The Knights Templar 9781641891691

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The Knights Templar Helen J. Nicholson

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Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Chapter 1. Beginnings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Chapter 2. The Concept . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Chapter 3. Beliefs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Chapter 4. Battle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Chapter 5. Impact . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Chapter 6. The End . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Chapter 7. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

Introduction

The Knights Templar began in obscurity, and grew to be one of the most influential organizations in Christendom. From a small group of warriors who set out to serve God in the best way that they knew, the Knights Templar became a trans-European multinational organization at a time when the only trans-European multinational organizations were branches of the Christian Church. They held property in almost every Christian country in Europe, they had a permanent presence at the papal court and at most royal courts in Latin Christendom, and their members served governments as diplomats, treasurers, and advisors. They were the living embodiment of the Latin Church’s reform movement of the eleventh and twelfth century, demonstrating that non-noble people could be virtuous and could serve God in action. The Templars and other new religious movements of their time showed that to reach God, it was no longer necessary to shut oneself up in a religious community and spend one’s days in prayer and self-denial; a Christian could go out into the world and serve God in whatever way they knew best. Some Christians served in hospitals, some travelled the roads of Europe preaching God’s Word; the Templars defended Christians and Christian territory. The Templars began in Jerusalem, in the decades following the first crusade’s capture of that city in 1099. They acquired their title from their base in the Aqsa mosque, which the Franks called “Solomon’s Temple.” It took them a decade to get the attention of their contemporaries in Europe, but

2  Introduction the reaction—when it came—was almost entirely positive. True, Templars did not fit the traditional model of servants of God: they were not of noble birth, they did not spend their lives shut away in prayer and fasting, and as warriors they could not adhere to the ideals of poverty and austerity held by the early Church because they had to invest in military equipment and horses. Yet they gained fame for their discipline, their courage on the battlefield, and their self-denying piety. In the wake of the first crusade, clearly military skill was needed as much as prayer to defend Jerusalem and the other holy places which the crusaders had won. The Templars embodied contemporary warriors’ view that warriors could serve God with their military skills at least as well as monks could serve God with prayer. Their supporters gave the Templars land, money, armour and weapons, rents, and exemptions from taxes and other dues and customary payments. The pope cut them free from the authority of bishops and archbishops and made them answerable only to the papacy. Leading churchmen wrote in their support and encouraged them in their spiritual aims. The Knights Templar are remembered as valiant warriors, defenders of the defenceless, and heroes of hopeless last stands, who held property and churches across Europe, were very wealthy, and were involved in finance. Yet when we look beyond this image of mystery and romance, at first glance the original Templars can appear quite boring. The Templars were very pious, but they were not great scholars; they did not write sermons or works of theology, or record the histories of their properties. Their leading members were knights, but they were not nobles; they did not have great social prestige. Most of them came from the lesser knightly, gentry, burgess and other non-knightly families of Latin Christendom, who might be very influential at a local level but who were beneath the notice of contemporary commentators.1 1  Alan Forey, “Recruitment to the Military Orders (Twelfth to MidFourteenth Centuries),” Viator 17 (1986): 139–71 at 143–47.

Introduction  3

As Templars, however, they offer us an insight into the interests and concerns of their social class. Their leaders commissioned religious works for the members’ education: a translation of the Old Testament Book of Judges, a female saint’s life, a translation of the well-known story of St. Paul’s visit to Hell. Templars advised kings and popes, and their last grand master wrote reports for the pope on how to plan a new crusade and the future of military-religious orders. Satirists commented on their business sense, their efficient exploitation of their lands and resources, and their fixation on helping the Holy Land. Helping the Holy Land was what the Templars were all about. There were some doubters. Supporters’ writings hint at complaints that the Templars were greedy because they took booty and that religious men should not shed blood or kill; no one should spread the Word of God by killing people. Yet the Templars were not set up to spread the Word of God; their task was to defend Christians, not to create more Christians. A few of their supporters argued that they also won converts, but the Templars never claimed to be preaching God’s Word. Their task was to fight, and for that task they needed money—money that their vast estates across Christian Europe should provide. The Templars were always accessible to everyone. They would take a donation from anyone, no matter how small, and reward the donor with their prayers. Their regulations even allowed them to approach excommunicated knights to recruit them to the order. Although the order’s regulations allowed only adult men to join, married couples could be associate members, women joined some houses as sisters of the order, and noble children were brought up in the order’s houses: as King James I of Aragon was brought up in the Templars’ castle of Monzón. Anyone could play a role in the Templars’ work without taking the three religious vows of personal poverty, chastity, and obedience to a superior. Warriors could join on a temporary basis, fighting alongside the Templars in the Middle East for perhaps a year, and then returning to their homes. The order employed mercenaries on the military

4  Introduction frontiers of Christendom, but throughout Latin Christendom also employed many servants, clerks, administrative officials, and other workers, both men and women. Associate members could hold responsibilities within the order, holding an administrative post or even running one of the order’s properties. In return, associate members shared the spiritual benefits of the order and the post-mortem security of burial in the order’s consecrated ground. Some associate members and employees would become the order’s pensioners, living within the order’s community, sharing the members’ food, with clothing provided. Ironically, the Templars’ success in attracting patronage from across Latin Christendom is now a hindrance to research, because the records of their vast European estates are scattered piecemeal throughout the archives of Europe. The Templars would work with anyone who could assist them in their aims, including Jews and Muslims.2 They developed systems for transporting money from their European properties to the Middle East, and allowed pilgrims, crusaders, and merchants to use their systems of money transfer, developing processes which modern analysts have compared to modern banking. They had an advantage over Jewish bankers and the great Italian banking families: as a multinational institution spreading their financial risk over a variety of operations, the Templars did not go bankrupt if a debtor defaulted. In common with all religious and secular leaders of society in the “crusader states,” the Templars wrote regular newsletters to their supporters in Europe asking for military and financial aid. These letters had to maintain a careful balance between success stories, showing that previous aid had been effectively employed, and accounts of crises, demonstrating the ongoing need for support. If the Templars made out that all was well, then their supporters in Europe would stop send2  On this, see Paula R. Stiles, Templar Convivencia: Templars and their Associates in 12th and 13th Century Iberia (self-pub., Amazon, 2012), Kindle.

Introduction  5

ing aid; but if they reported nothing but defeats and emergencies, their supporters in Europe would conclude that the Templars were ineffective and withdraw their support. The Templars and other letter-writers in the Latin East tended to concentrate on the crises, and the result is that we know less about the Templars’ successes than their failures. During crusades to the Middle East, contemporary commentators wrote favourably about the Templars’ courage and military effectiveness, contrasting them with the ineffectiveness of the other crusaders. It was the Templars who formed the vanguard or rear guard (their sister military-religious order the Knights Hospitaller would take the responsibility for the other end of the army); it was the Templars who formed a rapid reaction force when the enemy broke into the crusader camp, and who drove them out again; the Templars defended the crusader army during a retreat; the Templars warned against rash attacks; and, when the attack turned into a disaster, the Templars fought to the last man. On the other hand, between crusades, contemporary commentators based in Europe had only newsletters and second-hand reports on events in the Latin East. They reported political infighting in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, truces with the enemy, alliances which went wrong, and devastating defeats. As the Templars, with their standing army and extensive landholdings, formed an influential political force in the Latin East, they were inevitably in the centre of these events, and contemporaries criticized them accordingly. Commentators who were resentful of their privileged status or opposed their policies—such as Archbishop William II of Tyre, recording events in the Kingdom of Jerusalem from the first crusade until 1184—failed to record positive information about the Templars’ achievements and exaggerated their failures. When modern writers rely on (for example) William of Tyre’s accounts of the Templars’ deeds, they reproduce his opinions and what he chose to tell us about the Templars, not necessarily what actually happened. There are other, more contemporary, accounts of what the Templars did in the Latin East in the twelfth century, but they are fragmentary and

6  Introduction much more difficult to find than Archbishop William’s famous history. As the Templars held property across most of Latin Christian Europe, were influential at the papal and royal courts, and were exempt from many taxes and customary payments and obligations, they were often at loggerheads with the monks and secular clergy who commented on current events in Europe. When Matthew Paris (d. 1259), monk and chronicler of the Benedictine abbey of St. Albans in England, complained that the Templars and Hospitallers swallowed up great wealth as if they sank it into a pit of the Great Abyss, his view reflected the competition for charitable donations between his great Benedictine abbey and these two modern military-religious orders. Money given to the military-religious orders for the Latin East was money that did not come to help maintain the fabric or operation of St. Albans Abbey, yet so far as Matthew could see the Templars and Hospitallers wasted it. Despite such grumbles, the Templars and their fellow military-religious orders were well-regarded by bishops and religious leaders because they provided an example of religious devotion in everyday life, and they could also give spiritual support to their tenants and neighbours. Twelfth-century Europe did not have the extensive network of parish churches that its growing population needed. The supporters of the Templars, Hospitallers, and other new religious orders of the twelfth century gave them land that was ripe for development but needed investment. The Templars and their fellow religious orders brought in tenants who drained marsh, irrigated dry land, cleared woodland, and made unproductive land productive; they could also be relied on to repair parish churches and install a suitable priest. They built new churches and provided pastoral care in regions where hitherto there had been no available priests.3 In theory, all of this develop3  Jochen Schenk, “Aspects and Problems of the Templars’ Religious Presence in Medieval Europe from the Twelfth to the Early Four­ teenth Century,” Traditio 71 (2016): 273–302.

Introduction  7

ment work should have raised more money for the Templars’ operations in the Latin East, but in fact it probably became a drain on their resources rather than benefitting them. Despite their vast resources, the Templars could never operate entirely outside the military strategies of the secular rulers of the Latin East. In 1129 King Baldwin II of Jerusalem set off to capture Damascus, supported by among others the Templars—whose leader, Hugh de Payns, had been overseas in Europe recruiting warriors and collecting money to support the campaign. When King Baldwin retreated without capturing Damascus, there were complaints in the West: the writer of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle declared that Hugh de Payns had lied. The Templars were also vulnerable to criticism from returning crusaders who wanted to justify their lack of achievement in the East. If a crusade had failed, it was easy to blame the Franks of the Latin East for failing to support the European crusaders, and particularly to blame the Templars for giving the wrong advice. Ironically, the Templars were criticized for their advice even when it turned out to have been correct. Yet the Templars must have had military successes, because they survived as an active military force for over one hundred and seventy years, from around 1120 to 1291, and supporters were still giving them resources and joining their institution right up to the arrest of the Templars in 1307–8. When in June 1306 Pope Clement V asked the Grand Masters of the Templars and of the Hospitallers for their opinion on how the Holy Land could be recovered and whether their two institutions should be amalgamated, he demonstrated that he still regarded these military religious institutions as having a valuable role to play in the defence of Christendom. Whatever their contemporaries thought of them, our views of the Templars are now indelibly coloured by the means of their destruction. In October 1307 King Philip IV of France ordered the arrest of all the Templars within his domains, on charges of blasphemy and sexual depravity. He instructed that if the Templars would not confess to these charges, they should be tortured until confessions were obtained. Many Templars in France confessed under torture or the threat

8  Introduction of torture, although contemporaries reported that thirty-six Templars interrogated in Paris died under torture rather than confess to these false charges. The testimonies extracted by torture are not reliable evidence about the Templars or their order. Few writers came forward to defend the Templars, but it is hardly surprising that their supporters remained silent as the pope declared that anyone who defended or helped them would also be suspected of heresy. Although many contemporaries outside France believed that King Philip attacked the Templars to get their wealth, rather than because they were guilty as charged, some refused to countenance the possibility that the king, or the pope who failed to stop the trial, would have connived at the destruction of an innocent religious order. There must have been something behind the charges, they believed; not just that the Templars’ wide properties and failure to prevent the Mamluk conquest of the Latin East made them vulnerable to powerful and greedy rulers. Modern readers might ask why, if the Templars were innocent, the order was dissolved by the pope. Yet even if the kings of England, the Iberian Peninsula, and Cyprus had not been forced by the pope to follow the King of France’s lead and arrest the Templars, the confiscation of their French territories would have made it difficult for the Templars to continue operations after 1307. As it was, the long and bitter trial of the Templars ended acrimoniously with the order’s guilt not proven. Under pressure from King Philip, Pope Clement V dissolved the Templars on the grounds that the order was too defamed to continue, and gave its properties to the equally unpopular Hospitallers. The argument over the Templars’ guilt has continued to the present day. In the century after the trial, authors who resented the influence of the King of France blamed him for destroying the Templars and stated that his aim was to get their wealth, or to avoid repaying a generous loan. By the fifteenth century, some writers were describing the Hospitallers as being founded after the Templars were destroyed— as if all the Templars had died when the city of Acre fell to the Mamluks in 1291, and the Hospitallers replaced them.

Introduction  9

Thomas Fuller (d. 1661), a Protestant cleric writing a history of the crusades just before the 1642–51 Civil War broke out in England, concluded that the Templars were generally seen as innocent of the sins of which they were charged, and that their great wealth was the cause of their downfall.4 In Catholic countries, however, the decision of a pope and a Catholic king could not so easily be criticized. The simplistic story of the Templars’ rise, decline, and fall was attractive to moralizing historians and story-tellers alike. The Romance movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth century made much of the Templars as flawed heroes, anti-heroes, or bearers of mysteries, especially as the guardians of the Holy Grail—an image loosely based on just one of the numerous medieval stories about the Holy Grail. These myths about the Templars threaten to make serious scholarship impossible, by discrediting them as a subject of academic research. This book focuses on some controversial aspects of the Templars’ history: how they began, the origins of the concept of the military-religious order, Templar religious beliefs, Templar warfare, the Templars’ impact on society, and the end of the order. As the present can never recover the past, we can never fully understand the Templars—but we can try to avoid simplistic answers and seek fuller, more nuanced solutions.

4  Thomas Fuller, The Historie of the Holy Warre (Cambridge: Thomas Buck, 1639), 233 (bk. 5, ch. 3).

Chapter 1

Beginnings

How exactly how did the Templars begin, and what did they originally set out to achieve? These should be easy questions to answer, but they began so quietly that no contemporary noted the fact. By the time that they were sufficiently important to be noticed, each commentator had their own view on what the Templars were for. So both the date of the Templars’ foundation and their original function remain uncertain. Written between 1165 and 1184, Archbishop William of Tyre’s history of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem is the most comprehensive account of the kingdom in the twelfth century. Educated at the Universities of Paris and Bologna, William wrote in excellent Latin, and as chancellor of the kingdom of Jerusalem he had easy access to the records of the kingdom. According to Archbishop William, in the year 1118: Certain noble men of the equestrian order, devoted to God, religious and God-fearing, putting themselves into the hand of the lord patriarch [of Jerusalem] for Christ’s service, professed that they wished to live perpetually in chastity and obedience and without their own property, following the custom of regular canons. [That is, they would follow the Rule of St. Augustine, like the canons of the church of the Holy Sepulchre.] The first and foremost among them were the venerable men Hugh de Payns and Geoffrey [or Godfrey] de Saint-Omer. Since they had neither church nor fixed domicile, the king conceded to them for the time being a small habitation in his palace [the Aqsa mosque] that was

12  Chapter 1 situated near the Lord’s Temple [the Dome of the Rock] to the south, while the canons of the Lord’s Temple conceded to them on certain conditions the courtyard that they had around the aforesaid palace, for their divine services. The lord king and his nobles, and also the lord patriarch and the prelates of the churches, conferred on them from their own possessions certain benefices to provide food and clothing, some for a temporary period, some in perpetuity. Their original profession, which was enjoined on them by the lord patriarch and the rest of the bishops for the remission of their sins, was that so far as their forces allowed they should protect the roads and routes, especially for the safety of the pilgrims against the ambushes of brigands and raiders. For nine years after they were established they wore secular clothing, wearing such clothes as people gave them for the salvation of their souls. At last, in the ninth year, at a council held at Troyes in France—at which were present the lord archbishops of Reims and Sens with their suffragans, and the bishop of Albano, papal legate, and the abbots of Cîteaux and Clairvaux with many others—on the instructions of Pope Honorius [II] and lord Stephen, patriarch of Jerusalem, a rule was laid down for them and a religious habit assigned to them, which was white. Although after being in operation for nine years they still had only nine members, from that time their numbers began to grow and their possessions to multiply.1

As these events took place before William’s birth (he was born in around 1132), he would have relied on his older contemporaries for this information. William depicted these men forming a new formal religious organization, under the authority of the Latin Church. Hugh de Payns, Godfrey de Saint-Omer, and their friends entrusted themselves to the patriarch and swore the three vows taken by professed monks. In further evidence that this was a reli1  Translated from the Latin text in Willelmi Tyrensis Archiepiscopi Chronicon, ed. R. B. C. Huygens, Corpus Christianorum continuatio mediaevalis 63 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1986), 553–55 (bk. 12, ch. 7).

