And it’s lucky it’s so quiet, for this is London’s legal quarter, and behind these elegant facades are some of the biggest brains in the country – barristers pouring over texts and scribbling down notes. There are two of the four of London’s Inns of Court here: the Middle Temple and Inner Temple. 

It might be an oasis of hushed tones today, but it wasn’t always so tranquil. Geoffrey Chaucer, who mentioned one of the clerks of the Inner Temple in the prologue of Canterbury Tales, was probably a student here, and he was recorded for fighting with a Franciscan friar in Fleet Street.

And in the Peasants Revolt of 1381, the mob poured through these lanes, into the houses of the Temple lawyers. They carried off everything they could find – valuable books, deeds and rolls of remembrance – and burnt them to cinders. 

But in the centre of this maze is a building far older and far more intriguing than the antics of Geoffrey Chaucer or Wat Tyler’s revolting peasants. Here is a building drenched in almost nine centuries of turbulent history – of crusading knights, secret pacts, hidden cells and blazing firestorms. It’s a historic gem full of secrets: Temple Church. 

The Knights Templar 

In 1118, a holy order of crusading knights was formed. They took the traditional vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, as well as a fourth vow, to protect pilgrims in the Holy Land, as they traveled to and from Jerusalem.

These knights were given headquarters in Jerusalem, near Temple Mount – believed to be the Temple of Solomon. So they became known as the ‘fellow soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem’, or Templars, for short. 

In 1162, these Templar Knights built this Round Church as their base in London, and the area became known as Temple. Over the years, they grew incredibly powerful, working as bankers and diplomatic brokers to successive kings. So this area of Temple grew to become the centre of England’s religious, political and economic life.

Detail of the West Door of Temple Church.

Image Credit: History Hit

On the West Door are some clues to the church’s crusading past. Each of the columns is surmounted by four busts. The ones on the north side are wearing caps or turbans, whereas those on the south side are bare-headed. Some of them wear tight-fitting buttoned clothing – before the 14th century, buttons were considered to be oriental – and so some of these figures may represent the Muslims, whom the Templars were called upon to fight. 

Medieval effigies

When you come into the church today, you’ll notice the two parts: the Chancel, and the Round. This circular design was inspired by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which they believed to be the site of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. So the Templars commissioned a circular design for their London church, too. 

There are nine effigies in the round of the church.

Image Credit: History Hit

In the middle ages, this would have looked quite different: there were brightly painted lozenge shapes on the walls, carved heads bursting with colour, metallic plating on the ceiling to reflect the candlelight, and banners hanging down the columns.

And although most of this doesn’t survive, there are still some hints of a bygone medieval past. On the ground are nine male figures, weathered and bashed by the ravages of time, and packed full of symbolism and hidden meaning. They are all depicted in their early thirties: the age at which Christ died. The most important effigy is a man known as the “best knight that ever lived.” It shows William Marshall, the 1st Earl of Pembroke. 

William Marshall was said to be the greatest knight that ever lived.

Image Credit: History Hit

He was a soldier and statesman who served four English kings and is perhaps most famous for being one of the chief mediators in the years leading up to Magna Carta. In fact, in the countdown to Runnymede, lots of the negotiations around the Magna Carta happened in Temple Church. In January 1215, when the king was in the Temple, a group of barons charged in, armed and ready to fight a war. They confronted the king, and demanded his submission to a charter.

These sculptures would have once been blazing with coloured paint. Analysis from the 1840s tells us that there would have once been a ‘delicate flesh colour’ on the face. The mouldings had some light green, there were traces of gilding on the ring-mail. And the buckles, spurs and this little squirrel hiding underneath the shield had been gilt. The surcoat – that’s the tunic worn over the armour – was coloured in crimson, and the inner lining was light blue.

The penitentiary cell 

The Knights Templars’ management of the routes in and out of the Middle East soon brought them great wealth, with which came great power, with which came great enemies. Rumours – started by rivals in other religious orders and the nobility – began to spread of their nefarious conduct, sacrilegious initiation ceremonies and worship of idols.

One particularly notorious story was in regards to Walter Bacheler, the preceptor of Ireland, who refused to follow the Order’s rules. He was locked away for eight weeks, and starved to death. And in a final insult, he was even refused a proper burial.

The circular staircase of Temple Church hides a secret space. Behind a door is a space four and a half feet long and two feet, nine inches wide. The story goes that this is the penitentiary cell where Walter Bacheler spent his final, miserable days. 

It was just one of the terrible rumours which blackened the name of the Templars, and in 1307, at the instigation of Philip IV King of France – who happened to owe them quite a lot of money – the Order was abolished by the Pope. King Edward II took control of the church here, and gave it to the Order of St John: the Knights Hospitaller.

Richard Martin 

The following centuries were full of drama, including the great theological debate in the 1580s known as the Battle of the Pulpits. The church was rented out to a bunch of lawyers, the Inner Temple and Middle Temple, who shared use of the church, and still do to this day. It was during these years that Richard Martin was around.

Richard Martin was known for his lavish parties.

