Charlie Fenton > Recent Status Updates

‘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 heresy.’

‘Once again the Templars had been wrenched out of a stronghold on the promise of safe passage and betrayed. Until a serious expedition could be mounted it would be desperately difficult for the order to extend much beyond Cyprus. James of Molay’s tenure as master had been a struggle from the beginning - and despite regular talk of a new crusade it showed little sign of getting any better.’

‘Losing Safad shook the Templars to their core. They still manned many castles in the steadily eroding crusader states, but only a very few were equal to Safad, which Baybars had managed to reduce in less than two months. It was hard to be optimistic. The Hospitallers sent a craven embassy to Baybars begging him to leave alone a pair of their most valuable castles, Margat and Crac des Chevaliers’

‘During the later decades of the thirteenth century the Templars found they had two deadly enemies ranger against them, both seeking their destruction. The first was the Mamluks, who rose from the banks of the Nile to extend their power across Muslim lands of the Levant... The second was St Louis’ grandson, Philip IV, king of France.’

‘The Order of the Temple was in reality far more than a fighting force: it was an international business network as useful to pilgrims seeking a safe passage to Jerusalem as it was to kings, queens and noble looking for a comprehensive financial service to run their accounts, keep an eye on their valuables and raise loans when they got into trouble.’

‘The Templars and Hospitallers saw things otherwise. Allied with the acerbic and forceful patriarch of Jerusalem, Gerold of Lausanne, they refused to march with the rest of Frederick’s army, arguing that it would be a disgrace for them to associate with a man who had been excommunicated from the church... Frederick was not a man accustomed to being thwarted.’

‘It was exactly a century since Hugh of Payns had established the Order of the Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. During those 100 years the Templars had 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.’

‘In 1188, having heard the news from Hattin, Henry tasked the Templars with helping to collect a levy known as the Saladin Tithe: a tax to raise emergency funds for a new crusade. With their intimate ties to the cause and their infrastructure all over England, the Templars were perfectly placed to go about collecting this money, and Henry trusted them to do it.’

‘According to a Christian chronicle, the Templars and Hospitallers counselled Richard in the strongest terms against attempting to storm Jerusalem, arguing that he lacked the numbers required to besiege the city while also fighting a relieving force, and that even if they succeeded, they would find themselves helpless to hold what they had won.’

‘Sixth-eight years had passed since Hugh of Payns and his fellow knights had gathered around the Holy Sepulchre to imagine into existence a new order that would defend the Holy City and protect its Christian pilgrims. It had taken Saladin less than fifteen weeks to massacre its members, imprison their master, seize their castles, overrun the holy sites they had sworn to protect’

‘truth was that of the 140 knights who rode at the Saracens, some of them Templars and others merely carried along in the madness, only a handful escaped alive. Gerard of Ridefort, who ordered the charge, was badly wounded in the fighting but eventually left the battlefield, accompanied by three of his companions. Fifty to sixty knights died in a shower of their own gore; the rest were taken away to imprisonment’

‘The battle of Mont Gisard was the first major armed showdown between Saladin and a Christian army, and its timing was no accident. The kingdom of Jerusalem had been weakened in 1174 by the sudden death of King Amalric from the dysentery he contracted during a siege at Banyas... his successor: his son Baldwin was thirteen years old and suffering from leprosy’

‘forced back from defending their patched-up wall and agreed to hand over their city to Christian rule and sue for peace. On Saturday 22 August Baldwin III’s standard was raised over the highest tower in the city. 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.’

‘The Templars had invested a great deal in the Second Crusade. They har marched Louis VII through Asia Minor and propped up his crusade with enormous loans. They had taken Conrad III in and provided him with protection and their considered military advice. Together with the master of the Hospitallers, Robert of Craon had backed the plan to attack Damascus rather than Edessa.’

‘The Templars were guaranteed the right to be ruled by a master drawn from their own number and were exempted from playing 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. This income was to be reserved exclusively for their own use.‘

‘drafted in Latin a 68-point code of Templar conduct, later known as The Primitive (or Latin) Rule. This detailed the process by which knights of the order were to be selected and received, how they were to pray and which feast days they were to observe, what they should wear, eat and drink, where they should sleep, how they were to behave in public, and with whom they could - and could not - socialise.’

‘he intended to send back two of his men, so that they might ‘obtain approval of their order from the Pope’. He hoper the pontiff would help them raise money and support, so that the Templars could better pursue the fight against ‘the enemies of the faith’. Baldwin urged Bernard to throw his weight behind this project by encouraging secular rulers across Europe to support the Templars’

‘From here it was a relatively small step to argue that if fighting men could become holy, then it was possible to imagine that holy men could fight. Indeed, given the strain on resources in the crusader states in the 1120s, it was a matter of necessity to concede that a cleric could from time to time wield weapons without reproach - as Patriarch Bernard had done at Antioch.’

‘The Knights of the Temple were founded in Jerusalem in 1119 and officially recognised at some point between 14 January and 13 September of the year 1120. The truth was that barely anyone noticed. The Templars did not arrive on a wave of popular demand, nor was their creation the product of some far-sighted planning between the nascent crusader states and religious authorities in western Christendom.’

‘Pilgrimage was a centrally important part of Christian life in the early twelfth century, and had been for nearly a thousand years. People travelled incredible distances to visit saints’ shrines and the sites of famous Christian deeds. They did it for the good of their souls: sometimes to seek divine relief from illness, sometimes as penance to atone for their sins.‘

‘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.’

‘This is a book about a seemingly endless war in Palestine, Syria and Egypt, where factions of Sunni and Shi’a Muslims clashed with militant Christian invaders from the west; about a ‘globalised’, tax-exempt organisation that grew so rich that it became more powerful than some governments; about the relationship between international finance and geopolitics; about the power of propaganda and mythmaking’

‘Hers had been a troubled existence, torn between Scotland and England, her husbands, son and her brother. Margaret’s third husband Lord Methven married his mistress Janet Stewart, not long after the queen’s death and they had four children before his demise in 1552. The abbey she was laid to rest in, also the burial place of James I, was ransacked during the Scottish Protestant Revolution of 1559‘

‘Margaret’s regency was relatively peaceful but her personal life was falling apart. In January 1537 she found out that her husband Henry Stewart, Lord Methven, had been stealing the rents from her properties and not only that but he had housed his mistress Janet Stewart, daughter of John Stewart, 2nd Earl of Atholl and Lady Janet Campbell, in one of her properties and was raising a young family.’

‘She would not find out until December that in fact in February her divorce had been granted and for all these months she had been a free woman. And her brother Henry for all his posturing and demands was indeed seeking a divorce himself. Margaret wasted no time in preparing for her next marriage and she wed her lover Henry Stewart, son of Lord Avondale who had died at Flodden, in March 1528’

‘At Christmas, Margaret moved to Tantallon, leaving the Laird of Jedworth in charge of Newark. It was whilst here that she finally had confirmation of her suspicions about her husband. Not only was he taking her rents from her land and properties at Methven and Ettrick Forest but he had forcefully taken the house at Newark and was openly living with his mistress and their child - at Margaret’s expense.’