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00:02On the eastern frontier of the Christian world, faith, worship and blood, a new kind of conflict setting Muslim against
00:14Christian, a holy land, a holy war, the Knights of Jerusalem's Temple, a new kind of soldier.
00:24The Templars were under discipline like modern soldiers.
00:29Warriors for Christ.
00:32You would fight for God. God would be your Lord.
00:36There were masters of the battlefields of the Middle East.
00:40The Knights Templar were very much seen as the quintessential military order, the classic military order.
00:47Their very appearance made them icons of the Crusades.
00:51There are none more illustrious or more renowned than them.
00:57They've become part of the myth and romance of the Middle Ages.
01:02But what's the real truth? Their untold story.
01:08They would fight and gladly die in the service of their God.
01:14The Order of the Knights Templar.
01:24From the end of the 11th to the 15th century, the Crusades raged across Europe and the Middle East.
01:32Perhaps 200,000 people answered the call of the Christian Pope and left their homes behind.
01:38They bore the sign of the cross.
01:41They journeyed hundreds of miles to besiege the very walls of Jerusalem.
01:46And against all the odds and all military logic, they captured the Holy City.
01:55For the next two centuries, the Crusader Kingdom thrived and survived as Christians held on to the ideal that had
02:03been forged in their blood.
02:06Elsewhere, the Crusaders' zeal led them northward to the frontier with the pagan wilderness of the Baltic.
02:12And southward, over the seas of the Mediterranean and the Aegean, to the island fortresses of Greece and the Near
02:20East.
02:21Long after the fall of Jerusalem and the rise of mighty Islamic empires, Christians dreamed of the days, for good
02:29or bad, of the Holy City and the ideals of the Crusaders.
02:39The Knights Templar are among the most famous warriors of the Middle Ages.
02:45In the early 12th century, the knight had become the symbol of the lower nobility.
02:50The men who ran estates throughout kingdoms and who, mounted on horseback, were the most important figures on the medieval
02:58battlefield.
03:00But the Templars were more than just regular knights.
03:04They had forsaken a secular life for a devoutly Christian one.
03:09The plain red cross on white.
03:12To many, they are the archetype of the medieval knight.
03:16Saint George, the Christian warrior, the Crusader.
03:20The Templar order was born of such ideals and dominated not only the Holy Land and its battlefields, but also
03:29the domestic landscape of medieval Europe.
03:32Yet the order ended in superstition and intrigue, its members accused of heresy.
03:40More than six centuries since the Knights Templar were dissolved, their story more than ever fascinates many of the world's
03:48top medieval scholars.
03:51Well, I thought, I need to know more about these people. Who are they? These great, remarkable, outstanding Templars.
03:58The Templars are a medieval elite. There's just no way around that. They were the top dogs militarily.
04:04And in the popular imagination too, the allure of the Templars is just as strong. So much so that this
04:10can cause problems for real historians.
04:13The Templars have given rise to all sorts of myths and legends throughout history.
04:18And it's astonishing today that there seems to be almost a genre of Templar fiction with all sorts of ideas
04:24and speculations associated with it.
04:29So who really were the Knights Templar? And how did their order come about?
04:35Given the layers of myth surrounding the order, ranging from the unlikely to the purely fictional, for even professional historians,
04:45sifting fact from legend is less straightforward than it might appear.
04:51Researching the Templars is rather like looking for needles in a haystack because the records that they left us don't
05:00tell us a great deal about the Templars personally.
05:03The order wrote little about itself. Instead, what historians know about the Templars comes from how they imprinted themselves on
05:12the world around them.
05:14The only way to discover hard facts is through dedicated study of many contemporary sources, in case they mention the
05:22Templar order even just in passing.
05:25Dr Helen Nicholson has spent years doing just this.
05:29We have the donation charters when outsiders gave them charitable gifts.
05:35We have some correspondence with outside bodies, particularly legal cases.
05:43Even from these fragmentary references, it's clear the Templars were well known in everyday life in the Middle Ages.
05:51Ordinary people would have known who they were and what they were about.
05:56This is because the Knights Templar were the first of a phenomenon that captured the imagination of medieval Christians.
06:05There were a new kind of order. Religious, dedicated Christians, but military.
06:12Holy warriors who vowed to serve for life as soldiers of God.
06:21To understand how the military orders came about, we have to look into the crucible from which they were formed.
06:29The Crusades. More than 300 years of conflict, destruction and misery.