Image Credit: History Hit

His tomb in Temple Church makes him appear a sombre, sober, rule-abiding lawyer. This is far from the truth. Richard Martin was described as “a very handsome man, a graceful speaker, facetious and well-loved”, and once more, he made it his business to organise riotous parties for Middle Temple lawyers. He was so notorious for this debauchery it took him 15 years to qualify as a barrister. 

The encaustic tiles 

There have been all sorts of refurbishments at Temple Church over the years. Some classical features added by Christopher Wren, then a return to medieval styles during the Gothic Revival of the Victorian period. Now not much of the Victorian work is visible, apart from up in the clerestory, where visitors will find a remarkable display of encaustic tiles. Encaustic tiles were originally produced by Cistercian monks in the 12th century, and were found in abbeys, monasteries and royal palaces all across Britain during the medieval period.

They went out of fashion abruptly in the 1540s, during the Reformation, but were rescued by the Victorians, who fell in love with all things medieval. So as the Palace of Westminster was being rebuilt in all its gothic splendour, Temple Church was being decked out in encaustic tiles.

Encaustic tiles were common in great medieval cathedrals.

Image Credit: History Hit

The tiles at Temple Church were created by the Victorians, and the design is simple and striking. They have a solid red body, inlaid with white and glazed with yellow. Some of them feature a knight on horseback after medieval originals from the Temple Church. They even have a pitted surface, made to imitate that of a medieval tile. A subtle, romantic nod to bygone days of the Knights Templar. 

Temple Church during the Blitz 

The most testing moment of the church’s history came on the night of 10 May 1941. This was the most devastating raid of the Blitz. German bombers sent down 711 tons of explosives, and around 1400 people were killed, over 2,000 injured and 14 hospitals damaged. There were fires the whole length of London, and by morning, 700 acres of the city was destroyed, about double that of the Great Fire of London.

Temple Church was at the heart of these attacks. Around midnight, fire-watchers saw an incendiary land on the roof. The fire caught hold and spread down to the body of the church itself. The blaze was so fierce that it split the chancel’s columns, melted the lead, and the wooden roof of the Round caved in on the knights’ effigies below. 

The Senior Warden remembered the chaos:

At two o’clock in the morning, it was as light as day. Charred papers and embers were flying through the air, bombs and shrapnel all around. It was an awe-inspiring sight.

The fire brigade were powerless to stop the blaze – the attack had been timed so the Thames was at low tide, making it impossible to use the water. Temple Church was lucky not to have been completely annihilated.  

Post-World War Two restoration 

The destruction of the Blitz was immense, although not totally unwelcome for those who considered some of the Victorian restoration work as outright vandalism. The treasurer of the Inner Temple was happy to see the Victorian alterations destroyed, writing:

For my own part, seeing how dreadfully the Church had been despoiled by its pretended friends a century before, I do not grieve so very acutely for the havoc now wrought by its avowed enemies …. to have got rid of their awful stained glass windows, their ghastly pulpit, their hideous encaustic tiles, their abominable pews and seats (on which alone they spent over £10,000), will be almost a blessing in disguise.

It was seventeen years before the Church was fully repaired. The cracked columns were all replaced, with new stone from the beds of Purbeck ‘marble’ quarried in the Middle Ages. The original columns had been famous for tilting outwards; and so they were rebuilt at the same wonky angle. 

The organ, too, is a post-war addition, since the original was destroyed in the Blitz. This organ began its life in the wild hills of Aberdeenshire. It was built in 1927 for the ballroom of Glen Tanar House, where its inaugural recital had been given by the great composer Marcel Dupré.

The nave of the church is much restored. Note the organ loft to the left.

Image Credit: History Hit

But the acoustic in that Scottish ballroom, which is quite a squat space covered with hundreds of antlers, was “as dead as it well could be…very disappointing”, and so the organ wasn’t used much. Lord Glentanar gifted his organ to the church, and it came whizzing down to London, by rail, in 1953.  

Since then Lord Glentanar’s organ has greatly impressed many a musician, including none other than the film composer Hans Zimmer, who called described this as “one of the most magnificent organs in the world”. After spending two years writing the score for Interstellar, Zimmer chose this organ to record the film score, performed by the organist of Temple Church, Roger Sayer.

Once more, the sound and tonal potential of this organ was so remarkable, the score for Interstellar was actually shaped and created around the possibilities of the incredible instrument.

A Shakespearean legacy

The story of Temple Church is a history peppered with thrills, terror and even riotous parties. So it’s perhaps it’s no surprise that this was also the inspiration for one of William Shakespeare’s most famous scenes. 

A key scene of Shakespeare’s Wars of the Roses saga was set in the Temple Gardens.

Image Credit: Henry Payne via Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain

Just a stone’s throw away is the Inner Temple Garden. It was here, in King Henry VI (Part I, Act II, Scene 4) where Shakespeare’s characters declared their loyalties to the York and Lancastrian faction by plucking a red or white rose and thus beginning the epic drama of the Wars of the Roses. The scene closes with the words of Warwick: 

This brawl to-day,
Grown to this faction in the Temple Garden,
Shall send, between the red rose and the white,
A thousand souls to death and deadly night.

Often we’re basing our understanding of the period and its characters on things that were written hundreds of years after their death. So how confident can medievalist historians be that they are creating an accurate picture of any of the people they’re writing about?

