The Templars

by Dan Jones

  Remarkably, the Hospitallers were still not wiped out, and in 1530 Charles II of Spain awarded them a new base on the island of Malta, from where they were ejected by Napoleon in 1798–9. Today the Hospitallers still exist: the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta (or simply the Knights of Malta) is a Catholic order based in Rome, where it is recognized by international law as a sovereign body with its own anthem, flag, passports and army. Other versions of the order survive in countries including Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland. The Hospitaller movement in Britain was reorganized during the nineteenth century; in 1888 the Order of St John of Jerusalem was granted a royal charter by Queen Victoria. Today it is a Christian order, predominantly Protestant and subject to the authority of the crown. Its members are invited to join by merit and are sworn to uphold the charitable works that the order carries out. Its dependent organizations include St John Ambulance, which provides voluntary first aid.

  In 1530 the Dutch scholar Erasmus prepared a Latin tract called the Consultatio de bello Turcis infirendo (‘On the question of waging war on the Turks’). As he wrote, Suleiman the Magnificent’s armies occupied large swathes of the Balkans, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. The previous year they had besieged Vienna, and a new Islamic empire appeared to be heading relentlessly westward.

  This state of affairs presented Erasmus, an enlightened, humanist thinker, with several problems. He despised populist bigotry, warning that:

  When the ignorant masses hear the Turks mentioned, they immediately become incensed and bloodthirsty, labelling them as dogs and enemies of the Christian name... They do not consider whether the war’s cause is just and whether it is expedient to take up arms, which will exasperate the enemy and make him more vicious.29

  He also noted the violence of the early Reformation, which suggested that ‘what Christians do to Christians is crueller’ than many of the worst evils perpetrated by Muslims.

  Yet Erasmus was by no means a pacifist, and he reserved equal scorn for ‘folk [who] consider the right to wage war to be totally forbidden to Christians... this opinion is so absurd it does not need to be rebutted... What I teach is that war should never be undertaken except as a last resort, all else having failed.’ Of course the Ottomans were a danger, he wrote – and he went on to consider at length the philophical justifications for war, the corruption that had bedevilled crusading in centuries gone by and his ultimate belief that the best route to peace between Islam and the west was through converting unbelievers to the path of Jesus Christ.

  In the middle of his essay Erasmus mentioned, almost as an aside, the lost ideal of the Christian warrior, who was sorely missed in such a time of trouble and confusion. This was the ultimate crusader type whose example men of the sixteenth century could only dream of matching. He called them ‘those soldiers whom St Bernard describes, whom he doesn’t know whether to call monks or knights, so great was their moral probity and their warrior courage’.30

  The Templars were long gone. But so long as crusading continued, they would have a place in human imagination.

  * This is the ‘Chinon Parchment’, lost for many years in the Vatican Archive and discovered in 2001 by Dr Barbara Frale. In 2007, 800 facsimiles of the document were produced; some are in private hands and others in public libraries across the world. Processus contra Templarios (Vatican City: 2007).

  Epilogue

  The Holy Grail

  Between 1200 and 1210 the German writer Wolfram von Eschenbach composed a romantic poem called Parzival. Tens of thousands of lines long, it drew on the legends of King Arthur, which had been wildly popular across Europe for decades. These stories delighted aristocratic audiences with tales of love, chivalry, questing, betrayal, magic and combat. Eschenbach’s patron was one Hermann, landgrave of Thuringia, but the readership his work eventually found was enormous and its influence immense. More than eighty medieval manuscripts of the poem still survive.

  In Parzival, the eponymous young hero appears at Arthur’s court and straightaway becomes embroiled in a dispute with a ‘red knight’, whom he kills in a fight. After going away to learn to be more chivalrous Parzival embarks on a search for the Holy Grail: both a literal hunt for a mysterious, life-giving stone and a spiritual journey towards enlightenment in God. The Grail is initially guarded in a magical castle by a character called the Fisher King, who is in constant pain from a wound to his leg, divine punishment for his failure to remain chaste. Parzival meets the Fisher King, then becomes sidetracked by other escapades. Eventually, after fighting a knight who turns out to be his own brother, he learns that he himself has become the new king destined to guard the Grail, and the story eventually draws to a close.

