Disposable Lit Reviews

St. Martin’s Press, 2000
350 pp.
ISBN 0-312-26658-8

Buy it from Amazon.com
or
Find it used at
eBay or Half.com

Few historical subjects have become so obscured by rumor, fable, demonization and idealization as the Knights Templar. The idea of warrior-monks is a romantically attractive one, and the fact that the Order of the Knights of the Temple of Solomon was first whole-heartedly supported by the Catholic Church, and then abruptly castigated and dissolved with accusations of heresy and sodomy has only provided even more fertile ground for folklore. To some, they are still symbols of blasphemous dark arts within a Christian framework (see their fanciful use in Amando de Ossorio’s [link]Tombs of the Blind Dead); to others, notably Masonic scholars and apologists of a couple of centuries past, they were mystically initiated champions, whose rites and hidden ceremonies were then transmitted to the Freemasons.

Behind all of these ideological co-options of the Templars, though, is an actual history, and that’s what Piers Paul Read traces here: the documentable history of the Order through its verifiable term of existence, from its original formation in 1119 with the express purpose of protecting Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land, to its papal dissolution in 1314.

Having written a book for the intelligent layman, Read goes further than the Templar history proper in giving background information; the first few chapters document the rise of the three main religious traditions with connections to Jerusalem — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — to the point where the three come into direct conflict over the city that each of them revers as holy. And from there, the book follows the history of the Crusades as a whole, with particular (but by no means exclusive) attention paid to the Templars; the Crusades were, after all, the context in which the knightly orders had meaning.

Read is rigorous in documenting the establishment of the various governments of Outremer (the Western name for the European kingdoms set up in the Middle East). If there is confusion to be found here, it’s not Read’s fault, but simply a part of the history. Political machinations inside and out of the Church were the order of the day, and practically every noteworthy participant was related to or involved with enough other notables that a full flowchart would require at least three dimensions. (Add to that the fact that every other person was named “Hugh,” “Bernard” or “Phillip,” and every other Pope took the name “Clement.”)

Although intriguing as most history can be (at least to those of us who like that kind of thing), a sober look at Templar history is somewhat deflating. Despite their almost superheroic reputation, documents of the time paint the members of leaders of the Order as being terribly ordinary and, as Read even goes to so far as to indicate, “boring.” Nothing in the strategies, alliances, or behavior of the Templars speaks of any special wisdom or enlightenment (or endarkenment, if you will). As denizens of their era, the individual Knights were occasionally motivated by true religious zeal and faith, and just as often hampered by their own pride, stodginess, and complex love-hate relationships with other parties (notably the other major knightly order, the Hospitallers), leading to poor judgement and strategic mistakes. It’s exactly the track record you’d expect of a military body whose leadership was drawn by turns through nepotistic appointments and illiterate career crusaders.

The dissolution of the Order, as evocative of legend as any other part of their history, is a complex mix of happenstance and various overbearing personalities. The French king Philip (counterintuitively called “the Fair”) was up to his eyeballs in debt, and had already disenfranchised other marginalized groups such as Jews and naturalized Muslims. As the Temple had a large set of holdings gifted by the nobility of various countries, and pipelines of international monetary trade which had inadvertantly turned them into the de facto bankers of Europe’s nobility, their assets were too tempting for Philip to keep his hands off, and he siezed them under a pretext of “heresy, blasphemy, sodomy, etc.” (the standardized accusations which had been leveled at every heretical group since Christianity had become a political as well as ecclesiastical power in Europe). Pope Clement V found himself powerless, both because Philip managed to have a number of damning confessions extracted by torture before his actions could be censured, and because the Church was already butting heads with Philip on a number of other fronts regarding the rights of the Church as an eminent political power. The die was further cast when other European monarchs jumped on the bandwagon, fomenting accusations in order to appropriate Templar holdings. Finally, the Pope threw the Templars to the wolves as a calculated loss and went along with their condemnation, dissolving their order and using their amassed wealth as bargaining chips in subsequent conflicts.

Whence, then, the body of folklore surrounding the Templars? For the first few centuries after the Order’s dissolution, the horrific charges bandied about against them turned them into posterboys for the dangers of heresy and Satan worship; later, as the Reformation and the Enlightenment came into conflict with Rome, the Templars were held up as examples of the wrongly-persecuted faithful, under the simple philosophy of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Coupled with the intense romantic obsession of the era of discovering the lost “hidden wisdom” of the ancients, the Templars became doomed and betrayed heroes of legend, whose vague inner workings allowed them to be proclaimed the spiritual ancestors of Masonry and all other quasi-mystical bodies, redefined as needed.

As usual, objective and meticulous research deflates the larger-than-life reputation of the historical Templars, but in its place there is a fascinating portrait of the religious temper of the times, too often dismissed as “rapacious Europeanism” these days — an insight into the idea of Crusading as a salvific devotion, as promoted throughout Christendom. The idea of taking a sword as champion of a religion originally seen as pacifistic seems a contradiction in terms, but perhaps its from that very dichotomy that the mystique of the Templar warrior-monks has arisen.

Nathan Shumate