This article is an edited transcript of The Templars with Dan Jones on Dan Snow’s History Hit, first broadcast 11 September 2017. You can listen to the full episode below or to the full podcast for free on Acast.

The benefit of time

The search for objective accuracy will drive historians mad or they’ll become Bob Caro and still be writing about Lyndon Johnson 40 years later.

This is admirable but it’s a sort of beautiful form of insanity.

Historians are helped slightly by distance in that, in terms of judgment, they are further from events.

So in that respect it’s much easier to think about the kingship of Philip IV of France, for example, than the presidency of Obama – partly because we’re still living Obama. We’re so far from any kind of place where we can really assess Obama’s presidency in regard to its long-term, medium-term, and perhaps even short-term effects. 

It’s somewhat easier when you go back 800 years and you have the benefit of perspective. You also have a more manageable source base and there is something to be said for the Middle Ages in that it’s possible to master your sources in a way that must be much harder for modern historians who have so much more to read. 

Filling in the blanks

The flip side is that medieval historians have much bigger holes in their sources and can only ever make provisional assertions based on the material they have access to. So you’re trading the two things off.

But the thing about the Middle Ages is that there’s just enough material – there’s just enough that, as a historian, you can get your head around it without becoming completely overwhelmed and having this sort of terrible feeling that you’re never going to read all the primary stuff, let alone the secondary stuff.

And there is sufficient information available that interesting debates can still be had about the time period and that historians can think critically and disagree about what it is they’re looking at. 

Of course, there is that line between how much, as a historian, you can fill in the blank spaces with historical speculation and imagination and how much you are rigorously contained by your source material.

But you could fill a room with medievalists and you’d find people drawing this line in different places. 

Meanwhile, because of the gaps in the evidence when it comes to the Middle Ages, study of that time is becoming much more interdisciplinary. People are mapping together archaeological work and textual work and legal work and cultural history and all of that is very fruitful and good for historians in general.

This article is an edited transcript of The Templars with Dan Jones on Dan Snow’s History Hit, first broadcast 11 September 2017. You can listen to the full episode below or to the full podcast for free on Acast.

The Middle Ages were a formative time in England and the United Kingdom when some of the real building blocks of today’s political, social, legal and cultural frameworks were established. But it’s also a very strange world, so it’s got that lovely balance.

It hits a sweet spot between being recognisably similar for us – the legal profession, for example, dates back to the high Middle Ages in England – and also being incredibly weird.

There’s weird stuff that goes down in the Middle Age and it’s a mindset that takes some effort to get into.

It is often read as old fashioned to say that we need to learn about things like Magna Carta because they made us the men we are today etc and, indeed, that’s not quite it. It’s more that these things are valuable to study in and of themselves – they happened to our ancestors and our people and they’re part of who we are and where we come from.

Dan Jones believes historical documents like Magna Carta are valuable in and of themselves – regardless, to some extent, of whether they are relevant to our lives today.

It’s not a question of trumpeting them and being all sort of Victorian and Whiggish and triumphalist about our history. It’s just to say that every country has its history and if peoples of every country want to be good citizens then they ought to know the history of who they are and where they’re from. 

For their sins

As a historian, when immersing yourself in medieval history you can at one moment feel extraordinarily close to the characters about whom you’re writing and feel their elemental human struggles and flaws and problems and then, at a turn of the page, find yourself saying, “You know what? This stuff is batshit crazy and I have no idea what you guys were on”. 

Particularly with the suffusion of Christian thought into absolutely every aspect of life and the kind of weird cosmology of a world in which, if something goes wrong, it’s because of our sins. That’s kind of the opposite of the way we think today. 

Normally, now, we think that if something goes against us then we’ve been incredibly unlucky and if we do something that’s successful then it’s because we’re incredibly great human beings. And the medieval world didn’t seem to conform to that. Everything was seen through a lens of piety.

For example, if you went into battle then you would be parading a fragment of the true cross above your head thinking that it was going to help you out. And then if you lost the battle then there would always be these enormous periods of soul searching with people saying, “How on earth did we lose that one? It must’ve been because of our sins”. 

Imagine if every time England got knocked out of a World Cup on penalties, we all went around saying that it was because we were bad people.

That it was because as a nation we had sinned too much.

But why are Americans so interested in British medieval history?

This history particularly touches a nerve with Americans – the subject is tremendously exotic in the United States. Many Americans find the things that we take for granted, such as sitting outside a church that dates back to the 12th century, to be almost unimaginably brilliant and exotic.

This is largely because the western takeover of the continental United States was a relatively recent thing. They have the Hearst Castle, right? And that’s about as good as it gets.

We are enormously blessed in Europe and in the UK with a fabric of history that’s much more ancient than we often think.

And people in some other parts of the world, particularly in the US, seem to appreciate what we have in a way that we cannot because we take it all for granted. 

As for the holy grail specifically, there is, of course, a connection between the Templars and the holy grail but it’s like the connection between James Bond, Spectre and MI6: it exists in fantasy and is one of the most successful and long-running entertainment and business stories of the last 800 years. 

This article is an edited transcript of The Templars with Dan Jones on Dan Snow’s History Hit, first broadcast 11 September 2017.

