Book Review: The Templars

The Templars:The Rise and Spectacular Fall of God's Holy Warriorsby Dan JonesViking, 2017The Knights Templar, a military Catholic order that was founded in 1119, recognized by the Pope twenty years later, and disbanded by the Pope in 1312, a few years after a dramatic move against them by the King of France. The Templars had been renowned both as warriors and as money-managers; there was a starched kind of mystique about their order, and there was a certain air of obscurity in the abrupt nature of their extermination – it was more than enough, in other words, to attract the attention of fabulists ever since. For poets, dramatists, and novelists, the Templars can be made into almost anything – heroes, villains, backstage manipulators, betrayed martyrs – and they featured prominently in one of the best-selling novels of the modern ear, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code.No surprise that this kind of notoriety can get in the way of actual history-writing, as historian Dan Jones (author of the very popular The Plantagenets, an accessible single-volume history of a very complicated dynasty) notes at the beginning of his latest book, which is an attempt to ground the Templars in facts and sources:

This book seeks to tell the story of the Templars as they were, not as legend has embellished them. My goal is not so much to debunk or even engage with the more outlandish themes of Templar mythology, but rather to show that their real deeds were even more extraordinary than the romances, half-truths and voodoo histories that have swirled around them since they fell.

The book is, as Jones warns his readers, a narrative history – a clear strong suit of this author, who has a sharp eye for personalities and dramatic pacing. He follows the Templars through all the stages of their rise, dramatic flourishing, and fall, hitting on every outsized personality, every razor-sharp conflict of interest, and of course every battle, all vividly told and invested with the kind of smart tone of tension that characterizes all of this author's work. August of 1153, for instance, brings readers the long and brutal siege of Ascalon, which culminated in a pitched battle Jones clearly wishes he'd seen in person:

Blocked into a hostile city with no chance of retreat or rescue, the Templars were massacred. None was taken for ransom – not even their master. This was unusual for such high-value prisoners. It spoke to the fearsome reputation the Templars held among their enemies and the pent-up fear and desperation of citizens who had been pinned down under enemy assault for half the year. No amount of wealth or booty was worth the lives of forty of the ablest Christian soldiers in the region, who had presented themselves unsupported for the taking. No detailed record of the fight between the citizens of Ascalon and the Knights of the Temple survives, but at the end of it, every single one of the Templars was dead.

In addition to being rousingly good reading, The Templars also does much-needed work at clearing away the vine-growth of legend and pseudo-history that grows up around the Knights Templar in every generation, with the slightest provocation. The Da Vinci Code prompted a veritable flood of such pseudo-histories, and there's been no shortage of them since – all the more reason to be grateful for this latest book from Jones, which matches the thrillers and historical pot-boilers on their own ground of dramatic excitement but trusts that the real events were more gripping than any fictionalized treatment could ever be. He's right about that, of course – but only if those real events are in the right writer's hands.