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

by Dan Jones

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.

The Templars did not arrive on a wave of popular demand,

pacifism suggested by the example of Christ’s life rubbed against a martial mentality embedded in the language of Christian rhetoric and scripture.

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.

‘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,

Bernard emphasized the profound difference between homicide – the sin of killing a man – and malicide, the act of killing evil itself, which God would consider a noble deed.

the eastern thrust of the Second Crusade had turned out to be nothing more than a four-day hack through

a booby-trapped fruit-field, a few isolated skirmishes and an impotent retreat.

More than this, the Templars were pragmatists. Their mission was lofty, but the world in which they operated was messy. In the context of the long war they were fighting, Nasr al-Din was not a potential soul saved so much as a wanted man and a valuable prisoner.

‘Christ is our life and death is our reward’.

This is bat shit

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.

Guy took the Templar master’s advice and decided to attack.

Idiot

But having committed to the strategy, Guy would not now change his mind.

Stubborn and stupid. Good combo

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.’