The Templars: The Rise and Fall Of God’s Holy Warriors

Dan Jones is unabashedly one of my favorite authors and television personalities. His brutal honesty, sense of humor and willingness to use sarcasm via his social media make him a very entertaining character, and the topics he chooses to write and present on are generally some of my favorites to learn about. However, behind this flash is substance, as Jones’ Cambridge education, his dedication to doing real historical work with primary sources and his mastery of the material of any topic he chooses to engage shine through in everything he writes. Jones is perhaps the best on the market right now at taking real historical research and crafting it into a compelling and entertaining narrative.

In The Templars: The Rise and Fall of God’s Holy Warriors, Jones continues to master this balance, staying at the top of his game as he takes a topic that has been distorted, misused and misappropriated in both popular fiction and non-fiction, and shows us, once again, that real history can be just as compelling as stories about secret bloodlines, albino monks and holy/magical cups (Looking at you Dan Brown). In Jones’ newest tome he demystifies myth and legend from history, giving us the story of the Templar order from its humble origins in the wake of the First Crusade to its growth into one of the most powerful multinational organizations in the medieval world. Jones makes it clear in his book that in their own day the Templars were known for far more than just their bravery and fighting prowess. Supporting these soldiers in the Holy Land was a much larger group of brothers whose job it was to collect donations and manage lands under the ownership of the Templar Order, generating revenue from these lands to support their mission in the east. This led to them growing into one of the most respected banking institutions of their day, a true multinational entity in some ways more similar to an international corporation than an army. Jones’ story is as much about the growth and demise of this aspect of the Order as it is about the battles for the Holy Land the Templars fought which made them legends in their own day. While telling the tale of the Templars, Jones also gives us a great history of the Crusades, and of westerners in the Holy Land in general. The bulk of the narrative however is about this specific order, their actions in the Holy Land and the work that was done in western Europe to support this exclusive sect of elite warrior monks.

What I Learned

One of the first topics that Jones tackles, and rightfully so, is the origins of the Templar order and the theological justifications used to establish them as a religious order specifically. Regarding the first item, their historical origins, the answer is fairly simple. As the end of the first Crusade in 1099 the Europeans (referred to by Muslims of the Holy Land as “The Franks”, because they were predominantly French), had established what is referred to as the “Crusader States”, which were comprised of a sliver of land on the Mediterranean stretching from the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the south to the principality of Antioch and the county of Edessa in the north. After the First Crusade was completed nobles and soldiers remained in the region to rule these crusader states and went about consolidating their hard won holdings in the Levant. The establishment of this Christian presence in the Holy Land meant that there was a great influx of pilgrims to area coming to see all the Christian holy sites and shrines. However, as anyone could see from looking at a map of the Holy Land after the First Crusade, what the Crusaders had control over was relatively small. Many of the Christian pilgrimage sites were in still contested areas and unless one arrived by sea a pilgrim would have to travel a great distance through hostile, dangerous territory to reach the safety of the Crusader States in the first place. The Templars were established specifically to deal with this issue, to provide pilgrims with assistance and safe passage to the holy sites around Jerusalem and the Holy Land, and, more generally, to contribute to the overall defense of these Christian held lands.

The Order itself started in the early 1100s as a loose association of expatriate knights in the Holy Land, who gathered around a French noble named Hugh of Payns to protect pilgrims visiting the holy sites. This group was loosely modeled on brotherhoods of men that were organized in the west to defend churches and shrines from bandits. This particular group of men, under the leadership of Payns, swore oaths of obedience to Gerard, Prior of the Holy Sepulchre, who provided them room and board, as you can guess by his name, on the grounds of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. This building would become the historical headquarters of the Order in the Holy Land as the organization grew. By the year 1120 the religious and secular authorities in the Holy Land felt it would good to give this group a more official recognition and they began to receive official backing from Baldwin II, the King of Jerusalem. Baldwin II would even write to one of the foremost theological authorities of the day, the Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, in 1126, asking for help from him in establishing an official rule for this new religious group, and asking him to appeal to the Pope to support them as well. In 1129 the Council of Troyes gave the Templars official recognition as a religious order and set up their Primitive Rule. It was based on the Cistercian order’s rule, emphasizing vows of chastity, poverty and obedience, but it also gave accommodations for the fact that these men would frequently be in combat and not able to always fulfill the required services and daily prayers of the typical monk.

It was their existence as both a religious and a military order that created an uneasy existence for the order in its first years, as the express purpose for their existence (warfare) was hardly something one could find an example for from the life or teachings of Christ (though other parts of the Bible certainly advocate for violence, and excessive violence at that). It is a tension that has existed within the Christian religion at whole, as evidenced by the Crusades themselves, and Jones does a great job of explaining how this tension was teased out both in the case of the Templar Order and the Crusading movement in general.

