Book Reviews

The Trial Of the Templars

by Malcolm Barber

     There have been tons of books written about the Knights Templars that are filled with garbage. The Trial Of the Templars by Malcolm Barber isn’t one of them. This is a sober-minded account of how they were taken down by church and state. In fact, this book isn’t actually a comprehensive history of this most famous of all medieval fraternal orders. It is really about their persecution and destruction at the hands of the monarchy.

The opening chapter gives a short account of who the Templars were. They rose up to be the most prominent and successful order of knights during the Crusades at the turn of the 14^th century. They built castles at outposts throughout the Middle East, provided protection for people on pilgrimage to the so-called Holy Land, and set up a primitive banking network. Admission to this secret society was highly coveted because it guaranteed rapid social advancement for the lower classes and they were considered exempt from prosecution by dictate from the Catholic church.

Then Pope Clement V and Phillip IV came to power and everything went to hell for the highly revered knights. Clement V held the papacy in Avignon during the schism when France tried to wrestle the position out of the hands of the Vatican in Rome. Clement V had plans for expanding the power of the church and part of his plot involved uniting all knightly orders into one army in order to fight another crusade. The Templars, who prized their privileged status, didn’t want to share it with others so the conflict went from there. Phillip IV was installed as King of France by divine mandate according to Clement V, who was backed by the monarchy in his bid to control the church from Avignon. Phillip IV also had big ambitions to untie France into one kingdom, taking land from England, Flanders, Germany, Sicily, and Italy. His problem was that the previous king had nearly bankrupted the monarchy by building too many castles and funding too many crusades which were becoming less and less successful due to the rise of Saladin, the commander who led the Muslims to victory over the Crusaders. The battle of Acre, in what is now Syria, was the turning point and they blamed the Templars for the defeat.

Phillip IV needed money and guess who the richest and most unpopular people were at the time?The Templars. Clement and Phillip conspired together to take the order down. The pope declared them heretics and the French aristocracy was put in charge of the trial. Accusations of satanism, blasphemy, and homosexuality were leveled against the Templars and many confessions were obtained after some of the knights were tortured. Many of them retracted their confessions, and those who did were burned at the stake.

Malcolm Barber does an outstanding job of explaining the legal, theological, and technical aspects of the trial and points out how the government and church were able to manipulate the French populace and turn them against the Templars. Part of Barber’s methodology is to repeat over and over again what the Templars confessed. It was the same thing every time: spitting and walking on a cross, denying the divinity of Jesus Christ, worshiping idols, kissing men’s anuses, indulging in sodomy, and practicing witchcraft. By repeating the confessions continuously, the words get seared into your brain. This is awfully annoying for the reader, but it seems Barber has done this to make his point. After reading the same thing so many times, you tend to forget that these confessions were the result of torture. We should know by now that during torture, people will confess to anything, no matter how untrue or absurd, to make the torture stop. Imagine how the medieval illiterates who watched the trials would feel after hearing confession after confession without even knowing the knights had spent so much times in the dungeons. While this might be a mind-numbing writing technique, it goes a long way in helping the author to make his case.

Barber breaks up the painful monotony with one interesting chapter that traces the folkloric roots of the accusations against the Templars. He examines myths, legends, and folk tales that were circulating at the time that contributed to the public’s perception that the Templars were Satanists. Other than that, this book is thankfully devoid of any of the occult or conspiracy theory crap that usually gets attached to the name of the Holy Order Of the Knights Of the Temple.

Malcolm Barber’s The Trial Of the Templars is a stone cold attempt at presenting the facts surrounding the liquidation of the Knights Templar. While it isn’t a thrilling read, he succeeds in demonstrating how the real evil happening in this historical legal drama was on the throne and in the church. None of the skullduggery going on had anything to do with what the Templars were actually up to; it was entirely the result of a plot hatched by those in power who were greedy for more wealth. Don’t say it can’t happen here in America during the 21^st century. Human nature hasn’t changed at all since the Middle Ages.