06:37Warfare between European Christians and people of other religions whom they regarded as pagan.
06:43The First Crusade, from 1096 to 99, saw several armies, totalling thousands of people from numerous countries across Europe, embark
06:55for the Holy Land.
06:57But they were led not by any one king or general. They followed the cross.
07:04This was something entirely without precedent.
07:07There was nothing like the First Crusade. It was a one-off.
07:10It brought together a number of existing ideas. It was a pilgrimage. It was an armed pilgrimage.
07:17But it was unique in the sense of its scale, its pan-European, its pan-Western Christianity aspect.
07:26So it came as a shock to everybody at the time. And it still is a bit of a mystery
07:31to us to this day.
07:33In the mid-1090s, there'd been no one sudden outrage that provoked Western Christendom.
07:41The Christian Byzantine Empire had suffered defeats to Islamic armies in recent years.
07:48Pilgrims to Palestine had been attacked by bandits, although this was nothing new.
07:53And most of the holy places themselves had actually been in Muslim hands for many years.
08:00But somehow, when Pope Urban II called for a crusade at the Council of Clermont in 1095, it was the
08:08right time for the idea to catch.
08:11Pope Urban's preaching of the crusade came at a quite extraordinary moment.
08:17And historians to this day cannot fully comprehend why it spread so quickly across a continent which lacked all modern
08:26forms of communication.
08:28Nevertheless, this message, this concept, this inspired fanatical idea spread like wildfire.
08:37The Holy Land was, and still is, just a narrow strip of territory in the eastern Mediterranean.
08:44Yet it contains important places for two of the world's most widespread religions.
08:51Islam and Christianity.
08:53Nowhere more so than the holy city itself.
08:57Jerusalem.
08:59For Christians, it was the place of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection.
09:04For Muslims, it was where Muhammad ascended to heaven.
09:11Yet despite its great spiritual resonance for these and other religions, throughout history it's rarely, for long, been a peaceful
09:20place.
09:21Least of all, when the first crusade arrived to attack these walls.
09:28In July 1099, for four days the crusader army dashed itself against the defences.
09:35Then on the fifth day, they got in.
09:40Among them it's possible were some of the knights who a few years later would form the first military orders.
09:48The crusader army had captured Jerusalem, or as they might have seen it, retaken it for Christianity.
09:58Their first act saw the crusaders hunt down every last defender or occupant they could catch, soldiers or otherwise.
10:10Many fled to the walled complex, which enclosed the holiest Muslim places.
10:15The Dome of the Rock and Al Aska Mosque.
10:21In the hope that the crusaders' blood rage would abate.
10:25It didn't work, and they were slaughtered.
10:28Some, it was said, threw themselves from the dome, rather than wait for the blades.
10:34The morning after the liberation, in inverted commas, conquests of Jerusalem by the first crusade, what did they do?
10:42I think a lot of them would have been completely at a loss.
10:46They had achieved what they wanted to achieve.
10:48A majority of those who actually had survived this appeared to have gone home.
10:52In fact, I think that's reasonably certain.
10:54Only a small number remained.
10:56So what are they going to do?
10:59For those who stayed, there was work to do.
11:02The Kingdom of Jerusalem had to become a functioning state.
11:07They needed trade, and they needed the pilgrim business.
11:11But the borders were wide open to either Muslim raiders or common bandits.
11:18Security was a major problem.
11:21In those early days, for the New Kingdom, the pilgrims, and for their own souls,
11:28few individual knights took the initiative.
11:34The idea came up, among some of the knights who were resident, who had decided to stay, that, well, we
11:41should just get together and we can protect the pilgrims.
11:46This was a good thing to do.
11:48They would earn spiritual value for doing this.
11:53They had not died on crusade, so in a sense, they had missed out on this free passport to heaven.
11:59You've got to continue living a good Christian life as fighting men.
12:03One of the fascinating things about the Crusades is how what was originally a pilgrimage, religiously and spiritually inspired, becomes
12:14a military operation.
12:15The groups of knights will ride out accompanying pilgrims who have come the long way from the west and need
12:22to get to important sites, and to protect against just bandit attacks.
12:29Pretty soon, the knights were indispensable.
12:32They patrolled the frontiers and kept the pilgrim routes open.
12:37It was from one of these groups that the Knights Templar, the first of the military orders, grew.
12:43But we don't know exactly when.
