For the past three years, I have been using author Dan Jones’s The Wars of the Roses in the classroom when I need to do history. Students usually like it, and I have enjoyed both that book and another by Jones, namely The Plantagenets. With that in mind, and knowing Jones’s writing style is clear and informative, I should have really enjoyed his book on the Knights Templar.
However, while I didn’t dislike it, I couldn’t get quite as into The Templars: The Rise and Fall of God’s Holy Warriors as I had hoped to.
Now, before I go any further, none of that is Jones’s fault aside from one basic fact, and that was his choice of subject matter. As I have observed in the past, Jones covers the ground he needs to well and thoroughly. If you don’t know much of anything about the Knights Templar, a book like this is a fine place to learn. Jones offers the history of this group, an organization made up of soldiers fighting for Christianity primarily in the Holy Land, with viewpoints from the time period both pro and con, and those views were not always the ones one might expect. Muslim viewpoints of the Templars ranged pretty far with some writers thinking well of them, some condemning them, others having professional respect for the work the Templars did, and some just considering them the best of a bunch of unwanted foreigners running around Palestine.
Essentially, the Templars were professional soldiers dedicated to God and the Catholic Church, a religious organization that acted as a military unit, and that was more or less all they were. True, they had a good deal of wealth and even acted as bankers for numerous European royal courts, but they themselves didn’t seem to partake too much in the wealth themselves. The Templars, whether noble-born knights or commoner sergeants and servants, took oaths that they seemed to take seriously.
And therein lies the problem with this book. The Templars themselves, long the subject of numerous conspiracy theories, just aren’t that interesting for much of the book unless the master of the order is an overzealous guy who can’t stop himself from attacking an Islamic army far too large or powerful to take down with whatever forces he has, and those guys were few and far between. For the most part, Jones is writing less about the Templars and more about the Crusades that the Templars were present for, often as the professional soldiers who knew what they were doing in the area.
That is not to say there’s nothing of interest to the Templar story. Their origin, as a group dedicated to offering protection to Christian pilgrims in a hostile region before it morphs into Crusader rear support, is interesting, but the best part comes as the end when French king Philip IV, described a man who would hold onto a grudge forever to the point he dug up and put a Pope on trial despite the fact the pontiff in question had been dead for four years, decided he needed wealth, the Templars had it, and any excuse to bring them down and take their riches would do, doing so in the cruelest and most vindictive way possible. Those last few chapters especially, showing Philip’s single-minded destruction of a group whose only real crime in France was acting as the royal banker for the better part of two centuries, was well-done and an example of how cruel an autocrat can be. Yes, the Templars weren’t saints, but they weren’t the sinners they were painted out to be.
Plus, Jones does spend his epilogue briefly discussing the conspiracy theories about hidden Templar treasure, mostly to say as far as he could tell, there isn’t any. Not that that ever stopped a conspiracy theorist…\
Grade: C+
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