Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors (14 page)

Knights Templar: The Beginning

by Scott Higginbotham

T
he Knights Templar occupy a unique n
iche in the chronicles of history, and those who write historical fiction have no shortage of fodder for their novels as there is a wealth of information—sometimes conflicting. The Templar order was feared, hated, respected, hailed, and coveted across a wide spectrum of medieval society, both in Europe and the Holy Land. To be certain, this order of knights had few equals; they forged a new path and formed their bond upon a foundation like no other. They were true originals.

In modern times they are speculated upon in countless ways—the Templars control the banking system, the stock market, are behind every uprising around the globe, wear strange hats and drive jalopies in parades. Their secret symbols are on currency, and if a scapegoat is needed then look no further than the
The Order of the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon.

There is much speculation, informed and otherwise, concerning the Knights Templar, but this piece will briefly touch upon their humble genesis and those facts which are undisputed by historians.

After Jerusalem was captured during the First Crusade in 1099, religious zeal swelled as the news of the Crusaders’ victory spread across Europe. Pious pilgrims trekked to the Holy City. However, they were beset on the perilous roads of Palestine, suffering the loss of their belongings and even their lives. Nine knights later formed an armed brotherhood to protect the pilgrim roads of which Charles Addison puts it nicely:

To alleviate the dangers and distresses to which these pious enthusiasts were exposed, to guard the honour of the saintly virgins and matrons, and to protect the gray hairs of the venerable palmer, nine noble knights formed a holy brotherhood in arms, and entered into a solemn compact to aid one another in clearing the highways of infidels, and of robbers, and in protecting the pilgrims through the passes and defiles of the mountains to the Holy City.

Moreover, their brotherhood was unique and original owing to the fact that these knights were warriors, but ones that embraced the same vows as those of monks—poverty, chastity, and obedience. The ideal of a dashing knight astride a pawing destrier, begging a lady’s favor to wear on his arm had taken an odd turn. Troubadours and bards had lost a portion of the deep, chivalrous well upon which to draw their verse. Addison writes further
:

They renounced the world and its pleasures, and in the holy church of the Resurrection, in the presence of the patriarch of Jerusalem, they embraced vows of perpetual chastity, obedience, and poverty, after the manner of monks.

In 1118, these nine knights, led by Hugues de Payens, the order’s first Grand Master, were granted usage of a portion of the King of Jerusalem’s quarters, which was part of the al-Aqsa Mosque, believed to be built over King Solomon’s temple. The Temple of Mysteries writes that,
“It was from this place that the Order took its name—the Order of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon (Ordo Pauperum Commilitonum Christi Templique Salominici); Templars for short.”

It took a little time before the fledgling movement became a force to be reckoned with. The Temple of Mysteries writes that:

Until they were officially recognized, the Knights Templar remained a small and obscure force for about the first decade of their existence. They operated largely upon their own initiative, but with the blessing and support of the King of Jerusalem and its Patriarch. They initially wore no distinctive devices that proclaimed this new order, but their actions piqued the interest of Bernard of Clairvaux, head of the Cistercian monks, for it was Bernard who organized the Council of Troyes in 1129 thus giving the order official papal recognition. This council transformed this small band that simply protected pilgrims into the army of Christendom and the interests of the Church.

The Order would soon grow to be one of the most formidable fighting forces in medieval Europe, transcending borders and drawing some of the most skilled knights into their ranks. They were fighting men, but they were also monks, adhering to a strict Benedictine rule. The red cross pattée on their surcoats (with minor variances) and the black and white Beauseant shield and banner were soon adopted as part of their distinction—many knights during the crusading era had crosses etched into the pommel of their swords.

Much more can be said upon their rise, their nuances, and their ultimate demise, but even this short introduction shows that their legacy lives on as an interesting footnote in history and fuels much conjecture for novelists, theorists, and the curious.

Sources

Addison, Charles G.
The History of the Knights Templars, the Temple Church, and the Temple.
Kindle Edition:
2012.
Kindle Locations 211-215, 216-218.

Temple of Mysteries.
The Knights Templar
. Kindle Edition: Temple of Mysteries, 2010. Kindle Locations 116-118, 148-149.

A Bad Rap for Henry and El
é
onore

by Sherry Jones

N
ever had I found myself disagreeing so thoroughly
with an historian. In fact, Thomas B. Costain’s
The Magnificent Century
(first published in 1951) rubbed me the wrong way so completely that I had to put it down and walk away more than once.

