The Templars: The Rise and Spectacular Fall of God's Holy Warriors

Written by Dan Jones

Narrated by Dan Jones

“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 Year

A 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 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Audio
• Release date: Sep 19, 2017
• ISBN: 9780525524489

Dan Jones

Dan Jones is a bestselling historian, TV presenter and award-winning journalist. His non-fiction books, which have sold more than a million copies worldwide, include the Sunday Times bestsellers THE PLANTAGENETS, THE TEMPLARS, POWERS AND THRONES and HENRY V. His fiction includes the acclaimed Essex Dogs trilogy, set during the Hundred Years War, concluding with LION HEARTS. Dan has written and presented numerous TV series including Secrets of Great British Castles, Britain's Bloodiest Dynasty: The Plantagenets and London: 2000 Years of History. He writes and hosts the Sony Music podcast This is History. For a decade Dan was a weekly columnist for the London Evening Standard; he has also contributed to dozens of newspapers and magazines worldwide, including the New York Times, Sunday Times, Telegraph and Spectator. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Trustee of Historic Royal Palaces.

Reviews for The Templars

[jhemlock-1711 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

With an excellent narrative Dan Jones picks his way across the scorching terrain of the Crusades and how the Templars picked its bones and became the most powerful religious military order in history while using the greed and piety of European Kings to fill their coffers. Gritty, bold and unbiased Dan Jones stands between the Christian and Muslim armies and lets us have it as the arrows fly and the Calvary charges. It's all there. Impetuous Templar leaders, brazen Kings, calculating and precise Muslim leaders all set the scale for centuries of brutal conflict that clearly cannot identify a winner. As you read this book the ground will shake with hooves and the doomed will plead for mercy from their God. The amount of research Jones does not only in this volume but all of his works is almost unimaginable. He deserves some serious credit.

[joligula · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

With an excellent narrative Dan Jones picks his way across the scorching terrain of the Crusades and how the Templars picked its bones and became the most powerful religious military order in history while using the greed and piety of European Kings to fill their coffers. Gritty, bold and unbiased Dan Jones stands between the Christian and Muslim armies and lets us have it as the arrows fly and the Calvary charges. It's all there. Impetuous Templar leaders, brazen Kings, calculating and precise Muslim leaders all set the scale for centuries of brutal conflict that clearly cannot identify a winner. As you read this book the ground will shake with hooves and the doomed will plead for mercy from their God. The amount of research Jones does not only in this volume but all of his works is almost unimaginable. He deserves some serious credit.

[infjsarah · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A free loan from audible. Enjoyable non-fiction listen about what the templars actually did.

[jakadk · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I haven’t been able to read as much as I usually do, but today (October 13th 2019) I managed to find the time to finish this belter of a book.

And as I’m writing this, it dawned on me that there is an ironic symbolism in that, given the topic of Dan Jones’ superb book.

The Knights Templar – or, to give them their proper title, the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon – started out as a rag-tag band of crusading knights based at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, but grew into a major player in world politics (and finance) spreading their influence from the Holy Land to the Hebrides.

They became a vital part of every major operation of successive Crusades, pushed the boundaries of finance and banking – but ultimately, this order of what was essentially (intended to be) warrior monks was brought down by very secular means.

And yet, they still influence our collective imagination to this day.
Jones does a spectacular job of boiling down the (at times extremely) motley history of this legendary order to a format that makes it approachable, enjoyable – and at the same time solidly academic.

He draws not only upon Western sources – we also get to hear from chroniclers, courtiers, diplomats and poets from the other side of the conflict. A nice touch, that adds a lot of depth to the narrative.

I flat out loved it, to be honest. Finishing it on October 13th – the date of their downfall in 1307 – was an unexpected little flourish. And if you like your medieval history well-written, impeccably researched and entertaining in tone – you will too.

An easy 5/5 for this one.

[drmaf-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Interesting potted history of an enormously influential order that's started out as group of humble knights vowing to protect pilgrims in the Holy Land and ended up as a banking and property cartel that had forgot how to fight in favour of getting very very rich. This of course was their downfall, as an unscrupulous French king greedy for their riches engineered their humiliating downfall. Yet in their heyday, the Templars were feared as the most potent fighting force in the Holy Land, doomed for immediate execution by the Muslims if captured because they were simply too dangerous to let live. Often their bravery was their own worse enemy as they swore to fight to the death, rather than escaping to fight another day. However, as the fortunes of the Holy War turned against the Crusaders, and European rulers became less and less interested, their numbers and influence dwindled. Poor choices by reckless and greedy leaders led to them being almost exterminated as a fighting force when the Crusaders were finally evicted from the Holy Land. However, even after they disappeared from Europe, they lived on in fiction and fantasy, the subject of so many conspiracy theories, with which the author deals briefly at the end of the book. Entertaining and well-written history, definitely recommended for those who lack the patience or the inclination to deal with more academic, authoritiave works.

[prichardson_33 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

So much has been written of the Templars that is pure supposition and groundless in historical fact that it was a great relief to find this book. A detailed book that takes time to get through but we'll worth it. Wonderfully balanced and pulling together Templar history in a way I have not encountered before it is a very finely written book that I enjoyed very much.