The Templars
Pages: 448
Edition: Hardcover
List Price: $30
Publisher: Viking
ISBN: 9780525428305
First entered: 23rd, Sep 2017
Number of weeks: 1
Book Summary
An instant 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.
A vindictive King of France set his sights on their fortune. He instructed his lawyers to mount a damning case against them, built on deliberate lies and false testimony. Then 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 publicly humiliated. 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, in a book that is at once authoritative and compulsively readable.
Authors
Name: Dan Jones
Hometown: Reading, England
About the author:
Dan Jones is a bestselling historian, TV presenter and award-winning journalist. His books include THE PLANTAGENETS, a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, and THE HOLLOW CROWN, a Sunday Times bestseller, published in the USA as THE WARS OF THE ROSES. He has also written books about the Peasants’ Revolt and Magna Carta and a forthcoming social history of Plantagenet England, entitled REALM DIVIDED. He is now writing a book about the Knights Templar, due for publication in 2017.
Dan has presented several TV series including Secrets of Great British Castles (Channel 5) and Britain’s Bloodiest Dynasty: The Plantagenets, which has been sold to more than 40 countries worldwide. He has also appeared on programmes for BBC2, BBC3, BBC4, Channel 4, Sky Atlantic as well as dozens of radio stations in the UK and USA.
Dan’s journalism appears on both sides of the Atlantic. He is a columnist for the London Evening Standard and also contributes to the Sunday Times, Wall Street Journal, Mail on Sunday, Daily Telegraph, Smithsonian, CNN, GQ, The Spectator, The New Statesman, BBC History Magazine, History Today, Tatler and the Literary Review. He lives in London.