Saladin FTW

Books read this week: The Templars (Piers Paul Read)

The Templars is an intriguing book, although the title is somewhat misleading; it is really more of a general history of the Crusades from 1096 until 1307, rather than an in-depth history of the Knights Templar. In part, I think this is because there is a lack of information about what the Templars were doing when not directly involved in the business of killing muslims; we are told, for example, that the Temple became a major (in fact the major) international banking house in Europe, but there is little discussion of how this occurred, or how the banking business impacted upon the monastic aspect of the Templar life. Similarly, we are told that the majority of Templars spent their time administering the order's properties outside the Holy Land, but very little about what that life entailed. This is a pity, as a detailed study of exactly how the order mutated from its original form as a poor monastic order to one of richest organisations in Christendom would be fascinating.

 The history of the Crusades as presented here is interesting, partly because Read tries oh so very hard to make the Templars, the Crusaders and the medieval Church appear sympathetic, and fails absymally. There's lots of special pleading: a particularly darkly comically passage attempts to explain that whilst it is true that when the Crusaders captured Jerusalem they killed every living thing within its walls and waded knee deep in blood to the thanksgiving mass in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and it is also true that on both occasions that the forces of Islam captured Jerusalem there was no massacre, the cases were totally different, and anyway the Muslims started it (by daring to live in the Holy Land). And all the Crusaders were motivated by genuine piety, not loot, which must have been a great comfort to the Jews of Mainz, to know that the men who robbed and murdered them acted from genuine religious conviction.

Defending the Templars becomes particularly difficult when we get to the period immediately before the Third Crusade, because even if you're rooting for the Crusaders (and I'm really not), the Templars were a total disaster, whether it's supporting Reynald de Chatillon (called "Reginald" here, for no apparent reason - possibly because it sounds like the name a more pleasant man might have) when he broke the truce with Saladin (FAIL!), supporting Reynald's plan to attack Saladin's army (DOUBLE FAIL!) or insisting on stopping for the night in the middle of the desert miles from the nearest well (SUPER MEGA TRIPLE FAIL!). We're also treated to some rather pathetic apologies made by 'Reynald de Chatillon's defenders' (I wasn't aware he had any, being violent, untrustworthy and thoroughly unpleasant even by the Crusader's standards, which were not high). The most amusing of which is that "Chatillon consider the presence of guards on the caravan he attacked a breach of the truce".

Of course, once the Holy Land is lost, the Templars became a bit pointless. And so, (in a move of which Stalin would have been proud) the King of France had all 15,000 templars arrested, tortured and convicted of murder, heresy, blasphemy, sodomy and probably jaywalking as well. And then he stole their money. The Pope, being more concerned with temporal than spiritual matters, looked the other way. It has to be said, the medieval Papacy doesn't come out of the crusades well - and Boniface VIII is generally consider one of the more crap popes, having persuaded his (illiterate) predecessor to abdicate, before murdering him. The image of a cackling Boniface VIII sitting on the throne of Constantine waving a sword and screaming "I AM CEASAR!" is one that will stay with me (to be fair, the book doesn't explicitly say that he was cackling, but I can't imagine an octogenarian waving a sword and screaming "I AM SPARTACUS CEASAR!" doing anything else).

The feeling one gets reading about the final downfall of the Templars was not dissimilar to how one feels when reading about the Night of the Long Knives; you feel a brief twinge of sympathy for the victims, who were betrayed by the masters they served loyally and accused of ridiculous crimes which they obvious did not commit. Then you remember that they were very unpleasant people, and that whilst they didn't commit the crimes they were accused of, they certainly did commit a bunch of other crimes which they were not punished for.

The most interesting thing about the destruction of the Temple was how modern Philip IV of France's methods were - I said that Stalin would have been proud of his actions, and the account in this book certainly plays up the similarities - accusations of outlandish and absurd plots, backed up by very public confessions and show trials, combined with a reign of terror (one bishop was accused of treason, heresy, sorcery, simony and fornication for the crime of saying King Philip "looked like an owl") to prevent anyone objecting. Philip even had recourse to the very modern method of "disappearing" the Templar's lawyer when he proved too effective. It is surprising to me that such a well organised and efficient purge (arresting 15,000 people simultaneuous across the whole of France) could be carried out over medieval infrastructure. Of course, it may be that the Templars were just that unpopular amongst the general population. Or possibly (and this is the book's thesis) they just didn't employ enough lawyers before the purge.