The Real History Behind the Templars Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  PART ONE - The Poor Knights of Christ

  CHAPTER ONE - The Beginning of the Order

  CHAPTER TWO - Hugh de Payns

  CHAPTER THREE - Baldwin II, King of Jerusalem

  CHAPTER FOUR - Hugh, Count of Champagne One of the earliest members of the ...

  CHAPTER FIVE - Bernard of Clairvaux

  CHAPTER SIX - Hugh de Payns Takes the Templars on the Road

  CHAPTER SEVEN - The Council of Troyes

  CHAPTER EIGHT - Go Forth and Multiply

  CHAPTER NINE - The Life of a Templar, According to the Rule

  CHAPTER TEN - Melisande, Queen of Jerusalem

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - Fulk of Anjou, the Queen’s Husband

  CHAPTER TWELVE - The Temple in Jerusalem

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN - The Popes Get Involved (You Knew They Would)

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN - The Second Crusade

  PART TWO - The Glory Years

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Grand Masters 1136-1191

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Between the Second and Third Crusades (1150-1191)

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - Who Were the Saracens, Anyway? In the first paragraph of ...

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - Saladin

  CHAPTER NINETEEN - Richard the Lionheart

  CHAPTER TWENTY - The Assassins

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - The Hospita lers

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - Grand Masters 1191-1292/93

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - The Templars and the Saint, Louis IX of France Louis IX, ...

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - Templars and Money

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - The Temple in Paris

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX - The Temple in London

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN - The Last Stands; The Fa l of Acre and Loss of the Holy Land

  PART THREE - The End of the Order of the Poor Knights

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT - Jacques de Molay: The Last Grand Master 1292-1313

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE - Philip the Fair

  CHAPTER THIRTY - Friday the Thirteenth; the Arrest and Trials of the Templars

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE - The Charges Against the Templars

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO - Guillaume de Nogaret

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE - The Council of Vienne and the End of the Order

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR - Time Line of the Trials

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE - The Trials Outside of France

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX - The Secret Rite of Initiation

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN - Marguerite Porete

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT - Who Were the Templars?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE - The Other Guys; Regional Military Orders

  CHAPTER FORTY - Baphomet

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE - The Cathars

  PART FOUR - The Beginning of the Legends

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO - Templars in Fiction

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE - What Happened to the Templars?

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR - The Holy Grail

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE - Templars in Denmark: Bornholm Island

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX - The Templars and the Shroud of Turin

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN - Templars in Scotland: Rosslyn Chapel

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT - The Freemasons and the Templars

  Epilogue

  How to Tell if You Are Reading Pseudohistory

  Templar Time Line

  Recommended Reading

  Index

  Praise for The Real History Behind the Da Vinci Code:

  “If, like Sam Cooke sang, you ‘don’t know much about history,’ Newman’s encyclopedic, A-to-Z look at topics ranging from ‘Apocrypha’ to ‘Wren, Christopher’ provides perspective and insight.” —Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

  “Witty and charming, but nonetheless rational in explanation and complete in background research, The Real History Behind the Da Vinci Code seeks not so much to refute the novel, but to elucidate on the truth, and not so much to disparage the mistakes of Mr. Brown but to make readers realize that the history is bigger than any one person, popular novelists included.”

  —Business World

  “The book . . . gives the truth about topics used in Brown’s fiction. . . .

  Well-written and precise, it is the work of a woman who writes what she knows.”—Statesman Journal (Oregon)

  “For fans of Dan Brown’s popular The Da Vinci Code, Sharan Newman’s The Real History Behind the Da Vinci Code is a must-have companion.”

  —The Sunday Oregonian

  “Newman has arranged her discussion of the people, places, and events in The Da Vinci Code in an encyclopedic format, creating a book that is both accessible and fun to read. Recommended for all libraries.”

  —Library Journal

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  THE REAL HISTORY BEHIND THE TEMPLARS

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  Copyright © 2007 by Sharan Newman

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  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley trade paperback edition / September 2007

  eISBN : 978-0-425-21533-3

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  Acknowledgments

  Professor Malcolm Barber, for his generosity now and over the years in sharing his profound knowledge of the Templars and for enduring my many e-mail questions and ventings.

  Professor Paul Crawford, California University of Pennsylvania, for his help on the Templars, Philip the Fair, and the University of Paris.

