Dan Snow's History Hit - The Knights Templar

Episode Date: September 11, 2023

Few organisations in history have names as loaded with legend as the Knights Templar. Western culture is infused with the mythology of these pious warrior monks, who wielded magic and went on quests for legendary treasures. In reality, it was an elite fighting force that became a Middle Ages military and financial powerhouse. Its members moved in the same circles as kings and popes, their influence spanning from Portugal to the River Jordan. But as the Holy Land was lost, European leaders began to turn on the Order, and its final leaders would meet a violent end at the stake.In this Explainer episode, Dan takes us from their pious beginnings in the first Crusades through to the height of their power in the 13th century, and finally, to their abrupt end.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.PLEASE VOTE NOW! for Dan Snow's History Hit in the British Podcast Awards Listener's Choice category here. Every vote counts, thank you!We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Few institutions in our history have names so loaded with myth as the Knights Templar. Historical, almost hysterical, novelists and filmmakers have turned them into a mystical secret society of magic wielding warrior monks who make the Freemasons look like the local neighborhood watch. As always though I think the truth is far more interesting. You don't need to exaggerate. You don't need to make things up when it comes to the Templars. For 200 years, the Knights Templar were a military and financial power, spanning Europe and the Near East, from the west coast of Portugal to the River Jordan. They exploded in size and ambition, from just a small band, a handful of knights dedicated to protecting pilgrims in the Holy Land

to become one of the most effective military forces in Christendom. A bulwark of the Christian grip on the Holy Land. As well as warriors, they were monks, they were bankers, they were seafarers, they were ambassadors, they were papal counsellors. But not even the Templars could halt the march of Saladin, still less of the Egyptian Mamluks. And eventually, the Holy Land was lost to the Christians. The fate of the Templars more mirrored that of the fate that they were sworn to defend. And in 1314, just a few years after the last

Christian possession in the Holy Land was lost, the last Grand Master of the Templars was burned at the stake. In this podcast, I'm going to tell the story of their rise and fall. And there's still hints in our landscapes, on our maps, all around us still. I remember going to the strange round temple church in London for the first time, seeing the tomb effigy of William the Marshal in there. He became a Templar just a few days before his death. England's greatest knight. It's no surprise that his tomb effigy survived a near direct hit from the German Lefafa during the Blitz. I've sailed into La Rochelle on the west coast of France. It was once

the most important portal on that coast, thanks to it being the Templar headquarters for that area. They dominated the Bay of Biscay from their base there, and to Clontarf Castle in Dublin, which was once the site of a Templar castle. Their reach extended right the way through Ireland. And then I've also been all the way to the eastern edge of Christendom, the River Jordan. I've been to the Beaufort Castle, one of the most imposing castles in the Levant today, one still fought over at the very end of the 20th century. It's just perched on this mighty ridge, just on the Lebanese side of the Israel-Lebanon border. And I've been to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Dome of the Rock, one of the holiest

sites in Islam, once the Templar headquarters. So in this podcast I'll be telling the story of the Holy Order, of monks hungry for martyrdom, of how the Templars wielded the power of kings, commanded a shadow army funded by a multinational property empire. I'll talk about how they were the shock troops of the crusading project, the last men to fight under the banner of Christ on the shores of the Levant, the last Christians hacked down at the feet of the victorious Sultan. But I'm also going to tell the story of how in the end their deadliest foe was not that Sultan or the Mongols, but were Christian politicians, threatened by and desirous of their wealth and their power.

This is the story of the Templars. Enjoy. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. It's mid-January of 1120, and all is not well in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The senior, ecclesiastic and secular lords of the Holy Land are gathering. They're going to have a summit. Among them, Warman, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, King Baldwin II. They're there alongside luminaries like the Bishop of Nazareth,

Bishop of Bethlehem, the Constable of Jaffa, the Lord of Ramla. And they're meeting 30 miles or so north of Jerusalem in the town of Nablus, which is today the seat of the Palestinian Authority, where councils are still held, attended no doubt by men who still seek to improve their position in the contested Holy Land. 900 years ago, in 1120, the lords of the Crusader States had come together because the project was faltering. Jerusalem itself, the Holy

