The Templars

There’s no way around it: I picked up a book on the Knights Templar because I knew nothing about them, but what little I’d heard sounded titillating. Talk about delivering the goods…I found myself in the middle of what felt like a Vatican-sponsored PFLAG meeting.

The book at hand is The Templars by Dan Jones. It is a serious history, and more than usual I stress here that the book’s author takes no stand on anybody’s sexuality…the man has his hands full trying to write about the Crusades without taking sides, which he does admirably. Mr. Jones does, however, have an eye for certain details, so let’s review a few.

The Templars were founded in A.D. 1119, first led by a guy named Hugh of Payns…as always, the French were involved. Hugh and a group of seven or eight friends were noble and devout, and had come to the Holy Land, staying in Jerusalem. They spent much of their day hanging out at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and they were agreed that as a group they wanted to do something worthwhile for Christianity. They had come as pilgrims, never a safe undertaking and since the seventh century a truly dangerous one; so they hit on the idea of banding together as a religious military order whose mission would be to protect Christian pilgrims on their travels.

They also all agreed that women were a distraction and that they would live in an all-male community. Hmm.

For help Hugh and the boys approached the King of Jerusalem, Baldwin II. Whether they knew it or not, they had been on his radar for a while: a pack of young guys hanging out and thinking Great Thoughts (seemingly loudly) attracted local notice, and in fact had been interfering with other pilgrims at the Holy Sepulcher. Officially giving them something to do and a place to be solved that problem for Baldwin, who heaved a sigh of relief and told them he’d give them a lease on King Solomon’s old Temple in Jerusalem, no rent, just for their sweat equity in the improvements…provided they got a charter for the pilgrim protection business from the pope.

If that sounds a little like The Wizard of Oz, it does. And if you’re guessing that’s where the Templars got their name, you’re right.

Hugh took the matter of a charter seriously, and through his French connections he made contact with one of the great lights of the Middle Ages, Bernard of Clairvaux. Bernard was an intellectual and an abbot, later a Saint, plus the namesake of a truly outstanding breed of dog. He was also a highly effective individual, much involved in the affairs of the world. Bernard thought the idea of a military order protecting pilgrims was a great idea; and as a monk and abbot, the bit about a bunch of guys living together with no women made sense to him. He wrote to Pope Eugene III and told him to endorse the new order. (His writing the pope wasn’t unusual, Bernard was in the habit of writing popes to tell them what to do. And yes, there was a Pope Eugene.) Eugene’s envoy convened an ecumenical counsel at a town called Troyes, studied the matter, and issued the paperwork. The Templars were established, and Bernard set about writing to the landed and noble heads of Europe to ask their financial backing for the new order.

The Templars turned out to be extremely successful. From a small band of nine they grew quickly, and their military prowess was legendary and real. Their core mission of protecting innocent pilgrims was an easy sell, and an early donor was the King of Aragón, Alfonso the Battler. Turns out Alfonso thought girls were kind of icky, too, and gosh-darn it didn’t leave any heirs for his kingdom. He left a third of it to the Templars, land on the northern border of Spain. Which suited Pope Eugene just fine: Eugene had a strategic mind, plus he had conflicts with Islam in both the Holy Land and Iberia. With Alfonso’s donation the Templars now had land and income in just those places. Useful to the pope, who increased his patronage accordingly.

Alfonso’s was not the only donation (and not the only one from a guy who didn’t have kids), and the Templars soon developed advanced systems for managing their geographically far-flung properties, plus banking and accounting systems to handle the cash. Those systems were sophisticated: a French pilgrim, for example, could put money on deposit with the Templars in Paris, then travel to Jerusalem and draw the funds there. The Templars got good enough with money and accounting that in 1202, under our old friend King Philip II Augustus, a Templar brother was appointed Treasurer to the French crown. The Templars thereby gained a great deal of influence and prestige. In exchange, Philip got efficient and centralized financial management and with it, financial reporting. Nerdy as that sounds, it conveyed a strategic advantage over France’s adversaries. French military victories in the day were financed by Templar-managed cash.

The fees from that work plus the considerable income from their own lands funded Templar activities, primarily military operations. But the Templars also built houses for their brothers…which were always known as the best-looking house in the neighborhood, no matter which neighborhood it was in.

Life, regrettably, has second acts and so did the Templars.

The Templars had both the good and the bad fortune to arise pretty much at the same time as the Crusades. The First Crusade, arguably the most successful from the Christian perspective, happened only twenty years before the Templars were formed. And while the order had as its charter protecting non-military pilgrimages, many of those pilgrims joined the waves of crusading that ensued. The Templars, not entirely willingly, got swept along. They were in battle theoretically to protect the pilgrims who were crusading, rather than to crusade themselves; although the difference was, of course, immaterial when the battles started.

The Templars had a two-hundred-year run, but by the end of the thirteenth century the crusading movement had played out, a casualty of too many battles lost or drawn, and too much moral ambiguity. Europe turned its quest for spiritual purity inward with the Inquisition, leaving the Templars an order with a great deal of money and a mission that no longer spoke to its sponsors. European conflicts, including the Hundred Years War, were ongoing and the French crown needed money which the Templars had. So the French led a propaganda attack on their former financiers, styling them as heretics.

And homosexuals.

The irony to that latter bit is that the Templars actually delt with gay sex among its members harshly. The penalty was a sort of solitary confinement, a year of being fed and housed, but excluded from the life of the community. Transgressions were very infrequent. Led by the French, the Church turned on the Templars, extracting confessions of heresy and sodomy under torture. The last Templars were executed in 1314, a painful bit to read.

There’s a scene in the opera Harvey Milk in which the young protagonist, dealing with coming out, buys standing room at the Metropolitan Opera and suddenly finds himself immersed in a group of “men without wives.” In the end I can’t say if the Templars were as gay as they read to me. It was an age in which making sacrifices for one’s religious faith was a lot more popular than it is today, and intellectually I know that the Templar houses must have held a wide range of sexualities. Certainly we have instances of married men with children abandoning all and joining the order. But having read the book and made all those adult-sounding disclaimers, I still can’t shake a certain and familiar feeling, that with the Templars we are among men without wives.

I wish I’d known about them sooner.