Growing from Paul’s metaphorical language of putting on the full armor of God in his letter to the Ephesians and Augustine of Hippo’s framing of Christian existence as a cosmic, spiritual battle with the devil, by the first Crusade the influence of medieval feudal society, with its emphasis on the warring, chivalrous knight, gave way to the idea of Christian holy war, of laymen joining the “knighthood of Christ” to go liberate Christian brothers and sisters in the east and return Jerusalem to Christian hands. While the clergy had generally kept themselves free from actual fighting, Jones very correctly points out that very practical concerns made it necessary for clergy to at the least be willing and able to arm and defend themselves in the Holy Land. It was at the Council of Nablus in 1120, called to better organize the ruling of the Holy Lands, that it was decreed “if a cleric takes up arms in the cause of self-defense, he shall not bear any guilt,”. Originally intended to justify violence on the part of the clergy only as a last resort, this decree and the spirit of the Crusades themselves quickly established a precedent that would lead to the official recognition of the Templars as a military and religious order in 1129.

With the backing of both the King of Jerusalem and Rome the Templar Order was set to defend the Holy Land and expand the borders of the Crusader States. However, to truly fulfill that mission the Order would need a serious inflow of cash to pay for the armor, horses, weapons, food and supplies that would make this possible, as well as pay for things like the castles it was building in the Holy Land to guard roadways. It was the system the Templars created to raise funds and generate revenue for their crusading endeavors in the east, as well as against Moorish Spain, that is one of the most fascinating things I learned from Jones’ book. As Jones explains, in some ways we can look at the Templars as one of the first multinational corporations in the world, capable of moving large sums of money across the world more safely than banks at the time, and holding onto many diverse revenue streams in western Europe like a seasoned hedge fund manager or corporate entity would.

This ability to raise funds began with some wide sweeping privileges that were given to the Order by Pope Innocent II in a bull he issued in 1139 called Omne Datum Optimum. The first thing the bull did was recognize the Order as under the direct tutelage and protection of the papacy, meaning the Templars were only answerable to the Pope, no other monastic orders or bishops had a power to command them or police their members. Their mission was defined in this bull as, “defenders of the Catholic Church and attackers of the enemies of Christ,” a mission so vague that Jones sees it justifying a whole range of activities. Regarding financial matters they were exempted from the tithe, which at this time was essentially a tax collected by the Church, and they could even charge a tithe for those who lived on lands they owned without giving any of that tithe to local bishops or abbots, giving them an important source of revenue to support their mission in the Holy Land. These privileges would be expanded in further papal bulls, but the ones they gained in 1139 were the crucial ones which first gave them the ability to raise revenues and grow as an organization.

With the ability to collect a tithe on land they owned, the next logical step for the Templars was to start acquiring land, amongst other assets, which they could collect a tithe from. Fortunately for the Templars the importance of their mission and the esteem that they were put in made many willing to donate everything from cash to firewood to clothing to vineyards, businesses and whole estates to support their cause. There were also religious implications to this, as donating to religious orders like the Templars was often perceived to convey some sort of spiritual benefit on the one donating said cash, land or goods. This practice of donating to the order was first started when Hugh of Payns, the Order’s first Grandmaster, returned to Europe on his first mission to gain the blessing of the Pope for this new religious group in 1127. This mission’s primary goal was to recruit men to join the order for a major assault on Damascus, but as Hugh went around France he was gifted with land, income from property, rights to feudal payments and cash in the form of gold and silver.

These first gifts would follow with ever increasing ones as the order became more and more prestigious and well known. The largest gift by far in the Templars’ history was given by Alfonso the King of Aragon (a sizable region in what is now modern day Spain) who upon his death in 1134 left the Templars a third of his kingdom! Gifts were especially popular for those who wanted to support the order but couldn’t, or simply wouldn’t join the order as a knight in the Holy Land. As the size and frequency of gifts became larger eventually the Templars had to set up a permanent presence in western Europe to collect and funnel these funds to where they were needed out east. They did this by organizing Western Europe into several regions overseen by senior officials. Donations of land were collected, when they could be, into large estates supervised by monastic-style houses called preceptories or commanderies. These precepotories were housed and managed by brothers known as servants or sergeants. They wore dark robes instead of the white of Templar knights, and their roles were largely relegated to non-combat functions like managing the lands that were under the Templar Order’s rule, and collecting and funneling the funds needed in the Holy Land. In fact the majority of the members of the Templar Order were in these non-combat roles in western Europe, it was only a small portion of the order that were in the Crusader states and areas of Spain wrapped up in active combat against the Muslim world, and even in these combat areas a great amount of Templars were still those servants and sergeants. Jones also lets us know that in some regions of Europe women were able to join the order as sergeants, though no women served with the Templars in the Holy Land.