City, had been captured by the multinational force of European Crusaders in 1099, about 20 years earlier. And it was now the center of a small kingdom of Jerusalem, which sat alongside other mini Crusader statelets, like the Principality of Antioch and the counties of Edessa and Tripoli, covering much of the area now of what is Israel, parts of southern Turkey, Lebanon, and little pieces of Syria thrown in as well. Collectively, these Christian toeholds in the Levant were dwarfed. They were surrounded by big regional powers like the Seljuk Turks and the Fatimids in Egypt, Islamic powers. Now we hear in 1120 there was a plague of locusts and of mice in Jerusalem. On top of that, despite their capture of the holy city and some key

fortresses, the crusader states were under constant attack from Muslims. There was a sense from the senior figures present that they were under divine judgment at the moment they'd been found wanting. The sins of the people need to be corrected before Jerusalem could prosper, before the Christian grip on the holy Land was secure. So, at Nablus, these men banned adultery. Obviously, that's going to do the job. If men were accused, they'd be subject to torture with hot irons, unless they could prove their innocence. And if guilty, the gentleman's penis would be chopped off, and then he'd be sent into exile. Women would be mutilated. Sodomy, and then he'd be sent into exile. Women would be mutilated. Sodomy, not allowed either. You'd get burned at the stake unless you were very old or very young and you could prove you were the passive

party. No sex with Muslims either, naturally. The punishment was castration for men, mutilation again for women. Now alongside all these surefire ways of dealing with plagues of locusts, mice, and encroaching Muslim armies, there was a plan which stood, I'd say, a better chance of working. One man had arrived here in Nablus with this plan. It did not concern the locusts or the mice, or cross-confessional shagging, but it did concern attacks on Muslims, particularly on pilgrims that were coming to the Holy Land to visit the most holy sites in the Christian world. Only the previous year, 300 pilgrims traveling together had been massacred at Easter of all times, the holiest time of year as they attempted to get Jerusalem. Others had been taken as slaves along the way as they traveled from Europe.

Now, Hugh de Pain could not bear this. The whole point of the Crusades, let's remember, had been to allow Christians access to the holy sites, and it's still there, risking death and enslavement. See the place where their savior had been buried and risen from the dead. So he was here in Nablus, lobbying for permission to set up a protection force. He wanted to protect pilgrims, to take on the Muslim forces that threatened them, and so by extension protect the Christian project in the Holy Land. Now we think, we can't be certain, but we think that at this summit the king agreed. And he even gave Hugh a rather striking building for his headquarters,

And he even gave Hugh a rather striking building for his headquarters, no less than the former Al-Aqsa Mosque on Temple Mount itself. Temple Mount is the holiest place in Judaism. It's where the mighty Temple of Solomon had once stood. But it's also where Muslims believe that Muhammad had ascended to heaven. So it's also one of Islam's holiest sites. And it's a place where when Muslims captured Jerusalem from the Eastern Roman Empire, they had built their magnificent mosque that still stands today. That mosque, the Al-Aqsa, is where terrified believers, terrified Muslims had fled to,

had flocked to when the Crusader army penetrated the defences of Jerusalem in 1099 during the conquest of Jerusalem. On that occasion, the Crusaders had paid no notice to the site's designation as a holy place. We have reports of the Christian knights making such a slaughter that the blood splashed as high as their shins. They waded through a sea of corpses. And now this former mosque,

this site of that terrible massacre, those of a war crime, was handed over to Hugh de Pau's brotherhood. And they took their name from the mount, Temple Mount. They were the poor fellow soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, known for short as the Knights Templar. His plan was that they would be warrior monks,

soldiers of Christ, in the tradition of the crusade, but taking it a step further. Rather than joining for the duration of the crusade itself and then going back into secular life, they would now serve for life. It was a new idea, but it tapped into developments that were going on elsewhere in Christendom. The church was changing. Traditionally, nobles became monks. But a new wave of religious enthusiasm was driving people from less illustrious backgrounds to form ad hoc groups, really, groups of hermits, groups of people devoted to helping those less fortunate than

themselves. And the church, probably quite wisely, decided to embrace these groups and absorb them and turn them into formal religious orders. In 1098, you get a group set up called the Hospital Brothers of St. Anthony in southeast France. They were dedicated to the treatment of St. Anthony's fire, what we call today ergotism. In 1076, the Pope gave permission to one St. Stephen of Tyre to establish a community of hermits called the Grand Montines in central France, dedicated to prayer and contemplation and good works for the poor. So the Templars fit into this new trend. They're a group of lay people coming together and forming a religious group. They also fused this idea with a parallel fashion in Europe at the time, that of romantic knighthood, of chivalry, fighting on behalf of those less tough than you, protecting the innocent.

