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

by Dan Jones

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.

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.

The Templars were founded in 1119 on the principles of chastity, obedience and poverty—the

Not to us, O lord, not to us, but to your name give glory, for the sake of your steadfast love and your faithfulness!

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

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.

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

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.

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.

The Christian custom in battle, he explained, was that plunder belonged to the plunderer.

None of this, however, could detract from the general sense that Richard the Lionheart had saved the Franks of Outremer. He had arrived in the Holy Land as a new king with everything to prove. He left as a living legend: hated by some, revered by others, feared by all. His name would quickly become synonymous with the Christians’ desire to win back Jerusalem at any cost. Fifty years after his death, Muslim mothers were said to quiet their unruly children by saying, “Hush! Or I will send king Richard of England to you.”

For all their scandalized verbiage, the letters authorizing the arrests were mostly hot air and familiar assertions of Philip’s personal righteousness.

So although the king gave notice of the Crown’s intention to try every Templar in France, announcing the engagement of his confessor William of Paris, “inquisitor of heretical depravity,” to lead the effort and promising to freeze Templar assets until the truth was determined, a close reading of the arrest warrant revealed nothing beyond a hysterically exaggerated account of the Templars’ idiosyncratic induction ceremony, puffed up with insults and titillating hearsay.

Most Templars in France were not warriors. They were agricultural managers, shepherds and pig farmers, carpenters or wine merchants.2 Only a tiny minority were knights, since by the early fourteenth century some preceptories were staffed entirely by sergeants: this was true in areas of Champagne, Picardy, Auvergne, Poitou and Limousin.3 Forty percent of those questioned were over fifty years old. A third were veterans of the order, having served in this apparent hotbed of sodomy and irreligion for more than twenty years without complaint.4 All the same, the king’s orders called for torture and there is no reason to think they were disobeyed.

The only sodomy he knew of in the order’s entire history, he said, was that of the three brothers in the East who had been caught and sentenced to perpetual imprisonment in Château Pèlerin: a case so unusual and abhorrent it had been preserved in the rule as an example of extreme waywardness.

Another French chronicler recorded in verse the last minutes of the two Templars, and described a calm scene in which James of Molay stripped to his underclothes without shivering or showing any signs of being afraid. As he was tied to the stake he asked to be allowed a prayer. He added: “God knows who is in the wrong and has sinned. Soon misfortune will come to those who have wrongly condemned us: God will avenge our death.” Then he said he was ready to die.

When Dante Alighieri completed the Divine Comedy in 1320, his readers found Clement in hell, being roasted feetfirst upside down. Dante described Clement as a “lawless shepherd from the west” who had bought his position and been dealt with “softly” by the king of France.

One of the supposed Templar survivalist bolt-holes, Oak Island in Nova Scotia, has been put forward as a possible location for the order’s lost treasure. It has also been linked with evidence proving the true authorship of Shakespeare manuscripts, the location of Marie Antoinette’s jewelry and the hidden archives of a secret society of Rosicrucians led by Sir Francis Bacon. Needless to say, no Templar treasure has yet been discovered.

On April 2, 2014, the New York Times reported the death of a Mexican drug lord, Enrique Plancarte, who had been hiding out in a rented house in the state of Querétaro.2 Plancarte was shot dead by marines as he walked down the street. His death was announced in Mexico and the United States with some satisfaction, for Plancarte was one of the highest-ranking members of a notorious cartel called Los Caballeros Templarios: The Knights Templar.