The Templars

by Michael Haag

  Cressing Temple, originally over 14,000 acres in extent, occupied a fertile site with good transport links by road and river, and by establishing a market here the Templars developed their holding as a considerable agricultural enterprise worked by over 160 tenant farmers, its surplus providing a profit which went towards paying for the order’s activities in Outremer. The property would have been in the charge of a preceptor accompanied by two or three knights or sergeants, together with a chaplain, a bailiff and numerous household servants. In 1309 the estate was recorded as possessing a mansion house with associated buildings including a bakehouse, a brewhouse, a dairy, a granary and a smithy, as well as gardens, a dovecote, a chapel with cemetery, a watermill and a windmill. After the suppression of the order in 1312, Cressing Temple was given to the Knights Hospitaller.

  ROSSLYN CHAPEL, SCOTLAND

  Rosslyn Chapel, at Roslin, seven miles south of Edinburgh, has been co-opted into every alternative history of Britain, and among the claims made for the chapel are that it has associations with the Holy Grail, the Templars and the Freemasons.

  Originally named the Collegiate Chapel of Saint Matthew, Rosslyn was designed by William St Clair (also spelt Sinclair), 1st Earl of Caithness, whose ancestors were Norman nobles. Construction of the chapel, which was built on the pattern of the choir in Glasgow Cathedral, began in 1456. The original intention was for it to be part of a much larger church, for the fashion in Scotland was to build ambitious private churches able to support a resident clerical community. But the grandiose scheme was never completed, and after William’s death in about 1491, it fell to his son to roof over the chapel and see the interior carving and decoration to its conclusion.

  Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code synthesises much that has been written about Rosslyn in the alternative histories. For example, he claims that Rosslyn was built on the site of an ancient Mithraic temple, and that it is ‘an exact architectural blueprint of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem’–this despite the fact that the chapel follows the pattern of the choir in Glasgow Cathedral. He also claims that it stands on a north-south meridian that runs through Glastonbury, on a Rose Line from which the chapel gets its name. In fact Rosslyn’s longitude is W3:08:41, while Glastonbury’s is W2:42:52, centred on the Abbey, or W2:41:41 centred on the ancient Tor. And like any good Scots kirk, Rosslyn’s name refers simply to it location, ‘ross’ meaning promontory or headland, and ‘lyn’ meaning pool or stream.

  Brown also attempts to link the chapel with the Templars. Though Rosslyn does lie only four miles to the northwest of Temple, the Knights Templar headquarters in Scotland, the chapel was built well over a century after the dissolution of the Templars. As for any link between the Sinclairs and the order, the one thing that can be said for certain is that a descendant of William Sinclair testified against the Templars during their trial at Edinburgh’s Holyrood Palace in 1309.

  Nevertheless, Rosslyn Chapel is an extraordinary place to visit. The exterior is alive with exaggeratedly decorated stone buttresses, arches, finials and canopies, and the interior stonework is if anything even more exotic, every surface covered in richly allegorical sculpture that draws heavily on biblical and medieval Christian symbolism–the Seven Deadly Sins, the Dance of Death and so on–and also on figurative naturalistic work and pagan mythological images–look out for the numerous Green Men.

  The most remarkable of all the thousands of pieces of virtuoso stonework is the twisted Prentice Pillar, which stands at a corner of the Lady Chapel, to the right of the main altar, with entwined dragons at its foot. Local legend has it that the column was created by an apprentice subsequently murdered by his master in a jealous rage. Dan Brown’s idea that a second facing pillar is an ‘exact replica’ of Boaz, the pillar that the Bible places on the left of the entrance to Solomon’s Temple, is pure invention. There is a second column at Rosslyn dubbed the Mason’s Pillar, but the name developed out of a local legend to do with stone-carving and has nothing to do with Freemasons. Nor is there a ‘massive subterranean chamber’ lurking beneath the chapel, as Dan Brown claims, though high-tech efforts to find one are unceasing.

  In 2005 a modern-day descendant, Dr Andrew Sinclair, denounced The Da Vinci Code. ‘The book is preposterous,’ he said, ‘its message pernicious, its history a bungle and a muddle. What it says about the Grail and Rosslyn is absolute invention.’ But as every good conspiracy theorist knows, he would say that.