So it wasn't a huge leap to bring these two strands together. You get a group of holy men, of monks, serving God through prayer, but also serving God on the field of battle, protecting defenseless Christians. It was a powerful idea, the birth of a very powerful brand, and it proved extraordinarily popular, as you'll hear. And the first step on that path to really scaling up the operation was gaining legitimacy in the Christian West. Hugh de Pau spends the next few years forming this brotherhood, a small group, very, very small number of people going out and protecting pilgrims, but also trying to get plugged into the religious leadership of Christendom in the West. And he manages to get a hugely influential French abbot called Bernard

of Clairvaux on side. He's just established this new Cistercian abbey. He may have been related to Hugh de Pau, we think. They're certainly from a very, very similar part of France. Hugh asked Bernard to support his new military religious order. And Bernard agrees. He comes up with a justification for the Templars. This is formalized in 1129 at the Council of Troyes. Bernard's there and the rule of the Templars is written up. They borrow a lot from existing templates for religious communities. They borrow a lot from the Cistercians. They can live as monks and obey the big three rules. Poverty, they're not allowed to have anything. No fornicating and total obedience to the master

of the house. So there's no drinking, no gambling, no swearing, they had to forbear, they had to not have sex with anyone. I'm not surprised they fought hard, the battlefield must have been a blessed relief from their day-to-day chores. They cut their hair short, they want to set themselves aside from secular knights with their lustrous hair, their flowery ornamentation, their uniforms, their jewelry. They agree that they will simply wear white to symbolize their purity, their break with any sort of former allegiance, their rebirth. People associate Templars, I think, with wearing white, but with the big red cross on it. And that actually came slightly later. The Pope gave it to them for the

Second Crusade. It was a symbol of martyrdom because to die in battle beneath a papally sanctioned banner meant you were going straight to heaven. So they're off. They're legit. And with a few more years, they get the ultimate sanction. They get papal blessing in the form of a papal bull, which apart from anything else, exempts them from tax and obedience to local laws. It basically creates this autonomous group within Christendom at the time. They could pass freely across borders. They weren't required to pay any taxes. And they were exempt from all authority except that of the Pope.

They're up and running. And I think the best way to look at the Templars is they are the answer to a thorny problem. And that problem is projecting force in the Holy Land. In this period, kingdoms protect themselves by the sovereign, the leader, the king or the duke, summoning his nobles to bring in their military retinues and help. So when Henry I of England invades his brother, who's the Duke of Normandy in 1106, the earls of Surrey and Leicester were key subordinates, and they bring in turn their clients, lesser nobles, their gentry with them. And of course the king could top up this force with paid professionals, archers, that kind of thing. But a lot of it is dependent on your land holdings, the men that can

be mobilized from across your kingdom using this kind of pyramid structure of client landholders. But the crusader states don't have this muscle. They don't have this pyramid of great lords with vast estates and lots of men below them eligible for military service. The crusader states are small. They've been ravaged by war. They're very thinly populated. And they're not facing a neighboring mini state like Brittany or Flanders or Gwynedd or Scotland. They're facing massive, great Muslim powers. And so just the crusades themselves have been a transnational enterprise, people from different countries gathering together and forming this crusading army. The Templars are also a kind of transnational solution to the occupation of the Holy Land. The Holy Land had been conquered by this collaboration

between European princes and bishops and lords and kings and adventurers seeking wealth and glory and absolution for sins. Well now in a strange way the Templars are going to try and recreate that. They are forming a permanent standing army, defense force in the Holy Land. They're going to be professionals in a world of part-timers, of levies. They're a band of brothers who live together, who do nothing else other than pray and fight. And the really clever bit about the Templars is it's paid for by donations from right across Christendom. So going back to the beginning, almost in 1120, Count Foulke of Anjou, a great French magnate, he'd gone out on crusade. He'd heard about the Templars, liked the look of them, and even got permission to join them briefly. He got a part-time commission with the Templars.

And when he went back to the West, he kept up his association. He started sending donations. This caught on. People donated a vast amount of wealth, of land. Lords left them castles in their wills. One monarch even tried to leave them a third of his kingdom once.