The role of the entertainment industry

This story has its origins as early as the first part of the 12th century when Wolfram Von Eschenbach was writing King Arthur stories and plunked the Templars in as guardians of this thing called the grail.

Now, the idea of the grail, the history of the holy grail, is something that has a sort of a life of its own – a mystique and a mystery of its own. What was it? Did it exist? Where did it come from? What does it stand for? 

Plug that into the Templars’ own extraordinary story and you have this sort of incredible concoction of myth and magic and sex and scandal and holy mystery that has proved understandably irresistible to screenwriters and novelists, to the people who were producing entertainment from the early 13th century.

Was the Holy Grail real?

But does that mean that the holy grail was an actual real thing? No, of course it wasn’t. It was a trope.

It was a literary idea. So we mustn’t mistake the connection between the Templars and the holy grail in the history books of the entertainment industry with actual history.  

When put against the entertainment industry, historians can often come across as the fun police or joy suckers where such myths are concerned. Historians want to look at all these films and television shows and novels and say, “That’s what you got wrong. This is all nonsense”.

But although the business of all historians is to present the facts as best as they can discern them,  it isn’t a zero-sum game and the Templars probably wouldn’t be fun if we took away all the myths.

But we have to remember that part of their story consists of history and part of it consists of myth. They can coexist though and one doesn’t have to kill the other.

This article is an edited transcript of The Templars with Dan Jones on Dan Snow’s History Hit, first broadcast 11 September 2017. You can listen to the full episode below or to the full podcast for free on Acast.

The Knights Templar are the most famous of the medieval military orders. Originating in Jerusalem in around 1119 or 1120, the Templars evolved into a highly profitable global organisation and a major political power on the world stage – at least in Europe and the Middle East.

But their fortunes began to change around the the end of the 13th century and the beginning of the 14th century. In 1291, the crusader states were basically wiped out by Mamluk forces from Egypt. The crusader kingdom of Jerusalem relocated to Cyprus, along with a couple of hundred Templars, and then the inquest began. 

So from 1291, for about the next 15 years, people started to wonder why the crusader states had been lost and a certain amount of blame – some of it fair, but most of it unfair – was levelled at the Templars and the Hospitallers, another high-profile knightly order.

As military orders, it was the duty of these organisation to guard the people and property of Jerusalem. Thus, manifestly, they’d failed in that duty. So there was a lot of call for reform and reorganisation of the military orders, one idea being that they might be rolled into a single super order and so on.

Fast forward to 1306 and all of this began to intersect with domestic politics and, to an extent, foreign policy in France, the heartland of the Templars.

France, was traditionally the Templars strongest recruiting ground and the Templars had bailed out French kings taken prisoner on crusade. They had also saved a French crusading army and been subcontracted the treasury business of the French crown for 100 years. France was safe for the Templars – or so they had thought until the reign of Philip IV. 

As military orders, it was the duty of these organisation to guard the people and property of Jerusalem. Thus, manifestly, they’d failed in that duty.

Philip had been engaged in long struggles against the papacy and a number of popes but most particularly against one called Boniface VIII who he essentially hounded to death in 1303. Even after Boniface’s death, Philip still wanted to dig him up and put him on trial for a sort of concoction of charges: corruption, heresy, sodomy, sorcery, you name it.

The problem really was that Boniface had refused to allow Philip to tax the church in France. But let’s put that aside for a second. 

Enter Philip’s money problems

Philip was also in desperate need for cash. It’s often said that he was in debt to the Templars. But it’s not quite that simple. He had a massive structural problem with the French economy that was two-fold. One, he’d overspent massively on wars against France, against Aragon and against Flanders. Two, there was a general shortage of silver in Europe and he couldn’t physically make enough coin.

So, to put it simply, the French economy was in the toilet and Philip was casting about for ways to fix it. He tried taxing the church. But that brought him into an almighty conflict with the pope. He then tried in 1306 to attack the Jews of France who he expelled en masse.

Philip IV of France was in desperate need of cash.

There were 100,000 Jews in France and he expelled them all, taking their property. But that still didn’t bring in enough money for him, and so, in 1307, he began to look at the Templars. The Templars were a convenient target for Philip because their role was somewhat under question following the fall of the crusader states. And he also knew that the order was both cash-rich and land-rich. 

In fact, because the Templars were running French treasury functions out of the temple in Paris, Philip knew how much physical coin the order had. He also knew they were extremely wealthy in terms of land and that they were kind of unpopular.

To put it simply, the French economy was in the toilet.

They were also connected with the pope and it was in Philip’s interest to bash the papacy. So he put one, two, three and four together and came up with a plan to arrest en masse all of the Templars in France. He would then charge them with a series of sexed-up – in every sense – accusations.

These included spitting on the cross, trampling on images of Christ, illicit kissing at their induction ceremonies and mandating sodomy between members. If someone wanted to compile a list of things that would shock people in France in the Middle Ages, this was it.

On Friday 13 October 1307, Philip’s agents all over France went at dawn to every Templar house, knocked on the door and presented the houses with the accusations and arrested the order’s members en masse.

Knights Templar members were charged with a series of sexed-up allegations.