Beginnings  13

gious order of the Latin Church, William recorded that people gave them gifts for the salvation of their souls. They could have done this only if the brothers of the new order were pursuing a meritorious, divinely approved purpose, which would attract a reward from God. The new order’s purpose was charitable: to protect the roads and routes for pilgrims. Pilgrims travelling to the Christian holy places in the Middle East would have been grateful for armed guards as they travelled around the holy places. The breakdown of security on the pilgrim routes in the Middle East from the mid-eleventh century had been one of the justifications for the first crusade. In the 1180s the Anglo-Welsh cleric Walter Map recorded that Hugh de Payns, first master of the Temple, had begun his career protecting a holy spring which was frequented by pilgrims. Pilgrim accounts from the 1160s onwards record how effectively the Templars performed their protective function. Their network of castles along the pilgrim routes enabled them to ensure that the roads were safe for pilgrims from Europe. They escorted pilgrims around the holy places of Jerusalem and watched over pilgrims as they bathed in the River Jordan. So William’s account makes sense, but it also raises some questions. He placed the foundation of the Templars under 1118, but then stated that in the ninth year after their foundation there was a Church council held at Troyes in France at which a rule was instituted for them. A record of that meeting set out at the beginning of the Templars’ first official rule states that the council met on January 13, 1128, in the ninth year from the beginning of the order. Incidentally, the record credits Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux with setting up the council. He may have been asked by King Baldwin II of Jerusalem to support the Templars, although the document that records this could be a forgery. However, Cardinal-Bishop Matthew of Albano, who was papal legate at the Council of Troyes, could not have been at the Council of Troyes in January 1128, although he could have been present in January 1129. In fact, in Champagne at that time the year began on March 25, not on January 1; so the

14  Chapter 1 date January 13, 1128 would be under our present system of dating January 13, 1129.2 Nine years before 1129 would put the Templars’ foundation in 1120, not 1118. January 1120 would provide a likely occasion for the official beginning of the Templars: the Council of Nablūs, at which both Patriarch Warmund of Jerusalem and King Baldwin II were present. The twentieth canon issued by this council allowed clerics to bear “arms for the sake of defence,” which looks at first sight as if it could be referring to the Templars. However, it then goes on to state that clerics could not become knights or take up secular office, and that if a cleric did this, he would lose his priestly status. Such prohibitions on clergy joining the army or taking up secular office went back to the early days of the Christian Church, so this was simply a reiteration of ancient practice.3 Again, as the first Templars were not ordained clergy this canon cannot have been referring to them. Yet, given the presence of the king and patriarch at the council and the council’s acknowledgement that clerics might sometimes have to fight, the Council of Nablūs would have provided a fitting context for the first official acknowledgement of the Templars. William’s claim that it was the patriarch of Jerusalem who first approved the Templars is also questionable. The so-called Chronique d’Ernoul et de Bernard le trésorier gives a different account of the Templars’ beginnings: Chapter 2: How the Templars came about. When the Christians had conquered Jerusalem, many knights dedicated themselves to the temple of the Sepul2  Rudolf Hiestand, “Kardinalbischof Matthäus von Albano, das Konzil von Troyes und die Entstehung des Templerordens,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 99 (1988): 295–325.

3  Benjamin Z. Kedar, “On the Origins of the Earliest Laws of Frankish Jerusalem: the Canons of the Council of Nablus, 1120,” Speculum 74, no. 2 (1999): 310–35 at 334; Lawrence G. Duggan, Armsbearing and the Clergy in the History and Canon Law of Western Chris­tianity (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013), 94.

Beginnings  15

chre; and later on many from all lands dedicated themselves to it. And they were obedient to the prior of the Sepulchre. Among those who had dedicated themselves to it were good knights, so they consulted together among themselves and said, “We have left our lands and our loved ones, and have come here to lift up and exalt the law of God. So we rest here eating and drinking and spending, without doing any work. We do not perform any deed of arms either, although this country needs it, and we obey a priest, and so we do no labour of arms. Let us take advice, and with our prior’s permission we shall make one of us our master, who may lead us in battle when appropriate.” At that time Baldwin [II] was king. So they came to him and said: “Lord, advise us for God’s sake. We have decided to make one of us a master who may lead us in battle to help the country.” The king was delighted with this, and said that he would willingly advise them and aid them. At that the king sent for the patriarch [of Jerusalem] and the archbishops and the bishops and the barons of the country, to take counsel. There they took counsel, and they all agreed that it would be a good thing to do. The king came to them and gave them land and castles and towns. Through his advice the king succeeded in persuading the prior of the Sepulchre to release them from their obedience, and they left him, except that they still carry part of the sign on the Sepulchre’s habit. The sign on the Sepulchre’s habit is a cross with two scarlet arms—such as the Hospital carries. And those of the Temple carry a cross which is completely scarlet.—And so the Hospital threw out the Temple, and gave it its relief, and the standard which is called the Bauçaut [piebald] standard.4

The Chronique d’Ernoul et Bernard was assembled into its current form more than a hundred years after the beginnings of the Templars, in the early 1230s in northern France. Anthony Luttrell, however, has argued that its account of the Templars’ beginnings fits what we know about the Templars 4  Translated from Chronique d’Ernoul et de Bernard le trésorier, ed. L. de Mas Latrie (Paris: Jules Renouard, 1871), 7–8.

16  Chapter 1 better than William of Tyre’s account, and also fits what we know about the Hospitallers.5 Ernoul–Bernard depicts the Templars as a group of knights living as a pious brotherhood at the church of the Holy Sepulchre. Their decision to take up arms is initially approved by the king, rather than by the patriarch. Their task is to defend the land conquered by the Franks in the first crusade and since, rather than defend the roads for pilgrims. If Ernoul–Bernard’s account were correct, this would explain why many writers in Europe were confused about the relationship between the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem (set up in the 1060s or 1070s to care for poor sick pilgrims to Jerusalem), the Order of the Temple, and the canons of the Holy Sepulchre (the priests who lived and worked in the church of the Holy Sepulchre). It would also explain why the Hospitallers and the Templars in the Latin East followed the liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre in their church services. According to Ernoul–Bernard, all three groups were originally together; the Hospitallers and Templars had begun life as part of the religious community based in the church of the Holy Sepulchre. In contrast to William of Tyre, Ernoul–Bernard gave King Baldwin II a leading role, stating that he gave the order its first official support. The Templars had very close connections with the kings of Jerusalem during the twelfth century, as they did with kings in Europe; much closer than their connections with the patriarch. Perhaps William exaggerated the Templars’ dependence on the patriarch, in order to heighten the contrast between the early order (which he regarded as humble and useful to the Kingdom of Jerusalem) and the order of his own day (which he regarded as too independent and a danger to the kingdom). Yet, although the story of the Templars’ beginnings in Ernoul–Bernard could have been taken from a contemporary 5  Anthony Luttrell, “The Earliest Templars,” in Autour de la première croisade. Actes du colloque de la Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East: Clermont-Ferrand, 22–25 juin 1995, ed. Michel Balard (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1996), 193–202.

Beginnings  17

account, no other version of that account survives. The direct contemporaries of the first Templars mentioned them only after the order had been in operation for some years.6 Orderic Vitalis, writing in the Norman monastery of Saint-Evroul in the 1120s or 1130s, recorded that Count Fulk V of Anjou had joined the “knights of the Temple” for a while, at the time he was on pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1120. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded under the year 1128 that Hugh de Payns met King Henry I of England in Normandy and then went on to Scotland, where he met King David; both gave him gifts for the new order. Neither writer described how it began. Simon of Saint-Bertin—an abbey in the town of SaintOmer, home of Godfrey de Saint-Omer’s family—wrote around 1135/37 that the beginnings of the Templars fell in the reign of Godfrey de Bouillon, first Latin ruler of the kingdom of Jerusalem, newly-conquered by the first crusade. While he [Godfrey] was reigning magnificently, some [of the crusaders] had decided not to return to the shadows of the world after suffering such dangers for God’s sake. On the advice of the princes of God’s army they vowed themselves to God’s Temple under this rule: they would renounce the world, give up personal goods, free themselves for chastity, and lead a communal life wearing a poor habit, only using arms to defend the land against the attacks of the insurgent pagans when necessity demanded.

At first glance, Simon’s account appears unlikely. If the first Templars had really been veterans of the first crusade, surely Archbishop William of Tyre would have mentioned this? On the other hand, as Simon was writing within the home town of Godfrey de Saint-Omer’s family, perhaps he was drawing on local tradition regarding this founding member of the order. The suggestion that the first Templars had originally gone to the East at the time of the first crusade (1096–99) and the wars of the Investiture Dispute in the first decade of the 6  For what follows see Helen Nicholson, The Knights Templar: A Brief History of the Warrior Order (London: Constable and Robinson, 2010), 26–28, 34–35.

18  Chapter 1 twelfth century, was repeated by Bishop Otto of Freising, writing around 1143/47: Around this time, while the kingdom of the Romans was divided in civil and parricidal war caused by a desire for domination, others, despising what they had for Christ’s sake, and realising that they did not bear the belt of knighthood without good reason, headed for Jerusalem. And there they began a new type of knighthood. Thus they bear arms against the enemies of Christ’s cross, so that—continually carrying the mortification of the cross on their bodies—they might appear to be in life and lifestyle not knights but monks.

A link with the first crusade was most clearly stated by Bishop Anselm of Havelberg, writing in 1149/50. Calling the Templars “laymen, religious men who call themselves knights of the Temple,” he stated that it was Pope Urban II who confirmed their way of life: the same pope who called the first crusade in 1095. It is tempting to suggest that these writers were correct and later writers wrong: the first Templars had taken part in the first crusade and their brotherhood was a continuation of the confraternities of knights formed during that expedition. On the other hand, all three had obvious reasons to exalt the Templars’ prestige. Simon, as already mentioned, was writing in the home town of one of the founders of the order. Bishops Otto and Anselm were both involved in the second crusade (1147–1149), and in promoting the Templars they were promoting the concept of holy knighthood. They emphasized the Templars’ penitential aspect and their monastic lifestyle, and indicated that they took up arms only when necessary, against the enemies of Christendom. The works of Bishop Otto and Bishop Anselm quoted directly from Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux’s letter of support for the early Templars. Written for the first master of the order, Hugh de Payns, the letter calls the Templars “a new militia,” the Latin term used in the twelfth century to denote a body of warriors. It emphasizes that Templars took up arms only because it was essential to defeat the enemies of Christendom and there was no other alternative. Bernard

Beginnings  19

stressed that their day-to-day lifestyle within their house was like that of monks, obeying their master, with no personal property and without wives and children, and always busy with some constructive work such as mending their armour. On the battlefield, they concentrated on military effectiveness rather than show. In short, they were both monks and warriors. Bernard indicated that the Templars were a new development, different from any organization seen before.7 In contrast, Simon de Vermandois (d. 1148), bishop of Noyon, declared that the Templars were re-creating the old order of defenders of society, so that one of the three notional orders of society that had completely fallen apart was now repaired and restored to its proper place. The Templars were fulfilling God’s purpose for warriors. Each of these ecclesiastical writers gave the Templars a slightly different function, depending on their own particular interests. Some linked the new institution to the first crusade, stressed its military function and the fact that it was founded by laymen, but they also highlighted the brothers’ pious lifestyle and their similarity to monks. This raises the question of how the concept of the Templars first developed. Did its origins lie within Latin Christian society, or was the concept imported from outside Latin Christendom?

7  Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux, “De laude novae militiae,” in The Templars: Selected Sources Translated and Annotated, trans. by Malcolm Barber and Keith Bate (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 215–27.

Chapter 2

The Concept

Christianity has always been in at least two minds over the validity of violence. On the one hand, the Ten Commandments prohibit murder; on the other, there is a moral imperative to defend the defenceless. Some leading churchmen expressed approval of the concept of the military-religious order. Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux insisted in his letter for Master Hugh de Payns that the Templars were a new concept, a new militia or knighthood, and that when the brothers fought non-Christians in defence of Christians their fighting was necessary and spiritually valid. Bishops Otto of Freising and Anselm of Havelberg agreed. Abbot Guigo of La Grande Chartreuse wrote to advise the Templars in their spiritual battles and prayed that the mercy and power of God would enable them to triumph gloriously in spiritual and physical battles. Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, wrote positively to Everard des Barres, third master of the Temple (d. 1152), praising the brothers for fighting both spiritual and physical wars and for being monks by their virtues, knights by their deeds (writing to Pope Eugenius III he was less positive, describing the Templars as simply a militia). However, the contemporary writer who called himself Hugo Peccator (that is, “Hugh the Sinner”) indicated that other, nameless, commentators had criticized the Templars’ military activity, calling it illicit, harmful, and an obstacle to spiritual process. Hugh argued that the Templars followed a religious lifestyle, with fasting and self-denial. They were

22  Chapter 2 not guilty of hatred, because they hated wickedness, not humans; they were justified in taking plunder, because they had earned it through their work; and their active work for God was as valuable, or more valuable, than prayer and contemplation. He urged the Templars to remain at their posts and continue their valuable work for God.1 Scholars have not agreed who Hugo Peccator was: perhaps he was Hugh de Payns, first master of the Templars; perhaps he was the eminent theologian Hugh of St. Victor; he might even have been Count Hugh of Champagne, Hugh de Payns’s overlord, who joined the Templars in around 1125. There are strong arguments for the first two of these. In any case, the letter—which survives in only one copy, suggesting that it did not circulate widely—shows both the objections which could have been made against the concept of the Templars and how the brothers and their supporters could have answered them. The criticisms of the concept, and Abbot Bernard’s description of the Templars as a new militia, suggests that the Templars were a revolutionary movement that did not fit well into European Christian society. No wonder, if this were the case, that the order was so short-lived. Yet, even if the concept was new, the Templars were not its only representatives; the brothers of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem also began to take on military functions in the decades after the Templars were founded. Arguably, the military-religious order was a natural development from the Church reform movement and the developing ideals of chivalry.2 1  The letters of Hugo Peccator, Guigo, and Peter the Venerable to the Templars are translated in The Templars: Selected Sources, trans. Barber and Bate, 54–59, 213–15, 227–30. 2  Luis García-Guijarro Ramos, “Ecclesiastical Reform and the Origins of the Military Orders: New Perspectives on Hugh of Payns’ Letter,” in The Military Orders, volume 4: On Land and By Sea, ed. Judi Upton-Ward (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 77–83; Malcolm Barber, “The Social Context of the Templars,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th ser., 34 (1984): 27–46.

The Concept  23

The obvious immediate stimulus for the concept of the military-religious order was the first crusade, in which warriors took a vow to fight for God for the duration of the campaign. The contemporary commentator Guibert de Nogent declared that “in our time God has ordained holy wars, so that the knightly order and the wandering crowd—who had previously been engaged in slaughtering each other, like their ancient pagan forebears—could find a new way of earning salvation.” A liturgical hymn produced soon after the first crusade addressed crusaders as o nova militia—“O, new knighthood.”3 Such language indicates that the concept of the Templars was simply a permanent form of the crusade idea: warriors fighting God’s wars as part of a penitential life. The idea of the military-religious order may have grown out of the concept of the military confraternity, an informal group of warriors who took vows of comradeship and agreed to share their gains and losses during a campaign. This was an old tradition. During the first crusade, crusaders formed confraternities: one was established during the siege of Antioch (1097–98) with a common treasury to pay for replacement horses. But these were only temporary groups for the duration of the crusade. In contrast, full members of the military orders took vows for life. The concept of the military-religious order appeared very soon after 1120 in the Iberian Peninsula, suggesting it had also been developing in that region. In 1122 King Alfonso I of Aragon founded a confraternity at Belchite, near Zaragoza, recently captured from the Muslims. In his foundation charter he compared the new organization to the militiam Christi Ierosolimis (the militia of Christ at Jerusalem) and milicia confraternitatis Iherosolimitana (the Jerusalem militia of confraternity), echoing the first Templars. Alfonso went on to set up a second military-religious institution, the Order of Monréal del Campo (1126–30). As he explained in his foundation charter, he had thought it suitable and pleasing to the Lord God to 3  M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons: Liturgy and the Making of Crusade Ideology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017), 142.

24  Chapter 2 organize and set up a Knighthood of Christ of Jerusalem. With the king as its commander, this order would defeat the Saracens (that is, the Muslims) on this side of the sea and clear the way to cross to Jerusalem. Although Alfonso’s organizations did not go on to develop successfully, they demonstrate that the concept of a military-religious institution was known and approved by one monarch at least in the Iberian Peninsula in the 1120s. Another institution which echoed the concept of the military-religious order was the Hospital of San Jacopo d’Altopascio (St. James of Altopascio) in Italy. Founded in the late eleventh century by the lords of the castle of Porcari, this was a hospice that aided travellers and pilgrims and employed armed men to escort travellers in safety. One of its patrons may have been Countess Matilda of Tuscany, who was probably also a sponsor of the campaign against the North African city of al-Mahdiyya in 1087, depicted by contemporaries as a holy war led by Christ and fighting against the godless Muslims.4 The regulations or rule of the Hospital of St. James of Altopascio mentions brother knights, brother priests, and brother sergeants—reminiscent of the Templars. The knights protected travellers, policed the traffic on the road, and maintained the road and the bridge over the Arno. However, the rule of the Hospital of St. James of Altopascio was drawn up more than a century after the Templars were officially founded, in 1239, when the hospice became associated with the Knights Hospitaller. So it is more likely that the rule was borrowed from the Hospitallers and Templars, rather than the other way round. Nevertheless, the concept of the military-religious order could have originated in Italy from the Church reform movement. Countess Matilda of Tuscany was a devoted supporter of Church reform and of its leading champion Pope Gregory VII. Pope Gregory VII himself had emphasized the need for 4  Alasdair C. Grant, “Pisan Perspectives: The Carmen in victoriam and Holy War, c. 1000–1150,” English Historical Review 131, no. 552 (2016): 983–1009 at 994.

The Concept  25

Christian warriors to use arms in defence of Christianity. He planned to recruit warriors to defend the Christian faith, and his ideas were further developed and transmitted more widely by Anselm of Lucca and Bonizo of Sutri, canonists who were supported at Matilda’s court. So, perhaps the concept of the military-religious order was already forming in Italy in the late eleventh century, in the papal court, in canonists’ discussions, and in secular courts that supported Church reform, before it appeared in the Latin East in the twelfth. Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux’s description of the Templars as monks as well as warriors associated the new military-religious order with the monastic reform movement of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Thirty of the seventy-two clauses of the Templars’ first official rule, drawn up at the Council of Troyes in 1129, included word-for-word extracts from the most famous monastic rule, the Rule of St. Benedict. Abbot Bernard’s involvement in promoting the new Order of the Temple could have implied that the order was derived from the Cistercians, a recently-formed monastic institution based on the original Benedictine Rule. Yet overall the tone of the Templars’ rule is more like the so-called Rule of St. Augustine, the regulations for community life most often followed by medieval hospitals and houses of priests, where the members did not live in an enclosed house but had regular contact with the outside world. The Templars’ rule followed the same themes as the Rule of St. Augustine, with all property held in common, members praying together, with plain clothing and simple food, avoiding close contact with members of the opposite sex. The Templars in the Latin East followed a canonical liturgy rather than a monastic one: like canons, their services comprised nine lessons, rather than the twelve lessons of the monastic office. Nevertheless, whether they resembled reformed monks or reformed canons, their regulations linked them to Church reform and the new religious orders of eleventh- and twelfth-century Europe. However, the Templars’ 1129 rule was not entirely dictated by ecclesiastical authorities; it also included the brothers’ own formal decisions. The clause forbidding servants

26  Chapter 2 and squires to wear white habits states that this decision is by common council of the order’s chapter, showing that the brothers’ formal structure of management meetings was already in place before 1129. Simonetta Cerrini has emphasized the agency of Hugh de Payns and his fellow knights in setting up this novel lay religious order, where laymen rather than clerics held the highest offices. First and foremost, this was a knightly order before it was a religious one. As noted in Chapter 1, Archbishop William II of Tyre recorded that Hugh de Payns, Godfrey de Saint-Omer, and their friends were noble men of the equestrian order, de equestri ordine. Archbishop William used equester in the classical Latin sense to mean what Abbot Bernard and most of his clerical contemporaries called milites: in modern English, knights. In the early twelfth century a chevalier, as William’s Frankish compatriots would have said, would not necessarily have been the powerful landed nobleman that we now associate with the word. A chevalier was a skilled, heavily-armed career warrior, or knight, who typically fought on horseback and whose typical weapons were the lance and sword. He was probably in a nobleman’s service rather than being a nobleman himself; but his social status was rising. The Latin word generally used in twelfth-century Europe as an equivalent for chevalier was miles, although strictly speaking the Roman miles had been an infantryman, and the collective term was a militia. William, who disliked neologisms and strove to make his Latin as pure as possible, used the classical Latin term for a horseman instead. The skilled, heavily-armed mounted warriors had formed the most significant part of the army of the first crusade and were developing their own self-image, literature, and culture—chevalerie, knighthood, or now “chivalry” in English. The two leading members of the new Order of the Temple, as named by William of Tyre, came from the region that is now northeastern France, which was the centre of the new ideals of chevalerie. Chevaliers’ sense of self-worth included the belief that their military skill was a valid means of serving God and that they had a duty to fight for this purpose.

