TEMPLARS OF DOOM
These fearless holy warriors had just one flaw – they were stupid
The Templars
Dan Jones
Head Of Zeus €35
★★★★★
At the end of the 11th century, an army of Christian crusaders arrived in the Holy Land and, against all odds, succeeded in wresting Jerusalem from Muslim rule. Pilgrims flooded in from all over Europe to pray at sacred Christian sites and in time a number of knightly orders sprang up to help and protect them. Of these, the most famous were the Templars.
The Templars were conceived as warrior monks and, as Dan Jones explains in this stirring account of their colourful history, their founding ideology expressed a conflict at the heart of medieval Christianity. Supposedly a religion of peace, it was also dedicated to forcibly opposing the devil and all his works, and that was bad news for non-believers. For as one begrudgingly admiring Muslim chronicler put it, the Templars were ‘the fiercest fighters of all the Franks’. Ferocious they undoubtedly were, but as Jones reminds us
in a series of vivid battle scenes, tactical intelligence was not their forte.
Time and time again the Templars would hurl themselves gung-ho into obvious deathtraps and suffer horrendous and unnecessary casualties.
Their battles were the medieval equivalent of the Charge of the Light Brigade.
Although they had taken vows of poverty, the Templars were richly endowed, and their wealth inspired jealousy and resentment.
When, after nearly two centuries of clinging on to an increasingly hopeless position, the crusaders were eventually expelled from the Holy Land, Christendom looked for scapegoats, and the Templars were top of the list.
The vicious and vainglorious French King, Philip IV, arrested the Templars on trumped-up charges of heresy and burned their leaders at the stake. It was an ignominious end to a body that, for all its faults, had always served loyally.
Told with all Jones’s usual verve and panache, this is a dramatic and gripping tale of courage and stupidity, faith and betrayal.