  Part 7

  Templarism

  Born Again Templars

  Templars in Popular Culture

  When Anthony Burgess reviewed The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail–the book that put the Templars at the heart of a millennium of conspiracies–he said, ‘I can only see this as a marvellous theme for a novel.’ How prescient he was. A small army of novelists, from Umberto Eco to Dan Brown, have taken the book’s pseudo-history of the Knights Templar for their plots. The Templars have become screen regulars, too, and are keeping up with the times with starring roles in medieval-themed computer games.

  Not that adopting the Templars in fiction is entirely a modern phenomenon. The literary trail starts in the thirteenth century with Wolfram von Eschenbach’s epic poem Parzival (which reworks Chrétien de Troyes’ unfinished Grail romance Perceval) in which a group of knights known as Templeisen guard the Grail.

  Rise of the Templar Literary Phenomenon

  The writer who really put the Templars on the modern literary map was Sir Walter Scott, whose first foray into medieval fiction, Ivanhoe (1819), featured Sir Brian de Bois-Gilbert, a lustful Grand Master of the Templars, as its chief villain. King Richard the Lionheart–and the Templars–intrigued Scott so much that he returned to the patch in The Talisman (1825). His creation was so successful that it even spawned parody, in American novelist Herman Melville’s Typee (1846) and, in more extended form, The Paradise of Bachelors (1855). In this tale of a dinner at Temple Bar, Melville enjoys musing on the ‘moral blight that tainted at last this sacred brotherhood’ and turned them into hypocrites and rakes.

  The Templars then went quiet for a few decades–leaving aside a namecheck in Leslie Charteris’ hero Simon Templar–until the 1950s, when Maurice Druon wrote a series of seven historical novels, The Accursed Kings. These start with James of Molay’s burning in 1314 and his supposed curse on the Capetian dynasty. In the 1970s Druon’s novels were made into an acclaimed mini-series in France. Something was obviously stirring. In 1972 Ishmael Reed made a Templar knight, Hinkle von Hampton, the villain in his post-modernist satire Mumbo Jumbo and Pierre Barbet wrote Baphomet’s Meteor, a bizarre sci-fi take on the legend in which the Templars are manipulated by aliens. The best novel to date about the order, William Watson’s sadly neglected The Last of the Templars, also appeared.

  The publication of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982) introduced the order’s puzzling legend to a wider audience. That same year Lawrence Durrell’s Constance, the third volume in his Avignon Quintet, honoured the Templars as secret Gnostics–which is why, he suggests, James of Molay was burned at the stake on Pope Clement V’s orders. Before their destruction, imagines Durrell, the Templars buried a secret treasure near Avignon, a treasure coveted by Hitler, who hopes it will inspire his Nazi ‘black chivalry’. Umberto Eco, that astute student of popular culture, spoofed the Templar obsession and popularised it in his international bestseller Foucault’s Pendulum (1988), memorably noting that you could always tell a lunatic because ‘sooner or later he brings up the Templars’.

  However, with Spielberg’s film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), an order that had officially died out seven hundred years ago suddenly came to feel like part of the zeitgeist. In the next decade, Katherine Kurtz, an American novelist (who claims to be a ‘Templar at heart’) launched a series of heroic Templar fantasy novels; British writer Michael Jecks penned various Cadfael-esque murder mysteries starring a Templar called Sir Baldwin; and Swedish author Jan Guillou entered the fray with a trilogy about a Swedish Templar. The pace was hot
ting up, and as The Da Vinci Code (2003) became one of the bestselling books ever, the Templars entered the book charts centre stage, with Raymond Khoury’s The Last Templar (2005) and Steve Berry’s The Templar Legacy (2006).

  * * *

  Templar Plots

  The blockbuster Templar plot draws loosely on history and myth. Here are some of the more crucial ingredients.

  James of Molay (Jacques de Molay) is a hero. Steven Berry, in The Templar Legacy, dares to suggest that the last Grand Master broke under torture, although, to compensate, he says it is James of Molay’s image on the Turin Shroud. But most of the time, Molay is so brave and far-sighted that it is a mystery how he failed to handle King Philip.