The Concept  27

Likewise, the Templars’ regulations allowed brothers to kill “the enemies of the cross” without sinning, because this was justified war. Christianity has never held a single view on the use of physical violence. Although in the Gospels Christ is depicted speaking against violence, for example stating that “all who take the sword die by the sword” (Matthew 26:52), Christ’s followers also recorded His statement that He had not come to bring peace but a sword (Matt. 10:34), and that at the Last Supper He warned His apostles to sell their cloaks and buy swords to protect themselves as they went about preaching (Luke 22:36). The New Testament records that some of Jesus’ earliest followers were soldiers, and these military converts remained in the army after their conversion and continued to fight for the Roman emperor. Christians adopted military metaphors for the spiritual life: Paul of Tarsus advised the Christians at Ephesus to arm themselves for the spiritual battle against evil, with the armour of God, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of God’s Spirit (Eph. 6:13–17). By describing the struggle against evil in terms of armed warfare, Christians promoted the concept of positive conflict, rather than condemning all forms of conflict. Bishop Ambrose of Milan (d. 397) followed Roman tradition in believing that war should be for defence, praising those who defended their homeland at their own risk, and also those who stepped in to defend others at a personal level. On the other hand, he argued that Christians should not seek personal vengeance on those who harm them, and Christian clergy should pray rather than fight. In contrast, some leading Christian thinkers under the later Roman Empire believed that clergy could use violence for a good cause, for example to destroy pagan shrines. Bishop Augustine of Hippo Regius in North Africa (d. 430) condemned war but acknowledged that it is sometimes necessary to use violence to protect the vulnerable against violence. He argued that war is justifiable when other means have failed and war is waged with the right intention—that is, in order to gain peace. Christian writers and Church councils alike generally agreed that clergy should

28  Chapter 2 not shed blood, even in self-defence. Nevertheless, a cleric could offer prayer support to warriors, and a bishop could and should command troops as part of his service to the king and his role as protector of his flock. Christian monks and nuns claimed that they formed the only valid militia Dei, army of God, as they fought against evil with prayer and contemplation. The spiritual war of prayer was superior to physical warfare. Yet clergy also believed that warriors had a duty to fight physically to protect Christian society. From the late tenth century, a series of Church councils in Francia promoted a “peace of God,” by which warriors swore oaths not to attack Church property or the peasantry, and bishops worked with secular rulers to raise armed forces to keep the peace. War could be justified if it was fought to defend the Church and/or those who could not defend themselves. Secular warriors would have gone much further, arguing that God needs physical war to defend His interests. In particular, the medieval epic poems of Roland and of Guillaume, set in the eighth and ninth centuries during the reigns of Charlemagne and his son Louis the Pious, related how these great warriors and their relatives and comrades defended Christianity in France and Spain in the face of Muslim invasion. The versions of these epic poems which now survive were composed in the early twelfth century, around the time of the first crusade. It is clear from their contents that they were aimed at warriors, and that these warriors believed that in fighting God’s battles against God’s enemies they were serving God better than did the non-combatant clergy. The Song of Roland states that a knight who is not strong and fierce in battle is not worth four pence, but should become a monk in church and spend all day praying for our sins: as if spiritual warfare was inferior to physical warfare. Roland’s death is equated with the death of Christ, marked by a darkened sky and an earthquake, while the angel Gabriel intervenes to enable the Emperor Charlemagne to defeat the great “pagan” leader Baligant in battle. The tales of the great warrior Guillaume d’Orange insist that the physical warfare

The Concept  29

of the warrior is of more value than monks’ prayers. The final story in the series records that after a lifetime of fighting Muslims Guillaume became a monk to do penance for his sins, but could not reconcile his military values with his new lifestyle. When his abbot sent him to buy fish, Guillaume was horrified to learn that if he was attacked by bandits, he should not fight back. His response was characteristically aggressive: “Now I shall go to carry out this service; if the thieves attack me or kill me, what will it be, master? Do tell me.” “It will be penance, good lord,” said the abbot, “you will receive martyrdom for the sake of your holy order. Whatever happens, don’t fight, for the holy order of St. Benedict begs you, and all the monks order and command you not to harm any person. All must discipline themselves rather than do that.” Guillaume said: “May God bring shame on this order and Jesus curse whoever set it up, because he was a bad man and full of cowardice. The order of knighthood is more worthwhile because they fight the Saracen race, take their lands and conquer their towns, and convert the pagans to our law. Monks only want to stay in the abbey, and eat and drink wine to the dregs, and go to sleep when they’ve said compline. But by God Who has all in His hands, if the thieves of whom I’ve heard you speak do any harm, trouble or shame to me, your Order will not stop me killing one of them if I can.”5

Guillaume here was not referring to a religious order of knights but to knights as a social group. The poem gently mocks the ideology of the developing warrior class of knights, which sees military action as the answer to everything; but it also mocks the monks, who are greedy, treacherous, lazy, and not prepared to risk their comfort for the good of Christendom. Compared to the idle monks, the warriors are the 5  Les deux rédactions en vers du Moniage Guillaume, chansons de geste du XIIe siècle, ed. Wilhelm Cloetta, 2 vols. (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1906–11), 1:72–73, lines 627–651 (my translation).

30  Chapter 2 true militia Christi, the warriors of Christ, who fight on His behalf. Guillaume eventually leaves the corrupt and idle monks and goes on to form his own monastery. Both Roland and Guillaume came to be honoured as saints. The first crusaders would also have known of holy warriors who were not epic heroes. Although the Byzantine military saints such as St. George, St. Maurice, and St. Mercurius were not venerated for their fighting skills but for their piety and courageous martyrdoms, it was clear to medieval Latin Christians that these soldiers’ lives had pleased God. These saints were already known in Latin Europe long before the first crusade, but their cults became more popular among Latin Christians after the first crusade. The Europeans who settled in the “crusader states” took up these cults and produced icons of mounted soldier saints based on the Byzantine and eastern Christian artistic traditions.6 The concept of the military-religious order could therefore have arisen from a combination of European warrior ideals (chivalry), the individual spiritual life advocated by the Latin Church reform movement of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and these older Christian examples of warrior sainthood. Admittedly, most Templars were not knights and many were not warriors: they were servants, craftsmen, priests, and sisters, and their contribution to the order was in work and prayer, not in fighting. Overall the Templars’ membership was not primarily chivalric; in their mixed and mostly non-noble membership the Templars resembled the other new religious movements founded between the eleventh and the early thirteenth century, particularly the regular canons and friars. Yet the order as a whole identified with knighthood. The Templars’ original rule, approved in January 1129 at the Council of Troyes, sets out their foundational beliefs: the listener is 6  Jaroslav Folda, “Mounted Warrior Saints in Crusader Icons: Images of the Knighthoods of Christ,” in Knighthoods of Christ: Essays on the History of the Crusades and the Knights Templar Presented to Malcolm Barber, ed. Norman Housley (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 87–107 at 95–96, 97, 99.

The Concept  31

called to be Christi miles, a knight of Christ. This new militia will revive the ordo militaris—the order of fighters, one of the notional three orders of society—whose duty was to defend the poor and churches but which had in recent years been stealing, destroying, and killing. During the 1130s, when the Templars’ rule was translated into the French of northern France, these Latin terms became the chevalier de Crist (knight of Christ), the chevalerie (knighthood or group of knights) and the orde de chevalerie (the order of knighthood). The rule now stated that knights should love justice and defend the poor, widows, orphans, and churches. This translation reveals that by the 1130s chivalry was developing the social responsibilities that would later feature in Chrétien de Troyes’s Arthurian romances and other chivalric literature, and that the Templars identified with these responsibilities. The Templars took their duty to defend Christians very seriously: any Templar who killed a Christian man or woman or caused them to be killed would be expelled from the order. The instance described in the Templars’ regulations (section 554 in Upton-Ward’s translation) states that three brothers in the Latin East who killed some Christian merchants were expelled, then publicly flogged through four cities, and then imprisoned for life, and died in prison. The regulations did not expand on the need to help widows and orphans, but from the early thirteenth century French and German romance literature developed the Templars’ role into supporting and helping lovers.7 However, at least one Templar believed they had a duty to do justice in the world. During the proceedings against the Templars in London on November 17, 1309, Brother William of Welles, who had been in the order for over twenty-six years, stated that the brothers “had a precept to do justice to all Christians” (omnibus xpianis faciant iusticiam), or to “every person”: the two manuscripts recording 7  Helen J. Nicholson, Love, War and the Grail: Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights in Medieval Epic and Romance, 1150–1500 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 52–57.

32  Chapter 2 his testimony differ.8 This was an echo of secular chivalry, although no other Templar mentioned this interpretation of their role. Others stated that they swore not to be in a place where a Christian was disinherited, or to prevent the disinheritance of Christians: as stated in the Templars’ admission ceremony. Their primary concern was to defend the Latin East rather than protecting individuals. Perhaps Brother William of Welles’s view was a personal interpretation of the order’s function in the light of contemporary chivalric ideals. In any case, this is an appropriate point to turn to a consideration of the Templars’ personal beliefs.

8  Helen J. Nicholson, ed., The Proceedings against the Templars in the British Isles, 2 vols. (Farnham, 2011), 1:103, 2:93: MS A fol. 54r.

Chapter 3

Beliefs

The Templars were Latin—that is, Catholic—Christians.1 Their faith was the faith of pre-Reformation Europe, a broad Church which expected believers to attend church only three times a year and did not expect the laity to take an active role in church services. The Templars were not educated in theology and would not have been aware of or even interested in the complex theological debates that were taking place in the Latin Church in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Their function was to serve the Holy Land, not to engage in intellectual debate. The Templars’ admission ceremony instructed that new members should make their vows to “God and Our Lady” (the Blessed Virgin Mary, Christ’s Mother). They swore to be obedient to the master of the order, to preserve their physical chastity, and live without personal property. They also promised to keep the customs of the order, to help to conquer the Holy Land of Jerusalem, never to leave the order without permission from the master, and never to be in a situation where a Christian might be wrongfully deprived of his or her possessions through their authority or advice. When they had 1  Helen J. Nicholson, “Evidence of the Templars’ Religious Practice from the Records of the Templars’ Estates in Britain and Ireland in 1308,” in Communicating the Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of Sophia Menache, ed. Iris Shagrir, Benjamin Z. Kedar, and Michel Balard, Crusades Subsidia 11 (London: Routledge, 2018), 50–63.

34  Chapter 3 made these promises, they were welcomed into the house and promised “the bread and water and poor clothing of the house and much pain and suffering.” Although Jacques de Vitry, bishop of Acre (d. 1240), suggested that some brothers joined a military-religious order to gain prestige and an easier life, the order’s official line was that life would not be easy, and that members could expect to sacrifice all their own interests for the sake of God and Our Lady. Although they formed an active rather than a praying religious order, the Templars expected to focus their lives on prayer and serving God. Their regulations show that their daily timetable was based on the timetable of the monastic Rule of St. Benedict, with prayers to be said at fixed times during the day, known as the “Hours.” If brothers could not say the Hours in chapel because they were travelling on the order’s business, they should recite the Lord’s Prayer at the appropriate times. They should also say the Lord’s Prayer when they went to bed, before and after meals, and in a daily service for the members of the order and their benefactors, living and dead. Their outer appearance reflected their inner lives. Like all religious men and women who had taken the three vows, they wore a uniform or “habit” to mark them out from the rest of society. All members wore a long, dark tunic, with a cloak or mantle over it with a red cross on the left breast. Knight-brothers had a white mantle; everyone else wore a dark-coloured mantle, but it was the white mantle that was most famous. Templar knights and serving- or sergeant-­brothers were also noted for their beards, and—at least according to twelfth-century writers—their short hair. Priests, however, were expected to be clean-shaven. Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux had noted in his letter in praise of the new knighthood that the Templars led an austere lifestyle and that their clothing and armour was undecorated, in contrast to secular knights’ flamboyant appearance. Although the Templars’ regulations imply that some Templars were tempted by fine clothes—because the regulations prohibit them—overall the Templars appear to have stuck with this

Beliefs  35

image of austerity. Nothing should be wasted on themselves; all possible money should be saved for the help of the Holy Land. The exception to this was in their attitude to divine worship. The Templars and their patrons noted the fine decoration of their chapels, their valuable plate, and the good service offered by their priests. The inventories taken after the Templars’ arrests in 1307 and 1308 reveal that many of their chapels were filled with beautiful fabrics and objects: priestly vestments, altar frontals, coloured banners, gold and silver plate, candlesticks and lamps, lovely reliquaries, images and statues of the saints, crosses and crucifixes, and liturgical books. Some of the chapels were used by the Templars alone, some also acted as parish churches, while yet others were attached to Templar houses where no Templars lived and so primarily operated to serve the parish community or patronal families. In the Templars’ chapels in the Crown of Aragon (for example) the holy relics included crosses containing (allegedly) fragments of Christ’s cross, cloth from Christ’s tunic, and relics from a wide range of saints. The Templars owned many relics of the True Cross, as well as having the cross on their habit, demonstrating their great devotion to Christ’s Cross.2 The chapel inventories of 1307–8 also mention images of Christ, the apostles, and other saints, especially the Blessed Virgin Mary: beautifully-decorated diptychs, Mary holding Christ in her arms, crosses with Mary alongside, images of Mary alone, and images of Mary over the altar. The Templars had an image of the Blessed Virgin and the Christ child at their church of Santa María la Blanca at Villalcázar de Sirga in Palencia, Castile, that was reported to perform miracles. The Templars of Pontferrada in Castile were credited with the discovery of the “Virgen de la Encina,” an image of the Virgin and Child reportedly found hidden in a holm oak. 2  Jochen Schenk, “The Cult of the Cross in the Order of the Temple,” in As Ordens Militares: freires, guerreiros, cavaleiros. Actas do VI Encontro sobre Ordens Militares, ed. Isabel Cristina Ferreira Fernandes (Palmela: GEeOS/Município de Palmela, 2012), 207–19.

36  Chapter 3 The list of saints set out at the end of the French translation of the Latin Rule shows that the Templars celebrated the same feast days as the rest of the Church, although some had particular relevance for a Latin Christian religious order based in Jerusalem: May 3 (the finding of the True Cross in Jerusalem in AD/CE 335) and July 22 (the coronation of Godfrey de Bouillon in 1099 as first Latin Christian ruler of Jerusalem). The Templars paid particular attention to saints venerated in their local area: in Paris, for example, where the Cistercians promoted the cult of St. Ursula and the 11,000 virgin martyrs, the Templars venerated a relic of one of the virgins. The Templars of Modena included among the saints’ days that they observed the feast days of local bishops and St. Euphemia, whose relic had been discovered in nearby Piacenza; although the Templars also claimed to hold their own relics of this Byzantine martyr at their Castle Pilgrim in the Latin East, where it was noted by several pilgrim accounts. They also held the head of the martyr St. Policarp, which had been given to the order by the abbot of the Lord’s Temple in Jerusalem for safekeeping, and they were actively involved in promoting local saints’ cults in Portugal and elsewhere. The surviving frescoes from former Templar churches show martyr-saints who could inspire them to stand firm in their faith and give their lives in the struggle against non-Christians, such as St. George and St. Katherine of Alexandria. Given that they were likely to die in battle against non-Christians, it is not surprising that the Templars venerated martyr-saints. That said, although some contemporary accounts of the Templars’ battles against Muslims in the Latin East depicted the dead brothers as martyrs, the Templars’ own surviving letters did not depict them in this way. The Templars memorialized all their dead members in a church service every day, but there is no evidence that they gave preference to those who had died in battle, or identified any of their brothers as martyrs over and above the rest. The martyr-saints were also important to the Templars because they gave a valuable spiritual lesson. The virtues

Beliefs  37

of George, Euphemia, and Ursula’s maidens included chastity, patience, long-suffering, modesty, and humility. New recruits to the order were far more likely to embody the virtues expected in a warrior: self-confidence, aggression, the desire to seek their own honour and glory, and a tendency to react violently if insulted. These warrior qualities, valuable as they could be in combat, could be damaging to the community of brothers, undermining discipline in the house and on the battlefield, where the brothers must fight as a unit under the command of a leader, not as a group of independent glory-seekers. These more passive saintly virtues could help to transform new recruits into an effective military force and dedicated religious men.3 It is well known that some of the churches built by the Templars in Europe had more-or-less circular naves, echoing the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Other religious orders and individuals in the West also built circular-naved churches, some at around the same time as the Templars— following the capture of Jerusalem in 1099—and some in earlier centuries. Although these churches were apparently intended to mimic the church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Templars did not devise any special liturgies for them. The 1129 Latin Rule and the French translation of the Rule instructed the brothers to follow “the canonical institution and regular custom of the Holy City;” which meant that they adopted the liturgy used by the canons of the church 3  Helen Nicholson, “Saints Venerated in the Military Orders,” in Selbstbild und Selbstverständnis der geistlichen Ritterorden, ed. Roman Czaja and Jürgen Sarnowsky, Ordines Militares: Colloquia Torunensia Historica 13 (Toruń: Nicolaus Copernicus University Press, 2005), 91–113; Helen Nicholson, “The Head of St Euphemia: Templar Devotion to Female Saints,” in Gendering the Crusades, ed. Susan B. Edgington and Sarah Lambert (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001), 108–20; Esther Dehoux, “Vaincre le dragon. Saint Georges et les Templiers,” in Images et ornements autour des ordres militaires au moyen âge: culture visuelle et culte des saints (France, Espagne du Nord, Italie), ed. Damien Carraz and Esther Dehoux (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Midi, 2016), 181–92.