These members were tortured and put on show trials. Eventually, an enormous amount of evidence was compiled that appeared to show the Templars individually guilty of terrible crimes against the Christian faith and church and, as an institution, irredeemably corrupt.

The reaction abroad

The initial reaction to Philip’s attack on the Templars from other western rulers seems to have been one of sort of bafflement. Even Edward II, new to the throne in England and not a wonderful or sensible king, couldn’t really believe it.

He was betrothed at that time and soon to be married to Philip’s daughter and so he had an interest in falling in line. But people just sort of shook their heads and said, “What is this guy on? What’s going on here?”. But the process had begun. 

The pope at the time, Clement V, was a Gascon. Gascony was English but it was also a part of France and so he was more or less a Frenchman. He was a very pliable pope who was in Philip’s pocket, let’s say. He never took up residence in Rome and was the first pope to live in Avignon. People saw him as a French puppet.

The sexed-up allegations included spitting on the cross, trampling on images of Christ, illicit kissing at their induction ceremonies and mandating sodomy between members.

But even for him it was a little much to countenance the rolling up of the most famous military order in the world. So he did the best he could which was to take over the process of dealing with the Templars himself and say to the king of France, “You know what? This is a church matter. I’m going to take it over and we’re going to investigate the Templars everywhere”. 

So that had the effect of the investigation being rolled out to England and Aragon and Sicily and the Italian and German states, and so on.

But while the evidence in France, most of it acquired through torture, shed the Templars in an almost uniformly bad and the order’s members in France were lining up to admit that they’d committed grotesque crimes, in other countries, where torture wasn’t really used, there was not much to go on.

In England, for example, the pope sent French inquisitors to look into the English Templars but they weren’t allowed to use torture and they became incredibly frustrated because they got nowhere. 

They said, “Did you have sex with each other and kiss each other and spit on Christ’s image?” And the Templars responded with, “No”.

And in fact, there’s evidence that the French inquisitors started looking into mass extraordinary rendition for the Templars. They wanted to take them all across the channel to the county of Ponthieu, which was another place that was part English and part French, so that they could torture them.  It was amazing.

But it didn’t happen in the end. Enough evidence was eventually kind of wheedled out of the Templars in England and elsewhere. 

All for nothing?

Anyway, by 1312 all of this evidence had been amassed from the various territories where Templars were based and sent to a church council in Vienne, near Lyon, at which the Templars weren’t allowed to represent themselves.

An illustration of the last Knights Templar grand master, Jacques de Molay, being burned at the stake following Philip IV’s campaign against the order.

The king of France parked an army down the road to make sure the council came up with the right result, and the result was that the Templars were useless as an organisation. After that, no one wanted to join them anymore. They were rolled up and shut down. They were gone.

There’s evidence that the French inquisitors started looking into mass extraordinary rendition for the Templars.

But, as with his attacks on the Jews, Philip didn’t get enough out of bringing down the Templars. We have to assume, although we don’t know for sure, that the coin in the Templar treasury in Paris ended up in the French treasury and that would have been a short-term gain in terms of income.

But the Templars’ lands, which was where their real wealth existed, were given to the Hospitallers. They were not given to the king of France. 

Philip’s plan must have been to appropriate this land, but it didn’t happen. So his attack on the Templars was really a futile, wasteful and kind of a tragic one because it didn’t gain anyone anything. 

This article is an edited transcript of The Templars with Dan Jones on Dan Snow’s History Hit, first broadcast 11 September 2017. You can listen to the full episode below or to the full podcast for free on Acast.

The Knights Templar military order was established in Jerusalem in around 1119 or 1120 – nearly 1,000 years ago. So why is the mystique and myth around them still going so strong today? In short, what is it with the Templars thing?

Ripe for conspiracy theories

The Knights Templar was one of just many such military orders. But today, we don’t often talk about the Hospitallers or Teutonic Knights. No one’s making Hollywood movies or big budget television series about those orders, even though they were also very high-profile in their day. It’s always the Templars, right?

A little bit of that must come from the order’s origins and the fact that it was named after the Temple of Solomon which, according to the Hebrew Bible, was destroyed in 587 BC and is believed to have been located on the site known today as Haram Al Sharif or Temple Mount (see top image).

A painting of Baldwin II, King of Jerusalem, ceding Haram Al Sharif (also known as Temple Mount), the believed site of the Temple of Solomon, to Knights Templar founders Hugues de Payns and Gaudefroy de Saint-Homer.

The central mysteries of the Christian faith all come from that site. And so, that’s partly why the Knights Templar continue to hold such fascination for so many people. But it’s also much more than that. 

No one’s making Hollywood movies or big budget television series about the Hospitallers or Teutonic Knights.

The nature of the Templars’ fall, along with the grotesque black propaganda that was levelled against them and their enormous wealth and unaccountability – as well as their story’s combination of militaristic, spiritual and financial elements – all rolls together to create an organisation that is ripe for having conspiracy theories of grand global plans and so on attached to it. 

But the nature of the Templars’ fall, the fact that they were brought down so quickly, so devastatingly and so brutally in such a short period of time, and then appeared to disappear, is perhaps the main reason for the continuing mystique surrounding them. It was as if they were just … rolled up. People find that very, very hard to believe.

