![]() Tease out some of the parallels between then and now. Reading your book, I was struck by the number of place names that I see on the news today every night, from Aleppo to Gaza to the Al-Aqsa mosque. Their full name was the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon-Knights Templar for short.įor the first time in the modern era, scientists open the tomb that many believe to be Jesus Christ's resting place. They weren’t actually monks, though they lived a monk-like existence, originally modelled on the rule of the Cistercians. They are sometimes described as “monk-warriors” but that is slightly misleading. Early in their history they were granted lodgings in the building that we call today the Al-Aqsa mosque on Al-Haram al-Sharif ("the Noble Sanctuary") or Temple Mount. In the decades that followed, they grew from being a pilgrim rescue service to an elite, paramilitary unit in the armies of the Crusades. Around the year 1119, a group of mostly French knights, from the Champagne region, decided to set up a roadside rescue service, a sort of medieval AAA, with the purpose of protecting pilgrims around Jerusalem. Pilgrim diaries describe corpses piling up on the roadside where they’d been attacked by bandits and left to be devoured by wild beasts. Their experience, as we know from pilgrim diaries, was that the area around Jerusalem and the holy sites was extremely dangerous. After the First Crusade, when the city switched from Muslim to Christian occupation, there was an influx of pilgrims from the West. Their beginnings can be traced to Jerusalem and the aftermath of the First Crusade. Who were the Templars? And when and where did they operate? The effect feels very real but, taken as a whole, it’s a hocus-pocus of speculation and half-truth. He switches seamlessly between factual statements, like them being founded in Jerusalem in 1119, to myth and speculation, all of which has swirled around the Templars. If you read the passages specifically about the Templars within the Da Vinci Code, they’re a wonderful admixture of Templar myth and Templar history. It’s certainly captured people’s imaginations. Vanishingly little! What the Da Vinci Code does very effectively is to present a pseudo history of the Templars and to roll up ideas like the Priory of Sion and notions about the Holy Grail as a metaphor for the secret bloodline of Christ. How much of that book is based in historical fact? Most of us know of the Templars through The Da Vinci Code.
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