38  Chapter 3 of the Holy Sepulchre. This liturgy was developed from Latin Christian liturgies used in Europe, and was also followed by the Hospitallers and the Carmelite Friars. However, what evidence survives from Europe indicates that the Templars outside the Latin East adopted the liturgy followed in the diocese where they lived. In this case, European Templar liturgical manuscripts would be just like those used by everyone else.4 That aside, most Templar churches in Europe would not have followed a Templar liturgy for the simple reason that the priests were not Templars. As few Templar houses in the West had their own priest-brothers, they had to hire priests, who would have followed the local liturgy. Again, where the Templars appointed priests to their parish churches, these priests had to be approved by the diocesan bishop and would have followed local practice. The Templars’ role in church services would have been as spectators rather than active participants, because most Templars did not know Latin. Only where Templars had access to liturgical books translated into their own language could they join in the singing. Perhaps, however, they could take part in processions: their regulations refer to processions and the inventories of 1307–8 mention processional candles, banners, and copes. A liturgy that was produced for the Templars in the Latin East sets out processions around Jerusalem, which would have been made by the Templars’ priests but could have been accompanied by lay members. Of course, after Jerusalem was lost to Saladin in 1187 there could be no more processions there. Although the Templars were never noted for theological learning, they did attempt to educate their members in Christian doctrine. The Templars’ Rule of 1129 laid down that there should be sancta lectio, “holy reading,” during meals. The obvious holy reading would be from the Bible, but the major4  Sebastián Salvadó, “Templar Liturgy and Devotion in the Crown of Aragon,” in On the Margins of Crusading: the Military Orders, the Papacy and the Christian World, ed. Helen J. Nicholson, Crusades Subsidia 4 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 31–43.

Beliefs  39

ity of the Templars would not have understood it in Latin. In the third quarter of the twelfth century two of the leading Templars in England, Richard de Hastings and Osto de SaintOmer, commissioned a translation of the Old Testament Book of Judges from Latin into Anglo-Norman French. This book of slaughter and battle describes how God’s Chosen People defended the Promised Land in the years after its conquest and the need to keep faith with God, and so would have been appropriate listening for the Templars. Brother Henry d’Arcy, commander of Temple Bruer in Lincolnshire between 1161 and 1174, commissioned translations of other edifying works from Latin into Anglo-Norman French: a version of the “Lives of the Fathers” (the deeds of early Christians); an account of the future coming of Antichrist; a version of the well-known account of St. Paul’s visit to Hell; and the popular legend of the Life of St. Thaïs, a converted prostitute. These were relatively short and accessible works rather than profound theology, suitable for an audience of deeply devout lay people.5 Although opportunities for self-education were fewer than in a monastic house, members of the order did have some access to educational reading material. The inventories of 1307–8 reveal that Templar houses held many books. Most of these were liturgical books, but houses in Aragon, England, France, and Ireland also owned copies of the “Lives of the Fathers,” legends of the saints, books of the Bible, historical legends, and—in individual houses—the dialogues of Pope Gregory the Great, a history of King Louis IX of France, saint and crusader, a “book of beasts,” and a “Brut of England written in French,” possibly a French version of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s history of the kings of Britain. There were also 5  Le livre des Juges. Les cinq textes de la version française faite au xiie siècle pour les chevaliers du Temple, ed. Le marquis d’Albon (Lyon: Société des bibliophiles Lyonnois, 1913); R. C. D. Perman, “Henri d’Arci: the Shorter Works,” in Studies in Medieval French Presented to Alfred Ewert in Honour of his Seventieth Birthday, ed. E. A. Francis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 279–321; The Templars, trans. Barber and Bate, 111–15.

40  Chapter 3 some more practical books, perhaps intended for use among the surrounding community: a book on pastoral care, a book on surgery, and a book on the ritual for baptizing children. The Templars appear to have taken their religious vocation very seriously. Under interrogation in London in October 1309, Brother Imbert or Humbert Blanc, commander of Auvergne, declared that he did not believe that any other religious order believed or ever would believe better in the sacrament of the altar than the Templars did. But he admitted that mistakes had been made, and he corrected an error that the grand commander of England had made about the order’s procedures. In English chapter meetings (that is, the order’s regular formal management meetings), the presiding officer told the brothers present that he asked God to absolve them of all the faults that they had been afraid to confess, and he pardoned them of these so far as he was able. In contrast, the French regulations stated that the presider should tell the brothers present that he asked God to absolve them of all the faults that they had not been afraid to confess, and he pardoned them of these so far as he was able. Presumably a copyist had missed out the word “not” in the version used in England, but despite their piety the English Templars had not noticed the error. In effect, the English Templars were following the practice of silent confession now followed by the Church of England. This was not an error of doctrine or a blasphemy; it was an error of ignorance that was corrected as soon as Imbert Blanc pointed it out. The Templars’ regulations stated that where there were four or more brothers in a house there should be a chapter meeting every Sunday. In 1307–8 many Templar houses housed only one or two brothers, and many were leased out to tenants and had no Templars at all, but perhaps four was an average community in the Templars’ European houses away from the frontiers. How could just four brothers maintain their community as “fellow-knights of Christ”? The answer is that many other people lived in, were employed in, or were associated with the Templars’ houses, forming a community that ate and prayed together.

Beliefs  41

In addition to brother-knights and brother-sergeants (also known as serving brothers, who could be fighting men supporting the knights, or craftsmen, or servants), from 1139 the papal bull Omne datum optimum allowed the Templars to recruit priests as full members of the order, although their numbers remained relatively small. There were also some sisters in the order: some solitary individuals in individual houses, such as “the sister” (otherwise nameless) at the commandery of Payns in 1307, some larger groups, as at Rourell in 1198, and from 1272 one nunnery affiliated to the Templars at Mühlen in Germany. Associate members of the order could live in or outside the house. The papal bull Milites Templi of 1144 allowed the Templars to have a confraternity of supporters who made an annual payment to the order and might give other gifts. In return for their generosity a seventh part of the penance due for their confessed sins was remitted, and at their death they would receive Christian burial (provided that they were not personally excommunicated at the time). They were included in the Templars’ daily prayers for all their benefactors. Some benefactors went further and gave themselves to a Templar house, taking a vow of obedience to the order and undertaking to join the order as full members at some point. Meanwhile, they might live in a Templar house and wear a form of the Templar habit. Still other associates made a donation to the order in return for a corrody (an allowance) of food, clothing, cash, and perhaps accommodation for themselves, family members and/or servants, for the rest of their lives. Each house would also have employed servants, to wait on the members of the order (the sister at Payns had a maid, Hersante), to look after the house, cook, and clean, as clerks to keep records, and as bailiffs to manage their estates. On rural estates there would be large numbers of farmworkers with various skills, who might live in lodgings within the manor complex or in their own houses, and probably came into the hall for their main meal. On the frontiers of Christendom there were slaves who were captives taken in war. Because of the scarcity of priest-brothers in the order, most

42  Chapter 3 houses would also need to employ a priest. Servants and slaves would need to eat within the house; priests might live in, or only attend when needed. A Templar house would also give hospitality to travellers. When all these people were assembled together, there could have been a substantial community in a Templar house, even where there were only two or three brothers in residence. The associate members would share the Templars’ motivation and ideals. The employees were also expected to align themselves with the Templars’ interests: regulations from the late thirteenth century indicate that the servants were expected to make a promise to God, “Our Lady Saint Mary,” and all God’s saints, male and female, to serve the house loyally and well.6 So even where there were just a few Templars, they were surrounded by a larger community which shared meals and, even if only to a limited extent, their beliefs and prayers.

6  The Catalan Rule of the Templars, trans. Judi Upton-Ward (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003), 98–101, section 203.

Chapter 4

Battle

The Templars’ primary function was to protect Christians: either Christian pilgrims, as stated by Archbishop William of Tyre, or Christian territory, as recorded by Ernoul–Bernard. Writers of epic, romance, and satire referred to the Templars’ military deeds as famous across Christendom. The author of the so-called Itinerarium peregrinorum 1, written by an English crusader or crusaders early in the third crusade (1189–92), declared of the Templars that none were more illustrious than they. Yet contemporary commentators recorded remarkably little detail of the Templars’ military engagements with the non-Christian enemy, either in the Latin East or in the Iberian Peninsula. This was partly due to the nature of conflict in these regions. Rather than constant battle, the Franks of Outremer and the neighbouring Muslims kept up raids against each other, plundering each other’s territory and carrying off goods and slaves, but seldom engaging in major battles. Likewise, in the Iberian Peninsula the Templars were generally involved in raids on Muslim territory rather than full-scale battle, which occurred only rarely. In major conflicts, as they provided only a small part of the royal army their deeds could pass unnoticed. That said, because they depicted themselves as defenders of Christendom in their alms-collecting campaigns and newsletters to their supporters in Europe, when defeat came they were most likely to be blamed.

44  Chapter 4

Warfare in the Middle East In the late eleventh century, when the first crusade arrived in the Middle East, the region was not predominantly Muslim. The population was divided between Greek and other eastern Christians, Jews, Muslims, and minority religious groups which did not fit precisely into any of the three great religions. The Muslims were not united against other religions and were not necessarily anti-Frankish. The conflicts in this region were not fundamentally over religion; the key factor at stake was the need for land. What those who farmed this land and traded across it wanted from government were not so much rulers who followed their own religion as rulers who would keep the peace, so that they could carry on their agriculture and trade. Although the peoples living in the Middle East were deeply religious, they did not live in homogenous religious groups. Even the armies that fought for the rulers of this region were of mixed religions and cultural backgrounds. The Franks— including the Templars and Hospitallers—employed native light cavalry archers known as turcopoles, who fought alongside their heavy cavalry. Within the orders of the Temple and Hospital, the turcopoles were sufficiently significant to have a brother-knight assigned as their commanding officer, the turcopolier.1 The Frankish military leaders, including the Templars, had regular diplomatic ties with Muslims. The Arab-Syrian prince Usāmā ibn Munqidh called the Templars his friends and described how when he visited Jerusalem they allowed him to pray in one of their chapels at their headquarters in the former Aqsa mosque. This friendship, however, did not prevent the Templars of Gaza nearly killing Usāmā in 1154 in an ambush. In 1244 Emperor Frederick II bitterly criticized the Franks of Outremer for abandoning his treaty with the sul1  Yuval Harari, “The Military Role of the Frankish Turcopoles: A Reassessment,” Mediterranean Historical Review 12, no. 1 (1997): 75–116.

Battle  45

tan of Egypt in favour of an alliance with the ruler of Damascus, and accused the Templars of playing host to Muslims within their walls and allowing their guests to follow their religious practices—yet he himself had negotiated with the sultan of Egypt and made a peace treaty with him in 1229. The Anglo-Welsh cleric Walter Map, writing in the 1180s or 1190s, claimed that a Muslim prince named Salius converted to Christianity and joined the Templars. Conversely, the Templars’ regulations indicate that disaffected Templars would join the Muslims, but any Templar who converted to Islam was expelled from the order. The Franks, including the Templars, remained distinct from their Muslim neighbours in their diet, as well as their religious practices: archaeological evidence from their houses shows that the Templars ate pork and bacon, and drank alcohol. Muslim and Christian worked with each other when it was to their advantage, but they remained separate.

The Templars’ Roles in Combat The Templars’ main military role was to support and supplement the armies of secular rulers fighting non-Christians, especially the armies of the king of Jerusalem, but also the kings of Aragon and the other kings of the Iberian Peninsula, and in 1241 their forces assisted the king of Hungary and the duke of Silesia against the invading Mongols. Templars not only assisted kings on the battlefield, but acted as diplomats to eastern and western courts, attended royal courts, and acted as witnesses to documents issued by the royal chancery. In the twelfth century, at least two masters of the Temple had previously been ministers of the king of Jerusalem: Odo (Eudes in French) de Saint-Amand and Gerard de Ridefort. Because of their loyalty, kings regarded Templars as trustworthy custodians of castles on the frontier. For instance, when Gaza was fortified in 1149 after the second crusade, it was entrusted to the Templars; and the rulers of Portugal and of Aragon entrusted the Templars with several key fortresses.

46  Chapter 4 Yet, although the Templars had considerable political influ­­ence, they were never in control of military policy. They were only ever support forces, both in the Middle East and in the Iberian Peninsula. They supplied forces to King James I of Aragon’s invasions of the Balearic Islands and Valencia (1229–38), and they accompanied him when he set out on crusade in 1269, but the king’s account makes clear that their role was to assist and advise him, not to take the lead. Serving the king meant that the Templars did not have agency: when a king failed, they failed with him. For example, in 1129 King Baldwin II of Jerusalem’s expedition to capture Damascus came to nothing; possibly the Muslims in Damascus bought off the Franks, paying them to go away. Nearly twenty years later, when the second crusade besieged Damascus in 1148, contemporary western writers recorded that the Damascenes paid the crusaders to withdraw the siege. On both occasions, western commentators blamed the Templars for the unsuccessful outcome, accusing them of lying, or treachery: as if they were so influential that they could persuade a king to withdraw against his will. In fact, the Templars would have had little say in the matter. The fact that the Templars were frequently blamed for defeats which clearly were not their fault is testimony to their reputation as great warriors, as contemporaries apparently believed that no enemy could defeat them—they could fail only through their own errors. It is difficult to get past the criticisms to the Templars’ original actions. For example, Archbishop William of Tyre, writing after 1167, described how at the siege of Ascalon in 1153 (when he was still a young man at university in Europe), the Templars jeopardized King Baldwin III’s attempt to capture the important port city of Ascalon by breaking through the city walls and then preventing any other members of the royal army from following them, because they wanted the glory and booty from capturing the city for themselves. They were all killed. In fact, according to an eyewitness account recorded in the Low Countries, after the Templars broke into the city they fought their way into the central square and made a stand there, but the rest of the

Battle  47

Frankish force failed to follow them and they were all killed. In this case, Archbishop William appears to have twisted events to make the Templars appear self-interested and excuse the rest of the army for failing to support them.2 Archbishop William also recounted how King Amaury of Jerusalem (1163–74) entrusted a cave fortress in Transjordan in the kingdom of Jerusalem to the Templars. According to William, when Nūr al-Dīn’s general Shīrkūh came to attack it the Templar garrison surrendered without waiting for relief, and the king hanged all twelve of them as traitors. In fact it is very likely that this event never took place. Jochen Burgtorf has suggested that a castle was lost, but it did not belong to the Templars, and William’s story of the hanging of twelve Templars was an invention.3 A disputed succession and bitter disputes over policy led the master of the Temple to be blamed by some for the disastrous Battle of Hattin (July 4, 1187) at which Saladin’s forces decisively defeated the army of the kingdom of Jerusalem, took prisoner the king and several leading Frankish nobles, killed others and executed every Templar and Hospitaller they captured. The author of the Itinerarium peregrinorum 1 blamed the defeat on the dispute between Count Raymond III of Tripoli and Guy de Lusignan over the crown of the kingdom of Jerusalem. Other English writers blamed Raymond of Tripoli for making a peace treaty with Saladin, calling Raymond a traitor. In contrast, a contemporary account preserved in Ernoul–Bernard supported Raymond and blamed Gerard de Ridefort, the Master of the Temple, for advising King Guy to lead the army to relieve Count Raymond’s city of Tiberias, 2  Helen Nicholson, “Before William of Tyre: European Reports on the Military Orders’ Deeds in the East, 1150–1185,” in The Military Orders, vol. 2: Welfare and Warfare, ed. Helen J. Nicholson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 111–18.

3  Jochen Burgtorf, “The Templars and the Kings of Jerusalem,” in The Templars and their Sources, ed. Karl Borchardt, Karoline Döring, Philippe Josserand, and Helen J. Nicholson, Crusades Subsidia 10 (London: Routledge, 2017), 25–37 at 31–34.

48  Chapter 4 under siege by Saladin. This account implied that Guy was too weak to make a sound judgement. If Master Gerard de Ridefort’s advice on the eve of Hattin was ill-advised, his opponent Count Raymond showed no more prudence: Kevin Lewis’s assessment of Count Raymond’s career remarks on his “astonishing lack of judgement both in battle and at court.”4 But it was the anti-Gerard version of events—written in French, in a racy, compelling narrative—which became better known in Europe, and was used in the early nineteenth century by Walter Scott for his novel The Talisman, and again in the present century for the film Kingdom of Heaven (2005). Defeated crusaders found a ready scapegoat for their failures in the Templars and Hospitallers. In 1239 the Templars advised an army of French crusaders not to attack Gaza; the crusaders declined to take their advice, and launched an attack which led to a disastrous defeat. The military orders tried but failed to rescue them. After the defeat, Philip de Nanteuil, who had been captured by the Muslims, complained that the military orders had not come to the crusaders’ assistance—which was untrue. Matthew Paris described the biting criticism aimed at the Templars and Hospitallers in 1250 during King Louis IX’s first crusade, when they advised crusader leaders not to attack the city of Mansurah: they were accused of deceiving Christendom, wanting to prolong the war with Islam, poisoning crusaders and betraying them to the enemy. Matthew depicted the Templars and Hospitallers defending themselves and asking why they should have joined a religious order with the intention of betraying Christendom and losing their souls. In the resulting battle, almost every Christian was either killed or captured. A contemporary Old French poem recounting the disaster describes how Templar brothers fought valiantly and died alongside the poem’s hero, the English nobleman William Longespee. One of them, Brother Richard, swears never to desert the hero while he is 4  Kevin James Lewis, The Counts of Tripoli and Lebanon in the Twelfth Century: Sons of Saint-Gilles, Rulers of the Latin East (London: Routledge, 2017), 258–60, 264–68; quotation at 275.