  The Templars have secret knowledge. What they know varies but it is often suggested that in the Holy Land they became acquainted with some profound, esoteric wisdom after hobnobbing with their Muslim opponents. For example, a Templar killing of an Assassin envoy becomes a thread with which the most elaborate fantasies can be spun.

  The Templars criss-cross the globe. Scotland, Paris, New York, Israel, the Languedoc, Turin, Copenhagen–no place on earth is safe as these complex plots unravel as surrogate travelogues.

  A modern-day Templar geek is usually a villain, just like Sir Leigh Teabing in The Da Vinci Code and the less eccentrically monikered Vance Williams in Khoury’s The Last Templar.

  Popes are devious and none more so than Leo X (1475–1521), who is forever quoted as saying, ‘It has served us well, this myth of Christ.’ In fact this remark was put into the Pope’s mouth by John Bale (1495–1563), a rabidly anti-Catholic propagandist.

  Never hesitate to draw on the theories of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail–but in appendices and bibliographies designed to suggest that a fiction is grounded in fact, don’t credit this (nonsensical) book.

  Heresy and Satanism make good copy–especially the Templars’ supposed worship of an Anti-christ called Baphomet.

  The Templars still exist. And they are behind everything.

  * * *

  TEMPLAR NOVELS

  Templar novels are beginning to outweigh historical accounts of the period. Here’s the pick of the crop, from Scott to the present.

  Sir Walter Scott Ivanhoe (1819) and The Talisman (1825)

  The Scottish novelist was obviously fascinated by the Templars–they provide the pantomime villains in these two famous novels–but not so fascinated that he looked much beyond the charges used to justify the order’s suppression. So in The Talisman the Grand Master presides over an order accused of heresy, suspected of being in league with the devil, and so arrogant that it would risk the downfall of Western civilisation to preserve itself. Scott even finds something sinister in the Grand Master’s abacus, ‘a mystic staff of office, the peculiar form of which has given rise to such singular conjectures and commentaries, leading to suspicions that this celebrated fraternity of Christian knights were embodied under the foulest symbols of paganism’. Some traditions suggest that the Templar abacus was modelled on the staff carried by Moses’ brother Aaron, which hardly makes it pagan, even if it later became associated with Freemasonry.

  Willing to glorify any calumny against the Templars, Scott has these reckless knights entering into a rash alliance with the Austrians against King Richard I and Saladin in The Talisman. In reality Richard was as obsessed by the Crusades as the Templars, which may be why he confirmed the order’s land holdings in England and granted them a kind of diplomatic immunity from English law.

  Scott’s most iconic Templar villain is hard-hearted Sir Brian de Bois-Gilbert, who, the novelist hints, personifies the order. Ivanhoe’s father Cedric describes him as ‘valiant as the bravest of his order but stained with their usual vices, pride, arrogance, cruelty and voluptuousness’. Bois-Gilbert may have about as much in common with the real Templars as the Arthur in Disney’s The Sword in the Stone has with the historical King Arthur. But he has, through sheer charisma–and a wonderful portrayal by George Sanders in the 1952 movie–become the most famous fictional Knight Templar of them all.

  Maurice Druon The Accursed Kings (1955–77)

  A Prix Goncourt-winning novelist, a minister of culture under Georges Pompidou, and the co-author of an anthem sung by the French resistance, Maurice Druon’s life is almost as interesting as his fiction. In the 1950s he began a series of novels, Les Rois Maudits (The Accursed Kings), on the story of James of Molay’s supposed curse–flung at King Philip as he burnt at the stake. At the heart of Druon’s saga is a real historical puzzle. When Molay burned, Philip was in good health and had three grown sons. Yet within twenty-five years, lack of male issue forced the Capetian dynasty to hand the throne to their Valois cousins.

  Druon’s seven novels–The Iron King, The Strangled Queen, The Poisoned Crown, The Royal Succession, The She-Wolf of France, The Lily and the Lion, When a King Loses France–span six tumultuous decades in French history, starting with Philip being refused a loan by the Templars and ending with the Valois dynasty. Although the series is named in honour of Molay’s curse, the plot is driven, in part, by another real story of the era: the campaign by Robert III of Artois, related through marriage to the first Valois king, to reclaim land from his aunt. Robert’s pursuit of this grievance led to exile and war.

