The Knights Templar and their Myths

Who were the Templars?

The Order of the Temple was formed around 1118/1119 in Jerusalem by nine western knights, led by one Hugh de Payns. No contemporary chronicler recorded the foundation of the order - not even the court chronicler of Baldwin II, King of Jerusalem, which speaks to the order’s humble origins.

There are however three accounts of the foundation of the Order of the Temple given by later chroniclers William of Tyre, Michael the Syrian, and Walter Map. William of Tyre’s account is generally seen as the most important given William’s position within the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the access he would have had.

According to William’s version, in 1118 a number of ‘noble men’ came before Baldwin II.  These men led by Hugh of Payns took monastic vows promising to serve the King of Jerusalem and the Patriarch of Jerusalem. The king gave these knights accommodations in the Royal Palace, which at the time was believed to be the Temple of Solomon, which led them to be dubbed the Order of the Temple, or Templars.

William also records that this order of knights was charged with the protection of pilgrims in the holy lands; William is not clear on whose idea this was.

There is very little information about the early years of the order, given that the Order’s own records and the records of the Kingdom of Jerusalem have been lost. Yet the order did make a number of very powerful friends, for example Fulk Count of Anjou, one of the most powerful magnates in northern Europe. They also befriended Hugh Count of Champagne, another powerful magnate, who would later give up his titles and lands to join the Templars. Both of these magnates became aware of the Order after they lodged with them while on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. And through Hugh the Order befriended St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who wrote a treatise praising the Order of the Temple (he dubbed them “the new Knighthood”).

The Order of the Temple was officially recognized by the Church at the Council of Troyes in 1129, largely due to the input of St Bernard, and here the Order was given its first rule.  Following the recognition of the Order and the support given by Bernard, the donations came thick and fast and soon the Order was in possession of lands in all four corners of Europe.

What did the Templars do?

Throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Order of the Temple played a vital role in nigh on every crusade, providing funding, men, and expertise.

The Order also played an important role in the defense of the Latin Kingdoms in the east: their castles and troops provided a bulwark that protected the Latin Kingdoms from numerous attacks. Saladin, the great Muslim leader of the thirteenth century, truly believed that without the Military Orders (in particular the Templars and Order of St. John) the Latin Kingdoms in the East would have fallen many years earlier.

What happened to the Templars?

So why did this great and powerful Order fall? Many of you may be aware of Order of the Temple’s fall, but for those of you who aren’t, to cut a long story short, or, well, shorter…  

On Friday the 13^th of October 1307 the sergeants of the King of France, arrested all of the members of the Order of the Temple residing in France. This was followed by arrests all of Europe.  The Order was charged with several counts of heresy, and while very few confessions were obtained outside of France in 1312 the Order was dissolved and all of its lands were passed to other military orders. As for its members, those that didn’t die in prison were sent to live out their lives as members of various monastic and military orders. Some, however, like The Master of the Order were burned as heretics.

Templar Myths

Now that I have given a brief introduction to the Templars, I will move on to discuss the myths that have grown up around this group.  It seems that the 14^th century accusations of heresy and witchcraft have given rise to a number of conspiracy theories as to what the Order of the Temple actually got up to, very few of them true.

As Malcolm Barber has pointed out the Templar myths have proved extremely durable, and their contribution to the modern image of the Templars is arguably as strong as their documented history. In the almost seven hundred years since the fall of the Order, the Templars have been used by many for their own political ends, and they have represented everything from saintly keepers of a hidden knowledge to anti-societal demon worshippers bent on world domination.

It is easy to see that in some circles the myth has had a stronger influence.  When the Templars are mentioned many of those I have met outside of academia automatically mention books like Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, by Richard Leigh, Michael Baigent and Henry Lincoln; or more recently Dan Brown’s bestseller The Da Vinci Code, which the author claims is based on ‘fact’.  Interestingly these facts were the subject of an article in January’s issue of History Today, in which they were shown to be misinterpretations at best and at worst based on faked documents. They will even mention films like National Treasure, which in the week of it’s release reached number two in the US Box-office, and Revelation. The popularity of these myths can be seen if you go to the Mind, Body and Spirit Section of any bookshop; you will be able to find numerous works of pseudo-history that in some way involve the Templars.

In this article I will discuss some of the myths concerning the Knights Templar, and attempt to show that they are based on at best questionable evidence, which is why they remain as myths.

The Templars have come to be heavily involved in many conspiracy theories concerning secret societies and various secret ‘treasures’ as can be found in the examples I gave above. Many writers have attempted to connect the Templars to the Freemasons.  The earliest of said writers were the so-called ‘Speculative Freemasons’ and their reactionaries - this trend continues to this day as seen in National Treasure, and many of the pseudo-historical books published on the Templars.

This trend began in the eighteenth century, with the first Mason to connect the Lodge to Orders of Knighthood being Andrew Michael Ramsey, an exiled Jacobite writing in the 1730’s. He, however, made no explicit mention of the Templars but instead of Crusaders; this is most likely as he was a resident in France.