12:50No one recorded the very beginning of the Templars when it happened, because clearly it didn't strike anyone as being
12:56particularly unusual.
12:59So later on, 20 years after they first started, some writers in the West recorded that there had been a
13:08brotherhood of knights who formed in the wake of the First Crusade, but how much in the wake of the
13:14First Crusade they are not quite an agreement over.
13:18But historians can trace, more or less, when the group received sanction as an approved order. By that time, their
13:25fame had spread back to the homelands in Europe.
13:29One date was fairly clear, which was the Council of Troyes in Champagne, in what's now north-eastern France.
13:36January 1129, the Templars were given official church approval.
13:43At the time, the clerk who recorded this added that they, by that time, had existed for nine years, which
13:50means that the original group was approved in 1120,
13:54which then might have been at the church council of Nablus, which was in January 1120.
14:00So those dates would work quite nicely.
14:05The Templars made virtues of simplicity, poverty and brotherhood, useful values for an efficient and tight-knit military unit, operating
14:16in the saddle of a hostile frontier.
14:20Very quickly, the Templars attracted attention in the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
14:26Soon, they'd risen to such prominence that they were granted a prestige headquarters in the spiritual heart of the Holy
14:33Land.
14:35Originally, they were the poor Knights of Christ in Jerusalem, but King Baldwin II gave them one of his palaces.
14:42The palace in question was the Asker Mosque.
14:45By Jerusalem's southwest wall, the Asker Mosque was ideally placed for cavalry to move out in force when they were
14:53needed.
14:54It was around this time that the order got its famous name, even though historians can't now be completely sure
15:02how it happened.
15:04The name Templars is, in its origins at least, probably just a nickname.
15:11One of the seals of the order has survived, and it shows the dome of what might be described as
15:17a temple.
15:18It was clearly important to them symbolically.
15:21The Crusaders, when they first arrived in Jerusalem, had been trying to identify every site with somewhere that they knew
15:27from the Old Testament or the New Testament.
15:29And the magnificent Dome of the Rock, in their eyes, was clearly the Lord's Temple, as in the New Testament.
15:36Of course, it isn't.
15:38But which temple was it? The smaller, former Muslim mosque, the Asker, where they were quartered? Or was it the
15:45famous Christian Church of the Holy Sepulchre, supposed shrine to Christ's tomb?
15:52When people in the West thought about Jerusalem, they thought primarily about the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
15:58And then next door, there is this other building with a dome, and then there is the Church of the
16:02Holy Sepulchre with a dome.
16:03People in the West may just have felt that they were all one building, all three buildings, and they didn't
16:07really know which one they were.
16:09But if they see a building with a dome, it must be Jerusalem.
16:12They became known as the Templars.
16:15Yet the building on their famous seal is quite likely, in fact, not the fabled temple, but the Church of
16:22the Holy Sepulchre.
16:23That represents the Christian faith in the East. That's what pilgrims go and see. That's what the Templars are defending.
16:30In fact, it may simply stand for Jerusalem. We defend Jerusalem.
16:35The Templars became more powerful across much of Europe.
16:39But their heartland was always mainly in one region.
16:44The first Templars were based in what's now north-eastern France and the Low Countries.
16:49That's where its earliest members come from, for the most part.
16:52There's at least one that comes from the south of France, but French order, generally.
16:59Little is known about the individuals who were the early Templars.
17:05We don't know the names of all of the first members. We just know that there's nine of them.
17:10Presumably, they also had servants, squires, assistants.
17:14People joined from varied backgrounds, for varied reasons.
17:19Many of which had become viable because of the new Crusader ideal.
17:25Some of them, at least according to Abbott Bernard of Clairvaux,
17:29were people who had committed crimes in the West and who had gone to the East as penance.
17:34So he wrote that the West is glad to get rid of them and the East welcomes them because they
17:40wanted their military skills.
17:44Recruits flocked to the Templar banner.
17:47But in the early days, the order could afford to be choosy.
17:51It was quite a process to join, to be allowed in.
17:55You had to have no debts, no obligations on this earth or indeed anywhere else.
18:02Also family considerations.
18:04You were not really allowed to just ditch your responsibilities and go off for a soldier.
18:09That was not how it worked.
18:11It was a deep commitment by people who were in a position to make that commitment.
18:18Whatever their reason for joining, once accepted in, all Templar recruits, regardless of background, had to swear a solemn vow.
18:28This was a religious military order.
18:31But did this make them monastic?