  Druon takes care to achieve a level of historical accuracy but nonetheless bends the facts to suit his story. The dissolution of the Templars is a spur of the moment enterprise, not the fruit of meticulous planning. Philip does get his hands on Templar gold, but, when the Pope dies, becomes obsessed by James of Molay’s curse and, in the second novel, wastes away to death. Nonetheless, these first two novels are of genuine interest to any Templar aficionado.

  Pierre Barbet Baphomet’s Meteor (1972)

  As the Templars have long existed in an alternative dimension, between fact and fiction, it was smart of pseudonymous French sci-fi author Pierre Barbet to write a fictional alternative history in which Baphomet, the mysterious head the knights were accused of worshipping, is a stranded extraterrestrial who gives the Templars the scientific expertise and atomic weaponry they need to take over the world and develop the technology he needs to repair his spaceship. Alas, Baphomet has not allowed for human deviousness.

  The mysteries of Christianity were obviously of lifelong interest to Barbet, who was a doctor and wrote A Doctor at Calvary, one of the definitive medical accounts of the crucifixion.

  William Watson

  Last Of The Templars (1979)

  If you only read one Templar novel, try this. Watson brings a novelist’s insight into his historically scrupulous account of the Templars’ precipitous decline from the fall of Acre in 1291 to the burning of James of Molay in 1314. For once the Templars are not mystics, seers or heretics blackmailing the Church but the soldiers and bankers of historical record. Watson’s clever, dreamlike narrative offers a cogent analysis of the factors that doomed the order: the rise of nationalism, the order’s arrogance, the greed of King Philip, Papal acquiescence and, most of all, the loss of the Holy Land and the end of the Crusades, which left the Templars, without a mission, suddenly superfluous.

  Beltran, the last of the order, is a soldier-monk whose personal allegiance lies with Thibaud Gaudin, the penultimate Grand Master, who effectively dies from the strain of trying to reverse the decline in the Templars’ fortunes. Watson convincingly records the milestones on the order’s road to nowhere. While most novelists describe Molay’s death as a ceremony accompanied by pomp and circumstance, Watson presents the burning as a hurried, slightly disorganised spectacle, unforgettably noting, ‘The Grand Master has become a cinder.’

  Watson sees the brutal, unpredictable reality behind the noble stereotypes of conflict in the Holy Land and handles his historical cast–especially King Philip, his unscrupulous aide William of Nogaret and Pope Clement–with aplomb, even offering an intriguing explanation for the fact that all three were dead by Christmas 1314. Last of the Templars is worth reading both for its insight into t
he order and as a brilliant historical novel.

  Umberto Eco Foucault’s Pendulum (1988)

  In Eco’s second novel–following his hugely successful medieval whodunit, The Name of the Rose–three Italian intellectuals jokingly prepare The Plan, a ludicrously comprehensive plot which will explain everything–the Templars, the Rosicrucians, the Count of St Germain (an eighteenth-century con man who claimed to be immortal), the Merovingians, Jesus, the Nazis. A plot that anticipates, in some ways, the central premise of The Da Vinci Code.

  In Eco’s book, the Templars, according to a history written by a sinister colonel, were guardians of a secret treasure and ought to have taken over the world in 1944 but were mysteriously foiled. From this, Eco spins all manner of conceits with such enthusiasm that, at times, you can feel as if you are listening to a monologue by a very erudite pub bore. But you can forgive him a lot for inventing a secret society drolly known as the Synarchic Knights of Templar Rebirth.

  Jan Guillou The Crusades Trilogy (1998–2000)

  Swedish author Guillou’s novels are characterised by macho, politically correct heroes. In this trilogy set in the twelfth century, Swedish knight Arn Magnusson arrives in the Holy Land, condemned to serve twenty years as a Knight Templar for a youthful indiscretion, with the usual preconceptions about infidel Muslims being a brutish and uncivilised lot. But he soon casts off those prejudices and becomes a pro-Muslim multiculturalist who only fights for the Christians out of a sense of duty. Guillou blends fact, legend and fiction to make his point, even having his hero pardoned by Saladin because he once saved the great Muslim leader’s life from robbers.