Battle  49

alive and only gives way to death after William himself has been killed, falling over William’s body. This heroic story gives the lie to the accusations of error and sabotage against the Templars and Hospitallers, and corroborates the respect in which their Muslim opponents held them. It seems reasonable to conclude that the Templars and Hospitallers were not trying to prolong war, and that their overall strategy was simply to do whatever was necessary to defend Christendom and Christians, which sometimes means seeking peace rather than war. In 1309 Grand Master Jacques de Molay told the Pontifical Commission which was interrogating him about the Templars’ alleged heresies that as a young man who had recently arrived in the East as a new member of the Order of the Temple (in the 1270s) he had been critical of the then Grand Master’s policy of maintaining peace with the Mamluk sultan, but he had since realised that the Grand Master was right. Yet whenever opportunity arose the grand masters of the Order cooperated with other leaders in the crusader states to urge western leaders to come to the East: in 1260 the grand masters of all three leading military-religious orders and other religious and secular leaders of the kingdom of Jerusalem wrote to Charles of Anjou (soon to be King of Sicily and southern Italy) that as the recent Mongol invasion had thrown the Muslims into disarray it should be easy to win Jerusalem if all Christians acted promptly.5 The Templars and Hospitallers do not appear to have had any independently conceived grand scheme to enable them to achieve their aims, as the two leading military orders sometimes adopted conflicting means to their joint end, notably in the 1240s when the Templars joined an alliance with the Muslim ruler of Damascus while the Hospitallers supported an alliance with the sultan of Egypt. 5  Philippe Josserand, Jacques de Molay: Le dernier grand-maître des Templiers (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2019), 100; Charles Langlois, “Lettre à Charles d’Anjou sur les affaires de Terre Sainte (Acre, 22 avril 1260),” Bibliothèque de l’école des chartes 78 (1917): 487–490; Jean Dunbabin, Charles I of Anjou: Power, Kingship and State-Making in Thirteenth-Century Europe (Harlow: Longman, 1998), 4.

50  Chapter 4 As the Templars’ military activity formed only a small part of the overall activity of the Franks in the Holy Land it has no overarching narrative of its own: it is a series of anecdotes of Templar involvement in this or that raid, siege, or battle, a grand assault, a great charge, a famous last stand. Viewed outside the wider context of royal campaigns and strategy, reports of raids can appear to be little more than a catalogue: now the Templars lost, now they won, and the results may have had little connection to the state of the Franks’ territories at the time. For example, Archbishop William of Tyre described a raid against an invading Turkish force near Hebron in 1139. The raid was led by the second master of the Temple, Robert de Craon (d. 1149), while a secular knight named Bernard Vacher carried the king’s banner. The Turks won a decisive victory, and among the dead was Odo de Monte Falconis, a brother of the Temple and (according to William, who was only a child when this took place) an exceptional man whose death grieved everyone. Under 1163, Archbishop William recorded that Nūr al-Dīn was in the region of Tripoli when he encountered two noble Franks from Aquitaine and their forces. Nūr al-Dīn was forced to flee and barely escaped, leaving behind his sword and considerable booty. At the end of the account William mentioned that one of the leaders of the expedition was Gilbert de Lacy, a nobleman experienced in arms, who was commander of the brothers of the knighthood of the Temple in those parts. In the mid-thirteenth century Matthew Paris recorded an attack by the Templars and Hospitallers on the castle of Darbsak in 1237. This castle in the Amanus March to the north of Antioch had been held by the Templars before Saladin captured it in 1188. The Templars hoped to recover it, but rode into an ambush and were heavily defeated. According to Matthew, the Templars had been warned of the ambush and some wanted to turn back, but the commander of Antioch, Brother William de Montferrat, refused to take their advice. The contemporary Annales de Terre Sancte recounted that in June 1264 the Hospitallers and Templars went on a raid from Acre to the area of Ramla and Jaffa to recover the castellan of

Battle  51

Jaffa, who had been captured by the Muslims. They raided as far south as Ascalon, where they encountered a Muslim force three hundred strong, led by two emirs. They defeated this force, killing twenty-eight of the Muslim warriors and the two emirs, and returned to Acre with much booty. It is not always clear whether these expeditions had any lasting military impact. Some raids were remembered only because they were recorded in the Templars’ regulations as examples of what could go wrong on the battlefield: Brother Jacques de Ravane, commander of the palace of Acre, made a raid without permission and was defeated, with some of his men captured; some brothers charged without permission to rescue the turcopolier, who they thought was about to be ambushed, but lost their horses; and Brother Baldwin de Borages, commander of the knights, refused to turn back in the face of Muslim attack, and when he and his force were completely surrounded lowered the banner to charge, but only he and two brothers escaped alive. In Aragon, a commander led his brothers out against Muslim raiders but then failed to pay attention to a brother who told him that the Muslims had gone a different way, and missed the Muslims completely; the provincial chapter censured him severely. These raids contributed to the order’s group memory and may have helped to frame future tactics. One raid even aroused the ire of the pope: in 1261 a raid into Muslim territory in northern Galilee failed, the Templars lost all their equipment, and all the leaders of the raid were captured except for the Templar marshal, Brother Stephen de Cissey, who escaped. Stephen de Cissey was blamed for instigating the raid and accused of not fighting; when summoned to the papal court, he refused to go; the pope excommunicated him and the case dragged on until at least 1266. One expedition awarded particular significance by both sides was the Franks’ attack on Nablūs in 1242. The Franks killed the Muslim and Christian population and destroyed the mosque. This was in retaliation for previous raids by al-Nāsir Dā’ūd, lord of Kerak: he had sacked Bethlehem, killed the Christians and carried their children into slavery, and attacked a convoy of pilgrims, killing them and plundering their goods.

52  Chapter 4 The Templars represented the attack on Nablūs as a great triumph, but it may have stimulated al-Nāsir’s ally the sultan of Egypt, al-Sālih Ayyūb, to ally with the Khwarizmians, who went on to invade Syria, capture Jerusalem, and destroy the army of the kingdom of Jerusalem at the battle of La Forbie.6 In contrast to most raiding, pitched battle could give a quick and decisive result. In battle the Templars and the other military-religious orders acted as storm troops, charging as a solid phalanx to break up the enemy’s lines. The Templars’ discipline and courage in battle won them a great reputation both among the Muslims and in Latin Europe. An eyewitness account of the battle of Montgisard in 1177 described the devastating effect of the Templars’ charge on Saladin’s army, comparing Odo de Saint-Amand, master of the Temple, to the Old Testament Jewish hero Judas Maccabaeus. During the march of the French crusaders through Asia Minor during the second crusade, the Templars took over command of the ill-disciplined army and turned it into an effective fighting force. During the third crusade, they and the Hospitallers took command of the vanguard and the rear-guard of the army as it marched from Acre to Jaffa. Again, during the fifth crusade’s campaign in Egypt (1218–21) the Templars were noted as being the last to retreat from the battlefield, and their discipline enabled them to react quickly to a Muslim incursion into the crusaders’ camp and repel the enemy. In the early thirteenth century, Guiot de Provins, a poet turned Cluniac monk, was in two minds about the Templars. He described them as “most doughty men” who would never flee in battle, but confessed that he himself would run away: “I would much rather be a coward, and alive, than dead and the most esteemed man in the world.” Guiot summed up the problem that the Templars faced from their own side: they them­ selves were well-disciplined and would not run away from battle, but they could not always rely on the rest of the Franks to 6  Peter Jackson, “The Crusades of 1239–41 and their Aftermath,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 50 (1987): 32–60 at 51–56.

Battle  53

support them. The siege of Ascalon in 1153 is a case in point: the Templars broke into the city, but as the rest of the army did not follow they were all killed. At the battle of Hattin in July 1187, according to a contemporary letter to the master of the Hospitallers in Italy, the rest of the Franks did not follow the Templars when they charged Saladin’s army, and the Templars were surrounded by the Muslim troops and killed or captured and then executed. In a battle outside Acre on October 4, 1189 the Templars charged Saladin’s forces, but went on too far ahead for the rest of the crusader army to follow them, were surrounded and cut to pieces. Although the shock of a well-judged charge could enable the Templars to defeat a numerically superior army, there was a limit to the advantage that discipline could give over numbers. At the Spring of the Cresson on May 1, 1187 a small force of Templars and Hospitallers was defeated by the enemy’s sheer weight of numbers. As the Templars normally formed part of any large expeditionary force against the Muslims in Outremer or the Iberian Peninsula, they were frequently involved in sieges of fortified cities and of smaller fortresses. Although raiding could wear down the enemy, only the capture of fortresses could win control of the land. Contemporary commentators described the Templars’ leaders giving military advice during sieges, and the Templars taking part in assaults. At Acre in 1189–91 (during the third crusade), and in the siege of Damietta of 1218–19 (during the fifth crusade), the Templars built siege engines which could bombard the walls of the fortress. In the course of the siege of Damietta the crusaders also prepared ships to cross the river and attack the walls of the city. One of the Templars’ ships was caught in the current and thrown close to the enemy bank, where the enemy attacked it with grappling irons and Greek fire. The Templars on board fought back bravely, but at last the Egyptian forces succeeded in boarding the ship to fight the Templars hand-to-hand. The ship was holed—observers did not know whether the Egyptians or the Templars did this— and went to the bottom of the river, drowning everyone on board, Egyptians and crusaders.

54  Chapter 4 As owners of many fortresses, the Templars often had to defend their strongholds against siege by the Muslims. Saladin’s secretary ‘Imād al-Dīn described the Templars’ fortresses as impregnable and like lairs of wild animals. Although the Templars’ castles in the kingdom of Jerusalem fell to him, albeit usually only after a long siege, in July 1188 Saladin was unable to capture the Templars’ tower at Tortosa. Their castle of Darbsak in the Amanus March surrendered after a siege of eleven days, after Saladin’s forces had mined one of the towers of the outer rampart. Baghras surrendered after a long bombardment; ‘Imād al-Dīn, who was astounded by the castle’s strong position, was amazed that the Templars ever gave in, but Saladin’s offer of terms—allowing the Templars to withdraw to Antioch in peace—had been a powerful incentive to surrender. In 1266 Sultan Baybars of Egypt agreed that the Templar garrison of Safed could surrender their castle with a similar promise of “life and limb,” but then had the defenders seized as they left the castle and executed. In 1291, in the final defence of the city of Acre, when the city fell to the invading Mamluk army the Templars retreated into their fortress within the city and withstood the invaders for several days, until—realizing that they would not be relieved—they risked all in a last stand and were either killed or captured. Such glorious last stands required the agreement of the garrison, however. In 1268 when the Templar castle of Baghras came under siege by Sultan Baybars of Egypt (who had just captured the city of Antioch), the commander of Baghras wanted to defend the castle and the other Templars there agreed with him, but the mercenaries said that they would leave, as they did not want to die. Terms of surrender were agreed and the garrison withdrew. The commander and brothers were then censured by the master and convent for surrendering before they had received formal permission from their headquarters at Acre, and were formally punished by loss of their habits for a year and a day.7 7  Catalan Rule, trans. Upton-Ward, 80–87, section 180.

Battle  55

Even the Templars, skilled warriors as they were, sometimes had to retreat. The non-fighting sergeant brothers, if they saw that the brothers were losing and there was nothing they could do to help, were allowed to withdraw with the equipment, so that it would not fall into enemy hands. The fighting brothers were not allowed to withdraw as long as the order’s banner was upright. Any brother who did retreat before the banner was lowered would be expelled from the order. The Templars were (as an anonymous pilgrim wrote before 1187), generally the last to retreat from a battlefield, and with the brothers of the other military-religious orders they protected the rest of the Christian forces while they withdrew. Their casualties were always high when the Franks or the crusaders were defeated. In the end, the Templars were unsuccessful in the Latin East: they and the Hospitallers were unable to prevent the fall of the crusader states to the Mamluks of Egypt in 1291. Yet it was not the failings of the Templars, the Hospitallers, or the Frankish nobility as a whole that brought about the end of the crusader states but the change of regime in Egypt in 1250–60 and the changing situation in central Asia that followed the Mongol invasions. The Templars and their Frankish contemporaries could not have done anything to prevent this. When the Franks’ territories in the Latin East were lost in 1291, the Templars’ remaining front in the Iberian Peninsula was not sufficient to justify their continued existence in the eyes of the rulers of Europe, as we will see in Chapter 6.

Chapter 5

Impact

The Templars were almost everywhere in medieval Europe: at royal courts, in towns, overseeing markets and fairs, taking care of parish churches, and supervising farm workers. They loaned money and offered safe deposit and money transfer facilities. They developed underproductive land, maintained flood defences, and provided employment for clerks, household servants, and farmworkers. They invested in modern technology, notably fulling mills. Their houses, scattered across the countryside, provided hospitality to travellers and distributed alms to the needy on three days a week. The Templars’ reason for existence was to defend Christendom and Christians, and to this end they used their European properties to raise money, supplies, and personnel for their military activities on the frontiers. Leading Templars in the Latin East sent regular newsletters to their brothers and leading secular and religious figures in Europe, with the latest news of their activities, an overview of events on the frontier, and requests for aid. Their alms-collectors travelled regularly around Europe, preaching and collecting donations. They had papal authority to visit churches under interdict once a year, and to judge from contemporary complaints they visited more often. Yet, their patrons, tenants, and estates away from the frontiers of Christendom also made demands on them. Although they were founded to fight physical battles in defence of Christians, by the time of the Templars’ arrests in

58  Chapter 5 1307 and 1308 the brothers in Latin Europe were spending a considerable amount of time and money providing post-mortem care for their patrons. They were known (in fact and in fiction) for providing fine tombs for their patrons. A substantial number of the chapels that they maintained, at least in England, supported priests who performed mass for the souls of past patrons; and a large proportion of these chapels did not also serve a Templar house—in other words, their primary purpose was to commemorate the Templars’ benefactors and provide post-mortem care for their souls.

Parish Work Templars were popular providers of pastoral care. One possible reason for this was that popes had allowed the brothers exemption from observing interdicts, so that they could keep their churches open when other local churches were closed. What was more, during the trial of the Templars in England, some non-Templar witnesses stated that the Templars lifted excommunications from their own people—employees, ass­ ociate members, and perhaps even tenants—without episcopal permission. If this allegation were true, it could make the Templars attractive masters for anyone liable to excommunication. Many of the Templars’ chapels became parish churches. They not only took over existing parishes but also established new ones, sometimes with and sometimes without the diocesan bishop’s approval. In practice, however, the fact that the Templars had care of a parish church would have made very little difference to the parishoners. As explained in Chapter 3, although the Templars appointed priests to these parish churches, because they had very few priest-brothers these parish priests would have been secular priests from the local diocese, following the same liturgical practices as other local priests. A few stories of healing miracles indicate that the Templars had a reputation for particular piety, which could benefit the lives of their local communities. A Templar commander

Impact  59

of Tomar used dust from the tomb of the Blessed Gil de Santarém to heal a young man of fits; a priest-brother of the Templars at Nicosia, holding a cross in his hand, exorcized devils from a woman of Montaro; Templars in Portugal held an all-night vigil for the healing of a demon-possessed man, who was healed when he touched a reliquary holding a saint’s relics; the Templars’ statue of Santa María la Blanca, at their commandery at Villalcázar de Sirga close to the pilgrimage route to Santiago, was credited with various miracles involving both pilgrims and more local people. On a more mundane level, the Templars’ confraternity (described in Chapter 3) provided spiritual and physical support for their patrons. Their corrody system enabled those with property to make provision for their old age, with food, clothing, and accommodation provided by the order in return for a one-off payment or gift of land. The Templars’ elderly servants could also receive a lifetime corrody. For others with no assets to buy security in their old age, the Templars—like other religious orders in Europe—provided social security through their regular handouts to all comers, on three days a week. The Templars’ regulations did not specifically command the brothers to provide hospitality to strangers, but it was a general duty on all members of society and especially on all religious orders to provide hospitality for travellers as required. In 1338, when the Hospitallers drew up a statement of income and expenses for their houses in England, a number of former Templar houses were regularly housing visitors: Wetherby in Yorkshire, Eagle, Willoughton, and Bruer in Lincolnshire, Garway in Herefordshire, Wilburgham in Cambridgeshire, Templecombe in Somerset, and Sandford in Oxfordshire. It is difficult to identify guesthouses at Templar properties, but there is enough evidence to show that hospitality took place: a reference in the “Life” of the Blessed Gil de Santarém (d. 1265) includes an incident when two Dominican friars visited the Templars’ house of Tomar, their most important house in Portugal, where they were invited to eat in the hospitium (hospice)—suggesting that this was nor-

60  Chapter 5 mal practice. In the inventories of Templar houses drawn up in 1307 and 1308 there are references to sheets for guests; there was a guestroom at the Templar house at Arles, and elsewhere “hospices” where servants lodged—but perhaps guests could also stay there. Accounts from the period of the Templars’ trial also refer to food being provided to visitors to Templar houses.

Estate Management In addition to giving hospitality and helping the poor, the Templars also employed men and women in their houses and on their estates. The records made for the kings of England and of France after the Templars’ arrests in 1307 and 1308 show that the Templars’ houses employed specialized craftsmen such as smiths, millers, ploughmen, carters, and animal herdsmen. Other workers, such as carpenters and roofers, were employed as required. Any personal servants at the Templar houses would have been laid off when the Templars were arrested, but there would still be a cook, someone in charge of the dairy, and clerks. A bailiff would be employed to oversee each estate or group of estates, along with a reeve, and a forester if there were woodland on the estate. Some specialized staff were taken on at appropriate times of year, such as a harvest-overseer for harvest, additional men to work carts in autumn, and women to collect straw after harvest, to milk the ewes after lambing, or to harvest grapes. The workers were paid with an allowance of grain and in cash; the French workers also received an allowance of wine. Farmworkers also received some payment in kind, such as gloves in autumn. On the English estates, the carters and ploughmen earned most, herdsmen less, and the maid or lad who made the pottage for the farmworkers earned least. For the cook and dairy-servant, tasks which could be undertaken by a man or a woman, wages were the same for equivalent work, whether the employee was male or female. The limited surviving evidence indicates that the French workers

Impact  61

were more generously paid than those in England, but all the English workers received good quality grain, in contrast to (for example) the employees of the Benedictine abbey of Glastonbury. The accounts from England do not name the Templars’ employees, but the French accounts do, revealing that there was a rapid turnover of workers, at least after the Templars’ arrest. Perhaps they were paid generously to discourage them from leaving to work elsewhere. The Templars also appear to have followed the best standards of estate management for their day, operating threecourse crop rotation, and using horse-ploughs or ox-ploughs depending on whichever operated most effectively on the local soils. Wherever possible they focused on wheat production, the highest-value grain with the highest nutritive content. In areas where wheat could not be profitably grown they raised sheep for their valuable wool, and followed the recommendations of contemporary experts for sheep herding and care. In their management of their estates and provision for their workers the Templars were effective and perhaps generous employers, although there was nothing extraordinary in their practices.1 The Templars were more unusual in investing in technology that could process a large volume of woollen cloth production. Like other landowners, they invested in the construction of wind mills and water mills to grind grain, but they also invested in fulling mills to finish woollen cloth. At a period when the population was low and labour was cheap, most cloth producers should have found mechanization of the fulling process was unprofitable. The Cistercians invested in fulling mills, but as their rule required them to live away from population centres they could not easily employ outside labour for fulling. The Templars, on the other hand, had many tenants and farmworkers who could have been employed to full wool. The fact that already by 1185 the Templars at Bar1  J. Michael Jefferson, The Templar Estates in Lincolnshire 1185–1565: Agriculture and Economy (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2020), pp. 79–80, 81, 84–86, 88, 229.

