The writer who reaiiy put the Tempiars on the modern iiterary map was Sir Waiter Scott, whose first foray into medievai fiction,//an/7oe (1819), featured Sir Brian de Bois-Giibert, a iustfui Grand Master of the Tempiars, as its chief viiiain. King Richard the Lionheart-and the Tempiars-intrigued Scott so much that he returned to the patch in The Talisman (1825). His creation was so successfui that it even spawned parody, in American noveiist Herman Meiviiie’s Typee (1846) and, in more extended form. The Paradise of Bachelors (1855). in this taie of a dinner at Tempie Bar, Meiviiie enjoys musing on the ‘morai biight that tainted at iast this sacred brotherhood’ and turned them into hypocrites and rakes.
The Tempiars then went quiet for a few decades-ieaving aside a namecheck in Lesiie Charteris’ hero Simon Tempiar-untii the 1950s, when Maurice Druon wrote a series of seven historicai noveis. The Accursed Kings. These start with James of Moiay’s burning in 1314 and his supposed curse on the Capetian dynasty, in the 1970s Druon’s noveis were made into an acciaimed mini-series in France. Something was obviousiy stirring, in 1972 ishmaei
Reed made a Templar knight, Hinkle von Hampton, the villain in his post-modernist saiwe Mumbo Jumbo and Pierre Barbet wrote Baphomet’s Meteor, a bizarre sci-fi take on the legend in which the Templars are manipulated by aliens. The best novel to date about the order, William Watson’s sadly neglected The Last of the Templars, also appeared.
The publication of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982) introduced the order’s puzzling legend to a wider audience. That same year Lawrence Durrell’s Constance, the third volume in hsAvignon Quintet, honoured the Templars as secret Gnostics-which is why, he suggests, James of Molay was burned at the stake on Pope Clement V’s orders. Before their destruction, imagines Durrell, the Templars buried a secret treasure near Avignon, a treasure coveted by Hitler, who hopes it will inspire his Nazi ‘black chivalry. Umberto Eco, that astute student of popular culture, spoofed the Templar obsession and popularised it in his international bestseller Fotvcatv/f’s Pendulum (1988), memorably noting that you could always tell a lunatic because ‘sooner or later he brings up the Templars’.
However, with Spielberg’s film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), an order that had officially died out seven hundred years ago suddenly came to feel like part of the Zeitgeist. In the next decade, Katherine Kurtz, an American novelist (who claims to be a ‘Templar at heart’) launched a series of heroic Templar fantasy novels; British writer Michael decks penned various Cadfael-esque murder mysteries starring a Templar called Sir Baldwin; and Swedish author Jan Guillou entered the fray with a trilogy about a Swedish Templar. The pace was hotting up, and as The Da Vinci Code (2003) became one of the bestselling books ever, the Templars entered the book charts centre stage, with Raymond Khoury’s The Last Tempiar (2005) and Steve Berry’s The Tempiar Legacy (2006).
Templar Plots
The blockbuster Templar plot draws loosely on history and myth. Here are some of the more crucial ingredients.
World History