Normal people left them a horse. That's what's so clever about it. If you're a merchant, are you going to donate to some dodgy, corrupt king of Jerusalem who's probably going to be deposed by his cousin in a few years' time to help him with defence of the Holy Land? You're probably not. I believe it's not what it's referred to as an attractive giving destination. But are you going to donate to this group of pure warrior monks, untarnished

by grubby politics, eulogized, celebrated by the Pope? They protect pilgrims. They take the fight to the enemy reliably, continuously. Well, yes, you might just donate to them. You can contribute to the safety of pilgrims, to the idea of a Christian holy land. You could do so without leaving the comfort of your bed. So the Templars acquire huge swathes of property across Christendom. And the remnant of that property empire is still visible on our landscape today. Temple Church, I mentioned in London. Bristol Temple Meads, the famous train station, the site of a Templar property. Temple Cowley, near where I went to university in Oxford. There are Templar buildings and businesses and castles from Ireland to Eastern Europe,

from Donegal to the Danube. There you go. And it wasn't just money that the Templars attracted. Those second and third sons of big aristocratic families were drawn like moths to the flame, or perhaps we should say like testosterone-filled young thugs with no other way of realising their ambitions. They weren't going to inherit their dad's possessions, their titles, their lands, but they could join the Templars and rise through that institution and become great men. You listen to Dan Snow's

history. Don't go anywhere. There's more to come. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends,

murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. So the Templars evolve really quite quickly into a hugely effective order of military knights. They enjoy success on the endless battlefields of the Holy Land. I'll tell you about a few in a second. And they have a superb fundraising operation to support those efforts. Because, friends, as you all know, cash is the main sinew of war. Horses, thousands of riveted pieces of iron for male shirts,

arrowheads, shafts, snug-fitting barrel stays for supplies, and a million other expensive accoutrements of warriors is what you need to fight and win. And they didn't just need stuff. They needed smiths to hammer and shape swords. They needed armourers to give those swords the lethal edge, farriers and stable boys to keep their horses fit. And most of those supplies needed to be shipped out from Europe across the eastern Mediterranean. They needed the hulls to carry them, at least at first rented, then built and owned. Templar cargos carried in Templar ships. Those who flocked to the east didn't all have to be grand. There was space forever on the Templars. There were the noble knights. These were men who had to be knighted by their local lord, their local king,

but then they could join the Templars. They were the famous white mantles. They were the allegedly chased and allegedly poverty-stricken warrior monks. They fought as heavy cavalry, as knights did on the battlefields of Western Europe in that period. They would have four horses. They'd have a couple of squires look after them. Those squires could be hired from outside. They were not expected to join the order themselves. But other members of the order did include the sergeants. These were from non-noble families. They brought the skills like the builders and the blacksmiths, the joiners, and they would also be administrators and help manage the massive property portfolio of the Templars. And these

sergeants could also fight on the battlefield alongside the knights as light cavalry or infantrymen. Collectively, what does that mean? It meant that in a world of amateurs and ill-equipped, unwilling levies, the Templars were professionals. They wanted to be there. They weren't tenants roused to fight by their lord's threats of eviction. They weren't marching off with rusty billhooks over their shoulder unwillingly and looking for any opportunity to desert and get back for the harvest. They were elite. They were motivated. They hungered for martyrdom. And they were disciplined. We hear that a lot. They were disciplined. They would wheel their horses knee to knee across the battlefield as one. And they did make life safer for Christian pilgrims. No question. It was a drop-off in banditry on the road to Jerusalem when this

rapid reaction force appeared. But they rise to prominence quickly because they're not just tactically useful to protect pilgrims. They start to play a key strategic role in the Holy Land. They become one of the great buttresses of Christian rule. They're prominent at the Battle of Montgesard in 1177. You've got the teenage king Baldwin IV of Jerusalem, 16 years old, his body wracked with leprosy. He's commanding a small a small force is outnumbered by 30,000 troops under the brilliant General Saladin, who seized control of Egypt and established his own dynasty there. Saladin was feeling very confident on this occasion. His army was spread out. Detachments of it were looting, raiding, looking for food. And Baldwin took his army by surprise. The boy king had

knelt in front of the piece of the true cross that they'd brought with them, the cross on which Jesus had been crucified, was then held back into a saddle to place himself at the heart of the fighting, and led his men into the attack. The Templars on that occasion were the shock troops. They fought, the chronicler tells us, as one man, and they almost killed Saladin, which may well have changed the course of history. The following year, in 1178, the King of Jerusalem has a castle built on the River Jordan. This is the frontier, the absolute edge of the Christian possessions, and he gives it to the Templars because he knows that they're going to be the ones that are going to aggressively hold and patrol