They think that some of the Templars must have escaped, and that the ferocity with which the French crown pursued them must mean that they possessed something more than just wealth – that there must have been some great secret they had found in Jerusalem. Such theories are all total speculation but you can see why it’s alluring. 

It was as if the Templars were just … rolled up.

You could retort to such theorising with, “Hey, do you remember a company called Lehman Brothers? And what about Bear Stearns? You know, they vanished like that in 2008 too. We know this can happen”. But that doesn’t really answer the substantive point. 

Legends in their own lifetime

In Templar history there are also big holes, partly because the Templar Central Archive – which was moved from Jerusalem to Akka to Cyprus – disappeared when the Ottomans took Cyprus in the 16th century. So there’s lots of stuff we don’t know about the Templars. 

Pile onto that the fact that the Templars were genuinely legends in their own lifetime. If you go back to the early 1200s, when Wolfram Von Eschenbach was writing King Arthur stories, he plunked the Templars in as guardians of this thing called the grail.

Now, the idea of the grail, the history of the holy grail, is something that has a sort of a life of its own – a mystique and a mystery of its own. What was it? Did it exist? Where did it come from? What does it stand for?

The ferocity with which the French crown pursued the Templars has led some to believe that the order must have possessed something more than just wealth.

Plug that into the Templars and you have this sort of incredible concoction of myth and magic and sex and scandal and holy mystery that has proved understandably irresistible to screenwriters and novelists, to the people who were producing entertainment from the early 13th century.

The entertainment industry’s love of the Templar story is not a 20th or 21st century phenomenon. Indeed, it is as much a part of the history of the Templars as the order’s actual history. 

A medieval lesson in branding

The Templars’ branding was phenomenal, even in their day. We like to think that us 21st century kids invented branding. But the Templars had it down pat in the 1130s and 1140s. For the knights, a white uniform; for the sergeants, a black uniform, all emblazoned with the red cross which stood for the Templars’ willingness to shed blood in the name of Christ or for the blood that Christ had shed.

And their name too, which was so evocative of Christianity’s central mysteries, was a very potent, sexy idea. And when you look at the Templars over the years, they made many enemies. But only one of them really understood where the Templars were vulnerable. 

A painting depicting the Battle of Hattin in 1187.

If you take the great Sultan Saladin, for example, he thought that the way to get rid of the Templars was to kill them. After the Battle of Hattin in 1187, after which Jerusalem fell back into Muslim hands, Saladin paid a big fat fee to have every Templar who his men had been able to capture brought to him and lined up.

Two hundred Templars and Hospitallers were lined up in front of Saladin and he allowed his religious entourage to volunteer to behead them one by one. These were guys who were not headsmen, not executioners, and so it was a bloody scene. 

The entertainment industry’s love of the Templar story is not a 20th or 21st century phenomenon

He thought that this was the way to get at the Templars – to kill their members. But he was wrong because within 10 years the Templars had bounced back. 

The person who understood how to damage the Templars was Philip IV of France because he understood that the order was a brand. It represented certain values. And so Philip attacked the Templars’ chastity, their probity, their religiosity, all of which made up the core of why people donated to the order and why people joined it.

He came up with this list of accusations that essentially said, “Yeah you’ve taken vows of poverty, chastity and obedience but you haven’t been obedient to the church. You’ve been rolling around in this filthy money of yours and you’ve been shagging each other”. So he went hard at the Templars’ central values and that was were they were weak.

This article is an edited transcript of The Templars with Dan Jones on Dan Snow’s History Hit, first broadcast 11 September 2017. You can listen to the full episode below or to the full podcast for free on Acast.

The Knights Templar were effectively answerable only to the pope which meant that they didn’t pay very many taxes, that they weren’t under the authority of local bishops or archbishops, and that they could own property and place themselves in multiple jurisdictions without being truly answerable to the local king or lord or whoever was ruling a particular area. 

This posed jurisdiction-related questions and meant that the Templars ran the risk of coming into conflict with other political players of the day. 

Their relationships with other knightly orders and rulers and governments was, in short, really variable. Over time, the relations between the Templars and, let’s say, the kings of Jerusalem moved up and down depending on the character, personality and goals of Templar masters and the kings.

One good example is that of Amalric I, a king of Jerusalem in the mid-12th century who had a very rocky relationship with the Templars.

This was because, on the one hand, he recognised that they were an extremely necessary part of the make-up of the crusader kingdom. They manned castles, they defended pilgrims, they served in his armies. If he wanted to go down and fight in Egypt, he would take the Templars with him.

On the other hand, however, the Templars caused Amalric I a lot of problems because they weren’t technically answerable to his authority and they were in some sense rogue agents.

Amalric I and the Assassins

At one point in his reign, Amalric decided that he was going to negotiate with the Assassins and try to broker a peace deal with them. The Assassins were a Nizari Shiite sect that was based in the mountains, not far from the county of Tripoli, and which specialised in spectacular public murder. They were more or less a terrorist organisation. 

The Templars were in some sense rogue agents.