  Much of Parzival, as written by Eschenbach, was unoriginal. Earlier writers such as Geoffrey of Monmouth and Chrétien de Troyes had already established the world he described and provided many of the plots. Eschenbach was essentially updating, expanding the characters’ adventures and giving the tales a flavour which he thought his own readers (and listeners, for many would have heard the poems read aloud in their lords’ halls) would enjoy. One of the ingredients he added was the appearance of a military order known called the Templeise, warriors sworn to chastity who help the Fisher King keep watch in their ‘temple’ over the Holy Grail. These men were not identical to Templars: their symbol was a turtle dove rather than the crusaders’ cross, and they did not appear to have a developed Rule. All the same, the resemblance was striking and the story proved to be enduring. The Templars had been transformed for the first time from a crusader militia into the guardians of the mythical Holy Grail.*

  That writers were beginning to fictionalize the Templars even in their own times was not surprising. By the first decade of the thirteenth century the order was well known. Although it did not have much of a presence in Germany, where Eschenbach lived, anyone with a passing interest in the Holy Land could not fail to have heard of the Templars’ deeds. They had clashed with Saladin, starred in Richard the Lionheart’s crusade, manned dozens of castles in the Holy Land, become bound up in the Reconquista, put down a presence at most of the royal courts in Europe, acquired estates all over Christendom and made powerful enemies. It was not much of a jump to become a literary trope as well.

  In a sense the order had always existed in two spheres, the real and the imaginary. The idea of the Templars was otherworldly right from the start. When Bernard of Clairvaux wrote De Laude, exalting the first generation of knights in the 1130s, he was not composing a factual account of Hugh of Payns and his men. Through his soaring language, the idealized moral character of the knights and the Biblical literalism of the Holy Land he described, Bernard was overlaying the reality of the Templars with his own dreams for an order of men who swung swords like warriors but lived like Cistercians.

  Chroniclers who described the Templars before their fall also had their own agendas. On the Muslim side there were those who admired the Templars’ military skill, and painted the brothers as the least depraved of the accursed Franks. Usama ibn Munqidh portrayed the order as open-minded, worldly and chivalrous, noting that they had allowed him to use one of their churches in Jerusalem for his daily prayers. But less than a decade later, when Saladin ordered the execution of every Templar and Hospitaller captured at Hattin, Imad al-Din described them as ‘two unclean orders, whose practices are useless, who never give up their hostility and who have no use as slaves. The one and the other are the worst of the infidels’. Ibn Munqidh’s aim in his storytelling was to place honour and chivalry above the squalor of war, whereas Imad al-Din sought to portray Saladin as the glorious sultan who had defeated the enemies of Islam. The Templars were merely a vehicle for their contrasting preoccupations.

  Christian writers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were no less divided, and for every Bernard of Clairvaux there was a William of Tyre, whose influential account of the kingdom of Jerusalem under Amalric I and his family i
mposed a clear shape on the Templar story. William thought the Templars had sprung from a legitimate and noble concept but thought they had been corrupted by wealth, and he selected his material accordingly, overemphasizing the poverty of the order’s beginnings to magnify its later missteps, such as the disastrous charge into Ascalon in 1153 or the murder of the Assassin envoy twenty years later.

  The author of the Itinerarium Peregrinorum (who may have been a Templar) depicted an order of martyrs, embellishing stories of heroic defiance such as that of James of Maillé, killed at the Springs of Cresson, who was given a conventional but inspiring literary afterlife as a miracle-worker. The Templar of Tyre (who almost certainly was not a Templar) occupied a middle ground. He has great personal affection for William of Beaujeu, whose death at the fall of Acre was rendered in epic and heroic terms, but thought James of Molay an arrogant fool and recorded his appalling death in Paris in 1307 with disinterest bordering on disdain.

  For better or worse the Templars had been adopted by writers and storytellers long before they were crushed by Philip IV, in depictions ranging from the realistic to the outlandish. A cartoon of Templars on the charge survives in a fresco at the church of Cressac, built by the order in the thirteenth century: here brothers are shown at their most militant and heroic, doing battle with a Muslim army. Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora, written at around the same time, contains a more peaceful sketch of two brothers on horseback beside their famous black-and-white flag. Templars appeared in works such as Raoul de Cambrai; in the multi-authored Roman de la Rose, a dream vision poem completed around 1275 on the theme of courtly love; and in Sone de Nansai, a romance from the late thirteenth century in which a Templar in Ireland acts as a matchmaker between a Norwegian warrior and a lovelorn queen. Only rarely, as in Parzival and Sone, did the Templars play unconventional roles: ordinarily they were typecast warriors of a fairly rigid probity, or else a destination for heroes and villains who could be removed from the action of the plot by joining the order in the Holy Land.

  Even in their own day the Templars were of vastly more interest to writers of fiction than the Hospitallers and Teutonic Order. The Templars’ rivals long outlasted them in both their martial and pastoral roles, but they have left nothing like the same impression in the popular imagination. No one, either in the Middle Ages or today, has seemed very interested in epic poetry (still less Hollywood movies) about the Teutonic Order or the Sword Brothers of Livonia. Only the Templars can really be said to have passed from the realm of reality into mythology and staked a place in the popular imagination.

  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.