that frontier. They're a bit like the super-aggressive march of lords that William the Conqueror puts into place in the west, facing the Welsh after his invasion of England. The Templars end up controlling castles right across the Levant. One that I visited, and it is one of the most stunning castles you'll ever see, is Beaufort, it even means beautiful fort. It's in modern Lebanon, and it's a castle so well-situated, the Israelis held it for years, and the PLO and Hezbollah would launch attack after attack

trying to dislodge them from it. A few years later, the Battle of Hattin, the catastrophe at Hattin for the Crusaders. In 1187, I think it was, Saladin was completely victorious over the Christians. It was the decisive defeat for the control of the Holy Land. Afterwards, there was just a long, nearly inevitable slide to being driven out of the Holy Land completely. Jerusalem fell shortly after this battle. And after the Battle of Hattin,

he offered a reward for every Templar found, and he executed 200 of them in the days that followed. So he regarded them as the elite of the Christian fighting force in the Holy Land. I think that massacre of the Templars is, in some ways, the greatest compliment Saladin could have paid them. A few years later, Richard of England, Richard the Lionheart, had arrived in the Holy Land, and he took on Saladin's army, the Ayyubid army, at the town of Arsuf and crushed Saladin's army, inflicted an important defeat on Saladin. And again, in the vanguard of Richard's army

was this elite unit of Knights Templar under the command of Robert de Sablé. And they took part in a massive cavalry attack that broke the back of Saladin's army. And just as importantly, they then could be restrained by their commanders, not just chase off the random retreating units, but they were to wheel around, stay coherent, and make sure that Richard could capitalize on his victory. Another sign of their prestige was that a generation or two later in 1241, the Pope called on the Templars and sent a small force of Templars east to deal with the existential threat that was the Mongol horde entering central Europe. And Templars were present at two battles at which the Mongols

annihilated, humiliated the forces of Poland and Croatia and Hungary. One of the battles was fought at the very western edge of what is now Poland. It's amazing how far west they got, it's fascinating. And after those two crushing defeats, which the Templars were present at but couldn't swing in their favour, Hungary was occupied, destroyed. Something like, we think, a quarter of the population killed. Luckily for Christendom, the Mongols didn't maintain that push west. That's not the podcast. But in terms of the Templars in the 12th century, I think success bred success. Donors like to see results. Money, land, requests flowed in. Pilgrims paid to travel to the Holy Land on Templar ships,

which they quite rightly believed withstood less chance of being boarded by corsairs and having their crews and their passengers enslaved. And also to handle the huge flows of cash that are now being generated from their estates in the West. They had to develop a level of financial sophistication that was incredibly impressive. If you're transmitting one third of your operating profits from those farms and mills and quarries in Europe to the crusader states, you have to build a system of remittance.

And the Templars do that. And if you're a pilgrim or a crusader, you can now take advantage of this pre-existing financial network. So you can deposit money in London, you get a piece of paper in return, and you can then show that piece of paper to someone at Acre or Jerusalem, and you can withdraw cash. It's a bank.

They created a bank. And a few historians go even further and think it may have been an actual modern bank doing things like lending at interest. And their skill as financiers, as well as warriors, became highly sought after. So nobles, even kings, would put their finances in the hands of the Templars. So for example, they ended up running the royal treasury in France. The Pope always had a Templar on his personal staff. They acquired enormous influence throughout Christendom. And remember, they had these exemptions. They didn't have to obey the law in the territories of Europe. They could even exonerate their own members from excommunication. They're literally a law unto themselves. And there are examples, apparently, of people saying, oh, we're tenants of the Templars. We run this pub or we run this business.

We're tenants of the Templars. We don't have to pay tax. And officials come around saying, yes, you do. They attract celebrity members. Remember I mentioned before William the Marshal, who after a long and extraordinary career, dies a Templar, having joined them a few days before his death. In the end, though, not even the Templars could save the Holy Land. And the Templars are undone both by events in the East and the West, appropriately, for an organisation that always spanned the world of Christendom. They were undermined both on the battlefield and the courts of European royalty. Their They were undermined both on the battlefield and the courts of European royalty. Their independence has always been a great strength. They were self-supporting, they were self-funding, but it meant that they appeared dangerously independent.