  Dr. Rozanne Elder, Cistercian Institute, for giving me instant information on Bernard of Clairvaux.

 
; Professor Norman Hinton, University of Illinois, Springfield, emeritus, for Middle English references to the Templars.

  Professor Janus Moeller Jensen, University of Southern Denmark, for giving me literary background on Templar ideals in Danish sagas.

  Professor Kurt Villads Jensen, University of Southern Denmark, for advice on the likelihood of Templars in Denmark.

  Courtney de Mayo, Rice University, for spending a tedious day copying all of the Marquis D’Albon for me.

  Professor Brian Patrick McGuire, Roskilde University, for checking my section on Denmark and the Cistercians.

  Professor Helen Nicholson, Cardiff University, for advice on Templars and Hospitallers and for referring me to other excellent sources.

  Professor Jeffrey Russell, UC Santa Barbara, emeritus, (but not with me) for checking my Latin translations and giving advice on medieval theology.

  Mme. Alessandra Tchernik for checking my Italian translations.

  Kyle Wolfley, Ball State University, for copying several books I couldn’t find in my own library.

  And all the members of the Mediev-L list, who debated just what “interdict” consisted of when I couldn’t find a solid answer.

  All of these people kindly helped me in my research. Any errors in this book are totally my own. They did their best.

  Map drawn by Marcia Noland

  Introduction

  Last year I was in France to speak about Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code, explaining the places where the fiction diverged from history. At one stop a teenaged boy from the Netherlands asked me (in excellent English) about the Templars. I went into my standard lecture about their literary connection to the Grail and the myths surrounding their dissolution in 1312. He listened politely for a while and then interrupted to ask, “Yes, but what were the Templars? Did they really exist?”

  I came to a full stop. That young man had accepted that the novel was fiction. Therefore, he had assumed that the Templars were also fiction.

  When I started to think about it, it made perfect sense. When I read science fiction, I can’t judge what’s based on cutting-edge science and what the author made up. Why should I expect readers of historical fiction to know which characters in a book really existed?

  The story of the Templars is definitely the stuff of epic romance. From the time of the creation of the order, legends began to swirl around them. Some of these legends the Templars created themselves. Others appeared in popular chronicles of the late twelfth and early thirteenth century. Over the years the Templars were admired and reviled, adored and loathed. They were considered by some to be the closest that a fighting man could come to salvation and by others nothing more than materialistic money-grubbers. Their mass arrest on October 13, 1307, shocked the Western world. Some defended them; others believed they were heretics. Many who thought they were probably innocent of the charges still felt the Templars had gotten a comeuppance that they richly deserved.

  Since the Order of the Knights Templar was dissolved, the stories about them have grown and mutated until they are hardly recognizable. For three hundred years after the end of the order, the Templars were largely forgotten. If anything, they were seen as an anachronism that had ended well after it had ceased to be of any use. The other military orders survived by changing and adapting to the new world.

  Then there were two great spurts of interest in the Templars. The first was at the end of the eighteenth century when they were rediscovered by Protestant Europe. They became a symbol of resistance to papal tyranny and, in France, the tyranny of the monarchy. Catholics responded by remembering the Templars as the last defense against the enemies of Christ.

  At the end of the eighteenth century, the creation of Templar myths took a huge leap. The new society known as the Freemasons was spreading across Europe. Through the enthusiastic efforts of a German baron, Karl von Hund, who published under a pen name, the story of the Templars was grafted on to Masonic ritual and lore. This opened the door for a wealth of imaginative theories regarding the Templars, all of which had more to do with the political situation in Europe at that time than the history of the Templars.

  The second great development in the Templar myth came in the twentieth century. Late Victorian writers, such as Jessie Weston, had woven the Templars into European folklore. But it was not until the latter part of the century that the general public became intrigued by theories linking the Templars to everything from the Holy Grail, to Cathar Heresy, to modern secret societies. Currently, there are so many beliefs about the Templars that I find it impossible to keep up with them. They seem to have been involved with everything except the Kennedy assassination, and that might be next.