The Assassins wouldn’t touch the Templars because they realised the futility of murdering members of what was effectively a deathless corporation. If you killed a Templar it was like whack-a-mole – another one would spring up and take his place. So the Assassins were paying tribute to the Templars to be left alone. 

A 19th-century engraving of the founder of the Assassins, Hassan-e Sabbah. Credit: Commons

But then Almaric, as king of Jerusalem, became interested in a peace deal with the Assassins. A peace deal between the Assassins and the king of Jerusalem didn’t suit the Templars because it would mean the end of the tributes that the Assassins were paying to them. So they unilaterally decided to murder the Assassin envoy and scupper the deal, which they did.

The Assassins specialised in spectacular public murder and were more or less a terrorist organisation.

King Almaric, who was, understandably, absolutely furious, found that he wasn’t really able to do very much about it. He went to the master of the Knights Templar and said, “I can’t believe you’ve done this”. And the master said, “Yes, it is a shame, isn’t it? I know what. I’ll send the guy who did it to Rome for judgment before the pope”. 

He was essentially just sticking two fingers up at the king of Jerusalem and saying, “We might be here in your kingdom but your so-called authority means nothing to us and we’ll pursue our own policies and you’d better fit in with them”. So the Templars were quite good at making enemies. 

The Knights Templar were a paradox. The idea of a crusading order, of a military order, is a weird thing if you think about Christianity, full stop. But back in the era of the Crusades there was a sort of vogue for setting up military orders. So we have the Templars, the Hospitallers, the Teutonic Knights, the Sword Brothers of Livonia. There’s a lot of them. But the Templars are the ones who have become most famous. 

What is a military order? 

Imagine a sort of monk – well, not technically a monk, but a professed religious person – who also happens to be a trained killer. Or vice versa, a trained killer who decides to devote his life and his activities to the service of the church. That’s what the Templars were effectively.

They fought on the front line of the Crusades against the “enemies of Christ” in Palestine, Syria, Egypt, the Spanish kingdoms, Portugal and so on, all the areas where crusading was going on during the 12th and 13th centuries. 

But the concept of such orders was a peculiar thing and people at the time did note that it was odd that a trained killer could say: 

“I’m going to continue killing, maiming, injuring, fighting people, but instead of it being homicide it will be ‘malicide’. It will be the killing of evil and God will be super happy with me because I killed some Muslims or pagans, or any other non-Christians, whereas if I were killing Christians it would be a bad thing.”

The birth of the Templars

The Templars came into being in 1119 or 1120 in Jerusalem, so we’re talking 20 years after the fall of Jerusalem to the western Christian Frankish armies of the First Crusade. Jerusalem had been in Muslim hands but in 1099 it fell into Christian hands. 

The Templars were effectively trained killers who had decided to devote their lives and their activities to the service of the church.

Now, we know from travel diaries written by pilgrims in the 20 years that followed that lots of Christians from the West, from everywhere from Russia to Scotland, Scandinavia, France, all over the place, were going to newly Christian Jerusalem on pilgrimage.

A painting depicting the Crusaders’ capture of Jerusalem in 1099.

The travel diaries recorded the ardour and the hardship involved in that journey, but also just how dangerous it was. These pilgrims were walking into a very unstable countryside and if they went to Jerusalem and then wanted to take a trip to Nazareth, to Bethlehem, to the Sea of Galilee, to the Dead Sea or where ever, then they all note in their diaries that such trips were incredibly dangerous. 

As they walked along the roadside they would come across the bodies of people who’d been attacked by brigands, had their throats slit and their money taken. The roads were too dangerous for these pilgrims to even stop and bury these bodies because, as one pilgrim writes, “Anyone who did that would be digging a grave for himself”.

So around 1119, a knight from Champagne called Hugues de Payens decided that he was going to do something about it.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, as seen in 1885.

He and some of his buddies – one account says there were nine of them, another says there were 30, but, either way, a small group of knights – got together, hung out at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and said, “You know, we should do something about this. We should set up a sort of roadside rescue service to guard pilgrims”. 

As they walked along the roadside they would come across the bodies of people who’d been attacked by brigands, had their throats slit and their money taken.

There was already a hospital in Jerusalem, a pilgrim hospital, run by people who became the Hospitallers. But Hugues de Payens and his associates said that people needed assistance on the roads themselves. They needed guarding.

So the Templars became a kind of private security agency in hostile terrain; that was really the problem that the order was set up to solve. But very quickly the Templars expanded beyond their brief and became something else entirely. 

This article is an edited transcript of The Templars with Dan Jones on Dan Snow’s History Hit, first broadcast 11 September 2017. You can listen to the full episode below or to the full podcast for free on Acast.

Military orders like the Knights Templar or the Hospitallers or the Teutonic Knights may have started out with relatively humble ambitions but somehow, along the way, it was like they got injected with steroids and they became these huge, international institutions.

The medieval equivalent of Google?

If we look at the Templars specifically, earlier in their history they were given approval and a headquarters and so on by the Christian King of Jerusalem Baldwin II. But, really, their power and their legitimacy sprang from their relationship with the pope, and they were taken under the papal wing by way of a series of papal edicts.

