The Knights Templar

INTRODUCTION

THE HOLY LAND BEFORE THE TEMPLARS

The infamous Order of the Knights Templar was established early in the twelfth century but still captures the popular imagination 900 years later. The Knights Templar were formed to patrol the roads of the Holy Land but became a premier military force of the Crusades. The Templars' abolishment in 1312 has fuelled the continuing presence of myths and false claims, such as links to the occult, the Freemasons and secret treasure. In the modern era, they have been depicted in fiction with contradicting roles, such as guardians of the Holy Grail, undead monsters and knights, both heroic and villainous. The Templars became most known by their association with the nineteenth-century novels of Sir Walter Scott and their part in a centuries-old conspiracy in Dan Brown's 2003 bestseller The Da Vinci Code.

This book examines the 900-year story of the Knights Templar, examining the Order's origin, detailing the Templars as an organisation, their increasing influence in the Crusader states and their role in the Crusades. The Knights Templar fought alongside figures such as Richard the Lionheart and St Louis IX and were involved in some of the Crusaders' most significant victories, such as the Battle of Montgisard, and their most devastating defeats, such as the Battle of Hattin. The Templars held a vast amount of land in Europe before their sudden arrest by King Philip IV in 1307.

To examine the legacy of these warrior monks, this book will look beyond the myths that followed the Templars' demise and explore how they came to be and how these myths influenced artistic imagination and further embedded them within popular culture through literature, film and even computer games.

For the history of the Knights Templar, this book uses primary sources from both Christian and Muslim chroniclers of the period to attempt to provide a balanced perspective on the Templars. To supplement the primary accounts, this book draws upon the work of other historians' accounts of the Crusades, which may give this narrative a subtle Western bias. However, this is the story of the Templars and, therefore, their victories and losses will be described as such, but it is without the intention of partiality.

By providing a detailed history of the Templars, this book aims to ascertain the truth behind the myths and perceptions by comparing the fantastical associations with the historical reality. The book will tell the entire 900-year story of the Knights Templar, from the history to the myths that followed and how these are perceived in the modern era through fiction.

In examining the history of the Templars, it is vital to provide the context of not only the First Crusade, which preceded their creation, but also to establish the political make-up of the Holy Land prior to the First Crusade and the radical transformation left in its wake.

BYZANTINE DECLINE AND ISLAMIC DOMINANCE

Throughout almost all of the eleventh century, there were no Latin states in the Holy Land because they were created following the titanic shift in Western and Eastern politics at the end of the eleventh century. This saw European Christians invade the Holy Land as an armed pilgrimage and led to countless deaths and genocidal slaughter.

The war between Christians and Muslims over control of the Holy Land began centuries before the First Crusade. The Byzantines held Jerusalem before the Muslim conquest of the city in AD 638.

Damascus was the first Byzantine city to be lost after the Arabic forces laid siege to it in 634. Despite putting up fierce resistance, the city fell, and the Christian inhabitants were given three days of safe passage, but after the third day passed the escaping Christians were hunted down and killed. Knowing the fate of those at Damascus, Jerusalem resisted, with its defences led by the elderly Greek Orthodox patriarch, Sophronius, and they held out for two years before surrendering due to starvation.

The Christians at Jerusalem did not share the horrific fate of the Damascenes and they were allowed to remain within the city unharmed and their property intact as long as they paid Jizya, a tax for non-Muslims.1 Jerusalem remained under Muslim control for 400 years before the arrival of the First Crusaders, who did not allow the Muslim citizens the same clemency.

By the end of the eleventh century, the Byzantines had been pushed back to Constantinople, having lost their territories in the Holy Land, Syria and almost all of Asia Minor. Following the Muslim conquest of the Holy Land, the Muslim territory would stretch from the Indus River and the borders of China across North Africa and into Spain and southern France.2 The empire would become fragmented and split into independent states.

In 661, following the death of Ali (the Prophet's cousin and son-in-law), power was seized by the Umayyad dynasty, who moved the Muslim capital from Arabia to Damascus. The rise of the Umayyad dynasty saw the emergence of the Shia branch of Islam, which believed that only a descendant of Ali and his wife Fatima, the daughter of Muhammad, could rule as caliph.

