The Templars: The Rise and 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.

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

Bernard of Clairvaux – a sort of godfather to the order – hailed the Templars as ‘a new knighthood’, but a century later another learned French monk dismissed them as ‘a new monstrosity’.

Nevertheless, the sudden dissolution of the order in the early fourteenth century, which involved mass arrests, persecution, torture, show trials, group burnings and the seizure of all the Templars’ assets, shocked the whole of Christendom.

‘Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give the glory, for your steadfast love and faithfulness.’

Beside this was the al-Aqsa mosque, a wide, low, rectangular building also topped with a dome, built in the seventh century and converted to Christian use as a palace for the Christian king of Jerusalem, a wealthy nobleman from Boulogne known as Baldwin I.

Urban promised, alluringly, that going on crusade could be substituted for all penances the church had imposed on an individual for their sins – an entire lifetime’s wrongdoing could theoretically be wiped out in a single journey.

Jerusalem had fallen on 15 July 1099, an astonishing military coup that was accompanied by disgraceful plundering and massacres of the city’s Jewish and Muslim inhabitants, whose beheaded bodies were left lying in piles in the streets, many with their bellies slit open so that the Christian conquerors could retrieve gold coins their victims had swallowed in a bid to hide them from the marauding invaders.12 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.

The Knights of the Temple were founded in Jerusalem in 1119 and officially recognized at some point between 14 January and 13 September of the year 1120.

The notion that churchmen might go into battle armed not only with prayer but with deadly weapons was hardly new. It spoke to a tension that had existed at the heart of Christian thought for a thousand years, as the pacifism suggested by the example of Christ’s life rubbed against a martial mentality embedded in the language of Christian rhetoric and scripture.14 It also followed naturally from the ideas underpinning the whole crusading movement.

‘they are clothed in purple and fine linen, but their souls are in rags. Their bodies glitter with jewels but their lives are foul with vanity’.

Templar knights were to wear habits of all white,† ‘which signifies purity and complete chastity’.26 Black or brown habits were prescribed for the lesser rank of Templar sergeants and squires – brothers who were sworn members of the order but did not carry the full rank or training of the Templar knight.

‘Every good gift and every perfect boon is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom can be no variation, neither shadow that can be cast by turning.’ (James 1:17)

Abu Ishaq al-Ghazzi: ‘The past is gone... You have but the moment in which you exist.’3

In 1183 Reynald took a flotilla on a looting expedition along the eastern coast of the Red Sea and into the Hijaz – the most holy province of Arabia – inciting rumours that he intended to invade Mecca and Medina and steal the body of Muhammad. Saladin never forgave him for this insolence.

On the evening of 4 July King Guy and Reynald of Châtillon were brought before Saladin, who was by then sitting in splendour in the porch of his royal tent. The sultan comforted the parched, defeated and terrified king and gave him a cup of iced julep (rose-water) to quench his thirst. This was both a kindness between rulers and a display of hospitality that in the Arab tradition implied that the king’s life was now safe under Saladin’s protection.

On Tuesday 20 August Richard summarily massacred around 2,600 Muslim prisoners on the plain of Acre, citing Saladin’s failure to make good on his promise to return the True Cross and pay 100,000 dinars of the fee agreed at the city’s surrender.

‘Often the end fails to equal the beginning’ Medieval proverb

The cost of living doubled at a stroke and in Paris on 30 December there was such serious rioting – exacerbated by dreadful weather and flooding – that the king was forced to take refuge behind the gates of the Temple, which he decided was a safer stronghold than the royal palace on the Île de la Cité.

The first victim of Philip’s financial policies was France’s Jewish population. Jews in the west had traditionally been protected by their Christian monarchs, who permitted them to engage in moneylending at interest – which was in theory prohibited to followers of the Roman church.

