Charles Addison - The Knights Templars

Having some years ago, during a pilgrimage to the Holy City of Jerusalem, gained admission to the courts of the ancient Temple of the Knights Templars, which still exists on Mount Moriah in a perfect state of preservation as a Mussulman Mosque, and having visited many of the ruined fortresses and castles of the ancient order of the Temple, whose shattered walls are still to be seen at intervals in Palestine and in Syria, from Gaza to Antioch, and from the mountains of the Dead Sea to the shores of the Mediterranean, I naturally became greatly interested in the history of the order, and in the numerous remains and memorials of the Knights Templars still to be met with in various stages of decay and ruin in almost every part of Europe. The recent restoration of the Temple Church at London, the most beautiful and the best preserved of all the ancient ecclesiastical edifices of the western provinces of the Temple, first suggested to me the idea of writing a short historical account of the varied fortunes of that great religious and military fraternity of knights and monks by whom it was erected, and of their dark and terrible end.

Born during the first fervour of the Crusaders, the Templars were flattered and aggrandized as long as their great military power and religious fanaticism could be made available for the support of the Eastern church and the retention of the Holy Land; but when the crescent had ultimately triumphed over the cross, and the religious and military enthusiasm of Christendom had died away, they encountered the basest ingratitude in return for the services they had rendered to the Christian faith, and were plundered, persecuted, and condemned to a cruel death by those who ought in justice to have been their defenders and supporters.

The memory of these holy warriors is embalmed in all our recollections of the wars of the cross; they were the bulwarks of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem during the short period of its existence, and were the last band of Europe’s host that contended for the possession of Palestine. To the vows of the monk and the austere life of the convent, they added the discipline of the camp, and the stern duties of the military life, joining “the fine vocation of the sword and lance” with the holy zeal and body-bending toil of a poor brotherhood. The vulgar notion that they were as wicked as they were fearless and brave, has not yet been entirely exploded; but it is hoped that the copious account of the proceedings against the order in this country given in the ensuing volume, will dispel many unfounded prejudices still entertained against the fraternity, and excite emotions of admiration for their constancy and courage, and of pity for their unmerited and cruel fate.

The accounts, even of the best of the ancient historians concerning the Templars ought not to be implicitly relied upon. William of Tyre, for instance, tells us that Nassr-ed-deen, son of sultan Abbas, was taken prisoner by the Templars, and whilst in their hands became a convert to Christianity; that he had learned the rudiments of the Latin language, and earnestly sought to be baptized, but that the Templars were bribed with sixty thousand pieces of gold to surrender him to his enemies in Egypt, where certain death awaited him; and that they stood by to see him bound hand and foot with chains, and placed in an iron cage, to be conducted across the desert to Cairo. The Arabian historians, on the other hand, tell us that Nassr-ed-deen and his father murdered the caliph, threw his body into a well, and then fled into Palestine; that the sister of the murdered caliph wrote immediately to the commander of the garrison of the Knights Templars at Gaza, offering a handsome reward for the capture of the fugitives; that they were accordingly intercepted, and Nassr-ed-deen was sent to Cairo, where the female relations of the caliph caused his body to be cut into small pieces in the seraglio! The above act has constantly been made a matter of grave accusation against the Templars; but what a different complexion does the case assume on the testimony of the Arabian authorities! It must be remembered that William, archbishop of Tyre, was hostile to the order on account of its vast powers and privileges, and carried his complaints to a general council of the Church at Rome. He is abandoned, in everything that he says to the prejudice of the fraternity, by James of Vitry, bishop of Acre, a learned and most talented prelate, who wrote in Palestine subsequently to William of Tyre, and has copied largely from the history of the latter. The bishop of Acre speaks of the Templars in the highest terms, and declares that they were universally loved by all men for their piety and humility.

The celebrated orientalist Von Hammer has recently brought forward various extraordinary and unfounded charges, destitute of all authority, against the Templars; and Wilcke, who has written a German history of the order, seems to have imbibed all the vulgar prejudices against the fraternity. I might have added to the interest of the ensuing work, by making the Templars horrible and atrocious villains; but I have endeavoured to write a fair and impartial account of the order, not slavishly adopting everything I find detailed in ancient writers, but such matters only as I believe, after a careful examination of the best authorities, to be true.

The favourable reception given to the first edition of the ensuing work, and the interest that was taken in the extraordinary and romantic career of the Knights Templars, induced me to publish a second edition greatly enlarged, and to introduce various collateral matters of an antiquarian and local character, interesting only to a comparatively small number of readers. This enlarged edition having been exhausted, it occurred to me, in preparing a third edition for the press, that the work might be materially shortened and reduced in price without in anywise detracting from its value and interest as a record of the chief events of one of the most remarkable and interesting periods of history, and of the extraordinary and romantic achievements of the first and most ancient of the great religio-military orders of knights and monks established during the crusades.

The dry matters of detail, of local and partial interest, which interfered with the continuity of the main narrative, have been struck out of the body of the work, and the more striking incidents of the history have been thus brought into greater prominence. The long Latin and French extracts from the old chronicles have also been discarded from the notes, but the historical references have been preserved to enable the reader, if he thinks fit, to study the quaint and curious language of the originals. By these means, and by enlarging the size of the page, the work has been compressed into a smaller compass, and the price reduced nearly one half.

It is hoped that these alterations will be found to be improvements.

Inner Temple, December 8, 1851.

“Go forth to battle and employ your substance and your persons for the advancement of God’s religion. Verily, God loveth those who fight for his religion in battle array.” – Koran, chapter 56, entitled Battle Array.

“O Prophet, stir up the faithful to war! If twenty of you persevere with constancy they shall overcome two hundred, and if there be one hundred of you they shall overcome one thousand of those who believe not.” — Chapter 8, entitled The Spoils.

“Verily, if God pleased, he could take vengeance on the unbelievers without your assistance, but he commandeth you to fight his battles that he may prove the one of you by the other; and as to those who fight in defence of God’s true religion, God will not suffer their works to perish.” – Koran, chapter 47, entitled War.