Charlie Fenton’s Reviews > The Templars: The Rise and Fall of God's Holy Warriors > Status Update

‘By 2 July Clement V had seen enough to convince him either that the Templars were guilty, or (more likely) that he could accede to the French demands without seeming simply to be rolling over... On 12 August he issued a bull known as Faciens misericordiam (‘Granting forgiveness’) setting up two parallel investigations’

‘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.’

‘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’