The Templars (33 page)

Templar novels are beginning to outweigh historical accounts of the period. Here’s the pick of the crop, from Scott to the present.

Sir Walter Scott
Ivanhoe
(1819) and
The Talisman
(1825)

The Scottish novelist was obviously fascinated by the Templars–they provide the pantomime villains in these two famous novels–but not so fascinated that he looked much beyond the charges used to justify the order’s suppression. So in
The Talisman
the Grand Master presides over an order accused of heresy, suspected of being in league with the devil, and so arrogant that it would risk the downfall of Western civilisation to preserve itself. Scott even finds something sinister in the Grand Master’s abacus, ‘a mystic staff of office, the peculiar form of which has given rise to such singular conjectures and commentaries, leading to suspicions that this celebrated fraternity of Christian knights were embodied under the foulest symbols of paganism’. Some traditions suggest that the Templar abacus was modelled on the staff carried by Moses’ brother Aaron, which hardly makes it pagan, even if it later became associated with Freemasonry.

Willing to glorify any calumny against the Templars, Scott has these reckless knights entering into a rash alliance with the Austrians against King Richard I and Saladin in
The Talisman
. In reality Richard was as obsessed by the Crusades as the Templars, which may be why he confirmed the order’s land holdings in England and granted them a kind of diplomatic immunity from English law.

Scott’s most iconic Templar villain is hard-hearted Sir Brian de Bois-Gilbert, who, the novelist hints, personifies the order. Ivanhoe’s father Cedric describes him as ‘valiant as the bravest of his order but stained with their usual vices, pride, arrogance, cruelty and voluptuousness’. Bois-Gilbert may have about as much in common with the real Templars as the Arthur in Disney’s
The Sword in the Stone
has with the historical King Arthur. But he has, through sheer charisma–and a wonderful portrayal by George Sanders in the 1952 movie–become the most famous fictional Knight Templar of them all.

Maurice Druon
The Accursed Kings
(1955–77)

A Prix Goncourt-winning novelist, a minister of culture under Georges Pompidou, and the co-author of an anthem sung by the French resistance, Maurice Druon’s life is almost as interesting as his fiction. In the 1950s he began a series of novels,
Les Rois Maudits
(
The Accursed Kings
), on the story of James of Molay’s supposed curse–flung at King Philip as he burnt at the stake. At the heart of Druon’s saga is a real historical puzzle. When Molay burned, Philip was in good health and had three grown sons. Yet within twenty-five years, lack of male issue forced the Capetian dynasty to hand the throne to their Valois cousins.

Druon’s seven novels–
The Iron King
,
The Strangled Queen
,
The Poisoned Crown
,
The Royal Succession
,
The She-Wolf of France
,
The Lily and the Lion
,
When a King Loses France
–span six tumultuous decades in French history, starting with Philip being refused a loan by the Templars and ending with the Valois dynasty. Although the series is named in honour of Molay’s curse, the plot is driven, in part, by another real story of the era: the campaign by Robert III of Artois, related through marriage to the first Valois king, to reclaim land from his aunt. Robert’s pursuit of this grievance led to exile and war.

Druon takes care to achieve a level of historical accuracy but nonetheless bends the facts to suit his story. The dissolution of the Templars is a spur of the moment enterprise, not the fruit of meticulous planning. Philip does get his hands on Templar gold, but, when the Pope dies, becomes obsessed by James of Molay’s curse and, in the second novel, wastes away to death. Nonetheless, these first two novels are of genuine interest to any Templar aficionado.

Pierre Barbet
Baphomet’s Meteor
(1972)

As the Templars have long existed in an alternative dimension, between fact and fiction, it was smart of pseudonymous French sci-fi author Pierre Barbet
to write a fictional alternative history in which Baphomet, the mysterious head the knights were accused of worshipping, is a stranded extraterrestrial who gives the Templars the scientific expertise and atomic weaponry they need to take over the world and develop the technology he needs to repair his spaceship. Alas, Baphomet has not allowed for human deviousness.

The mysteries of Christianity were obviously of lifelong interest to Barbet, who was a doctor and wrote
A Doctor at Calvary
, one of the definitive medical accounts of the crucifixion.

