“Dan Jones is an entertainer, but also a bona fide historian. Seldom does one find serious scholarship so easy to read.” – The Times, Book of the YearA New York Times bestseller, this major new history of the knights Templar is “a fresh, muscular and compelling history of the ultimate military-religious crusading order, combining sensible scholarship with narrative swagger” – Simon Sebag … narrative swagger” – Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Jerusalem
A faltering war in the middle east. A band of elite warriors determined to fight to the death to protect Christianity’s holiest sites. A global financial network unaccountable to any government. A sinister plot founded on a web of lies.
Jerusalem 1119. A small group of knights seeking a purpose in the violent aftermath of the First Crusade decides to set up a new order. These are the first Knights Templar, a band of elite warriors prepared to give their lives to protect Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. Over the next two hundred years, the Templars would become the most powerful religious order of the medieval world. Their legend has inspired fervent speculation ever since.
In this groundbreaking narrative history, Dan Jones tells the true story of the Templars for the first time in a generation, drawing on extensive original sources to build a gripping account of these Christian holy warriors whose heroism and alleged depravity have been shrouded in myth. The Templars were protected by the pope and sworn to strict vows of celibacy. They fought the forces of Islam in hand-to-hand combat on the sun-baked hills where Jesus lived and died, finding their nemesis in Saladin, who vowed to drive all Christians from the lands of Islam. Experts at channeling money across borders, they established the medieval world’s largest and most innovative banking network and waged private wars against anyone who threatened their interests.
Then, as they faced setbacks at the hands of the ruthless Mamluk sultan Baybars and were forced to retreat to their stronghold in Cyprus, a vindictive and cash-strapped King of France set his sights on their fortune. His administrators quietly mounted a damning case against the Templars, built on deliberate lies and false testimony. On Friday October 13, 1307, hundreds of brothers were arrested, imprisoned and tortured, and the order was disbanded amid lurid accusations of sexual misconduct and heresy. They were tried by the Pope in secret proceedings and their last master was brutally tortured and burned at the stake. But were they heretics or victims of a ruthlessly repressive state? Dan Jones goes back to the sources tobring their dramatic tale, so relevant to our own times, to life in a book that is at once authoritative and compulsively readable.
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Dan Jones is a distinguished historian despite his relative youth, but also a really stylish wordsmith. And this is a fantastic story which he tells with wonderful energy, subtlety, detail and skill. He’s also slyly humorous at the expense of some of the most colourful and savage characters to inhabit a very violent past. This is distant history, but Jones really brings it to vibrant and compelling life. It’s the first book of his I’ve encountered and has left me pretty desperate to read all of those he’s written. It’s that good. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
The first history I read that provides a comprehensive history of The Templars.
This book covers a lot of information about the Crusades, i.e., names, dates, battles, but it seemed short on information about the Templars per se. Not an easy book to write because this was a time of limited written material. Credits to Dan Jones for his research and dedication to the topic. I preferred his book “The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens who Made England”. Another epic research project, but a bit more accessible.
Good read for a history fan. Can be a bit “dry”…but then again a lot of history can be that way. I never knew that The Templars were the elite “Special Forces” of their day!
It’s a good history but haven’t been able to finish it and started something else. Though I’m interested in the Templar’s as a subject , so far I haven’t found this book to really grip my imagination.
Seems OK as a history but VERY dry and a hard read to get into.
Once again Dan Jones illuminates the world of nearly 1000 years ago in his eminently readable fashion.
The 300 year existence of the Templars and a story about the holy land and the struggle between Islam and Christianity to hold it after it was liberated by the first crusade. Warrior monks of the highest quality fighters but at the end lead by foolish leaders to destruction and almost annihilated. Then betrayed by the king of France after so many decades of faithful service.
A very good, readable history.
Lengthy history of period
“The Templars” has a two-fold purpose: to tell the fascinating story of the meteoric rise of the Knights of the Holy Temple and its equally abrupt crash and burn less than a century later and to de-bunk the clouds of mystery and conspiracy which clings to the Templars like a shroud even today. Mr. Jones suceeds in both areas, but, in relating the history of the Order, this reader was left with the impression that he fails to hold the Templars fully accountable for their particiation in some of the worst battles of the Crusades from the prospective of the Latin states of Outremer. If the Templar knights were such battle-hardened veterans of the Crusader battles in the Holy Land whose advice was ignored to the peril of those leaders who failed to heed it, how was it that the Templars were so often the victims of massacre by the forces of Islam? The author writes that the Templars held alllegeance to their superiors to be one of the highest pricipals of the Order, and, therefore, once a decision was made, the Templars accepted that the issue was no longer open for discussion and set out to carry out their assigned duties with no further question or dissent. Blind alllegeance to their assigned duties speaks highly for the Templars commitment to follow orders, but it seems as short-sighted in the 13th century as it does in the 20th or 21st. (I was only following orders.)
Other than that one quibble, I enjoyed the book and felt it did a good job of presenting the fascinating story of one of history’s most famous military orders in an easy to read and understand form. Mr. Jones, while not excessively long-winded in his presentation of the actual history of the Order of the Temple, takes an almost casual approach to the debunking of the mythology of the Templars in current culture which he handles entirely in the book’s Epilogue. I recognize that he finds little credible information to support the often fantastic claims attributed to the Order, but I would have like him to address the issues and examine what has been offered in support of some of these claims in a bit more detail.
Again, my crticisms are relatively minor and did not prevent me from enjoying this examintion of the Knights of the Holy Temple and its legacy today. I would recommend this book to anyone with a genuine interest in the Templars, their role in the battles of the Crusades, the basis for their confounding crash at the hands of the French king, or about the Crusades themselves.
Pretty dry for the most part but we’ll researched and informative. It’s not his best work
Good read