The Templars, History and Myth

by Michael Haag

Profile Books, 368pp, £15

THE CHURCH IS A HUGE STONE circle, solid and dark like a fort: the church of the Templars at Tomar. It insists on the power of the soldier monks who built it and how they will always defend what is theirs, it is an island of cool and safe space inside walls that have seen so much blood. It is the one place in Portugal that the Knights Templar never quite left.

It would be an astounding sight even if you knew nothing much about it, but with a little knowledge – and the Templar name – the mysteries begin. Everything ought to have mystical meaning, even the number of steps in the chapter house; it's been seven centuries since the Order was brutally disbanded and we've had too much time to think. The Templars were everybody's bankers in medieval wartime, where the gentry left their gold for safe keeping; but where's the strongroom at Tomar, and why has it never been found, and is it just possible there are clues cut and painted on the walls?

The Masters of the Order in Portugal, oddly enough, are buried a mile away in a church across the river. So is there a secret tunnel that runs from the church to this great dark tower on the hill? The Templars did tunnel under the sea to their great fort at Acre. And in the closed castle there is a well whose opening seems just too wide …

You wouldn't think like this with Benedictines. You wouldn't dare with Jesuits. But the Templars are just obscure enough to be imagined: we make our ignorance into their secrets. They were celibate knights who guarded pilgrims and crusaders on their way to the Holy Land, who made their headquarters where the Temple of Solomon once stood; did they find something? They got just too rich and powerful, and had too many enemies at home; they were disbanded in 1313, their last Grand Master burned alive, and they disappeared along with all their archives.

What's left is legend, a shorthand for secret forces in the world. Templars were heretics, sodomites, even alien lizards ruling the universe – this notion is actually in print – and since the actual evidence is thin, you get to choose.

Mind you, the closer you stick to fact, the more mysteries appear. The disbanded Templars somehow continued at Tomar, and their castle became even more important. True, Tomar was a frontline at the time – the Christians trying to keep the Moors out of Portugal – and you don't waste good soldiers. A few knights came back after a decent interval, and helped form a new religious order: the Order of Christ. And we owe the world to the Order of Christ: they financed and organised the Portuguese caravels that went out to discover the world.

Take a deep breath because, as usual with the Templars, we're on the edge of ideas that need green ink and capital letters. The connection to the discoveries is history but it's also alarmingly close to all those feverish little books, mostly French, which insist the Templars sailed along force fields and leylines to mines of unimaginable riches long before Columbus (you can tell there's a fallacy; it makes La Rochelle the centre of the universe). It's the lunacy Dan Brown Googled into life, and it makes the whole subject nerve-wracking for serious scholars.

Loud persons insist they can find maize and aloe vera on the pillars at Rosslyn that were carved before America was even found. They say the Templars had great secrets and maybe the Holy Grail (nobody knew what it was until von Eschenbach wrote Parzifal in the 13th century), that the Templars won Bannockburn for the Bruce (which nobody knew until Scots masons needed a romantic backstory in Victorian times). Freemasonry made esoteric use of the Templar story and symbols, which was awkward until post-moderns decided myth was a subject just as good as the facts.

This is territory that needs an intelligent guidebook, which is what Michael Haag has produced. He's already written the Rough Guide to the Da Vinci Code so you can tell he's not self-conscious or terribly academic, which is good and bad.

He mentions many things, which is good, from solid history to the flakiest movies, from newly-found documents to the notion that somehow Templars started the French Revolution and still run the Skull and Bones club at Yale (and maybe George W Bush). But, inevitably, the material is thin – you could make half a library out of Templar lore – and the Templars deserve better.

They're uncanny, because they're gone but still working in our imagination; even in life they were the plain, grey knights, the ones that seemed ghostly. They have the power of shadows, which is a greater power than fact. They are the keepers of all kinds of non-specific mysteries, mostly because we don't know enough; and, since the Rule of their Order is missing, nobody can be perfectly sure what they believed, what they did.

They've become shorthand for deep mystery, but also the final revelation in 1930s whodunits and the plot in Indiana Jones films. Paranoia is much like a family tree, after all; it needs continuity. Miss out a few generations and the whole thing is meaningless. The Templars do the necessary and plug the gaps: obviously they were secretly keeping the secrets all the time, you see.