Secular monarchs do not like competing power structures, other alternative sources of power and authority within their kingdom. And it wouldn't be long before those secular rulers spotted their opportunity. A body blow came in 1187 when they lost the temple. Following the catastrophe at the Battle of Hattin, I mentioned, Saladin captured Jerusalem. The Al-Aqsa Mosque goes back to being a mosque, no longer the headquarters of the Templars. The Knights of the Temple of Solomon no longer control the Temple of Solomon. And it gets worse. Saladin's successors, the Ayyubid dynasty, managed to unify much of North Africa in the Middle East, creating something like a superpower. In the 1250s, they're replaced

by an even greater power, the Mamluks, who become the most effective military force in the world at the time. Let's put it this way. The Mamluks defeat the Mongols at the Battle of Ain Jalut, just north of Jerusalem in 1260. This is widely regarded as the Mongols' first ever big defeat in a set-piece battle, and several more defeats follow that. So these Mamluks are devastating opponents on the battlefield. Slowly crusader possessions are torn from their grasp one after the other. The crusaders are pinned back to Acre, what is now the city of Akko in northern Israel, right on the coast of the Mediterranean. It's protected by massive fortifications, but the Mamluks besieged it in 1291. And there at the end, as you'd expect,

are the Templars. 300 of the Templars ride out. They sally forth from the castle by moonlight, try and interfere, disrupt the preparations for the siege. They come back with all sorts of captured supplies and trophies, but it's not enough. The siege is pressed with great vigour by the Mamluks. On the 18th of May 1291, the Mamluks mount their final assault on the walls. They hack their way through the densely packed city, panicking defenders flooding down to the port, offering their life savings for rescue by a fishing boat evacuation to somewhere like Cyprus. The Mamluks massacre everyone in their path, fighting house to house. By evening, the smouldering city was in Mamluk hands, except for the giant Templar fortress at the very, fortress at the very, very western tip of the city. This was the last significant military possession in the hands of the Christians in the Holy Land, and it's fitting that it should be the

Templar castle. Fanatical Templars and knights of some other orders, similar orders like the Knights Hospitallers, held out there for a few days. The local Templar commander, Thibaut Gaudin, snuck out using a tunnel to a waiting ship with the Templar treasure and took it to Christian-controlled Cyprus. The rest of the Templars, under Peter's savoury, seemed to have tried to surrender to the Sultan, but were hacked to pieces before they could even start negotiating. With their death, the castle fell. It was the end of

the crusader presence in the Holy Land. The sultan celebrated. He returned to Cairo, had a huge parade, chained crusaders shuffling along as part of his triumphant procession. Templars tried to counterattack in 1300. An expedition of Templars and knights hospitalers, raided Alexandria, Rosetta, Northern Egypt, some other Mediterranean ports. They occupied Ruad, which is a tiny island off the very southern tip of Syria today. And the Crusaders were now so desperate. This is how desperate they were. They were relying on the Mongols to help them. They thought the Mongols might defeat the Mamluks and just give back the Holy Land to the Christians. Now that feels deeply unlikely, but it's a sign of a lack of options,

the extreme desperation that the Christians now had of gaining back the Holy Land. The Mongols unsurprisingly didn't act in accordance with the Christians' wishes, and eventually the Mamluks sent a naval force. The commander of the Templars was killed there. The rest surrendered. And that was the last Christian possession in the Levant until the First World War. We know that years later, 40 of those Templar prisoners were still in Egypt. They refused repeatedly to convert, and they eventually died of ill treatment in the cells of the Sultan. And they eventually died of ill treatment in the cells of the sultan. Now, the Templars had lost the temple.

They'd lost the Holy Land. Some other orders, the Teutonic Knights headed off to Eastern Europe to fight against pagans there. The Knights' hospitalers attacked roads and occupied an island. The Templars talked in general terms about counterattacking, trying to take back the Holy Land. But they were vulnerable at this point. They seemed to have lost their raison d'etre. They're a fantastically wealthy institution in want of a cause, and the King of France in particular noticed. King Philip IV of France was notorious for identifying groups within French society, accusing them of heresy or some other crime, and confiscating all of their worldly possessions. And in the early 15th century, his attention turned to the Templars.