  But this is only part of the story, and much of the Templars’ enduring popularity must also be attributed to the manner of their fall. Half a century after James of Molay’s fiery death, the Florentine poet and storyteller Giovanni Boccaccio composed a book known as De Casibus Vivorum Illustrium, a compilation of great men’s lives, selected to illustrate the turning of Fortune’s Wheel. This was a literary commonplace in the Middle Ages, a metaphor suggesting that life moved in perpetual flux, with moments of triumph followed by despair (and vice versa). The subjects of Boccaccio’s potted biographies ranged from Xerxes I and Alexander the Great to King Arthur, and his book was hugely successful, circulating throughout Europe and much more famous in its day than the Decameron.

  De Casibus was so successful that it was copied, expanded and translated by the French writer Laurence of Premierfait and the Englishman John Lydgate, who embellished and added further edifying examples to the text. A beautiful illuminated French edition, presented in 1409 to the duke of Berry, contains a vivid (if historically questionable) image of James of Molay being burned at the stake along with three colleagues, in front of a satisfied Philip IV.1 It also contains a detailed account of James’ life. In this telling, his death and the order’s downfall were the result of divine vengeance: the order’s wealth and status grew in inverse proportion to its religiosity until its members received the ultimate punishment for their sins. That was quite a glossing of the story, but it had poetic shape and a healthy dose of natural justice. It was an appealingly simple narrative, in which the Templars’ collective fate pivoted on the same moral flaws that William of Tyre had perceived in them: greed and pride.

  In the popular consciousness the Templar story has tended towards this trajectory ever since. From Boccaccio to Sir Walter Scott, who created the thuggish, lascivious and power-crazed Templar villain Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert in his 1820 novel Ivanhoe, to Ridley Scott, who depicted Gerard of Ridefort as a brutalized villain in his 2005 film Kingdom of Heaven, generations of writers have found rich material in the gap between the Templar ideal and real life. In the recent ‘Assassin’s Creed’ video game and movie franchise the Templars are also debased, crude enemies of a more elegant and noble time-travelling organization of Assassins. The spirit of the one-eyed Walter of Mesnil lives on.

  Over the past 200 years the Templars have also provided rich material for cranks, conspiracy theorists and fantasists. There is a thriving industry in what-if history about the Templars, much of it resting on the false supposition that an order so wealthy and powerful could not simply have been rolled up and dissolved. Alternative histories have been concocted suggesting an outlandish post-history. Did a small group of Templars escape persecution in France? Could they have sailed from La Rochelle with a stash of treasure? If so, did that include the Turin Shroud or the Ark of the Covenant? Did the Templars set themselves up as a secret organization elsewhere? Are they still out there, running the world from the shadows?

  One needs no more than an internet connection and an imagination to find the theories that have been piled onto this platform of speculation, including the notion that the Templars were the keepers of a real-life Holy Grail – be that an actual cup or a metaphor for some ancient truth – and that they had inherited their role of guardians of the truth from the Cathars (the collective name for heretics in southern France persecuted to obliteration in the early thirteenth century) and that this was what lay behind their downfall.

  The popular pseudohistory The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail, first published in 1982, suggested and popularized the idea that the Templars were linked to a corporation known as the Priory of Sion, established to guard a secret bloodline of kings descended from Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. Dan Brown’s bestselling The Da Vinci Code, published in 2003 and subsequently made into a successful movie, presented broadly similar ideas faux-seriously, adding greatly to the novel’s success but leaving readers to work out for themselves whether or not the author’s hypotheses had some basis in fact (many concluded that they did). In Umberto Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum, published in 1988 to a similarly misplaced credulity, three writers concoct a method for knitting together all of world history in one giant conspiracy, which they call The Plan. This features secret cells of Templars waiting to be revenged for their destruction by the king of France. Although archly postmodern, obviously satirical and directly mocking of those who place the Templars at the heart of a grand scheme for world domination, Eco’s novel has added to the popular mystique about the order. What if just 10 per cent of it were true?

  Sadly, none of it is. Although fragments of supposed evidence are often stitched together with convenient lacunae in the historical record to provide ‘proof’ for Templar-related fake history, it must be stressed that almost every plank of Templar-survival theory is borrowed from fiction or simply made up. This sort of thing is unique to the history of the military orders, although it is very common in
the history of the world. 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 jewellery 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.

  More interesting than conspiracy theory is the phenomenon of Templar revivalism, which began in earnest with the emergence of Freemasonry in England and France. As secret societies devoted to mutual assistance, characterized by their use of covert symbols, rituals and handshakes, masonic lodges in the early eighteenth century self-consciously sought to emphasize their ancient roots. Prominent masons in Scotland, France and Germany deliberately linked the movement with the history of the Templars, claiming a connection with the twelfth-century crusaders who lived in the ‘Temple of Solomon’ and implying a continuum of nobility, wisdom and religious inside knowledge that was alluring even if bogus.