There is also fine Templar fiction, not just Ivanhoe – it's good to see Haag acknowledge William Watson's glorious The Last Templar – but mostly the Templars have become useful props. In Templar movies, sacred objects turn up in the back of camper vans and start a conflict (with stressed-out Bad Templars), or muscular blonds use their spiked gauntlets to keep the Anti-Christ in place (these are Good Templars). And you don't want to know about the Templars' influence on German heavy metal bands.

So can anyone write their history without drowning in garbage and dreams? Haag does the crusader times with great efficiency, gives sidebars with the vital factoids and also, a nice dry touch, the essential elements for an instant Templar plot. But he can't, in this format, do justice to a heroine, and the story of this story has one.

Barbara Frale works in the Secret Archive of the Vatican and knows how to find things there (researchers say you can never be sure if the Vatican is actually hiding something or just can't place it). For almost a decade she's been publishing tight, serious books about what really happened to the Templars. She's given us the equivalent of the last few pages of a spooky whodunit, the moment when we stop shivering and discover the ghostly Hound of the Baskervilles was just a big dog with warpaint.

Her main discovery, now published on the Pope's orders, is simple but stunning: the records of the interrogations of the last knights and proof that their evidence won them Papal absolution. Since they were accused of recreational sodomy, spitting on the cross, talking blasphemy, kissing each other's hinder parts (among other parts), honouring some bearded pagan head as their most sacred relic and worshipping cats – most of which they admitted – you have to think the Pope must have known something extraordinary to forgive them. And he did.

Frale has shown that bizarre initiation rites make perfect sense for men whose job and life was fighting. They needed instant obedience even to orders they found grotesque. They risked capture, humiliation, interrogation; they had to put obedience above personal feeling. So the moment they took the oaths of lifelong obedience they were tested with all the bizarre rites their enemies loved to report, but they weren't blasphemers; they were inoculated against blasphemy.

Frale takes the Templars seriously as soldiers but also as monks and believers. One factor she hasn't explained, so far, is the bearded, severed head that was supposed to be their idol, with its name – Baphomet – that could almost sound like Mahomet. She suspects it may be an image of Christ that belongs to the rites of the earliest Christians in Jerusalem.

Templar rites couldn't change after 1313 and there was nobody to modernise the record, either, and take out the embarrassing stuff; so they raise a big question. What polishes the silly invention of a Dan Brown is a fact: that all the very different traditions around Christ had to be drastically simplified to make the story we now have. To make the four Gospels believable, you have to lose – for example – the Gospel According to Mary Magdalene, in which she claims that Jesus gave her special teachings, and the alternative Acts of the Apostles, the ones where women are allowed to do things. It took more than three centuries for Christians to come to a party line on whether Christ was the Son of God.

If something has been suppressed, then anything may have been suppressed; that's good paranoid thinking. If there's a secret we don't know it must have wonderfully powerful guardians. If the guardians just happen to have been on the site of the Temple of Solomon, storing archives and treasure there, why shouldn't they know things that Kings and Popes wanted to keep secret?

So it also matters that Frale has made very good sense of how the Templars fell so quickly from being favoured advisers of the Pope to burning alive. Were they crushed, just maybe, for knowing too much?

Actually, no. The great fort at Acre had fallen, Christians were retreating from the Holy Land and someone had to take the blame; and obviously the best explanation for defeat is someone else's sins, preferably somebody whose land and money you could use. The Templars were vulnerable. But there is more: it turns out the French king, being broke, was privately threatening to do what Henry VIII of England did two centuries later: establish a national church which did not answer to the Pope. The loss of France would have been devastating for a quite fragile Papacy; the Pope felt obliged to do what the French demanded. And they wanted an end to the Templars.

Sometimes fact does spoil a legend, makes it shrink; but I walked yesterday through the church at Tomar and I thought how little the power of the Templars truly rests on other people's fantasies. The Grey Knights are their extraordinary selves and they can survive anything – even lunatics, and even common sense.