In 750, the Umayyads' rule came to a violent end and another Arab dynasty seized control, the Abbasids. The Abbasids moved the centre of Sunni Islam to Baghdad as the new capital, which would remain the centre of the religious denomination for 500 years.3

Although Spain had been independent from the empire since the eighth century, there was further division when, in 969, a Shi'ite faction known as the Fatimids, who claimed descent from Muhammad's daughter, took control of north Africa and established a rival caliphate that rejected Sunni Baghdad's authority. The Fatimids soon captured Jerusalem and Damascus, bringing several coastal territories into the Shi'ite caliphate. Eventually, the rival caliph's influence would dwindle and become a figurehead, while the actual power was wielded by the lieutenants, the sultan in Baghdad and the vizier in Cairo.4

Despite the continual decline of Byzantine power in Asia Minor and the Holy Land, the tenth century saw the Byzantines recapture lost territory. In 934, Byzantine general John Curcuas captured the city of Melitene, which the Arabs had held since 638. The shocking loss and further Byzantine victories caused an outbreak of violence against Christians, such as the sacking of the Holy Sepulchre on Palm Sunday in 937, when the church was looted and set alight. This caused sections of the building to collapse, including the Anastasis that was thought to enclose the Tomb of Christ.5

Throughout much of the tenth century, the Byzantines retook a large number of territories, such as Crete and Cyprus, before capturing the lost coastal territories of Antioch and Latakia and much of northern Syria, eventually retaking Damascus. By the eleventh century, the reinvigorated Byzantines were on the back foot as a new force appeared in the Holy Land, the Seljuq Turks, and their dominance would be one of the catalysts for the First Crusade.

In 1040, the Turks arrived. Nomadic tribesmen from Central Asia and a clan known as the Seljuq adopted Sunni Islam as their religion and pledged allegiance to the Abbasid caliph. The Seljuqs would gain dominance, as by 1045 the warlord Tughril had been appointed Sultan of Baghdad, which not only gave control of Sunni Islam to the Seljuqs, but they soon dominated the region, taking back Damascus and the coastal territories, driving the Fatimids back and retaking Jerusalem.

Following the gains from the Byzantines, a splinter group established an independent sultanate in Asia Minor.6 The power of the Seljuk Empire would be split when the Seljuk Sultan Malik-Shah died in 1092; his sons fought over their inheritance, and Malik-Shah's brother Tutush seized Syria for himself. After Tutush died in 1095, his sons fought over the succession and took control of Aleppo and Damascus separately.

The state of the Holy Land at the dawn of the First Crusade was not a unified Islamic power, and Sunni Islam was in disarray, while the Fatimids were contending with the appointment of a new vizier following the sudden death of the Fatimid Caliph in 1094 and his vizier a year later. Crusades historian Thomas Ashbridge notes that despite the challenges facing the Muslim states in the Holy Land, there is no evidence that the Latin Christians were aware of this, but the timing was extremely advantageous.7

The catalyst for the launch of the First Crusade was not the loss of Jerusalem, as the Christians had lost control of the city in the seventh century, nor was it due to the suffering of Christians, even though there were cases of violence as mentioned previously. The Christians had been second-class citizens since the seventh century, but they were free to practise their religion as long as they paid the Jizya.

Christians and Muslims had been at war in the Holy Land for hundreds of years, and although there had been outbreaks of violence and intolerance at the end of the eleventh century, there was little indication of the seismic events that would follow.

THE LAUNCH OF THE FIRST CRUSADE

On 27 November 1095, in a field outside Clermont, Pope Urban II delivered a sermon that would change European society and see a mass exodus of Europeans pouring into Asia Minor. The sermon delivered by Urban was the result of months of development as, in March of that year, he received ambassadors from the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I, who sought aid from the European Christians to help repel the Seljuk Turks. Urban may have been moved by Constantinople's plight, but since becoming pope in 1088 he...