18:34There's been a great deal of debate over how the Templars should be characterised.
18:39Were they simply warrior monks? Can we say that?
18:42In a sense, that's a rather awkward way of defining them.
18:45It's safer though a little less punchy to describe them as professed religious.
18:50In other words, they had taken a monastic vow, poverty, chastity and obedience.
18:54And so therefore they were rather like monks.
18:57But unlike monks, they weren't located solely in a monastery.
19:01Their role took them all over the place and so their role was rather different in some respects.
19:07Nor did their vows make Templars churchmen.
19:11They were subject to no such restrictions.
19:15They're laymen, they're not priests.
19:18And this is what's revolutionary about the Templars, that they take the three monastic vows.
19:23But unlike monks, it's not a priestly order.
19:26So they can shed blood.
19:28Christians were supposed to turn the other cheek, even to love their enemy.
19:34How then could war be justified in any way?
19:37If you can be a Christian knight, you've solved the problem.
19:42You would fight for God.
19:44You would become a knight of God, leading you into battle.
19:48You were in his service.
19:50You did terrible things, killing and maiming and all the rest of it.
19:55But you were morally justified in doing it.
19:58And if you were killed, or even died of disease, in this process, you again had this free pass to
20:06heaven.
20:07This was a dedicated life.
20:09One for true believers.
20:12Many of them must have been pious men, because there was a very strong chance they were going to be
20:17killed in the East, fighting for Christendom.
20:20But the Templars never promoted individuals as saints.
20:26So if you wanted individual honour and glory, you wouldn't join the Templars.
20:31Members had to be prepared to give themselves wholly to the order.
20:35Unlike many medieval knights who have a reputation for charging off after plunder or glory,
20:41the Knights Templar have voluntarily sacrificed those kinds of ambitions, and they did so when they joined the order.
20:46They accepted that they would not be trying to acquire wealth for their own right,
20:51and glory belongs to the order, and indeed to God from their perspective, rather than to them individually.
20:57So that gives them incredible unit discipline.
21:00They're very controlled, and that makes them extremely valuable and powerful weapons on the battlefield.
21:06By the mid-1100s, the Knights Templar had grown beyond their humble origins.
21:11They'd become a vital component of the military infrastructure of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
21:19The remarkably rapid expansion of the Templar movement is, I think, very, very simple to explain.
21:27It's the fact is, they set out to do a job, and they did.
21:30They did provide security. They were extraordinarily successful as a military unit.
21:39The most important posting for a Templar fighter was the Holy Land.
21:44If you're young and fit, you may be sent off to actually fight in the Middle East.
21:48If you're middle-aged, but you had experience running your own estates, you might be sent off to look after
21:55one of the Templars' estates.
21:56People at the end of their lives, too, declared themselves for the order, including some of the leading knights of
22:04countries like France and England.
22:06Sir William Marshall was one of the most celebrated fighting knights of the Middle Ages.
22:12It was famously William Marshall, who'd been servant of Henry II, Richard the Lionheart and John, and then, as an
22:20old man on his deathbed, joins the Templars, as he said he'd promised to do years before when he was
22:25in the Holy Land.
22:28So there was a mixture of members. Of course, not all of them were warriors, because after the 1130s, non
22:35-warriors could also be full members.
22:38So they'd take craftspeople, anybody who can assist the order in any way.
22:45We want you and your money.
22:48From the Holy Land to Scotland, castles and churches were donated to the Templars.
22:54One of the acquisitions most valuable to them, though, was land.
22:59Agriculture was incredibly important to the order.
23:03In Essex, in South East England, lay some of the most valuable arable land in medieval Europe.
23:10The Templars were granted land here, and monuments to what they achieved can still be seen today.
23:21Crescent is a farming estate that dates back to Romano-British times, perhaps even the Neolithic.
23:29In medieval times, it was gifted to the Knights Templar in 1136 by Mathilda of Boulogne, wife of the English
23:37King Stephen.
23:39Templar bases were known as commanders, and Cressing was one of the first in England.
23:44And it was certainly one of the richest.
23:47Cressing is a wonderful estate because it produces wheat.
23:52High protein grain, very valuable, that's what the Templars wanted.
23:58Evidence of the prestige and wealth of the Templar complex here are the two great barns.
24:06They're among the earliest known timber-framed buildings known anywhere.
24:12The quite sudden and really rather dramatic expansion of the power, the wealth, the influence of the Templars is seen
24:20in buildings like this.
