Anyone who has read The Da Vinci Code will have an idea of who the Knights Templar were, albeit perhaps not an accurate one. Their reputation has been that of a shadowy sect lurking on the fringes of early medieval Christianity, combining occult dealings with near-limitless power and influence. In this thrillingly lucid account, Dan Jones demystifies the Templars in a story spanning hundreds of years and countless rulers, knights and archbishops, a seemingly disproportionate number of whom ended up beheaded.
The Templar sect originally lived in Jerusalem, leading lives “with humble attire and spare diet”. They were a Catholic military order dedicated to the promotion of Christian aims and values, by aggressively direct means. By the 1140s, three decades after their foundation, they were famous all over the Christian world, both for their bravery in battle and for the vast wealth their order had amassed.
Their name came from the original place of their order’s dwelling, a palace situated next to the Temple of the Lord in the city. Jones describes how “the kingdom of Jerusalem was a place where rapture and terror were to be experienced side by side, often over the course of the same day”.
It was in this ever-mutable place that the battle between the Christian and Muslim faiths would be fought throughout the 12th and 13th centuries, most notably between the great Saracen leader Saladin and the Templar-affiliated English king Richard I, “the Lionheart”. We learn that the defence of Jerusalem against Saladin in June 1187 was financed by a windfall fund paid to the church by Henry II as a penance because of his culpability in the murder of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral 17 years before.
If Jones has a central theme, it is that of the conflict between faith and progress, both in terms of the Christian-Islam wars that dominate the book, but also in the Templars’ own beliefs. Their strict values not only meant that all who belonged to the order had to swear a vow of celibacy, but retreat from the battlefield was forbidden under all circumstances. In one case, some inadvertent deserters served penance for a year and a day, during which they had to eat like dogs.
By the early 14th century, the Templars’ unbending values and refusal to compromise had made them an anachronism in an era that came to rely increasingly on diplomacy in place of military might and in the 1310s they were “imprisoned, tortured, killed, ejected from their homes and humiliated” in a great purge courtesy of Philip IV of France (who was heavily in debt to the order).
Anyone who has read Jones’s earlier medieval chronicles, The Plantagenets and The Hollow Crown, will know what to expect here: fast-paced narrative history depicted with irresistible verve, bloody battle scenes and moments of laugh-out-loud wit. There are contemporary parallels, too, with the Templars eventually being laid low by the medieval equivalent of a kind of “fake news”: anti-Templar propaganda spread by the church. This is another triumphant tale from a historian who writes as addictively as any page-turning novelist.
• The Templars: The Rise and Spectacular Fall of God’s Holy Warriors by Dan Jones is published by Head of Zeus (£25). To order a copy for £21.25, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