William Watson
Last Of The Templars
(1979)

If you only read one Templar novel, try this. Watson brings a novelist’s insight into his historically scrupulous account of the Templars’ precipitous decline from the fall of Acre in 1291 to the burning of James of Molay in 1314. For once the Templars are not mystics, seers or heretics blackmailing the Church but the soldiers and bankers of historical record. Watson’s clever, dreamlike narrative offers a cogent analysis of the factors that doomed the order: the rise of nationalism, the order’s arrogance, the greed of King Philip, Papal acquiescence and, most of all, the loss of the Holy Land and the end of the Crusades, which left the Templars, without a mission, suddenly superfluous.

Beltran, the last of the order, is a soldier-monk whose personal allegiance lies with Thibaud Gaudin, the penultimate Grand Master, who effectively dies from the strain of trying to reverse the decline in the Templars’ fortunes. Watson convincingly records the milestones on the order’s road to nowhere. While most novelists describe Molay’s death as a ceremony accompanied by pomp and circumstance, Watson presents the burning as a hurried, slightly disorganised spectacle, unforgettably noting, ‘The Grand Master has become a cinder.’

Watson sees the brutal, unpredictable reality behind the noble stereotypes of conflict in the Holy Land and handles his historical cast–especially King Philip, his unscrupulous aide William of Nogaret and Pope Clement–with aplomb,
even offering an intriguing explanation for the fact that all three were dead by Christmas 1314.
Last of the Templars
is worth reading both for its insight into the order and as a brilliant historical novel.

Umberto Eco
Foucault’s Pendulum
(1988)

In Eco’s second novel–following his hugely successful medieval whodunit,
The Name of the Rose
–three Italian intellectuals jokingly prepare The Plan, a ludicrously comprehensive plot which will explain everything–the Templars, the Rosicrucians, the Count of St Germain (an eighteenth-century con man who claimed to be immortal), the Merovingians, Jesus, the Nazis. A plot that anticipates, in some ways, the central premise of
The Da Vinci Code
.

In Eco’s book, the Templars, according to a history written by a sinister colonel, were guardians of a secret treasure and ought to have taken over the world in 1944 but were mysteriously foiled. From this, Eco spins all manner of conceits with such enthusiasm that, at times, you can feel as if you are listening to a monologue by a very erudite pub bore. But you can forgive him a lot for inventing a secret society drolly known as the Synarchic Knights of Templar Rebirth.

Jan Guillou
The Crusades Trilogy
(1998–2000)

Swedish author Guillou’s novels are characterised by macho, politically correct heroes. In this trilogy set in the twelfth century, Swedish knight Arn Magnusson arrives in the Holy Land, condemned to serve twenty years as a Knight Templar for a youthful indiscretion, with the usual preconceptions about infidel Muslims being a brutish and uncivilised lot. But he soon casts off those prejudices and becomes a pro-Muslim multiculturalist who only fights for the Christians out of a sense of duty. Guillou blends fact, legend and fiction to make his point, even having his hero pardoned by Saladin because he once saved the great Muslim leader’s life from robbers.

Guillou has a sure feel for the nuanced relationship between the Templars and their royal allies in the Holy Land and for the detail of historical battle. He blames the destruction of the Christian armies and the fall of Jerusalem on certain non-Templar military leaders and the King of Jerusalem. His Templars are brave, noble, well trained and ruthless; it is the incompetence that surrounds them that dooms their cause. A Templar spin doctor could not have put it better. Guillou does a similarly eloquent PR job for Saladin.

Dan Brown
The Da Vinci Code
(2003)

Everyone loves a conspiracy. Brown is so convinced this is true, he tells us twice. The assumption being that our obsession with a nothing-is-as-it-seems version of history might blind us to the way this compelling story edits, stretches and wilfully misunderstands the facts. Any reader who took Brown’s guidance on the Templars literally would conclude that they were founded by a mysterious order called the Priory of Sion, busied themselves by ensuring that motifs of the vagina, womb and clitoris were incorporated into many medieval cathedrals, and worshipped their own fertility god. Alas and alack, the Priory–which Brown seems to think was a real entity–was the fanciful invention of one Pierre Plantard, a French forger who came up with the idea in 1956, elaborated and reinforced his claims with a series of further forgeries, then finally admitted under oath that he had made the whole thing up–but of course if you are a true conspiracy theorist you know what that means! Apart from possibly those knights who jousted in drag at Acre in 1286–and the chronicler does not say that there were any Templars among them–there is no evidence that the Templars ever made any attempt to get in touch with their feminine side. In fact, their rule warned: ‘The company of woman is a dangerous thing.’