24:21After all, agriculture is central to the entire economic system, and it is fundamental to the wealth of all of
24:30the military orders.
24:32The buildings had to be of such size to be able to store the vast harvests from Templar lands for
24:39miles around.
24:41Structures like the Cressing barns would have been some of the most impressive in the medieval landscape.
24:47Each one is almost 40 metres long and 15 metres wide, and as spacious inside as a small cathedral.
24:56The giant timber frames were made from hundreds of trees, and they supported roofs covered with tens of thousands of
25:04terracotta tiles.
25:05You would have had the local churches would be of stone, almost invariably.
25:11The castle of the local lord would be both strong and impressive.
25:15And the other man-made features of the landscape would be buildings like this, which you could say are almost
25:20like temples of agriculture.
25:22The fact that they are so magnificent would have expressed the wealth and power of whoever owned it, and in
25:31this case, the military orders.
25:36That Cressing's barns have survived is due to a remarkable archaeological rescue story.
25:42The buildings might have been amended or routinely repaired since medieval times.
25:46Yet they'd stood in situ for more than 500 years, and survived two world wars.
25:54Until in 1987, the elements unleashed a fury.
25:59In just one single night, storm force conditions ravaged much of England and northern Europe.
26:06Winds gusting up to 100 miles per hour lashed the Essex countryside, and left the roofs of Cressing's barns in
26:13tatters.
26:15Back then, Barry Hillman Crouch was a young and newly qualified archaeologist, and it fell to him to begin picking
26:23up the pieces.
26:25We're standing in the barley barn, which is the oldest timber frame building in the world, dated to about 1205.
26:32When I first came to work here, which was in 1986, the Great Gale had just hit the site, and
26:40all the roofs were off of both of these barns.
26:42The barley barn, and its counterpart, the Wheat Barn, built in 1255, were left in disarray by the powerful storm.
26:52It might have been the end for both, had the site not just been purchased and listed for protection by
26:58the County of Essex.
27:00One of my jobs here at Cressing Temple was to record in detail both of these great barns.
27:07I spent three months doing that, making a 1 to 20 drawing of every timber in the barn.
27:13I remember that there was 35 drawings for each building, and I would have produced a section through each truss,
27:20a section through the main section of the building, in all directions.
27:24And then I marked in every single feature, so every nail, every knot hole, every iron tie, every pit prop
27:33mark that is in the building, in order to be able to interpret it.
27:37And I also marked up what was modern repair, and what was obvious replacements.
27:45By the end of the 12th century, the Templars had commanderies in the finest agricultural lands and the richest cities
27:53across Europe.
27:55By now, they and the other military orders were vital to the security of the Christian Holy Land.
28:03Their forces were highly respected by contemporary observers, even their Muslim enemies.
28:10The military orders, including the Knights Templars, they very rarely supplied armies in their own right.
28:16They were normally a contingent within the Kingdom of Jerusalem's main army, or indeed the other armies of the Crusader
28:20States.
28:21In those armies, they supplied a range of troops.
28:23They were most famous for their brother knights, the heavy cavalry squadrons, and certainly these were extremely disciplined,
28:29extremely effective, and indeed they were held up by many commentators as being the role models for elite cavalrymen across
28:39the Near East.
28:45When one Muslim commentator wants to compliment a squadron of Muslim troops, he actually described them as the Templars of
28:51Islam,
28:52which again demonstrates their role as the benchmark of military excellence at this time.
28:58This is even more impressive when considering the numbers that the Templars could field at any one time.
29:04We sometimes imagine that all medieval battles were fought between vast armies, but this was never the case in the
29:11Holy Land.
29:13Perhaps the largest field contingents we know for the Knights Templar, they rarely got above 300 brother knights.
29:18So that's fairly small.
29:20However, we should add to that a number of other contingents that they also supplied.
29:26Large numbers of infantry squadrons, possibly four or five times the number of brother knights, maybe more.
29:31Even so, the Knights Templars' great strength is not in their numbers, it's in their combat experience,
29:38and their military knowledge of the region, and their ability to feed that back to other commanders,
29:43and therefore enable other commanders to be a great deal more effective on the battlefield.
29:50How had the Templars become so effective in just a few decades since their formation?
29:56The answer begins with the primary figure of the battlefields of the First Crusade, the Knight.
30:03From a 21st century point of view, we have all sorts of preconceptions about the medieval knight, as a chivalrous,
30:11cultured archetype.
