Free Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, Henry Lincoln

Guillaume de Tyre, writing a half century later, the Templars were established in 1118 and moved into the king’s palace presumably sallying out from here to protect pilgrims on the Holy Land’s highways and byways. And yet there was, at this time, an official royal historian, employed by the king. His name was Fulk de Chartres, and he was writing not fifty years after the Order’s purported foundation but during the very years in question. Curiously enough, Fulk de Chartres makes no mention whatever of Hugues de Payen, Hugues’s companions or anything even remotely connected with the Knights Templar. Indeed there is a thunderous silence about Templar activities during the early days of their existence.
    Certainly there is no record anywhere not even later of them doing anything to protect pilgrims. And one cannot but wonder how so few men could hope to fulfill so mammoth a self-imposed task. Nine men to protect the pilgrims on all the thoroughfares of the Holy Land? Only nine? And all pilgrims? If this was their objective, one would surely expect them to welcome new recruits. Yet, according to Guillaume de Tyre, they admitted no new candidates to the Order for nine years.
    None the less, within a decade the Templars’ fame seems to have spread

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    back to Europe. Ecclesiastical authorities spoke highly of them and extolled their Christian undertaking.
    By 1128, or shortly thereafter, a tract lauding their virtues and qualities was issued by no less a person than Saint Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux and the age’s chief spokesman for Christendom. Bernard’s tract, “In Praise of the New Knighthood’, declares the Templars to be the epitome and apotheosis of Christian values.
    After nine years, in 1127, most of the nine knights returned to Europe and a triumphal welcome, orchestrated in large part by Saint Bernard.
    In
    January 1128 a Church council was convened at Troyes court of the count of Champagne, Hugues de Payen’s liege lord at which Bernard was again the guiding spirit.
    At this council the Templars were officially recognised and incorporated as a religious-military order. Hugues de Payen was given the title of Grand Master. He and his subordinates were to be warrior-monks, soldier-mystics, combining the austere discipline of the cloister with a martial zeal tantamount to fanaticism a “militia of Christ’, as they were called at the time. And it was again Saint Bernard who helped to draw up, with an enthusiastic preface, the rule of conduct to which the knights would adhere a rule based on that of the Cistercian monastic order, in which Bernard himself was a dominant influence.
    The Templa~s were sworn to poverty, chastity and obedience. They were obliged to cut their hair but forbidden to cut their beards, thus distinguishing themselves in an age when most men were clean-shaven.
    Diet, dress and other aspects of daily life were stringently regulated in accordance with both monastic and military routines. All members of the
    Order were obliged to wear white habits or surcoats and cloaks, and these soon evolved into the distinctive white mantle for which the Templars became famous. “It is granted to none to wear white habits, or to have white mantles, excepting the .. . Knights of Christ.” So stated the
    Order’s rule, which elaborated on the symbolic significance of this apparel, “To all the professed knights, both in winter and in summer, we give, if they can be procured, white garments, that those who have

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    cast behind them a dark life may know Map 4The Major Castles and Towns of the Holy Land in the Mid-Twelfth
    Century
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    - - TRIPOLI
    - I

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    Sidon I
    I DAMASCUS
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    - I
    - Cacaarea
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    \

    Jaffa”\ / / /
    -JERUSALEM *

    Aaralon -1
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    \ Kcrakl \ 1 \ 1
    MI nc real \ 1
    \ I
    1 I
    1 I
    1 I
    1 I
    Petra ~

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    \1\\ / / that they are to commend themselves to their creator