62  Chapter 5 ton near Temple Guiting in Gloucestershire and at Newsam in west Yorkshire had invested in constructing fulling mills suggests that a large volume of woollen cloth was being produced locally, so that they could gain a good return on their investment. They did not necessarily operate these fulling mills themselves, but leased them out to tenants, who presumably expected to make a handsome profit through operating them. Like other religious orders in Europe, the Templars also encouraged economic growth. Through their supporters’ generosity, religious orders had the capital to invest in developing land: draining marsh, clearing forest, and bringing unproductive land under the plough. The English royal officials’ accounts for the Templars’ lands after the Templars’ arrest in 1308 indicate that the Templars maintained sea defences in the low-lying lands alongside the Humber in east Yorkshire and southeast Essex, which the officials had to keep in repair after the Templars were arrested. In the Iberian Peninsula the Templars operated a settlement policy, offering favourable leases to encourage colonists to settle their underpopulated lands, and encouraging those colonists in turn to sub-lease their land to further colonists. On the same basis, in the thirteenth century the Templars acquired uncultivated land on the frontier between northeastern Germany and northwestern Poland; local bishops and secular lords hoped that they would make the land productive and develop the local economy. Their patrons also granted the Templars rights to hold markets on their lands (once a week) and fairs (once a year), where trade could take place, while the Templars benefitted from the dues they charged traders who attended.

Moneylending and Safe-Deposits Because the Templars stored cash and moved it long distances, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries they became the leading religious institution involved in lending cash, storing valuables, and transferring money from one country

Impact  63

to another.2 In particular, they acted as treasurers for kings, and providers of safe-deposits, which could look after money, jewels, documents, or anything else of value, including livestock and merchandise. Their house at Gardeny in the Crown of Aragon even had a “house of deposits” where anything valuable could be securely deposited, including gold, silver, jewels, documents, horses, mules, grain, and prisoners. The Templars could transfer money deposited with them to a third party on instructions from the depositor, which effectively allowed money transfers from the West to the East or the reverse. They also loaned money, on security of land or goods. Yet when the Templars in England were arrested at the start of 1308 there was little sign of financial activity: very little cash was found at Templar houses, and what was there was probably intended to pay the farmworkers. In England, just one large deposit was recorded: at Dunwich, where the parson of Brampton had deposited over a hundred pounds with the Templars for safekeeping. The king’s official who had taken charge at Dunwich returned the money to its owner. According to the accounts from individual counties, very little money was owed to the Templars in England: it seems that in the countryside and small towns the Templars were not making large loans, but were providing a service for people who needed to borrow small amounts. In contrast, the Templars in London and in Paris carried out important financial services for kings, nobles, bishops, and merchants. In France, the Templars gave financial assistance to King Louis VII during the second crusade, and the king deposited the royal treasure at the Temple of Paris while he was overseas; his son Philip Augustus instructed his offi2  For what follows, see: Alain Demurger, Les Templiers: une chevalerie chrétienne au moyen âge (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 376–81; A. J. Forey, The Templars in the Corona de Aragón (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 345, 346–50; Agnes Sandys, “The Fina­ ncial and Administrative Importance of the London Temple in the Thirteenth Century,” in Essays in Medieval History Presented to Thomas Frederick Tout, ed. A. G. Little and F. M. Powicke (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1925), 147–62.

64  Chapter 5 cials to deposit revenues at the Temple during his absence on the third crusade; and the Temple of Paris went on to act as the royal treasury throughout the thirteenth century, until King Philip IV of France moved the royal treasury to the Louvre in 1295 and appointed his own financial officers to run it. In 1303 he again made use of the Temple of Paris and Templars, but the Templars had less power than before 1295. In 1288, the Templar holding the office of royal treasury was responsible for receiving and accounting for taxes and debts due to the king, paying salaries due to royal officials, the kings’ regular expenses, loans made by the king, repayment of loans he had taken out, and wages to the king’s soldiers. The Templars had enormous potential power within the French government, and although there is no evidence that they ever abused it, it is understandable that by 1295 the king wished to take more control over his own finances. In England the Templars never held such power, although for many years from the reign of King Henry II (1154–1189) to King Henry III (1216–1272) the office of royal almoner was held by a Templar, who had responsibility for the king’s personal charitable giving. In 1188, organizing the levy of the “Saladin Tithe” which would help to finance the third crusade, King Henry II required that a Templar and Hospitaller should be included in the team of officials collecting the tithe in each parish. From at least 1185, the Templars’ house at New Temple, just outside London’s walls on the main road to Westminster, was used by the king as a safe-deposit for cash, valuable documents, books, jewels, and even wine. It was one of several “ordinary treasuries” where the king’s officials deposited the royal revenues. The Templars’ main houses in Portugal and Aragon were also used by their kings as safe-deposits, where the royal regalia were kept. The king, and merchants, used the New Temple in London to make payments at a distance through bills of exchange: money could be paid into the New Temple in London and paid out at any other Templar house in Christendom, or vice versa. Loans were specified as repayable at the New Temple in London. Bishops, nobles, and merchants also kept valu-

Impact  65

ables and goods in safe storage there. In the second half of the thirteenth century, the New Temple came to house legal and government records, and became a record office for the royal Chancery. The importance of the New Temple of London as a safe-deposit and the value of the material deposited there is evidenced by three royal raids on the treasury. The first was in 1232, when King Henry III demanded the Templars hand over the money they held on deposit from Hubert de Burgh, his former justiciar; the Templars refused, until Hubert himself agreed. In May 1263, King Henry III’s eldest son and heir, the Lord Edward, and a group of his friends talked their way into the treasury of the New Temple, broke open some of the storage chests and stole a thousand pounds. In September 1307 King Edward II confiscated the property of Walter Langton, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield and former royal treasurer, including his treasure deposited in the New Temple, which amounted to fifty thousand pounds of silver, plus gold, jewels, and precious stones. The boxes were broken open in the presence of the king and his comrade Piers Gaveston, and the king entrusted the money and treasure to Gaveston. The Templars were not the only military order in England that undertook financial services. The Hospital of St. John’s house at Clerkenwell was also used by kings to deposit jewels, property, and cash, and both made loans to the king. King Edward I of England (1272–1307) appointed a Hospitaller, Brother Joseph de Chauncy, rather than a Templar as his treasurer. Nevertheless, the New Temple remained the more important financial centre, and even after the dissolution of the Templars in England in 1311 it remained a place for repaying debts, recording legal processes and a safe-deposit for legal records. By the mid-fourteenth century, the Hospitallers were leasing most of the buildings there to lawyers, who came to refer to themselves as belonging to the “Inner Temple” (if they were based in the central courtyard of the complex) or the “Middle Temple” (if they were based in the outer courtyard). After King Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries the lawyers continued to rent the former New

66  Chapter 5 Temple, now from the Crown, until in 1608 they acquired the freehold. The Inner and Middle Temple now form two of London’s four Inns of Court; anyone wishing to become a barrister in England and Wales must join one of these Inns.

Royal Service Providing financial services was just one aspect of the Templars’ services for monarchs. They not only acted as advisors during crusades but also during peacetime. They and the Hospitallers maintained a presence at royal and papal courts, and fulfilled confidential roles such as papal cubicularius (the official in charge of the papal bedchamber) and porter (dooror gate-keeper), as well as acting as almoner for kings, as already mentioned. They also acted as diplomats; as clerics as well as knights, they commanded respect and were less likely to be taken prisoner by hostile action. All religious orders had to maintain good relationships with monarchs and the papacy, to ensure that their own interests were protected. When a new king came to the throne or a new pope was enthroned, religious orders hurried to get confirmation of their properties and privileges. But the Templars and Hospitallers were particularly close to rulers, perhaps because their connection with the crusade and the Holy Land gave their patrons particular prestige: by supporting these orders, they were supporting the Holy Land. At the same time, kings and popes expected a return for their investment. Kings of England gave generously to the Templars, but in return the Templars must be their loyal servants. King Henry III expected his almoner, Brother Geoffrey the Templar, to carry out various duties on his behalf beyond acting as almoner, so that the contemporary commentator Matthew Paris became extremely critical of Brother Geoffrey, regarding him as a royal meddler. Again, when Brother Brian le Jay, grand commander of the Templars in England, was killed at the Battle of Falkirk in 1298, contemporary commentators had no sympathy for him. He had fought in the battle more as a royal servant than as a representative of the military orders.

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Away from the frontier with non-Christians, the Templars’ only battles should have been spiritual battles of prayer. Nevertheless, the inventories of 1307–8 show that many Templar properties contained a few items of armour and/or weapons. For instance, the Templars’ house at Kilcloggan in Ireland con­­tained two lances, an iron cap, padded defensive jackets, a crossbow, a bow, and two baldrics or sword belts. At Dunwich in Suffolk, England, where there were no Templars living in 1308, there was armour for one person: a pair of plates (of armour), a pair of thigh-pieces and knee caps, one mailshirt, one iron cap, one padded defensive jacket, and a cross bow. At Sainte-Eulalie de Cernon in Aveyron in southern France there were ten iron caps and five crossbows. In 1289 and in 1307 the Templar houses in the Crown of Aragon contained weaponry and armour, including crossbows, hauberks, iron caps, and helmets: even though Aragon no longer had a frontier with the Muslims and the Templars’ fortresses no longer had to fear Muslim attack.3 Taking this information out of context, we might surmise that the Templars were plotting revolt, or that they were pre­­pared to arm themselves at any moment and ride out to defend the Holy Land. The actual explanation is far more mun­­dane. Like bishops and abbots everywhere in Christendom the military-religious orders owed military service to the secular authority for their lands; this was simply part of their duty as land holders. As the obligation lay on the order as a landholder and not on individuals, usually the provincial commander simply paid for the required military force and did not necessarily lead them himself: but some, like Brother Brian le Jay, fought in person. There was also an obligation on all free landowners to help the government to keep the peace, for which they needed to have basic armour and weapons handy. The presence of weapons in their properties reveals that the 3  Helen J. Nicholson, “Holy Warriors, Worldly War: Military-Religious Orders and Secular Conflict,” Journal of Medieval Military History 17 (2019): 61–79.

68  Chapter 5 Templars were loyal subjects and law-abiding citizens who obeyed the secular law. The military orders’ service gave kings prestige and ensured that they had loyal servants, but undermined the military orders’ reputation as neutral parties. When the kings of England and France, or France and Aragon, were at war, which side should the Templars and Hospitallers support? In practice, the brothers each supported their own king, so that their orders were split. Although in theory the popes had made them independent of all secular control, in practice they had to engage with the local secular power, win it over, and work with it. They could not be independent of the world, but this meant that they must also be involved in the secular conflicts that their order sought to avoid. The Templars relied on kings to protect them and promote their interests, and in return they served kings; but in the end it was the kings who turned upon them and brought about their dissolution. It is questionable how far the Templars benefitted the economy of Latin Christendom to a greater degree than any other religious institution of their time. The Cistercians had larger flocks of sheep than the Templars, while the Hospitallers’ houses were even more widespread than the Templars’ houses and performed similar functions, investing in mills, developing uncultivated land, and acting as safe-deposits. That said, the Templars were unique in developing particular houses as financial centres for kings and merchants— such as the Temple in Paris, the New Temple in London, and the house of deposits at Gardeny. After the Templars were arrested and their estates confiscated and systematically looted by their royal administrators, with equipment and stock sold and farmworkers laid off, this must have made a significant local impact on those who had previously relied on the Templars for regular or seasonal employment. Perhaps kings did not particularly notice the impact of the Templars, but at local level their presence or absence would have been keenly felt.

Chapter 6

The End

Between the years 1307 and 1312 the military-religious Order of the Temple was investigated on charges of heresy and dissolved by papal provision. Over seven hundred years later, there is still no consensus on the root cause of the fall of the Templars. Views divide roughly into two camps, both of which date from the original events: either the king of France destroyed the order for his own political and/or financial gain; or the order fell because of its failures and corruption within its ranks.

The Interrogations In 1307–8, Templars were arrested in France, Cyprus, the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, the Low Countries, England, Scotland, and Ireland, and interrogated on charges of blasphemy (including denying Christ, spitting on the Cross, and worshipping an idol-head) and sexual depravity. As such sins were associated with heresy, normal procedures against heretics were used to investigate the case. There were apparently no Templars in Greece, Sicily, or Eastern Europe, the papal inquisitors to Britain and Ireland reported that there were no Templars in Scandinavia, and few Templars were arrested in Germany. The Templars arrested in France and the parts of the Low Countries controlled by the king of France were told that if they did not confess they would be tortured until they did; but if they confessed (as they were told that their com-

70  Chapter 6 rades had done) they would be well treated. Despite these tried-and-tested interrogation techniques, contemporaries reported that thirty-six Templars in Paris died under torture rather than confess to any of the charges. Their testimonies were not recorded. Of one hundred and thirty-eight recorded Templar testimonies from the interrogations in Paris in October to November 1307, only four Templars appear not to have confessed to the charges. However, not all rulers outside France wished to arrest the Templars and few Templars within their realms confessed. The trial continued in fits and starts until March 1312, when Pope Clement V dissolved the Templars by papal provision at the Church council of Vienne. There was no detailed discussion of the case at the council, and Clement himself indicated that the evidence against the Templars was not conclusive, stating that he was dissolving the order because its reputation had been damaged beyond repair. For those who believe, then as now, that a confession must reflect guilt and that the innocent would not confess no matter what pressure was inflicted on them, the apparent confessions prove that the Templars were guilty as charged. They were, after all, warriors who were trained to face pain and danger without fear. However, being on the battlefield where warriors have at least some measure of control over their fate is quite different from being a prisoner at the mercy of torturers, and both the Templars themselves and other contemporaries pointed out that testimonies taken under torture or the threat of torture are not reliable. It is striking that where torture was not used, the Templars did not confess.1 1  Recent studies include: Elizabeth A. R. Brown, “Philip the Fair, Clement V, and the End of the Knights Templar: The Execution of Jacques de Molay and Geoffroi de Charny in March 1314,” Viator 47, no. 1 (2016): 229–92 at 240, 247–48, 255–58, 282–83; Sean L. Field, “The Heresy of the Templars and the Dream of a French Inquisition,” in Late Medieval Heresy: New Perspectives. Studies in Honor of Robert E. Lerner, ed. Michael D. Bailey and Sean L. Field (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2018), 14–34 at 27–28.

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Modern psychological studies have shown that even the mere threat of torture may distort testimonies, and that mental and physical duress in interrogation techniques can lead innocent people to confess to dire crimes which they have not and could not have committed, and even to believe that they have committed these crimes. They may even invent circumstantial detail to convict themselves. Accused people who have a respect for authority, and/or language problems, and those with strong beliefs in an external force that controls events, are more vulnerable to making a false confession.2 The Templars—with their deep belief in God, loyalty to the king of France, vowed to obedience, and with little knowledge of Latin—would have been poorly equipped to withstand aggressive interrogation. Inquisitors of heresy set out to get confessions to the charges, not to ascertain the truth. Some supposed confessions are simply a list of the charges, noting where the Templars’ statements agreed with them and ignoring denials. Thomas Krämer’s research into the interrogations in the seneschalsy of Nîmes–Beaucaire found that the inquisitors would begin proceedings with an elderly or infirm Templar who was less able to withstand bullying, and then having obtained a satisfactory confession from him use this to incriminate the Templars who followed him, who were forced to explain, deny, or agree with it. The inquisitors even re-wrote testimonies to make them fit the model they required.3 If, then, the Templar testimonies that were recorded are false—both because they were taken under duress and because they were inaccurately recorded—where did the charges come from? 2  Gisli H. Gudjonsson, The Psychology of Interrogations, Confessions, and Testimony (New York: Wiley, 1992), 208, 211, 234–73.

3  Thomas Krämer, “Terror, Torture and the Truth: The Testimonies of the Templars Revisited,” in The Debate on the Trial of the Templars (1307–1314), ed. Jochen Burgtorf, Paul F. Crawford, and Helen J. Nicholson (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 71–85.

