Why the Templars have always attracted obsessives
A Vatican filing error helped to fuel centuries of conspiracy theories, says David V Barrett

4 December 2009

The Templars continue to inspire films such as Kingdom of Heaven CNS photo from 20th Century Fox

The Templars: History and Myth
by Michael Haag
Profile Books, £15

There seems to be an endless stream of books making fanciful assertions about what the Knights Templar believed and did, and what became of them after their dissolution 700 years ago.

We're told that they spent years tunnelling under Temple Mount in Jerusalem, discovering either great wealth or heretical documents or the bones of Mary Magdalene or even Jesus; that they revered the Magdalene, or were allies of the Cathars, or were secret followers of John the Baptist; that they discovered America, or fought alongside Robert the Bruce at Bannockburn, or became the Freemasons; and more. Endlessly more. There's no evidence whatsoever for any of these claims, but they've been stated with such confidence by so many speculative historians that many now take them as fact.

That's why Michael Haag's book is such a refreshing change. Haag, who is best known for the Rough Guides travel series, made a foray into the confusing world of history and myth with The Rough Guide to The Da Vinci Code five years ago. Most of this new book is a straightforward history of the Knights Templar, usefully set in the context of pilgrimages to the Holy Land, the Muslim conquest and the crusades in the first section - indeed, he doesn't actually reach the formation of "the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon" until page 95, after which he relates in turn their rise, their power, their fall and the aftermath.

What we "know" of their origins, that nine nobles led by Hugh of Payns came together in 1118 or 1119 to defend pilgrims travelling to Jerusalem, comes from a history written by William of Tyre 55 years later in the mid-1170s. Small wonder, then, that there is so much scope for myths - and what might be called mythconceptions - to spring up about the Templars. Haag touches on some of these along the way, such as their supposed excavations beneath Temple Mount and legends of Mary Magdalene.

The big question, of course, is whether the Templars were heretics as claimed by King Philip IV of France, in charges devised by his minister William of Nogaret (who had previously made remarkably similar charges against Pope Boniface VIII). Haag's book is the first to have been written since the discovery of the Chinon Parchment, which detailed the confessions of several of the most senior Knights Templar, and the absolution given to them by Pope Clement V in 1308 - which was ignored by Philip when he burned Jacques de Molay to death in 1314.

Haag agrees with most serious historians that the Templars were destroyed because Philip was massively in debt to them, and wanted not only to wipe out his debt but also to get his hands on their reputed wealth.

The Chinon Parchment suggests that they were not guilty of heresy so much as going astray in their initiation rituals. "If the Templars were heretics," writes Haag, "they were the most inconsistent and unconvincing adherents any heresy could have. The Templars had fallen into peculiar ways and needed reform, but that, decided the Pope, was all."

But what of the confessions that Philip extracted from Templars in France? Haag points out that the only places where there were substantial confessions from Templars were "areas where the French authorities and their collaborators had applied ferocious tortures to their victims, or where their testimony was deliberately distorted to turn admitted irregularities into heresy".

If the Chinon Parchment had not been misfiled and mislaid in the depths of the Vatican Archives for centuries some of the sillier stories about the Templars might never have gained the unfortunate credence they have.

Haag makes short work of the supposed derivation of Freemasonry from the Templars, including the former Jesuit priest Abbé Augustin Barruel's claims in Mémoires pour servir a l'histoire du Jacobinisme (1797) which linked together the Knights Templar, the Freemasons, the Illuminati and the French Revolution.

"A few years later Barruel added Jews to the conspiracy, seeing them as the real power behind the Templars and the Freemasons and the ultimate manipulators of European events - a conspiracy theory that culminated in the gas ovens of the Third Reich" - and in the host of thoroughly unpleasant ultra-Right-wing conspiracy theories still around today. After discounting a bunch of other modern myths about the Templars Haag quotes the novelist Umberto Eco, that you could always tell a lunatic because "sooner or later he brings up the Templars". Absolutely!

This is a thorough, very readable and quite splendid book. It is spoilt for me by only one thing: Haag's decision to render every name into its English equivalent. It's perhaps acceptable to change Guillaume to William for easier reading, but it seems fairly pointless to change Hugues or Hugh de Payns to Hugh of Payns, and I found it ludicrous to transform the last Templar grand master from the well-known Jacques de Molay into "James of Molay".