Like many medieval monarchs, he'd had a massive falling out with the papacy. As so often between monarch and pope, it was about who exactly had the right to collect taxes, money from who, and how much. In 1403, the king had actually tried to arrest the pope. He'd about who exactly had the right to collect taxes, money from who, and how much. In 1403, the king had actually tried to arrest the pope. He'd intimidated him physically. The pope had narrowly escaped but died shortly afterwards. And the French had drawn up a charge sheet accusing that pope of sodomy, sorcery, heresy. And the French had made it very clear they would not be afraid to use this line of attack against the papacy. The papacy was trembling. It was nervous of the French crown. Having intimidated the papacy, King Philip feels that he can go after the Templars.

They've loaned a lot of money to the king and he has no interest in paying them back at all. So he tweaks his papal charge sheet and repurposes it to take down the Templars. It was at dawn on the 13th of October 1307 that King Philip's men came to arrest the upper echelons of the French Templars. The Royal Warrant said, God is not pleased. We have enemies of the faith in the kingdom. The Grand Master of the Templars, Jacques de Molay, went into custody along with 138 other Knights Templar. Many of them were tortured. We hear that 36 of them died rather than confess. Eventually, the French king's torturers managed to extort a confession from Jacques de Molay. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries.

The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions.

And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. The Templars were accused of spitting on the cross, of homosexuality, of sodomy, of idol worship, and of failing to consecrate the host in celebrating mass. Eventually the charge sheet would grow and grow as the king sought to build an unanswerable case against the Templars. de Molay didn't confess to all these charges but he did eventually confess that the

Templar initiation ritual included denying Christ and trampling on the cross. Well, that was enough for Philip IV, and he pressured the Pope, Clement V, to order all Templars throughout Christendom to be arrested and tried. Pope Clement and the papacy at that point were deeply intimidated by the French crown and he acquiesced. On the 22nd November 1307, all Christian monarchs in Europe were ordered to arrest all Templars and seize their assets. It was a strangely clinical end of such a powerful institution. And I think it's the Templars' hierarchical structure that was their undoing in the end. Once their grand master had confessed, the rest of the warrior monks had no choice really but to go along with it, to submit to the papal order to disband.

Had they resisted, they would certainly have made a powerful foe. The Templars were scattered in ones and twos to other monastic houses. Their possessions stripped, their lands given to other orders or taken by grateful royal treasuries. De Molay himself we burned at the stake in 1314 outside Notre Dame in Paris. He'd gone back on his confessions. He said they'd been extorted from him and he died in the flames. It said they called out from the flames, God knows who is wrong and who has sinned. Soon a calamity will occur to those who've condemned us to death. And interestingly, Pope Clement died a month later while King Philip died hunting within the year. Edward II of England, who'd taken his share of

the spoils of the Templars, didn't reign happily for much longer either. One of the best exhibitions I've ever been to was in the Vatican archives, and it shows some of the more remarkable documents in those archives, from Henry VIII's request for a divorce, to Marie Antoinette's last letter, to the first Jesuit report written back from missionaries in China. And in that exhibition, they had the huge, long roll of parchment, which was the account of the trial of the Templars, all the sins that they'd allegedly confessed to. It was that document that gave Clement the legal cover to disband the Templars. And so the order was consigned to history, just as the idea of a Christian holy land that they'd sworn to defend was. The strange thing about the Templars is they then go through a process in the 18th and

19th centuries of radical mythologization, keepers of the grail, owners of vast hidden treasures yet to be discovered. The Freemasons seem to co-opt a lot of Templar history and build it into their own myth history. There's a gigantic craze for pseudo-history. Unlike the other military orders, which are just as potentially glamorous, the Knights Hospitallers, the Teutonic Knights, the Templars are no longer around to defend themselves, so any author, any filmmaker, any scriptwriter can project onto them whatever they wish. Walter Scott turns them into cynical baddies. The Da Vinci Code turns them into, well, I guess a kind of catch-all repository for every conspiracy theory ever floated. But the reality was that the

Templars were eventually, well, like every other human institution ever invented, they were eventually outmaneuvered by their enemies on the battlefields, in the courtroom courtroom and the royal council chambers. They were disbanded, the spoils, their property divided by the jealous victors. The knights themselves grew old and died, perhaps we can imagine a few of them still loyal to the oath they'd sworn as young men, until every physical or human asset of the knights' templars had died or been redistributed. All that's left of the Templars is their name, is their story. And it's a story that has proved more enduring and more powerful than most. Thanks for listening, everybody. It's Dan Snow's History. See you next time. you