72  Chapter 6

The Charges Early in 1308 Esquin or Esquiu de Floyran wrote to King James II of Aragon, claiming that he had first alerted the king to the Templars’ evil deeds and that the king had promised to pay him a large sum if his accusations turned out to be true. Esquin had subsequently told King Philip IV of France about the Templars’ crimes; Philip had taken him seriously and began investigations. Philip IV’s minister William of Plaisians reported that the king had used undercover agents to investigate the order. Yet this does not mean that the charges were true. In the first decade of the fourteenth century, it was not unusual for charges of blasphemy or similar to be made against innocent persons. The Teutonic Order was accused of pagan practices, including burning their dead; Walter Langton, bishop of Lichfield and treasurer of King Edward I, was accused by one John Lovetot of doing homage to the devil; Bernard Saisnet, bishop of Pamiers, was accused of treason and heresy; Guichard, bishop of Troyes, was accused of practising magic, sodomy, and being the son of an incubus, while Pope Boniface VIII was accused of having a private demon and consulting sorcerers. None of these cases led to a conviction. The pope had no interest in convicting the Teutonic Order, which was a valuable political ally in the Baltic region, and in any case the order mounted a vigorous defence. King Edward I declined to press charges against his treasurer; his son Edward II took up the case, but Bishop Walter was eventually acquitted. The French government initially pressed charges vigorously against Bishop Bernard, Bishop Guichard, and (posthumously) Pope Boniface, but then dropped the case. The difference in the Templars’ case was that the charges were thoroughly investigated with the aim of bringing about a conviction, and that the French government maintained this until the order was dissolved. Note that three of these cases took place in France, and that it was King Philip IV who pursued them. Philip routinely used what James Given has termed “charges of fantas­­tic evil-doing—demonolatry, magic, and sexual perversion”

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to destroy political enemies. Yet the Templars had always been loyal servants of the French king. An obvious reason for Philip to arrest the Templars was that he needed their money. He had already taken a series of measures to raise money, to meet the costs of his wars against Aragon, England, and Flanders. In 1292 he arrested the Lombards in France, confiscating their goods and forcing them to buy French nationality. He devalued the French currency to make his scarce silver go further. In 1306 he arrested the Jews in France and confiscated their property. The arrest of the Templars and confiscation of their property was an obvious next step. Certainly some contemporaries outside France thought that Philip arrested the Templars because he wanted their wealth. Contemporaries also reported that Philip wanted the Templars’ wealth because he wanted to unify the Templars and Hospitallers and make one of his sons master of the new order, who would then recapture and rule the kingdom of Jerusalem, or even that Philip himself would abdicate and become master of the new order. Philip’s repression of the Templars was a significant step in the construction of French royal absolutism and the concept of the French nation. James Given has pointed out that the heresy trial, using inquisitorial procedures, gave Philip a legal mechanism to remove anyone he wished to remove and confiscate their goods. Any of his victims who tried to escape could be burned at the stake as a relapsed heretic, as happened to the Templars in France who recanted their confessions and tried to defend their order. The fantastically imaginative charges were difficult to disprove and may have convinced his subjects simply because they appeared too outlandish to be invented.4 4  Julien Théry, “Une hérésie d’état. Philippe le Bel, le procès des ‘perfides Templiers’ et la pontificalisation de la royauté française,” Médiévales 60 (2011): 157–86; James Given, “Chasing Phantoms: Philip IV and the Fantastic,” in Heresy and the Persecuting Society in the Middle Ages: Essays on the Work of R. I. Moore, ed. Michael Frassetto (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 271–89 at 281–89.

74  Chapter 6

The Trial When Acre was lost to the Mamluks of Egypt in 1291, the military-religious orders had obviously failed in their vocation to defend the Christian holy places in the east. To justify their existence, they needed to show that they were still working to defend Christendom. While the Teutonic Order moved its focus to Europe, the Templars and Hospitallers remained active in military affairs in the eastern Mediterranean. Grand Master Jacques de Molay of the Temple worked to organize a new crusade, summoning the grand commanders of his order’s provinces in western Europe to consult with him and his headquarters’ officials in Cyprus, while his subordinates also planned and undertook military operations.5 The death in 1303 of Pope Boniface VIII would have been a blow to the Templars’ plans for a new crusade. The eventual election of Bertrand de Got, who took the name Clement V, initially appeared promising as he had both French and English connections (born in France, but a subject of the king of England because he was from Gascony). Preferring to avoid the factional disputes in Rome, Clement never went to the traditional papal home but remained within what is now France—leaving himself open to hostile pressure from the king of France.6 In 1306 Clement summoned grand masters Jacques de Molay of the Temple and Fulk Villaret of the Hospital to come to western Europe to advise on how a crusade could be organized, acknowledging their expertise on the subject. He also asked them for their views on whether to amalgamate their two orders into one, for greater efficiency. Jacques de Molay opposed the proposal, arguing there would be conflicts within the new order between the former Templars and Hospitallers, and pointing out that the old rivalry had led to both orders achieving more than a single order would have done. After 5  Alain Demurger, Jacques de Molay: le crépuscule des templiers (Paris: Payot, 2002), 210–11.

6  Sophia Menache, Clement V (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 11–30.

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meeting the pope at Poitiers in June 1307, Jacques de Molay remained in the west, attending the provincial chapter of the Templars of France, and presumably advancing plans for a crusade. Later, the pope would state that he had heard rumours about the Templars’ alleged crimes before King Philip of France decided to act, and he was investigating them. Again later, contemporary commentators would state that King Philip had asked the pope to arrest the Templars and he refused. But if there were rumours circulating in western Europe in early summer 1307, there was little sign that anyone in authority was taking them seriously. King Edward I of England died on July 7, 1307. Renowned across Europe for his military skills and courage, and as a patron of chivalry, he and his forebears had always been supporters and friends of the Templars and the Hospitallers. While he lived, the Templars could hope that he would sponsor a new crusade to the east. In contrast, King Philip IV of France had not yet emulated his predecessors in undertaking a crusade, and no other European monarch appeared about to launch one. Instead, on August 18, 1307, King Dinis of Portugal initiated legal proceedings against the Templars in his kingdom, to recover lands which he claimed the Templars had misappropriated. On August 24, 1307, Pope Clement V wrote to King Philip IV of France to inform him that in view of accusations being made against the Templars, the grand master of the Templars and many of the commanders had asked him to investigate the truth of the allegations, and that he planned to do so. King Philip IV did not wait for the pope to act. On September 14, 1307 he sent out instructions to his officials throughout France, instructing them to arrest all the Templars within the kingdom of France on October 13, and to confiscate their property. He set out the charges of blasphemy and sodomy against the Templars. They should be imprisoned and interrogated; if they would not confess, they should be tortured until they confessed, or they should die. Philip implied that the pope and the Church stood behind his action.

76  Chapter 6 Philip’s instructions were carried out. Clement V was furious that Philip had gone ahead with his own enquiry without his authority or permission, but as so many Templars in France had apparently confessed he could not simply dismiss the case. On November 22, 1307 he sent out letters to the kings of Latin Christendom, telling them to arrest and interrogate the Templars. King James II of Aragon, King Edward II of England, and Albert of Habsburg, emperor-elect of Germany and Italy, were sceptical, but they could not easily stand against the papal order or the powerful king of France. In the case of Edward II, he was committed to marry Philip IV’s daughter Isabelle as part of a peace treaty between England and France, and refusal to arrest the Templars would lead to the renewal of a war that he could not afford. In Aragon, King James did act to arrest the Templars, but they refused to be arrested and took refuge in their castles. It took James until June 1309 to force all the Templars to surrender. The pope’s order to arrest the Templars did not reach Cyprus until May 1308, and the Templars initially refused to co-operate. Meanwhile, Clement V demanded that the French trial be put into the hands of the Church. Jacques de Molay and the other high dignitaries of the Templars in France then withdrew their confessions, claiming that they had confessed only out of fear of being tortured. In February 1308 Clement V called a halt to the trial. The next few months saw a war of words between Philip and the pope, until the pope decided to hear the Templars’ testimonies himself. Seventy-two Templars were sent to Poitiers by the king’s officials to repeat the confessions that they had already made to the king’s interrogators, and in August 1308 the pope sent three of his cardinals to Chinon to hear the confessions of the leading Templars in France. Later in the month, based on their findings, he sent out a series of papal bulls (whose names follow their opening words). Under the terms of the bull Regnans in coelis (“Reigning in heaven”) a Church council was summoned for October 1, 1310 to discuss the Templars’ case. This would meet at Vienne, in the Rhône valley south of Lyon. Another bull, Deus, ulcionum dominus (“God, Lord of punishments”), assigned the

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Templars’ properties to the care of the Church authorities; the revenues should be kept for the Holy Land. This was not implemented: in England and Ireland, for instance, the Templars’ lands remained under the king’s control and their revenues went to his exchequer. In Faciens misericordiam (“Acting mercifully”), Pope Clement explained that the leading officials of the Temple in France—the grand master, the visitor, and the grand commanders of Outremer, Normandy, and Aquitaine—had confessed to the charges against them, recanted, and been absolved. This was normal procedure in heresy cases; it did not mean that the Templars had been forgiven, only that the way had been cleared for them to do penance for their sins. Clement stated that their confessed crimes were disgusting and shameful, and must be fully investigated. He set out instructions for investigations to proceed throughout Christendom, naming the bishops and other dignatories and lesser clerics who should be involved in each kingdom. Yet he seemed to be in no hurry to move the trial forward: his inquisitors did not arrive in England until September 1309. Outside France proceedings produced few confessions and very little evidence of Templar misconduct. Without sufficient evidence to proceed, Pope Clement had to postpone his Church council for twelve months. The Church council at Vienne in France at last opened on October 1, 1311, discussing the Templars’ case alongside other heresies. The council made decisions about other heresies, condemning the mystical religious movement known as “the heresy of the Free Spirit” and the radical concept of poverty held by the Spiritual Franciscans, but it remained divided over the Templars’ affair. Some delegates feared that the king of France would come to the Council with his army to force his wishes on the council, and suggested that the Council be adjourned and moved to a safer location, away from King Philip’s authority. The king’s arrival at Vienne at the head of an army settled the matter. On March 22, 1312 Pope Clement took the decision to dissolve the Order of the Temple, although he did not announce this publicly until two weeks later, on April 3.

78  Chapter 6 The papal bull Vox in excelso was virtually a copy of Faciens misericordiam, adding so little to Clement’s statement of August 1308 that it was almost as if the events of the last three and a half years had not happened. Clement did not condemn the order as guilty, but stated that no one should enter the order, wear its habit, or follow its rule; anyone who did would be excommunicated. On May 2 he transferred the bulk of the order’s property to the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, amalgamating the Hospitallers’ and Templars’ resources to continue the defence of Christendom. On May 6, in the bull Considerantes dudum, he declared that those brothers of the Temple who were known to be innocent or who had confessed and been reconciled to the Church would receive a pension and could live in the order’s former houses or in a monastery. As their monastic vows were still valid, they could not return to secular life. Those Templars who were known to be guilty but who had not confessed, or those who had relapsed, would be tried.7 This last category included the grand master and three of the four provincial commanders of the order in France. In late December 1313 the pope set up a commission to judge them. The final judgement was made in March 1314, condemning the four to eternal imprisonment as relapsed heretics. When Jacques de Molay and Geoffrey de Charney (grand commander of Normandy) protested, they were condemned to burn as obdurate heretics.

The Templars’ Fate after the Trial The trial of the Templars lasted more than four years. By March 1312 many Templars were dead: of old age or illness, as a result of their sufferings in prison, or (in France) burned at the stake as relapsed heretics. Many Templars in France were condemned to lifetime imprisonment or at least to long prison sentences. 7  Elizabeth A. R. Brown and Alan Forey, “Vox in excelso and the suppression of the Knights Templar: The Bull, its History, and a New Edition,” Mediaeval Studies 80 (2018): 1–58.

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Outside France, most Templars who survived the trial avoided prison. They received the pensions that the pope had promised them, financed from the revenues of the former Templar properties. In England the Church council of London, which wound up the Templars’ case in the summer of 1311, allocated the former Templars to other religious houses. In Ireland, former Templars apparently remained in their order’s former houses, as they did in Aragon, Italy, and Germany, or returned to their family home. Their fate largely depended on the local ruling authority’s attitude towards the trial. In Aragon, the king had always regarded the order as useful to him, and the order was not harshly persecuted; in Germany and Italy there was no strong central secular authority to enforce papal demands if the local ecclesiastical authority was not inclined to do so. In England, however, the embattled government of King Edward II did not defend the Templars after 1310, and the provincial Church councils enforced papal instructions. Some Templars in Cyprus were repatriated to Western Europe, but a number of Templars on Cyprus were imprisoned after their involvement in a plot against the king. Three Templars in Britain avoided arrest by fleeing to Ireland; another four vanished at the start of the trial, while some thirty-four French Templars also fled. Two Italian Templar fugitives returned to their home base: Giacomo da Montecucco and Pietro da Bologna, natives of northwest Italy, where they lived with their families. Both had close connections with the papal court, which may have helped them disappear. One of the missing English Templars seems also to have gone home. Former Templars who returned to their families could effectively disappear from the records, unless they wished to draw attention to themselves like Brother Bernardo de Fuentes, who having fled from Aragon returned in 1313 as ambassador for the alcalde of Tunis.

80  Chapter 6

Conclusion So the order of the Temple was dissolved. The king of France did not receive its wealth, but neither did the Hospitallers. Although the pope had allocated the former Templar properties to them, it took them many years and considerable expense to obtain those properties. The Hospitallers managed to avoid the Templars’ fate, arguably because they invaded the island of Rhodes, captured it from the Byzantines, and made it their base against Muslim shipping and the Turks of Asia Minor. The expenses of the conquest and taking over the Templars’ lands, however, nearly bankrupted them. As Sophia Menache has pointed out, King Philip IV convinced many in France of the Templars’ guilt but he was far less successful outside France.8 Yet, if the charges were clearly fantastical, and contemporaries knew that the Templars were probably innocent, why was there no mass protest to stop the trial? Some individuals did protest, notably the anonymous writer of the so-called “Lament for the Templars” written in the winter of 1307–8. In England, the Templars’ corrodians protested at the loss of their incomes, petitioning the king to ensure that what was due to them was paid. In Aragon, the Templars’ vassals supported their resistance against King James II; but outside the Iberian Peninsula and Cyprus the Templars had no castles to hide in. Yet would-be supporters would have been deterred by Pope Clement V’s order of January 1309 that no one should assist the Templars publicly or secretly, and that anyone who gave them any sort of assistance would be placed under interdict. Many onlookers would have hoped to get part of the Templars’ property or their wealth, and anyone who owed them money would have been happy not to have to repay it. The friars in Ireland were particularly vociferous against 8  Sophia Menache, “Contemporary Attitudes Concerning the Templars’ Affair: Propaganda’s Fiasco?,” Journal of Medieval History 8 (1982): 135–47.

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the Templars. Possibly this was because they saw the Templars as their competitors for alms, but it may have been because they had frequently acted as priests for the Templars and now feared that they would be blamed for not reporting the Templars’ alleged heresies. William Greenfield, archbishop of York, appears to have been reluctant to progress the trial, while Bishop Ralph Baldock, bishop of London, insisted throughout the proceedings that he was present only to represent the king’s interests. But some other bishops were concerned that any suspicion of heresy, even if doubtful, should be investigated and eradicated. Many lay people were genuinely concerned that heresy would destroy society and would have agreed that the trial was necessary. Even if they knew that their own local Templars were good people, because the Templars were an international order they might have suspected that the charges could be true of Templars in another country. If there had been a strong pope, able to stand against the king of France, or if there had been a strong secular leader, of greater prestige and authority than the king of France, then the trial could have been stopped. But the pope was in a weak position, there was no crowned emperor, and no king in Europe able to stand up to King Philip IV. A combination of fear—of the pope and the king of France, of heresy, and of being accused oneself—and greed for the Templars’ property combined to bring about the end of the Templars.

Chapter 7

Conclusion

Pope Clement V dissolved the Order of the Temple, but there were still former Templars living throughout Europe and in Cyprus, and some were still prisoners of the Mamluks. Ex-Templars lived long: in 1350 there was at least one Templar alive in Roussillon in Catalonia but, as many Templars had dropped out of the records, there may have been more survivors elsewhere in Europe. Views of the Templars’ downfall remained mixed. As one French commentator wrote in around 1316, everyone had different opinions and there was great debate. Anyone who believed that the pope or the king of France would not have acted unjustly had to believe that the trial had been justified, because to disbelieve the pope was a form of heresy; but others condemned the trial nevertheless. Controversy continued: late in the fourteenth century the St. Albans’ chronicler Thomas of Walsingham followed two earlier English commentators, Adam Murimuth and Geoffrey le Baker, stating that the king of France attacked the Templars to get their property. But the so-called Sherborne missal, produced around 1399–1407, stated that the Templars were destroyed because of their idolatry.1

1  Helen J. Nicholson, The Knights Templar on Trial: the Trial of the Temp­ lars in the British Isles, 1308–1311 (Stroud: History, 2009), 200–202.

84  Chapter 7 The Templars were not forgotten. Obviously, their families and supporters would have remembered them. Templar properties continued to be called “the Temple” long after they had passed to the Hospital of St. John, and even a few Hospitaller properties acquired the suffix: such as Temple Grafton in Warwickshire, which had never belonged to the Templars. In other locations the suffix “Temple” had no connection to a military-religious order, but myths of Templar connections grew up to explain the name. The Templars continued to appear in fictional literature across Latin Christendom, almost invariably as good Christians, holy men, dedicated to serving God and helping Christians. The Templars’ heroic reputation as knights of Christ and their tragic and much-debated end made them an obvious subject for fiction, especially when there were no more living Templars to object. Tracing the image of the Templars over time, we can see how writers reshaped the image of the Templars to fit their own needs. For example, although the Templars’ modern mythical connection with magic has its roots in the charges of heresy against the Templars—some of the Templars’ contemporaries were accused of sorcery, although the Templars themselves were not—the Templars were not specifically linked to magic until Henry Cornelius Agrippa (d. 1535), writing books of occult philosophy, inaccurately mentioned the Templars in passing as a group destroyed after being accused of witchcraft. In contrast, Gotthold Lessing’s play Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise), published in 1779, built on the Templars’ image as friends of Muslims—used during the trial of the Order to attack the Templars—to present them as supporters of friendship between Jews, Muslims, and Christians. At the end of the play, the Jewish father and daughter, Muslim sultan, and Christian Templar turn out all to be closely related. Historically the Templars had indeed maintained friendly relations with Muslims and Jews, especially in the Iberian Peninsula where they had Muslim and Jewish tenants, and allied with Muslim powers when this was to their strategic advantage. Conversely, modern far-right groups now claim the Templars as precursors for their racial intolerance.

