The Templars (Manchester Medieval Studies) (Manchester Medieval Sources) [Paperback]

If one googles "Templars" one finds a large number of articles on the web about "the Knights of the Temple of Solomon of Jerusalem". To the professional historian most of these articles are distressingly inaccurate and lacking in hard facts about this organisation.

This book is a useful correction to the fantasies. It is a collection of translations of original French and Latin documents about the Templars. Many of them were written by officials of the organisation.

It is useful for students of history to read these documents, which tell us what is actually known about the Templars, as opposed to the fantasies that so many authors feel happy to write, presumably without having read them.

For example, some of the fantasists feel quite happy to state that the Templars were a subversive, non-Catholic organisation with secret beliefs. The actual documents provide no evidence at all that they believed anything other than the ordinary Catholic theology, nor that their ceremonies were anything other than the customary rites of the Church.

Their real history is quite spectacular enough without making them the "fathers" of Freemasonry or other weird religions, something for which there isn't any evidence. In the case of Freemasonry there is nothing to connect the Templars after their suppression in 1312 to the emergence of Masons in the 17th century - 300 years of absence of evidence.

There are 85 pages on the trial of the Templars at the instigation of the King of France, Philip the fourth. Interestingly, the documents about their Trial, when they were suppressed because the French king wanted their money, remind the reader of the accusations made during the Show Trials during Stalin's Terror in the 1930s. The accusations against them are obviously entirely fabricated. No modern jury could possibly find them guilty, there being no evidence other than confessions forced from the accused by torture.

Did the king, or anyone else seriously think they were "heretics"? The documents presented at their trial do not provide hard evidence. A possible speculation about them might be that their experience of living in the Middle East among people of different religions and cultures may actually have made them more tolerant. This is hinted at by the well-known document (not in this book) of the Muslim physician Osama Ibn Munqidh who describes a Templar ordering a Christian fanatic not to impede a Muslim wanting to pray in the Mosque which the Templars were using as their headquarters in Jerusalem. If they had learned tolerance - or ordinary human decency - this in itself may have made them suspect in the fanatical and ignorant west where people hated the Muslims without ever having met any. (That's very modern.) Thus there was an organisation with great wealth partly from generous donations and partly from successful business, practicing honest banking (if only we had something like that today) and staffed by people with knowledge of the real world. Religious fanatics were bound to hate it.

Far from being the holders of secret philosophies these monkish-knights were hard-headed practical men who may well have refounded the European economy simply by conveying produce under armed guard, buying in one area and selling in another for a higher price. What they should be famous for is the revival of the European economy, making possible the end of feudalism by giving rulers something to tax - trading and urban life.

The Editor of these documents is a world renowned specialist in Medieval history, Malcolm Barber.