Through a combination of heavy one-off taxes and loans extorted with menaces, many secular rulers had found the Jews to be a valuable source of revenue. The rise of Italian banking in the late thirteenth century had diminished the importance of Jews to royal finance, just as poisonously anti-Semitic attitudes arose across Europe, making mistreatment of Jewish communities a tool of easy populist policy. Jews were lampooned in public plays, at...

Philip IV believed and encouraged a popular prejudice which held that French Jews would obtain communion wafers and attack them with water, fire and knives, thus re-crucifying Christ,...

Driven by financial opportunism and naked bigotry, kings and nobles had begun to expel Jews from their lands, taking or auctioning their property. Philip Augustus had ordered Jews to leave the royal lands around Paris in 1182. Jews had been thrown out of Brittany in 1240 and Phili...

Edward I, who had his own cripplingly expensive wars to fund, expelled the Jews of Gascony and England by royal edict in 1288 and 1290 respectively, helping himself to a windfall se...

Desperate for a supply of silver with which to stock the royal mints, Philip issued orders on 21 June 1306 for his officials to carry out a co-ordinated round-up one month and one day later. On 22 July around 100,000‡ Jewish men, women and children were arrested and imprisoned while their wealth and property was...

it was carried out, pointedly, in parts of France where another lord technically held sovereignty over the Jewish population. ‘Every Jew must leave my land, taking none of his possessions with him; or let him choose a new God for himself, and we will be One People.’ This was the sentence of exodus later attributed by a Jewish writer to Philip IV as columns of hu...

The expulsion of the Jews, closely supervised by William of Nogaret, had been completed just weeks before James of Molay’s arrival in France, and the mas...

In May 1307 Philip IV was at the papal court in Poitiers, hectoring a reluctant Clement V to give him permission to put Pope Boniface VIII on posthumous trial for a familiar cocktail of ridiculous charges including heresy, sodomy, sorcery and murder.§ Blackening Boniface’s reputation served a dual purpose: it satisfied Philip’s grudge against the pope, and it pounded home the notion of the God-sponsored wondrousness of French kingship.

There has recently echoed in our ears, to our not inconsiderable astonishment and vehement horror, vouched for by many people worthy to be believed, a bitter thing, a lamentable thing, a thing horrible to contemplate, terrible to hear, a heinous crime, an execrable evil, an abominable deed, a hateful disgrace, a completely inhuman thing, indeed remote from all humanity. Having weighed up its seriousness we felt the immensity of our grief increase in us the more bitterly as it became evident that crimes of this nature and importance were so great as to constitute an offence against the divine majesty, a loss for the orthodox faith and for all Christianity, a disgrace for humanity, a pernicious example of evil and a universal scandal.

All the same, the king’s orders called for torture and there is no reason to think they were disobeyed. The methods of the day were not inventive but they were well-tested: starvation, sleep deprivation, solitary imprisonment, relentless questioning, shackling, racking, foot-burning and the strappado, a device that yanked the victim’s tethered arms behind him until he was raised from the ground and his shoulders dislocated. One Templar, Ponsard of Gisy, later described having his arms tied so tightly behind his back that blood flowed from under his nails, and being kept in a pit so small he could only take a single step in any direction – an experience to which he said death by decapitation, burning or scalding with boiling water would be greatly preferable.

The Tour de Nesle scandal brought Philip nothing but misery. It was nearly identical in its methods to the persecution of Pope Boniface, the French Jews and the Templars, all of which bound together the crown’s need for new sources of revenue with the king’s desire to stamp the authority of the crown over new parts of his kingdom and his extraordinary ability to convince himself of the foulest moral deviance in anyone who crossed his path. Even by the standards of his day he was a violent prig, and the best that can be said of his conduct was that the Templars were only one group of victims among many.

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 knight: violent but chaste, tough but pure of heart, merciless but godly. They were the ideal that all knights in Arthurian legend strove towards.

The Holy Grail, although often assumed to have been a real physical object dating to the Last Supper, is in fact the invention of late medieval Arthurian romances following Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval, The Story of the Grail, which was written in the 1180s.