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Perhaps the Templars’ most notorious fictional roles are in the novels of Walter Scott (1771–1832): in both Ivanhoe (1819) and The Talisman (1825) the Templars appear as threatening yet fascinating villains. The negative image of the Templars in The Talisman, which is set during the third crusade, reappears in modern films based on this crusade, such as Kingdom of Heaven (2005). They also played the role of bearers of sinister occult knowledge, appearing in this guise in (for example) George Macdonald’s gothic novel Phantastes (1858) and M. R. James’s short story “Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” (1904). In John Meade Falkner’s The Nebuly Coat (1903), the heir to the Blandamer estates makes a vow “as faithfully as ever taken by a Templar” to serve his family interests, but in the process of discharging his vow he commits two murders and at last sacrifices his own life. Leslie Charteris’s adventure stories of Simon Templar, “The Saint” (1928–83), were a more positive echo of the Templar myth: the hero operating underground on the side of right and justice. For Rudyard Kipling in his short story “They” (1904), and Jerome K. Jerome in Three Men in a Boat, to say Nothing of the Dog (1889), the buildings left behind by the historical Templars provided a physical link between the past and the present.2 Novelists and film-makers continue to use the Templars in all these roles and more, while writers of videogames combine historical fact and myth about the Templars to create challenging entertainment. In the mid-eighteenth century the Templars were used to provide historical foundation for the new Freemason movement. Initially the Freemasons claimed no link with the Templars. It was the German Freemasons who introduced the concept that the Templars must have had secret wisdom and magical powers, which they could have learned while they held the so-called Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, and which could have been handed down through a secret line of succession to the present-day masons. 2  References in Nicholson, Knights Templar: A Brief History, 269–70, 274–76.

86  Chapter 7 This claim could work two ways: it offered the Freemasons historical validity, but also provided grounds for their enemies to attack them. If the Templars had continued as an underground movement, then they could still influence events in the modern world: for example, stirring up the French Revolution and bringing about the execution of King Louis XVI in revenge for the death of Jacques de Molay in 1314. If the Templars were indeed heretics, as claimed in 1307, then the Freemasons were perpetuating their impiety. In 1818 Joseph von Hammer Purgstall published an attack on Templarist freemasonry entitled “The Mystery of Baphomet Revealed” which linked the Templars to the Gnostics, a religious movement of the early Christian era condemned by pagans and Christians alike for their alleged sexual depravity. Hammer argued that the Templars were Gnostics and the idol-head that in 1307 they were accused of worshipping was a Gnostic idol called Baphomet. In fact “Baphomet” is simply the Old French word for the name Mohammad and the Gnostics did not worship idols, because they believed that the physical world is an invention of evil. Hammer also linked his mythical Templars to the legend of the Holy Grail, arguing that the Grail legend represented Gnostic mysteries. Hammer’s vein of pseudo-history won a large following and underlies the modern myths linking the Templars to the Holy Grail and to the Cathars; but it was fiction. From the late twelfth century onwards there were many stories written about the Holy Grail, but only Wolfram von Eschenbach’s version, Parzival, and stories based on it refer to Templeise. As the contemporary German term for “Templars” was Tempelherren, and Wolfram’s Templeise bore a turtle-dove rather than a cross, Wolfram was not writing about real Templars but his own “Temple-people” invented for his story.3 Far from being linked to the Cathars, the Templars were opposed to them and their beliefs. The Templars, like 3  Helen J. Nicholson, Love, War and the Grail: Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights in Medieval Epic and Romance, 1150–1500 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 102–83.

Conclusion  87

other medieval Christians, believed in the physical existence of Christ, His Mother, and the saints; their vocation required them to take part in physical warfare and kill, and they ate meat. They also supported the Albigensian crusade against the Cathars. Yet Hammer’s fictional combination of the mysterious Grail legend, the mysterious Cathars, and the mysterious Templars gripped imaginations. In the early 1960s, Pierre Plantard and Philippe de Chérisey forged documents to show that a secret organization called “the Priory of Sion” had existed since Merovingian times to protect ancient Christian treasures, and that the Templars were associated with it. Their invented history was adapted and developed by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln into the best-selling The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1983), which itself became the basis for Dan Brown’s bestselling The Da Vinci Code (2003). Although the “Priory of Sion” has now been exposed as a hoax, this branch of the modern Templar myth is well-rooted and still growing. The Templars provided a more historical precursor for some self-improvement movements originating in the mid-nineteenth century and still in existence today. Several temperance fraternities took the title “Good Templars.” This was a play on words between “temperance’” and “Templar,” and also reflected their “great crusade” against “this terrible vice” of alcohol.4 In 1851, in Utica, New York State, an “Independent Order of Good Templars” was set up, which grew to become a world-wide organization, the International Order of Good Templars or IOGT. Members campaigned for prohibition, provided social facilities which served only non-alcoholic beverages, promoted education and self-help, and supported decent working conditions for working people. The movement produced its own newspapers and books, including fictional works promoting its ideals, with stirring titles such as William Hargreaves’s The Lost and Found! Or, Who is the Heir? (1901). 4  Quotations from Louisa May Alcott, Jack and Jill (Boston: Roberts, 1893; repr. Cleveland and New York: World Publishing, 1948), 267.

88  Chapter 7 Unlike the original Templars, women could hold high positions in the order. Jessie Forsyth, a leading campaigner within the Good Templars from 1872 to 1937, travelled widely promoting the movement in the USA, Europe, and Australia.5 The social impact of these “Good Templars” was reflected in wider contemporary fictional literature: Edgar Wallace (1875–1932), thriller-writer supreme and former member of a temperance society, included “Good Templars” in his crime novels. He depicted them as worthy and respectable, but in White Face (1930) the policeman who is a Good Templar misses important clues because of his fixation on temperance. At the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, the IOGT was still active around the globe, still campaigning against the use of alcohol and other drugs, equality for all, peace, justice, and education, and promoting their flagship “Drink Revolution” campaign. Although the spirit of the nineteenth-century temperance crusaders is still clearly present today, in 2019 the international body changed its name to “Movendi International,” to make it more accessible.6 Another Templar group with a positive message, also founded in around 1850, was the German Templar movement, set up by a Lutheran pastor and dedicated to “the spiritual and economic development of the Holy Land.” The German Templars founded several communities in Palestine, then under Ottoman rule. After the First World War, when Britain occupied Palestine, some migrated to Australia; but three of their settlements survived until the end of the British mandate in Palestine. From 1947 the remaining German Templars tried to sell their property and join their co-religionists overseas, but with the question of possible connections to Nazism hanging over them it was many years before they could emigrate to Australia and the USA. Disputes over their 5  David M. Fahey, The Collected Writings of Jessie Forsyth, 1847–1937: The Good Templars and Temperance Reform on Three Continents (Lampeter: Mellen, 1988). 6  https://movendi.ngo/blog/2020/01/10/let-me-introduce-movendiinternational/.

Conclusion  89

property in Palestine dragged on until the 1960s. The modern “Temple Society” in Australia does not claim any link with the medieval Knights Templar, and uses the spelling “Templer” to refer to its members.7 What if the Templars had not been attacked in 1307 and dissolved in 1312?8 “Counter-factual” history can only be speculative, but can help to identify key factors on which other events turned. In this case, the question is whether, given Latin Christendom’s reluctance to be involved in another crusade, the Templars could have survived even if they had not been attacked in 1307. Could the Templars have found another, lasting vocation? Ottokar’s Österreichische Reimchronik, written in German during the first two decades of the fourteenth century, presents a fictionalized master of the Temple stating that now that Acre has been lost, the Templars will go to fight the king of Morocco; they will go to Spain and help the king of Spain recover that land. If Ottokar was writing after the dissolution of the Templars, he could have known that the Christian kings of Spain were still fighting against the Muslims and were using the former property of the Templars to set up new military-religious orders for this purpose: the Order of Christ in Portugal and the Order of Montesa in Valencia. If he was writing before the dissolution of the Templars, he could have been speculating about what the order should be doing. Or, possibly he knew that the king of Aragon was expanding the Templars’ property in northern Valencia: between 1277 and 1307 the area they controlled more than doubled. In 1294 James II gave the Templars the magnificent coastal castle of Peñíscola and other property in exchange for the city of Tortosa, which the Templars had held since its conquest in 1148. Perhaps James’s aim was that the Templars, who had always 7  Roger Wettenhall, “The Templars and Australia: Crusading Orders and a Statutory Authority,” Australian Studies 16 (2001): 131–50; Nicholson, Knights Templar: A Brief History, 273–74.

8  “Conclusion” in Debate on the Trial of the Templars (1307–2007), ed. Burgtorf, Crawford, and Nicholson, 359–64 at 361–62.

90  Chapter 7 been trustworthy servants of the kings of Aragon, should act as his representatives in northern Valencia, with the former royal castle of Peñíscola as their base. The Templars would not be fighting Muslims on land, but with this new coastal base they could provide a naval guard against North African piracy.9 If this was the plan, it would have provided the Templars with a new area of operations which could have continued into the eighteenth century, just as the Hospitallers’ naval operations from their base on Rhodes and then on Malta continued until 1798. However, outside the Iberian Peninsula the Templars would have had to find other means to ensure royal support. As they were already performing numerous administrative roles for the monarchs of England and France, they could have become a branch of the royal administration in these kingdoms. They would then have gradually faded into secularization. Or perhaps, as the Order of Christ did, they would have become involved in the exploration of Africa and the Indies, and found a new function in the New World. These hypothetical modernized Templars would not have left behind them a legacy of myth and tragedy, but perhaps the original Templars would prefer to be remembered as they are today: heroes or villains, glorious or despicable, but above all memorable.

9  Nicholson, Love, War and the Grail, 82–85; Luis García-Guijarro Ramos, “The Extinction of the Order of the Temple in the Kingdom of Valencia and Early Montesa, 1307–30: A Case of Transition from Universalist to Territorialized Military Orders,” in Debate on the Trial of the Templars (1307–2007), ed. Burgtorf, Crawford, and Nicholson, 199–211 at 202–5.

Further Reading

General

Barber, Malcolm. The New Knighthood: A History of the Order of the Temple. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. The leading English-language scholarly history of the Templars

—— . and Keith Bate, trans. The Templars: Selected Sources Translated and Annotated. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. A wide-ranging collection of translated primary sources written by, for, and about the Templars.

Borchardt, Karl, Karoline Döring, Philippe Josserand, and Helen J. Nicholson, eds. The Templars and their Sources. Crusades Subsidia 10. London: Routledge, 2017. Twenty scholarly studies of various aspects of Templar history and the primary sources for that history.

Burgtorf, Jochen, Paul F. Crawford, and Helen J. Nicholson, eds. The Debate on the Trial of the Templars (1307–1314). Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Twenty-nine scholars of the Templars assess different aspects of the Templars’ trial: how it came about, how it proceeded, its aftermath and its legacy.

Demurger, Alain. Les Templiers: une chevalerie chrétienne au moyen âge. Paris: Seuil, 2005. A scholarly history by the leading French scholar of the Templars.

Hamilton, Bernard. Religion in the Medieval West. 2nd ed. London: Arnold, 2003. An accessible, scholarly introduction to medieval European Christianity.

92  Further Reading Morton, Nicholas. The Medieval Military Orders: 1120–1314. London: Pearson, 2013. An accessible survey of the military-religious orders.

Nicholson, Helen J. The Knights Templar: A New History. Stroud: Sutton, 2001; 2nd ed. The Knights Templar: A Brief History of the Warrior Order. London: Constable and Robinson, 2010. An accessible general history of the Templars; the 2001 edition is extensively illustrated.

—— . The Everyday Life of the Templars: The Knights Templar at Home. Stroud: Fonthill, 2017. A detailed study of the Templars’ lives away from the battlefield.

Upton-Ward, J. M., trans. The Rule of the Templars: The French Text of the Rule of the Order of the Knights Templar. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1992. An English translation of the Templars’ normative texts.

Introduction Edbury, Peter W., and John G. Rowe. William of Tyre: Historian of the Latin East. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

An analysis of this significant, extremely influential, widely-quoted but deeply prejudiced contemporary commentator on the Templars.

Nicholson, Helen. Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights: Images of the Military Orders, 1128–1291. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993. How their contemporaries regarded the Templars and their fellow military-religious orders.

Schenk, Jochen. Templar Families: Landowning Families and the Order of the Temple in France, c. 1120–1307. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. The Templars’ relations with their supporters and associate members.

Vaughan, Richard. Matthew Paris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958. Analysis of the personality and work of this well-informed and influential but deeply prejudiced contemporary commentator on the Templars.

Further Reading  93

Chapter 1 Duggan, Lawrence G. Armsbearing and the Clergy in the History and Canon Law of Western Christianity. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013. Chapter 3 considers the debates over Christian clerics’ involvement in warfare until the twelfth century.

Pringle, Denys. “Templar Castles on the Road to the Jordan.” In The Military Orders, vol. 1: Fighting for the Faith and Caring for the Sick, edited by Malcolm Barber, 148–66. Aldershot: Variorum, 1994

—— . “Templar Castles between Jaffa and Jerusalem.” In The Mili-

tary Orders, vol. 2: Welfare and Warfare, edited by Helen Nicholson, 89–109. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998. These two articles survey the Templars’ construction of castles on the pilgrim routes in the Latin East.

Chapter 2 Cerrini, Simonetta. La Révolution des Templiers: une histoire perdue du xiie siècle. Paris: Perrin, 2007. Explores the origins of the Templars and their rule, arguing that they were revolutionary in allowing laity to follow a religious life.

Crawford, Paul F. “Gregory VII and the Idea of a Military-Religious Order.” In Deeds Done beyond the Sea: Essays on William of Tyre, Cyprus and the Military Orders Presented to Peter Edbury, edited by Susan B. Edgington and Helen J. Nicholson, 171–80. Crusades Subsidia 6. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Discusses the role of eleventh-century Church reform and reformers in creating the concept of the military-religious order.

Forey, Alan. “The Emergence of the Military Order in the Twelfth Century.” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36 (1985): 175–95. Discusses how the concept of the military-religious order developed within Latin Christendom, arguing that it derived from the Latin Christian society of its day rather than being influenced by external examples.

Smith, Katherine Allen. War and the Making of Medieval Monastic Culture. Woodbridge, Boydell, 2011. How warfare and the concept of warfare shaped the self-image and theology of monks and nuns in medieval Europe.

94  Further Reading

Chapter 3 Holt, Edward L. “Crusading Memory in the Templar Liturgy of Barcelona.” In Crusades 18 (2019): 217–29. Examines the Templars’ piety through one of their surviving religious texts.

Schenk, Jochen. “The Documentary Evidence for Templar Religion.” In The Templars and their Sources, edited by Karl Borchardt, Karoline Döring, Philippe Josserand, and Helen J. Nicholson, 199–211. Crusades Subsidia 10. London: Routledge, 2017. A comprehensive insight into Templar piety.

—— . “Some Hagiographical Evidence for Templar Spirituality, Religious Life and Conduct.” Revue Mabillon, n.s. 22 (2011): 99–119. Explores Templar relations with holy men and women and how they promoted certain saints’ cults.

Chapter 4 Bennett, Matthew. “La Règle du Temple as a Military Manual or How to Deliver a Cavalry Charge.” In The Rule of the Templars. Translated by J. M. Upton-Ward, 175–88. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1992. An overview and analysis of the Templars’ military practice and expertise.

Marshall, Christopher. Warfare in the Latin East, 1192–1291. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Detailed background of the military situation faced by the Templars in the thirteenth-century Middle East.

Tibble, Steve. The Crusader Armies, 1099–1187. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. An analysis of the military situation in the Middle East in the twelfth century.

Chapter 5 Baudin, Arnaud, Ghislain Brunel, and Nicolas Dohrmann, eds. L’économie templière en Occident: patrimoines, commerce, finances. Langres: Guéniot, 2013. Eighteen scholarly studies of aspects of the Templars’ economic and commercial activity in Europe.

Further Reading  95

Jefferson, J. Michael. The Templar Estates in Lincolnshire 1185–1565: Agriculture and Economy. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2020. Detailed study of the Templars’ operations in a single region of Europe.

Josserand, Philippe, Luís F. Oliveira, and Damien Carraz, eds. Élites et ordres militaires au moyen âge: recontre autour d’Alain Demurger. Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2015. Twenty-three scholarly studies of the military-religious orders’ relations with nobles, rulers, and popes, and elites within the military-religious orders.

Nicholson, Helen J. “The Surveys and Accounts of the Templars’ Estates in England and Wales (1308–13).” In Crusading Europe: Essays in Honour of Christopher Tyerman, edited by G. E. M. Lippiatt and Jessalynn L. Bird, 181–209. Outremer: Studies in the Crusades and the Latin East 8. Turnhout: Brepols, 2019. A discussion of how the Templars’ estates were managed, their crops, livestock, and employees.

—— . “Evidence of the Templars’ Religious Practice from the Records of the Templars’ Estates in Britain and Ireland in 1308.” In Communicating the Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of Sophia Menache, edited by Iris Shagrir, Benjamin Z. Kedar, and Michel Balard, 50–63. Crusades Subsidia 11. London: Routledge, 2018. Argues that the Templars were investing considerable resources in maintaining chapels and chaplains for their patrons’ benefit, rather than to support the Holy Land.

Chapter 6 Barber, Malcolm. The Trial of the Templars. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. The leading English-language scholarly study of the trial.

Demurger, Alain. La Persécution des Templiers: journal (1307–1314). Paris: Payot, 2015. A detailed analysis of the trial of the Templars in France.

Forey, Alan. The Fall of the Templars in the Crown of Aragon. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. Provides a striking contrast to both the French and the British–Irish trial.

96  Further Reading

—— . “Templars After the Trial: Further Evidence.” Revue Mabillon 23 (2012): 89–110. The most detailed study of the fates of individual Templars after the trial of 1307–12.

Nicholson, Helen J. The Knights Templar on Trial: The Trial of the Templars in the British Isles, 1308–1311. Stroud: History, 2009. An analysis of the trial in Britain and Ireland, where confessions were eventually obtained, but only by using duress.

Conclusion Newman, Sharan. The Real History behind the Templars. New York: Berkley, 2007. An approachable survey of the myths and the history of the order.

Partner, Peter. The Knights Templar and their Myth. Revised ed. Rochester, VT: Destiny, 1990. The leading English-language study of the myths about the Templars, to 1990.

Walker, John. “‘From the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant to Freemasonry and the Priory of Sion,’ an Introduction to the ‘After-History’ of the Templars.” In The Military Orders, vol. 5: Politics and Power, edited by Peter W. Edbury, 439–48. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. Considers the continuing development of myths about the Templars.

—— . “Sources for the Templar Myth.” In The Templars and their

Sources, edited by Karl Borchardt, Karoline Döring, Philippe Josserand, and Helen J. Nicholson, 360–71. Crusades Subsidia 10. London: Routledge, 2017. Focuses on the process of the creation of Templar myths.

Wood, Juliette. “The Myth of Secret History, or ‘It’s not just the Templars involved in absolutely Everything’.” In The Military Orders, vol. 5: Politics and Power, edited by Peter W. Edbury, 449–60. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012 A study of how and why “secret history” develops.