MikePadgett.com

The Templars

— A millenium of pre-Templar history condensed into fifty taut pages. Sadly, Catholicism appointed itself the editor of the one that followed.”

• Piers Paul Read
• Phoenix (2003 edition)
• 

Piers Paul Read has written fiction, biography and journalism. He brought us the now-famous story of the Andes flight disaster of 1972, told from the perspective of the survivors in his book Alive. This work of popular history concerns the Knights Templar, an military-monastic Order whose precise history remains rather obscure.

The Templars prefigured the modern corporation. As Read explains, whilst the focus of their activities was in the Frankish Holy Land, business was conducted in their name all over Europe. The Order was so rich and powerful that it provoked the envy of kings and clergy. The aforementioned obscurity, a factor surely at odds with an organisation so conspicuously large, seems to have been created by the favour of and later persecution by, the Catholic Church.

Read breathlessly covers a millenium’s worth of history in under fifty dense pages, thoroughly explaining the Templars’ raison d’être. Moving through the Torah, the Bible and the Koran and onto a wealth of historical sources, a clear picture gradually takes shape, depicting a formidable force working in the difficult conditions of a hostile region. The taller order is to find viable reasons for the Templars’ disagrace and relatively rapid decline. In this, Read is less convincing, presumably hampered by a paucity of material and the unhelpful contrast with his earlier deeply evidenced chapters. Thankfully he avoids filling the gaps with flimsy inventions, many of which are responsible for the cultish perception of the Templars today.