Spectacular rise and ignominious decline of crusading Templars

The Tragedy of the Templars: The Rise and Fall of the Crusader States

Tortured, they confessed to blasphemy and sometimes sodomy. The pope, Clement V, who lived in France, made some effort to intervene, but, politically weak, ultimately failed them; their final grand master was burned at the stake

Of all the medieval military orders, the Templars are the ones most shrouded in mystique and legend. In the space of two centuries, they rose from being poor knights protecting pilgrims in the Holy Land to an economic power before collapsing in ignominy. Their enduring associations are with things like the Holy Grail, Freemasonry, occultism, and general secrecy.

However, this book does not set out to address these in detail, and is the better for it. Haag’s book is designed as a solid narrative with plenty of historical detail and context. As he presents it, it’s a story where you know the ending, you know that disaster after disaster awaits the Templars, but the important part is the journey from rise to fall.

He takes as his starting point the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187, a devastating blow to the crusader states of what is now the Middle East.

It is interesting to see the parallels between the rise and fall of the Templars and the rise and fall of the crusader states. He argues, with some merit, that the Templars, disgraced and depleted following the defeat of the Christian states, were made scapegoats when Western European states withdrew support for the crusades in subsequent centuries. The Templars had been founded to protect pilgrims to Jerusalem; with the city and wider region lost, one could argue that their primary purpose was now gone. By the end of crusader rule in Outremer (as they called the area along the Mediterranean), the Templars were powerful and wealthy, but without a purpose, and, already the subject of myth, inspired intense jealousy among secular lords.

The Middle East depicted here is very different from the one we know today. Although they had been under Muslim rule for centuries, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt were mostly Christian, though of different sects and traditions. It was also a multicultural and mobile world; Saladin, as he points out, was a Kurd from what is now Iraq, but who had risen to power in Egypt and whose officers were mainly Turkish. Haag gives substantial background to the theological and political landscape of the region from the early middle ages to the crusading period. It’s a good third of the book and, while useful background material to show how fractious and varied the area was, seems to get in the way of the core narrative.

The order began as a group of nine knights (or 30, depending on your source) protecting pilgrims in Jerusalem in 1120, and at its height had perhaps 15,000 members, with only a minority actually knights. I’ve read about the Templars before but until this book didn’t realise that women had been a part of the order in its earliest days — though they were barred in the late 1120s so as to preserve the chastity of the men. They were fierce in battle — another historian has referred to them as the crusaders’ “shock troops”. One of the reasons for the level of mystery is not only the order’s secret rules, but the fact that most of the Templars’ own documents were destroyed in the 16th century and earlier, meaning that we have to rely almost exclusively on outside sources for information about the order. This, as any historian will tell you, inevitably leads to a colouring of opinion. For instance, One of the earliest Templar chroniclers, Walter Map, archdeacon of Oxford in the 13th century, was completely against warrior monks. Haag does a good job of trying to separate the wheat from the chaff.

He also draws attention to how other sources from the time can vary widely, which serves as an implicit caveat to understanding the history of the region. For example, it is unquestioned that crusaders committed terrible massacres of Jews and Muslims, particularly the ordinary people who had made their way to the Middle East overland (separately from the knights and trained soldiers). However, it is in how Haag puts different accounts of the crusaders’ taking of Jerusalem alongside one another to show the hyperbole and exaggeration — contemporary chroniclers who were not there give the most lurid accounts of death and blood that were probably far in excess of what actually happened.

The crusades began with Pope Urban II’s urging of French knights to “free the churches of the East” following an appeal for help from the Byzantines, who had lost much territory to the Muslim Turks. As Haag points out, Urban did not want to create states in the east; he wanted to liberate Christians from Muslim rule and give the territory back to Byzantine rule. However, as the crusaders dealt with matters on an ad hoc basis, so they claimed land for themselves and founded states and counties, such as at Edessa and Antioch. The Templars emerged as a gendarmerie to protect pilgrims on the roads.

Once they do appear in the narrative, the text is concise and charges solidly through two centuries of history. It is a fascinating period which has seen the order shrouded in mystery and misinformation, and Haag has written precisely on this subject before. It is a well researched book but does not get too bogged down in historical debate. The journalist-historian in me wants more footnotes and sources, the reader in me is happy with the engaging and accessible narrative.

It is hard not to feel some sympathy for the Templars when you see how it was a combination of economics and politics that caused their downfall. Having helped to secure and develop Outremer, including many agricultural settlements, they were later unfairly blamed for the collapse of the Second Crusade in 1149, in which much of the Christian force died or was scattered. Haag says this led to a generation of bitterness between Outremer, Europe, and the idea of crusading. But the order persisted, and by the 14th century, the king of France, Philip IV, owed them a considerable amount of money in the form of legacy debt, and the order had substantial cash assets across Europe. On Oct 13, 1307, all Templars across France were arrested for heresy, the only crime for which they could be arrested. Tortured, they confessed to blasphemy and sometimes sodomy. The pope, Clement V, who lived in France, made some effort to intervene, but, politically weak, ultimately failed them; their final grand master was burned at the stake.

Overall, this is a worthwhile read for those interested in seeing how the Templars fitted in to the wider context of the crusades and their aftermath, but the amount of non-Templar background could leave the reader tired by the time the knights enter the narrative. However, it’s hard to beat in terms of clarity, accessibility, and coverage.