Swedish author Guillou’s novels are characterised by macho, politically correct heroes. In this trilogy set in the twelfth century, Swedish knight Am Magnusson arrives in the Holy Land, condemned to serve twenty years as a Knight Templar for a youthful indiscretion, with the usual preconceptions about infidel Muslims being a brutish and uncivilised lot. But he soon casts off those prejudices and becomes a pro-Muslim multiculturalist who only fights for the Christians out of a sense of duty. Guillou blends fact, legend and fiction to make his point, even having his hero pardoned by Saladin because he once saved the great Muslim leader’s life from robbers.
Guillou has a sure feel for the nuanced relationship between the Templars and their royal allies in the Holy Land and for the detail of historical battle. He blames the destruction of the Christian armies and the fall of Jerusalem on certain non-Templar military leaders and the King of Jerusalem. His Templars are brave, noble, well trained and ruthless; it is the incompetence that surrounds them that dooms their cause. A Templar spin doctor could not have put it better. Guillou does a similarly eloquent PR job for
Saladin.
Dan Brown The Da Vinci Code (2003)
Everyone loves a conspiracy. Brown is so convinced this is true, he tells us twice. The assumption being that our obsession with a nothing-is-as-it-seems version of history might blind us to the way this compelling story edits, stretches and wilfully misunderstands the facts. Any reader who took Brown’s guidance on the Templars literally would conclude that they were founded by a mysterious order called the Priory of Sion, busied themselves by ensuring that motifs of the vagina, womb and clitoris were incorporated into many medieval cathedrals, and worshipped their own fertility god. Alas and alack, the Priory-which Brown seems to think was a real entity-was the fanciful invention of one Pierre Plantard, a French forger who came up with the idea in 1956, elaborated and reinforced his claims with a series of further forgeries, then finally admitted under oath that he had made the whole thing up-but of course if you are a true conspiracy theorist you know what that means! Apart from possibly those knights who jousted in drag at Acre in 1286-and the chronicler does not say that there were any Templars among them-there is no evidence that the Templars ever made any attempt to get in touch with their feminine side. In fact, their rule warned: The company of woman is a dangerous thing.’
The novel’s central anti-clerical message means that the downfall of the Templars is attributed not to King Philip IV but to ‘Machiavellian’ Pope Clement V, who, fed up with being blackmailed about the secret of the Grail, unleashed an ‘ingeniously planned sting operation’ on the innocent order and saw to it that the tortured knights’ ashes were ‘tossed unceremoniously into the Tiber’. This would have been some toss as Clement V never stepped foot in Italy, never mind Rome.
World History
