Bookshot #189: The Templars

Honestly, I'm not quite sure why I picked this book up. I think I was in the bookstore with one of the

kiddos and just felt an unshakable urge to buy a book and saw this one and thought, 'hell, I'd love to learn more about The Templars' and snagged it. It didn't hurt that it was by Dan Jones, who is one of the best narrative historians out there. The Plantagenets and The Wars of the Roses were both phenomenal books, so I figured it would be more of the same here, and as it turns out, I was entirely correct.

The crusades have always fascinated me. Somewhere, lurking on our very crowded bookshelves, I've got a very nice three-volume history of the crusades from The Folio Society that somehow wound up in my possession after the parents did a book purge some years back. I have yet to crack those, but what I was left with after this book was that the idea of some kind of 'Clash of Civilizations' is really more ridiculous than it seems.

I'm going to go on a tangent here, but stay with me for a second.

Dan Simmons died a couple of weeks ago now, and I have to confess that although I've read Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, I never read much of his work beyond that. Hyperion was enough. Hyperion was monumental. Hyperion pushed the limitations of what science fiction could be and elevated it into territory occupied by luminaries such as Ursula K. LeGuin or Gene Wolfe. But I saw a mention on Twitter of how 'he got his shit rocked by 9/11' and tracked down what they were talking about.

It was a short story. A time traveller comes back to talk to the narrator about what's coming. A century-long war of a resurgent, Caliphate Islam, taking over Europe and dominating the world. It was the kind of thing that would catch you a rash of shit back then, but it also wasn't all that unusual in the wake of 9/11. Books were written about the forthcoming 'Clash of Civilizations.' Serious, policy books read by all the important people in Washington D.C. (There was also fiction; I distinctly remember this book floating around back then.) 

It seemed a stretch, even then. A reaction to fears provoked by 9/11 that some kind of fanatical Islam was coming to get us and gobble us up. It's still rearing its ugly head now and again, even now. Oklahoma banned Sharia law a few years ago, because of all the things going on in Oklahoma, the implementation of Sharia law was high on the list. A Congressional Representative just last week declared rather rashly that 'all the Muslims should go back' and that 'paperwork doesn't make you American.'  So maybe the fear of Islam is bleeding into the current blood and soil nativist nonsense we're all living with, I don't know.

Point is, the short story Simmons wrote was very much of its moment in time. It wasn't alone. I think policymakers thought that in the wake of the Cold War, someone needed to be the primary villain for national unity, so why not Islam?

The problem is that if you read history, you'll discover that Islam has been anything but united pretty much most of the time. Every Ottoman Sultan had multiple brothers and some kind of a succession crisis that involved dead bodies, knives, and if not that, then outright Civil War. Even back in the age of the Templars, Dan Jones lays it out again and again: the military genius of Saladin was the exception, not the rule. Otherwise, there would have been no way the Latin Kingdoms of Outremer would have lasted as long as they did. 

The Battle of Tours in 732 saw the Umayyad Caliphate turned back from further progress north into Europe. Islamic control over the Iberian Peninsula ended in 1492. The Siege of Vienna in 1683 was the high point of the Ottomans. It was downhill since then. Yes, right-wing media types, Influencers, and grifters like to make hay about creeping Islamization in Europe, but really, the secularization of Europe left a vacuum. Friendly immigration policies let Islam fill it. All politics is local, and if your majority in Parliament is dependent on the Muslim vote, what would you expect a Labour government to do?

Tangent OVER!

In the meantime, Dan Jones does what he does best, which is laying out the rise of the militant orders-- mainly the Hospitalers (who still survive today as the Knights of Malta) and the Templars. (The Teutonic Knights came a little bit later and also lasted a decent chunk of time longer than the Templars.) An outgrowth of the interest in crusading, they sort of developed as a force to protect the pilgrim routes between the ports (which were controlled by the Latin Kingdoms) and Jerusalem (also controlled by the Latin Kingdoms) but the parts in between were vulnerable to Muslim (or Saracen as they were called back then) raiding and pillaging.

Gradually, they grew, establishing a headquarters on the Temple Mount and soon becoming a key component of the Latin Kingdom's military force. They realized that in order to keep the fire of the Crusades going, they would need contacts, so gradually they amassed power, wealth, and contacts all across Europe to keep the mission going. As a result, they gradually amassed power across Europe-- realizing that with the Reconquista gathering steam, there was more than one place to promote the Crusades. (They actually helped manage the Regency of James I of Aragon at one point until he was old enough to leave their charge and take the reins himself.)

Ultimately, the weakness of the governing structure collided with the military genius of Saladin, and that was really the end. Richard the Lionheart clawed a lot back that held for a while. But failed expeditions at Damietta and the rise of the Mameluks in Egypt were the first portent of doom, and after Acre fell and Outremer was extinguished. The Templars never could get the crusades going again, and eventually, their wealth and power attracted the eye of the king of France, who rounded them all up on Friday the 13th. (Which is where we get the superstition from, apparently-- I didn't know that!) The order was extinguished after that, though it survived in various forms in Portuguese military orders for a while and inspired mythology and legend in it swake.

Overall: Dan Jones remains one of the best historians out there, and this was another page turner I couldn't put down. Like Roger Crowley, he's quickly becoming one of my go-tos for whatever historical topic they write about. My Grade: **** out of ****