippo.
“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.
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.
To sweeten the deal, William had brought with him some truly magnificent gifts, including a fragment of the True Cross and a decorated sword, which were to be presented to the cathedral in Le Mans, at the heart of Fulk’s territories.12
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.
paternoster).
by reducing holy duties to the most mundane repetition of the best-known prayer in Christendom, the Templars opened their pool of potential recruits to dedicated and talented men of any rank, and not just the rich and well schooled.
“We prohibit pointed shoes and shoelaces and forbid any brother to wear them . . . for it is manifest and well known that these abominable things belong to pagans.”
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.
Banned, too, was the company of women, which the rule scorned as “a dangerous thing, for by it the old devil has led man from the straight path to paradise . . . the flower of chastity is always [to be] maintained among you. . . . For this reason none of you may presume to kiss a woman, be it widow, young girl, mother, sister, aunt or any other. . . . The Knighthood of Christ should avoid at all costs the embraces of women, by which men have perished many times.” Although married men were permitted to join the order, they were not allowed to wear the white cloak and wives were not supposed to
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“If possible the house where they sleep and take lodging should be not without light at night, so that shadowy enemies may not lead them into wickedness, which God forbids them.”
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.
Templars were designated “defenders of the Catholic Church and attackers of the enemies of Christ,”
exempted from paying tithes—the taxes routinely collected by the Church from its flock—while being permitted to take tithes from those who lived on land they owned.
By the late 1140s, the Templars were famous all over the Christian world.
there. In three decades they had become almost synonymous with the kingdom of God that had been carved out of the Islamic Near East.
This was to be both their highest honor and their greatest curse.
But it had come at a high cost: the final battle had been fought with the butchered bodies of the forty dead Knights of the Temple dangling from the ropes hoisted high up on the city walls.
They defended the idea of Christendom and the honor of Christ, but how they did so was technically a matter for their own instinct and judgment.
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.
Other writers agreed that Nasr al-Din was taken by a mob of citizens and ripped apart before his broken corpse was hung from a cross on the huge, round stone towers of Cairo’s Zuwayla Gate. “The people literally tore him to pieces bit by bit with their teeth,” wrote William of Tyre.11 Whatever his fate, few would have been sorry to see him go.
a direct assault on Muslim forces.
Not to us, Lord, not to us, But to your name be the glory, Because of your love and faithfulness.
When Henry arranged a complex marriage deal between one of his infant daughters and the son of the French king Louis VII, three Templar knights had taken delivery of the castles forming part of the child bride’s dowry.