Neo-Templarism was born in Germany in the 1750s.  Around three myths of a continuation of the Order of the Temple surfaced around the same time, for example the myths concocted by Samuel Rosa or George Frederick Johnson. The basic content of these myths is that a secret knowledge or treasure was somehow transmitted from the Templars to the Freemasons, usually by some members of the Order who were able to escape being burnt.  For example the myth concocted by Johnson tells that De Molay, prior to his execution, passed on the secrets of the Order to his nephew, who retrieved the hidden treasure of the Order and carried it to Scotland (where Freemasonry began.)

Another version of this myth was circulated by Karl von Hund.  In Hund’s version the night before he was executed James of Molay appointed Pierre d’Aumont his successor as Grand Master and ordered him to take the Templars underground. D’Aumont and the Templars he was able to rally supposedly fled to Scotland disguised as stone masons, where they helped found the first Masonic Lodges to pass on the secret knowledge Hund believed the Templars learnt in the East.

Anti-masonic reactionaries like Abbe Augustin Baurrel and Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (Ed – the FUNNIEST name in the world!) as I previously mentioned also used the Templars, they constructed a model of history in which a coherent line was drawn between all of the major heretical movements of the middle ages, they portrayed the Templars and by association the Freemasons as anti-societal demon-worshippers. They wished to undermine and defame the Masons for their own political reasons.

As I mentioned this trend of making a connection between the Templars and the Freemasons continues to this day, as does the tendency of some writers to associate the Templars with other heretical movements like the Cathars. I will now move on from the subject of the supposed links between the Templars and the Freemasons, to the nature and location of the supposed treasure of the Templars.

The treasure of the Templars is the subject of many a work of pseudo-history.  What was it? How did the Order come to possess it? Where is it now? These are among the questions that such books ask. As Karen Ralls in her recent book The Templars and the Grail pointed out, many of these theories are based on speculation as to whether or not the Templars and their fellow Crusaders discovered anything in their excavations on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. As Dr Ralls points out there is little or no concrete evidence that anything was discovered; this has, however, not deterred many writers from speculating as to what was found. Some claim that the Templars discovered the Ark of the Covenant beneath Al-Aqsa Mosque, others that they discovered a repository of lost scrolls of Jewish wisdom including a copy of the Qumranian scrolls, and in connection with this that they found the lost treasure of the Temple of Jerusalem.  Some also state they found the Holy Grail itself. These theories also claim that the Order was able to keep these discoveries quiet and hide these treasures from the world and that they remain hidden to this day.  Others claim that they are hidden in the area of Rennes-le-Chateau in France or at Rosslyn in Scotland or even Oak Island in Nova Scotia. On these issues the debate still rages, much to the chagrin of many academics and sceptics.

There is also a tradition linking the Templars to the Holy Grail, which originates in the medieval Grail Romances, like Parzifal by Wolfram von Eschenbach (written between 1197 and 1210), in which the Grail Knights are known as Templeisen and wear a garb not unlike the traditional Templar garb, and many scholars acknowledge that Wolfram may have intended them to be viewed as Templars. Many have claimed that the Templars were in possession of the Grail and their successors guard it to this day. Again this is unresolved speculation.

Conclusion

In conclusion, while many of the above theories have very little supporting evidence, this has not deterred fringe theorists, these writers of fiction masquerading as history continue to publish books, and these books continue to grab the attention of the public. It is at least one thing that the Templars have so gripped the imagination of the public and that there is such thirst for stories of them; the Templar myth truly is one of the most pervasive myths of Western culture.

Bibliography

M. Barber and K. Bate, The Templars: Selected Sources, (Manchester; Manchester University Press, 2002).

M. Barber, The Trial of the Templars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).

M. Barber, The New Knighthood: A history of the Order of the Temple (Cambridge: C.U.P, 1994).

M. Barber, ‘James of Molay the Last Grand Master of the Order of the Temple’, in Crusaders and Heretics, Twelfth to Fourteenth Centuries (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995), pp. 91-124.

H. Nicholson, The Knights Templar: A New History (Stroud: Sutton, 2001).

M. Barber, ‘The Trial of the Templars Revisited’, in H. Nicholson (ed) The Military Orders: Volume Two, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 329-342.

P. Partner, The Knights Templar and their Myth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).

P. Partner, ‘The Magical mish-mash: esoteric and conspiratorial myths’, in Encounter 59 (1982), pp.46-52.

E.A.R Brown, ‘The Prince is Father to the King: The Character and Childhood of Phillip the Fair of France’, in Medieval Studies 49 (1987), 282-334.

N. Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, revised edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

N. Cohn, ‘The Demonization of Medieval Heretics’ in D. Olderidge (ed), The Witchcraft Reader, (Routledge: London, 2002).