My issue? His portrayals of England’s King Henry III and Queen Eléonore of Provence, lead characters in my historical novel
Four Sisters, All Queens
.

I didn’t have to read far before the author’s sniping began. After one hundred pages or so of background, Costain launches into the royal wedding—and soon thereafter is exclaiming over the extravagance of the affair as if such a thing were unheard of, as if extravagance were not expected of a king for such occasions.

“Fatuous,” he writes. “Spendthift.” For the rest of the tale, poor King Henry never gets a break. Costain paints a portrait of a mercurial, petulant, impulsive, and weak ruler, even giving Henry a “high neighing laugh.” Talk about historical fiction!

Eléonore fares even worse. “England’s Most Unpopular Queen,” she was one of those highfaluting snobs from Provence.
“A most superior lot,”
Costain sniffs, for whom
“the English people conceived a hatred...which grew with every day.”

“The Queen,”
he informs us,
“was never happy unless surrounded by her relatives and favorites from Provence.”
They were unhappy with her failure to give birth to an heir four years after her marriage, he tells us, failing to point out that she was but thirteen on her wedding day. Eléonore even falls short as a mother in his assessment; she “scandalized” the monks at Beaulieu, he sneers, by insisting on staying to nurse her son—the king’s heir—Edward back to health when he fell ill there.

We historical novelists deal with this all the time. Historians are humans and have points of view. Whom to believe?
The Magnificent Century
is more obvious than most in its approach, being a blatant hagiography with no pretensions toward objectivity.

Costain falls squarely on the side of Simon de Montfort, Henry’s seneschal, who instigated a revolution that is credited with establishing British Parliament as it exists. Costain portrays him as a democratic visionary. My research gave me a view of Montfort that is decidedly more ambivalent—he acted as much out of ambition for himself and his sons as for the good of the common people.

I found in Henry and Eléonore a royal couple who, although far from perfect, possessed a vision for England no less valid. They might have propelled the kingdom into superpower status had their reign not followed that of Henry III’s father, the tyrannical King John.

John lost some of England’s greatest landed possessions on the European continent to France’s King Philip Augustus. Weakened by unrest at home over his cruelty and corruption, he never reclaimed those lands. Losing Normandy, with all its riches, dealt a particularly harsh blow to the kingdom’s treasury. In true Oedipal fashion, Henry strived for years to regain the duchy, but could not muster support from his barons.

Costain is one of a number of historians who have portrayed King Henry III as a weak and ineffectual king and Eléonore as favoring her own family’s interests over those of the people she ruled. In my opinion, they get a bad rap. Eléonore and Henry were intelligent, ambitious rulers who might have done much for England. Their misfortune lay in Henry’s being the son of John and inheriting his father’s messes—corrupt bailiffs whose corruption bred resentment among the people, protectionist barons loath to spend any more money on ventures overseas, and a general distrust of “big government” at a time when big government was sorely needed.

Together, Henry and Eléonore refurbished Westminster Abbey, creating a splendid work of art. They created an alliance with the young Scottish king, Alexander, with his marriage to their daughter, Margaret, and kept the aggressive Prince Llewellyn from reclaiming their barons’ lands in the Welsh Marches.

They held onto Gascony, of which Henry was Duke, in spite of constant uprisings there. They might have gained not only Normandy but Sicily, too, had their barons supported their empire-building vision. They squelched the Montfortian campaign to end the Plantagenet reign—Simon had already planned to award lands and castles to his sons and place himself on the throne—and they produced instead a son who would become Edward I, one of England’s great kings…unless you were Scottish, Welsh, or Jewish.

Simon de Montfort and Simon de Montfort

by Katherine Ashe

I
n February of the year 1230—or 1229 by the way they calculated y
ears then, starting at Easter—a French youth appeared at the Court of Henry III of England claiming the title of Earl of Leicester, and its companion honor, Steward of England. He was jettisoned from the Court and later offered insulting pay as a mercenary.

Yet, a few months after his ignominious visit to Westminster, with the support of his cousin Ranulf, the Earl of Chester, he did manage to persuade King Henry to pay him the earldom’s rents. Later, he would indeed be Earl of Leicester, and later still, he would make Parliament a reality, harnessing the powers of King Henry.