With this amount of land to manage the Templars created a very complex infrastructure in western Europe, erecting giant temples for the order in cities like Paris and London, and a series of heavily guarded castles in which to store their considerable amounts of money and goods as they made their way towards Jerusalem. In fact the Templars became so adept at moving goods and money across the continent, and protecting it on its way there, that a great number of Kings in Europe, including Henry II, used Templar headquarters as their own treasuries, essentially using the order as a bank of deposit. In a reverse of this operation the Templars were also known to provide giant loans to the kings and nobles of Europe. One example of this was Louis VII of France, who upon reaching the Holy Land in 1148 as part of the Second Crusade was so in need of money from his costs of getting there that he had to ask the Templars for a loan that amounted to about half of the entire kingdom of France’s yearly revenue at the time. This is a great example not only of how well trusted the Templars were with banking matters, but also the sheer amount of funds that were available to the order at any time. At their height the Templars were one of the largest pan-European institutions of the time, a weird combination of Wells Fargo and the Green Berets.

However the amount of land the Templars had control of in Europe, as well as their immense wealth, led to some testy relationships with monarchs at different times in their history, and also led to their eventual downfall. Specifically it was the actions of King Phillip IV of France, known as “Philip the Fair”, though this moniker was due to his attractive appearance and not, as we will see, due to any dealing with him being a fair or judicious king. He was known to go after people for the smallest of slights, putting a bishop on trial for sorcery, blasphemy and treason, among other charges, for the simple slight of publicly questioning his ability to govern. In the year 1306 however Philip had much greater problems than spats with bishops, as he had put the Crown deeply in debt from successive wars with the Kingdom of Aragon, Flanders and England. After several attempts to fix France’s financial woes led to widespread inflation and riots, Philip first expelled France’s Jewish population, seizing all their land, money and other financial assets for the Crown in the process, as a way to get an influx of cash for the Crown. The amounts seized however were far from enough to fix France’s financial woes, so Philip looked to the Templars, a much more wealthy group who held a great deal more land in and around France, to fix his cash problems. After creating a series of trumped up and almost certainly false accusations, which included the charges that brothers were forced to deny Christ and engage in sexual activities with each other on their initiation into the order, on Friday October 13th 1307 representatives of the Crown acted in unison to arrest Templars all around the country. Their lands and assets were seized by the Crown much like the property of the Jews was a year earlier. Through force of personality, and his almost complete control of Pope Clement V, Philip was able to push through these false charges which led to the dissolution of the Templar order all over Europe.

This quick, decisive and complete destruction of the Templars is, as Jones points out, one of the reasons the Templars have become so mysterious and popular in the public’s imagination. There are plenty of theories about the Templars having some sort of secret knowledge that needed suppressed, or their having the Holy Grail and it being lost upon their dissolution, that have kept them in the pages of fiction writers and conspiracy theorists for centuries. In reality though, this dissolution of the order was a long drawn out process, while the arrests in France were undertaken in one fell swoop it was 1312, five years after those initial arrests, before the order was officially dissolved, and the majority of their members were never even convicted of anything. Outside of France no one really took the accusations seriously, so when the time came for the Templar properties to be confiscated across Europe most of the  land and remaining members of the Order were just absorbed by other religious orders and kept doing what they were doing, taking care of land and collecting revenues for the Church. This happened for the fighting men remaining out East, as many joined either the Hospitallers or the Teutonic Knights, similar military religious orders who were also in the Holy Land. While some of the leaders of the order were put to death for their alleged crimes, little changed for the majority of those who called themselves Templars except a change in clothing.

In Conclusion

By now I should probably address the fact that none of this review of a book written about a military order has covered any battles, strategies or really mentioned anything about the actual fighting the Templars undertook in both Spain and the Holy Land throughout their’ history. Rest assured, Jones does an excellent job covering both the campaigns and individual battles of note that the Templars were a part of during the era of the Crusades. As one peruses the pages of Jones’ tome he will make abundantly clear what fierce warriors and expert tacticians the Templars were, frequently winning battles where they were outnumbered and at strategic disadvantages. Jones is especially adept at giving the reader a sense of the scale of these conflicts, as well as giving vivid accounts of their violence. If you’re looking for a book that gives great stories of the battlefield this doesn’t disappoint. With that said, those battles, while they were entertaining and fascinating parts of the book, weren’t the parts that surprised me, those parts were the ones that I covered here, which told of the Templar Order’s ubiquitous presence throughout Europe from the 1100’s till 1307. Jones shows us the Templars were so much more than just a military order far away in the Middle East, they were an enduring presence in the life of Europeans for hundreds of years, serving many roles in European society, just one of which involved fighting. This deeply embedded presence in European society at the time is also what makes the story of their fall so surprising and engrossing. In the space of five short years a pan-European institution was gone from two continents, and while most of its members survived the Order’s dissolution it was still such a jarring experience that the Templars’ popularity in myth and history has remained to this day. Jones’ addition to literature on the Templars is a great addition to the history portion of that popularity, but its gripping and elucidating prose make it just as entertaining as some of the best fiction written on the Order.