And so the Templars were effectively answerable only to the pope which meant that they didn’t pay very many taxes, that they weren’t under the authority of local bishops or archbishops, and that they could own property and place themselves in multiple jurisdictions without being truly answerable to the local king or lord or whoever ruled the area. 

The Templars also had a uniform and a flag of their own, rather than those of another authority. So they were really like a global organisation in the modern sense.

A painting of Baldwin II, King of Jerusalem, ceding Haram Al Sharif (also known as Temple Mount) to Knights Templar founders Hugues de Payns and Gaudefroy de Saint-Homer.

Think about how Google operates today or any of those big multinational companies that are able to have headquarters here and there but are richer than, and, in many cases, more powerful than, some states, and are beyond the discipline of states in many ways. It’s a problem that has its modern equivalent. 

After the Templars were founded in Jerusalem in around 1119 or 1120, they began the job that they were originally set up to do: that of protecting western Christian pilgrims who were travelling to the Holy Land.

They were smart and they operated through networks of important families back in France and England and gained the patronage and the approval and favour of powerful people.

That meant two things. One, that they were recruiting members from among the sort of knightly class – that is, people who were already trained to fight and wanted to fight, and who wanted to go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land and were attracted by the idea of joining an organisation that could help them do that. 

The Templars get rich

But, of course, that wasn’t everybody and a lot of people approved of the Templars without necessarily wishing to sign up. So from those people the order accrued a lot in donations: donations of land, money and property. And the Templars’ donors included those from the very highest ranks of society. For example, Alfonso, the first king of Aragon, left them in his will a third of his kingdom.

On the other end of the scale, even ordinary men and women were dying and leaving the Templars what little they had: a coat, a couple of animals, a half share in a vineyard, that sort of thing. So they accrued these enormous donations from right across the social scale in western Christendom.

And one of their early successes was to organise their wealth into a system whereby they set up houses called commanderies or preceptories that were linked together in a hierarchy answerable ultimately to a grand master in Jerusalem.

These houses were very efficient at funnelling their profits to war zones, mainly to Syria, Palestine, Egypt or to the Spanish kingdoms where the battles of the Reconquista were taking aim at Muslim forces. 

A 13th-century painting of the Battle of Marrakech, one of the clashes of the Reconquista.

Did the Templars lose sight of their original goal?

The Templars order wasn’t just a massive money-making exercise. Its members were indeed pretty good at protecting the pilgrims and there are lots of accounts of Templars skirmishing.

Their military function did change with time, however, and by the middle of the 12th century they had become equivalent to some modern-day special forces – they were the vanguard or the rearguard of proper big crusading armies. They were pulling special operations, effectively; they were the Green Berets or Navy Seals of crusading armies. 

But they were also, particularly in the Holy Land, manning castles and watching roads and mountain passes. They were there to protect pilgrims as they went about. The Holy Land was still a very dangerous place despite the Templars’ presence but there was an awareness on the Muslim side.

There are lots of Muslim chronicles and when they mention the Templars it’s with a healthy degree of respect. One Islamic chronicler says, “They were the fiercest fighters of all the Franks”.

If you saw the Templars coming, you knew you had problems.

Despite this, criticism of the Templars was justified to a certain degree after 1291 in that they’d been set up to defend the crusader states and there were no longer any crusader states left to defend.

And then there’s the fact that the Templars were officially the Order of the Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon and that the image on their seal was of two brothers on the same horse (see top image). Poverty was supposed to be ingrained in them.

But by the early 13th century the Templars weren’t poor anymore and they had been overtaken in that respect by the mendicant orders. You had someone like Francis of Assisi turning up to the Fifth Crusade effectively in bare feet and dressed in sack cloth.

By contrast, the Templars has grown extremely rich and their master had an enormous coterie of servants, about 10 horses of his own and a strongbox to keep his valuables in, as well as his own private cook, scribe and Saracen translator.

There’s this great moment at the Fifth Crusade where the Templars are with the Christian armies and Francis of Assisi comes along and says, “I’m going to take care of this”. And he goes over to see the sultan and tries to convert him to Christianity and the sultan is absolutely flabbergasted to see him and sends him packing – miraculously without beheading him.

The Templars’ wealth starkly contrasted with the poverty of the barefooted Francis of Assisi.

The Deloitte of its day?

So the Templars, who had been set up to be dependent on charity and on handouts, had received so much charity and handouts that, by the early 13th century, they were extremely wealthy. And they’d also become financially extremely sophisticated.

Indeed, people often say that the Templars were the first bankers. There was this idea that money could be deposited in one temple house and withdrawn from another. But that wasn’t even a part of it.

The Templars were also into financial services in a big way. They were subcontracting a huge swathe of treasury duties from the French crown for 100 years. Like half of the French treasury was running through the Paris temple. 

Meanwhile, the Templars were also employed by popes to collect crusading tax from all over Europe and deliver it to where the crusade was happening. Again, to go back to the Fifth Crusade, there were Templars in England, France, Portugal and Hungary all going out and physically collecting tax from people and funnelling it to Egypt.

Logistically, that’s an incredible operation, something that’s very, very hard to do. The Templars had to be not only skilled in getting money out of people but also capable of accountancy. But none of that had been the original purpose of the Templars – they were only supposed to be guarding pilgrims.