The Templars: The Rise and Spectacular Fall of God's Holy Warriors by Dan Jones
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Readable and Absorbing Templar/Crusader History In the introduction to The Templars: The Rise and Spectacular Fall of God’s Holy Warriors (2017), Dan Jones says that his book will tell an entertaining narrative history of the modest beginning of the Templars after the first Crusade, of their rapid rise to wealth, power, and influence in the medieval world (east and west), and of their “spectacular fall” and dissolution. The last sentences of his book describe what he achieves as well: “The legend of the Templars will live on, inspiring, entertaining, and intriguing generations to come. That perhaps is their real legacy.” Through the course of his history, Jones illuminates much about the Templars in the Holy Land, where their order started in the early 12th century, dedicated to protecting the Christian presence, which I expected, but he also explains plenty about them in European countries like England and France, where they were major land-holders, bankers, political influencers, and crusaders (helping the Reconquista in Spain and Portugal), which surprised me. “Those hundred years had seen the Templars transformed from indigent shepherds of the pilgrim roads [in the Holy Land] dependent on the charity of fellow pilgrims for their food and clothes, into a borderless, self-sustaining paramilitary group funded by large scale estate management [from Scotland to Sicily],” with their “martial prowess with spiritual prestige and global connections” enabling them to act as diplomats, bankers, and advisors to kings and popes and other powers. Jones also vividly and suspensefully depicts battles and sieges and wars and negotiations, as well as the political and religious motivations behind them. Although Jones writes most of his history from the European point of view (using words like “unfortunately” or “fortunately” when describing things that hindered or helped the Templars and their crusading Christian allies and rivals achieve their goals), he also does present the Muslim point of view and quotes a fair number of Muslim chroniclers. And he depicts famous Muslim leaders like Saladin and Baybars as complex, charismatic, and capable men. He is a clear writer capable of finely dry lines, as when he says, “The Templars were not a missionary organization,” because they were not dedicated to converting enemies but to killing them. (One of the many interesting things to glean from his book is the distinction apologists for the church militant made between homicide (the sinful killing of men) and malicide (the graceful killing of evil). Another savory line comes when Jones covers a low point in the Templars’ history, when losses to Muslim armies left them “a ragtag leaderless rump.” He excels when critically summing up some of the less savory figures in his history, probably chief among them King Philip IV of France, the man most responsible for wiping out the Templars: “Philip was a man of little warmth and no great intellectual curiosity, but he was a calculating zealot, committed to his own self-serving form of piety, able to convince himself of the worst intentions in others and quite unafraid of destroying anyone who stood in his way.” I found many interesting things in Jones’ account, like the rationalization of some Christian thinkers and leaders to condone violence in the service of a religion whose major figure, Jesus, preached non-violence, the Templar rules forbidding members from doing things like wearing pointy shoes, hunting every animal except lions, and wearing clothes with decorative accessories, the rivalry between the Templars and the Hospittalers, and the way Philip IV and Pope Clement freely used torture and intimidation and even the University of Paris to destroy the Templars, not only in France but everywhere. He does hurry through the fourth Crusade and its sack of Constantinople, leaving me to wonder what if any role the Temple played in it. On the other hand, I sometimes felt I was reading a history of the Crusades in addition to that of the Templars. That’s inevitable, given how inextricably they were involved in the Crusades almost from the start, but still… The result is that, although I enjoyed this book and learned a lot from it, I sometimes wondered if he was stretching things to make the Templars relevant to the history of the Crusades, and I don’t now feel the need to read his book on the Crusades. The book closes with an interesting epilogue covering the history of idealizing or demonizing fictional representations of Templars, from the beginning of their order up to the present, from the early 13th century poem Parzifal up to the recent Assassin’s Creed games and including their co-option by the Freemasons in the 18th century and by Mexican drug cartels in the 21st. Jones summarily debunks the fanciful legends of their supposed continued secret existence and secreting away of great treasures and holy relics like the grail, explaining that the “evidence” from all such fancies derive from earlier fictions about the order. Although Jones reads his own book just fine, with clarity and enthusiasm without overdoing anything, for obvious reasons the Audiobook lacks his notes and maps, as well as his four appendices (Cast of Major Characters, Popes, Kings and Queens of Jerusalem, and Masters of the Order of the Templars). For readers interested in the Templars and Crusades, this book should be an enriching experience. View all my reviews
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