Fun Facts From The Templars

• There are pilgrims’ accounts of the Holy Land during the time of the crusades from visitors as far off as Portugal, Flanders, Germany Russia and Iceland.
• The Templar flag was known as the Confanon baucant, a simple black and white standard that Templars fought around during battles. The flag was not supposed lowered till every Templar in a battle was dead.
• The Templars marked buildings they built with a logo of a triangular shield with an upside down T bisecting it’s top half.
• The Assassins, made famous in their own right by many works of fiction including the Assassin’s Creed video game series, were a Shiite sect headquartered in Persia who also held castles in Syria close to the Templars. They were famous for using brutal public assassinations as part of their military and political strategies. The Templars had a mostly peaceful relationship with them, mostly paying them to be left alone. The head of the Assassins was only known as the Old Man of the Mountain.
• The King of Jerusalem during the time of the Crusades was chosen by a council of the Pope, the Kings of England and France and the Holy Roman Emperor.
• The coronation jewels necessary to crown the new king or queen of Jerusalem were kept locked in a treasury with three keys held by the Patriarch of Jerusalem, the masters of the Hospitallers and the master of the Templars. All three needed to accede to open the treasury for a king to be crowned.
• When the Templar James of Maille died in the Battle of Cresson he was so admired for his valor and determination that his body became a source of relics. The weirdest of these relics was collected by a man who cut off James of Maille’s testicles to see if they would create a man with as much courage as he.
• At the siege of Acre during the Third Crusade the crusader army had names for their trebuchets like “Bad Neighbor” and “God’s Stonethrower”
• At that same siege of Acre Richard the Lionheart took ill but still demanded to be brought out on a stretcher to shoot crossbow bolts at the defenders patrolling the walls.
• King John of England secured several large loans from the Templars, essentially by pawning his Crown Jewels to them.
• During the disastrous aftermath of the battle of al-Mansurah in 1250 things got so bad for the Crusaders that soldiers had to have their gums cut to allow them to eat through scurvy and Louis IX had such bad dysentery he had to have a hole cut in his undergarments.
• In 1258 when the Mongols destroyed Baghdad they threw so many books into the Euphrates the river turned back from the ink.
• Philip the Fair, King of France, tried to posthumously try Pope Boniface VIII for heresy, sodomy, sorcery and murder, and this wasn’t even the first time a Pope had be posthumously tried. In 897 Pope Formosus was exhumed and tried for perjury.
• Philip the Fair ordered the Templars to be arrested simultaneously all across France on Friday October 13, 1307 which is why Friday the 13th is seen as an unlucky date.
• In 1309 the Teutonic Knights, the last of the three established military orders in the Holy Land, established their headquarters as the autonomous state of Prussia in Germany, though by the rise of Prussia as a modern state they were no longer rulers of that territory. Napoleon dissolved the order in 1809 and it exists today as a group of nuns and priests who offer care to expatriate Germans.
• The idea of the Templars guarding the Holy Grail first came from the 13th century german epic poem Perceval.

Suggestions for Further Reading and Entertainment

• If you’re a big fan of Dan Jones or medieval European history in general I would suggest reading some of Dan Jones’ other works on medieval history. The Plantagenets has been reviewed on this site, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. The sequel to The Plantagenets, known as The Wars of the Roses in the United States and  The Hollow Crown in the UK, takes up the story right at the end of The Plantagenets, covering the War of the Roses and the rise of the Tudor dynasty in England. I haven’t read this one yet, though I have purchased it and intend to read it soon.
• Another thing you can do if you’re a big fan of Dan Jones, or becoming one, is catch one of his many television appearances. Secrets of Great British Castles is available on Netflix in the United States, and he has hosted a bunch of shows on medieval England for the UK’s Channel 5. TO my knowledge the majority of those programs are not available currently on any streaming services in the US, but hopefully they will make the trip over soon.
• As far as film goes, though it hasn’t had the greatest of reviews I still think Kingdom of Heaven, directed by Ridley Scott, is a solid movie about the Crusades and certainly the only one with a blockbuster production budget. The film is a relatively fictionalized depiction of Balian of Ibelin, a crusader noble who was active around the time of the Third Crusade. Balian is mentioned several times in Jones’ book.
• For books on the Crusades not written by Dan Jones I would suggest those written by Thomas Asbridge. I read his book The First Crusade: A New History a few years ago and remembered it as a quick and informative read on the First Crusade, which is exactly what I would imagine you would want out of a book with that title.