  This book is an attempt to give the known facts about the Knights Templar, from their beginnings in 1119 or 1120 to the dissolution in 1312 and beyond. It is my hope that this will make it easier for people who are reading the latest Templar book, either fiction or history, to separate fact from fiction and give them a base from which to evaluate the ideas presented. I have arranged the book chronologically, with some chapters being an overview of events and others focusing on individual people or subjects. When there are words in bold type, that means there is a section devoted to that one topic. Some sections overlap in subject matter, giving a different view of people and events.

  I have often heard that readers are put off by footnotes. Please don’t be. You don’t have to read them. They are there to let you know that I’ve done my best to find the most accurate information available. They are also there so that if you wish, you can go to these sources and check them for yourselves. Then you can decide if I’m right or not. But if you’re willing to trust me, then just ignore them. I’ll be very flattered. Studying history means that one has to be part scientist, part detective, and part psychologist. The evidence is not always complete and that’s why, when historians come to conclusions, they always let people know what sources those conclusions are based upon.

  So don’t worry about my citations. I’ll be very happy if you simply enjoy the book.

  PART ONE

  The Poor Knights of Christ

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Beginning of the Order

  How does a legend begin? In the case of the Knights of the Temple of Solomon at Jerusalem, it began in obscurity. No contemporary chronicler mentions their existence. We only know they existed by 1125 because there is a charter from that year witnessed by Hugh de Payns in which he is called the “Master of the Temple.”1

  Later generations would tell the story of the first Templars, each one a little differently:

  At the beginning of the reign of Baldwin II, a Frenchman came from Rome to Jerusalem to pray. He had made a vow not to return to his own country, but to become a monk after helping the king in the war for three years; he and the thirty knights who accompanied him would end their lives in Jerusalem. When the king and his barons saw that they had achieved remarkable things in the war . . . they advised the man to serve in the army with his thirty knights and defend the place against brigands rather than to become a monk in the hope of saving his own soul.2

  That is the explanation for the beginning of the Templars given by Michael, the Syrian patriarch of Antioch, in about 1190. At about the same time, an Englishman, Walter Map, gave a somewhat different account:

  A knight called Payns, from a district of Burgundy of the same name, came as a pilgrim to Jerusalem. When he heard that the Christians who watered their horses at a cistern not far outside the gates of Jerusalem were constantly attacked by the pagans, and that many of the believers were slain in these ambuscades, he pitied them, and . . . he tried to protect them as far as he could. He frequently sprang to their aid from well-chosen hiding places and slew many of the enemy.3

  Walter views the founder of the order as a sort of Lone Ranger who eventually enlisted other knights to join him in his work. This would make a good movie plot, but it is unlikely that a man doing this would live long enough to establish an order of knights.r />
  Yet another story of the first Templars is from a later writer, Bernard, a monk at Corbie. He wrote in 1232, over a hundred years after the order began, but he was drawing on a now lost version by a nobleman named Ernoul living in Jerusalem about the same time as the other writers. Bernard wrote:

  When the Christians had conquered Jerusalem, they installed themselves at the Temple of the Sepulcher and many more came there from everywhere. And they obeyed the prior of the sepulcher. The good knights there took counsel among themselves and said, “We have abandoned our lands and our friends and have come here to elevate and glorify the rule of God. If we stay here, drinking, eating and hanging around, without doing work, then we carry our weapons for nothing. This land has need of them. . . . Let us get together and make one of us the master of us all . . . to lead us in battle when it occurs.”4

  So Bernard believed that the men had originally been pilgrims, perhaps staying at the church of the Sepulcher under the supervision of a priest, and it was only through boredom that they decided to form a fighting unit.

  Finally we have the account of William, Archbishop of Tyre. He is the one most often quoted and it is his version that has most often been accepted. Since he was born in Jerusalem and educated in Europe, he had both access to the records and the polished style necessary to present the history.

  In that same year [1119] some noblemen of knightly rank, devoted to God, pious and God fearing, placed themselves in the hands of the lord patriarch for the service of Christ, professing the wish to live perpetually in the manner of regular canons in chastity, and obedience, without personal belongings. The leading and most eminent of these men were the venerable Hugh of Payns and Godfrey of St. Omer. As they had neither church nor fixed abode, the king gave them a temporary home in his palace which was on the south side of the Temple of the Lord, . . . Their main duty, imposed on them by the patriarch and the other bishops for the remission of their sins, was that they should maintain the safety of the roads and the highways to the best of their ability, for the benefit of pilgrims in particular, against attacks of bandits and marauders. 5