The youth was Simon de Montfort, and the name already was famous by 1229. His father, for whom he was named, was a leader of the Fourth Crusade. He had refused to become entangled with the politics of Constantinople and took his forces on to Palestine, while the rest of his fellow-crusaders covered themselves with shame in the imperial upheavals. For his single-mindedness, Simon de Montfort Pere was looked upon as a hero.

Today he’s looked upon as a ruthless opportunist.

In the France to which Simon Pere and his Normandy knights returned, there was a new religion rising which the papacy condemned as heretical. Named for the southern French city of Albi, a center of their preaching, the Albigensians were gaining converts from conventional Catholicism by the virtuous lives they lived and the astute reasoning of their market-square preaching. Their religion entailed a forty-day fast and a celebratory meal, followed by another forty day fast. Those who survived this regimen were confirmed as Cathars: Pure Ones.

Pope Innocent III commissioned Dominic Felix de Guzman (Saint Dominic) to found a preaching order to counter this increasingly popular diversion from standard Christianity.

But when the papal legate Pierre de Castelnau was murdered, the Pope took military measures. A knight who went on crusade to the Holy Land received forgiveness of his debts and of his sins; now those highly desirable gifts were offered for a far less costly crusade merely to southern France.

Thousands of northern French knights responded, converging on the south with a holy license to destroy. They entrapped six thousand Albigensians in the church at Bezier, piled wood around the building, and roasted to death every man, woman, and child within.

Recovering from this bout of blood-lust, the crusaders realized they needed a leader. But no one much wanted the dubious honor of making the murderous roisterers into a proper fighting force. Simon de Montfort Pere eventually accepted the command and, of course, has been blamed for the Bezier horror.

Fighting a lengthy war against the lords of southern France who harbored the Albigensians, Simon Pere was forced to hire mercenaries at his own expense. He conquered most of the strategic cities, setting up for himself a dukedom that included Foix, Toulouse, and Carcassonne.

Then, during his absence from the city, Toulouse managed to rebel. Simon found the outer walls held against him. When he attacked, he was killed by a stone hurled from a mangonel mounted on the wall and operated by a woman.

Toulouse still celebrates the event with an image of a lamb skewering a toppled lion with the point of a flagpole. (In a taxi in Toulouse I made a favorable remark about Simon de Montfort. The driver stopped the car, fished in the trunk, found a tire-iron and came at me. I escaped through the car’s farther door.)

Normal medieval practice usually included providing a virtual hostage to ensure the contact-giver’s commitment to the agreement. The obvious choice available for Amaury to offer to the Crown of France was his little brother Simon, whose mother was also dead by 1221, and hence unable to object. But such hostages in Paris enjoyed considerable advantages of education in the most scholarly and devout court in Christendom.

There is no record of young Simon’s childhood, but his excellent education, as attested by the letters of his Franciscan friends who were among the foremost scholars of the era, and the great fondness and trust repeatedly placed in him by King Louis IX of France (Saint Louis) and his mother Queen Blanche, who was regent for Louis, suggest that Simon—as I propose in my book—probably served as that hostage and was the little King of France’s childhood companion.

Queen Blanche even saw fit to betroth this title-less, virtually landless, and penniless orphan to Johanna, the Princess of Flanders, another child-hostage at her court, but one with immense wealth and power as her dowry. (Johanna eventually wed Thomas, the Count of Provence.)

That betrothal, and every other connection with the Court of France, collapsed for Simon after he pledged his liege to Henry III to obtain his earldom’s rents. Gossip of the period had Blanche cursing Simon and his fleeing from France.

What was the dispute about?

Simon’s brother Amaury repeatedly had petitioned Henry III for the Leicester titles and had been refused—understandably. Amaury was Marshall of France. He was responsible for providing mounts and pack-animals for the French Crown’s military campaigns, and England and France were at war, though in a desultory sort of way. Simon first appears in England after Amaury’s efforts irrevocably had come to naught, and at a time when France feared an English invasion.

Queen Blanche was noted for her network of spies. Was she hoping to place an agent in Henry’s Court? A man who could inform her of Henry’s plans, and possibly could influence the young and inept king away from military actions? Was Simon sent to be that agent, in his brother’s stead? And once he had pledged his solemn and holy oath of liege to Henry, as was required of him, did he then consider it would be an act of disloyalty to his pledged lord to serve Queen Blanche as her spy? My belief is that something along these lines was the cause of young Simon’s early rift with the French royal family.