The novel’s central anti-clerical message means that the downfall of the Templars is attributed not to King Philip IV but to ‘Machiavellian’ Pope Clement V, who, fed up with being blackmailed about the secret of the Grail, unleashed an ‘ingeniously planned sting operation’ on the innocent order and saw to it that the tortured knights’ ashes were ‘tossed unceremoniously into the Tiber’. This would have been some toss as Clement V never stepped foot in Italy, never mind Rome.

Kate Mosse
Labyrinth
(2005)

Labyrinth
reads like one of those books where the author is more worried about achieving the desired blockbuster pagination (700 pages) than how the story is told. But after 250 pages, the narrative begins to gather momentum as the threads of her parallel lives–Cathar Alaïs and modern-day volunteer archaeologist Alice Tanner–intersect compellingly. Mosse takes many themes associated with the Templars–the Grail, the Cathars, the implication of secret knowledge from the East–but only mentions the order in passing as she builds to a finale in which the Grail is revealed as a chalice, something that enables initiates to live for 800 years and ‘the love that is handed down from generation to generation’.

When she researched the novel, Mosse writes, she felt sure there would be a role for the Templars but decided ‘the connections people like to make between the Albigensian heresy and the Knights Templar are based on nothing more than historical coincidence’. On her website
www.mosselabyrinth.co.uk
she has published her notes on the man she refers to as ‘the great Jacques de Molay’ and speculates that the Knights Templar may have been the ‘fair-headed people using the power of the covenant’ who, in Ethiopian tradition, raised the massive obelisk at Axum. While many rumours and legends link the Templars to Ethiopia (usually in connection with the Ark of the Covenant), the obelisk is 1600–1700 years old. So not historical nor a coincidence.

Julia Navarro
The Brotherhood of the Holy Shroud
(2006)

This is one of the best Templar-inspired novels, Navarro alternating between a modern-day investigation into a mutilated body at Turin Cathedral and a well-told, and in large part nicely conceived, secret history of the Shroud. In this, the Templars–and a ruthless secret brotherhood from the biblical town of Edessa–are the antagonists.

The Templars are portrayed, as one of the investigators says, ‘as supermen who can do anything’ whose most sacred mission, once they have blackmailed the Byzantine emperor to hand it over, is to protect the Shroud. They manage to smuggle it out of Acre just before the Holy Land falls in 1291, but their annus horribilis, 1307, forces the order into desperate measures. One of the plotters trying to get his hands on the Shroud is said to be a direct descendant of Geoffrey of Charney, who burned with James of Molay. This makes possible sense as the widow of a man called Charney, who may have been the nephew of Geoffrey of Charney, put the Shroud on display in 1357. Navarro suggests that the Templars survived–initially in such places as Portugal, where, as she correctly notes, the order was simply nationalised, and in Scotland–and are so powerful today that they can, with impunity, organise the assassination of policemen who get too close to their secret.

Navarro tantalises readers with the idea that ‘there was a figure to whom the Templars prayed throughout the world though His name was not Baphomet’. In secret chapel meetings, she suggests they worshipped ‘a painting, an image of a strange figure, an idol’. Wisely, she does not elucidate, so the reader can take their pick from the usual suspects: Sophia the Greek goddess of wisdom, the Prophet Mohammed, the mummified head of Jesus, an Egyptian cat or the head of a Sufi martyr.

Raymond Khoury
The Last Templar
(2005)

Khoury used to write for BBC TV’s superior spy drama
Spooks
and he kicks off his bestselling novel with a stunning conceit, as four horsemen dressed as Templars storm the opening of an exhibition of Vatican artefacts in New York. As FBI agent Sean Reilly and archaeologist Tess Chaykin investigate, they discover a secret that has lain buried for a thousand years.