The Templars (32 page)

Nevertheless, Rosslyn Chapel is an extraordinary place to visit. The exterior is alive with exaggeratedly decorated stone buttresses, arches, finials and canopies, and the interior stonework is if anything even more exotic, every surface covered in richly allegorical sculpture that draws heavily on biblical and medieval Christian symbolism–the Seven Deadly Sins, the Dance of Death and so on–and also on figurative naturalistic work and pagan mythological images–look out for the numerous Green Men.

The most remarkable of all the thousands of pieces of virtuoso stonework is the twisted Prentice Pillar, which stands at a corner of the Lady Chapel, to the right of the main altar, with entwined dragons at its foot. Local legend has it that the column was created by an apprentice subsequently murdered by his master in a jealous rage. Dan Brown’s idea that a second facing pillar is an ‘exact replica’ of Boaz, the pillar
that the Bible places on the left of the entrance to Solomon’s Temple, is pure invention. There is a second column at Rosslyn dubbed the Mason’s Pillar, but the name developed out of a local legend to do with stone-carving and has nothing to do with Freemasons. Nor is there a ‘massive subterranean chamber’ lurking beneath the chapel, as Dan Brown claims, though high-tech efforts to find one are unceasing.

In 2005 a modern-day descendant, Dr Andrew Sinclair, denounced
The Da Vinci Code
. ‘The book is preposterous,’ he said, ‘its message pernicious, its history a bungle and a muddle. What it says about the Grail and Rosslyn is absolute invention.’ But as every good conspiracy theorist knows, he would say that.

Templars in Popular Culture

When Anthony Burgess reviewed
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
–the book that put the Templars at the heart of a millennium of conspiracies–he said, ‘I can only see this as a marvellous theme for a novel.’ How prescient he was. A small army of novelists, from Umberto Eco to Dan Brown, have taken the book’s pseudo-history of the Knights Templar for their plots. The Templars have become screen regulars, too, and are keeping up with the times with starring roles in medieval-themed computer games.

Not that adopting the Templars in fiction is entirely a modern phenomenon. The literary trail starts in the thirteenth century with Wolfram von Eschenbach’s epic poem
Parzival
(which reworks Chrétien de Troyes’ unfinished Grail romance
Perceval
) in which a group of knights known as Templeisen guard the Grail.

Rise of the Templar Literary Phenomenon

The writer who really put the Templars on the modern literary map was Sir Walter Scott, whose first foray into medieval fiction,
Ivanhoe
(1819), featured Sir Brian de Bois-Gilbert, a lustful Grand Master of the Templars, as its chief villain. King Richard the Lionheart–and the Templars–intrigued Scott so much that he returned to the patch in
The Talisman
(1825). His creation was so successful that it even spawned parody, in American novelist Herman Melville’s
Typee
(1846) and, in more extended form,
The Paradise of Bachelors
(1855). In this tale of a dinner at Temple Bar, Melville enjoys musing on the ‘moral blight that tainted at last this sacred brotherhood’ and turned them into hypocrites and rakes.

The Templars then went quiet for a few decades–leaving aside a namecheck in Leslie Charteris’ hero Simon Templar–until the 1950s, when Maurice Druon wrote a series of seven historical novels,
The Accursed Kings
. These start with James of Molay’s burning in 1314 and his supposed curse on the Capetian dynasty. In the 1970s Druon’s novels were made into an acclaimed mini-series in France. Something was obviously stirring. In 1972 Ishmael Reed made a Templar knight, Hinkle von Hampton, the villain in his post-modernist satire
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 his
Avignon 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
Foucault’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 Jecks 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 Templar
(2005) and Steve Berry’s
The Templar Legacy
(2006).

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