30:12But in the 12th century, that was still years in the future.
30:17These men, before anything else, were warriors.
30:24Yes, the 12th century knight is not the knight in shining armour rescuing damsels in distress,
30:28although he may have occasion to do that, but his focus is primarily military,
30:35and his skills are on the battlefield.
30:38The prowess we're talking about here is military prowess, skill with the spear and the lance.
30:44The mounted warrior knight would dominate the battlefield for centuries to come.
30:50Templar knights regarded themselves as chevaliers,
30:54and a key component of that identity was the horse.
30:59The Templars limited how many horses a knight could have,
31:03and you're supposed to look after your horse.
31:06They took temporary members as well.
31:08If someone like Foucault of Anjou joined for a short period,
31:12they would either get their horse back or the value of their horse when they left the order again.
31:18There's a recognition you might not have the same horse and you left because horses die.
31:24The battle is even harder on horses than it is on knights.
31:27Templar recruits had to take thorough care of their horses.
31:31They were allowed several mounts for different tasks.
31:35For knights and their squires, this would be common practice,
31:39deeply ingrained in them after virtually growing up in the saddle.
31:43The people who joined all the military orders, and certainly the early Templars,
31:48they were already knights, they were already trained military men.
31:53What was different was their coming together under strict orders,
31:58and an attitude which would accept orders.
32:03The impact of the Crusades ran deep in the Christian psyche,
32:07and was a powerful motivator.
32:10The importance of defending Jerusalem and the Holy Land was obvious to everyone.
32:16So the new breed of knights were receptive to a new way of life in their military orders.
32:22As members of a military order, the Templars were under discipline like modern soldiers,
32:26whereas the secular knights, who were concerned with their own honour, their own glory,
32:33might be more inspired to launch an attack.
32:37The Templars were disciplined, they demonstrated it on many occasions.
32:42The monastic orders, such as the Benedictines or Franciscans,
32:46traditionally lived in accordance with strict rules.
32:50This was the inspiration for the way the new fighting orders would live too.
32:55The Templars wrote theirs down, and remarkably, it survived.
33:00It's called the rule of the Templars.
33:04The first version was laid down in 1128 in Latin,
33:07but another was in vernacular French,
33:11a language that most of the knights would have spoken.
33:14It contains a wealth of unique detail for medieval and military historians,
33:20like Matthew Bennett.
33:22I think approaching the Templar rule as a historian,
33:25and certainly as a military historian who can compare with other periods,
33:29what you see is a kind of pernickety attention to detail,
33:32as the modern soldiers would say,
33:34down to every piece of equipment that should be kept and maintained,
33:38and the behaviour in peacetime, on campaign, and in battle,
33:45it's all laid out in a way that you cannot see anywhere else.
33:49The Templar rule describes a close-knit unit
33:52which consisted of the knight brother, a squire,
33:55and a couple of other servants,
33:57which in the later Middle Ages would be known as a lance.
33:59That is, the compact unit of people who are used to working together.
34:05The basic operational element was ten lances.
34:10It gives us our only insight, really,
34:13into how a medieval cavalry unit functioned.
34:17Building up from those blocks of ten,
34:21with each one of those has a banner,
34:22and then at the head of the force is the standard bearer of the order,
34:27with the banner of the order,
34:29and the idea was that everybody looked to that.
34:33In later centuries, cavalry were further grouped into troops and squadrons,
34:38say 200 to 300 strong.
34:40But the Templars had to work with far fewer numbers.
34:46Of course, a modern 19th century cavalry squadron would be the entire size of the Templar order in battle,
34:54only looking at about 300 men, perhaps, who could be brought together to one place.
34:59So, yeah, the control has to be done at local level, a group of ten, where a voice can still
35:05be heard, the voice of command.
35:07But also, because they would be used to working with one another,
35:11they would be looking right and left in order to check that they're in the right alignment.
35:16The Templar rule was often read out aloud at mealtimes, so the brothers had a communal understanding of what they
35:23should do in different situations.
35:26It allows the individual brother knights to refer back to and understand what that behaviour should be.
35:33So, for example, should they get themselves lost in the melee, you know, the scrum of fighting,
35:39they're told to go to their own banner, the banner of ten.
35:43If they can't find that, they would look for the banner of the order, or if that, any Christian banner,
35:49so that they can recover their usefulness, their utility in fighting.
35:57Cavalry at this time was usually a one-shot weapon.
36:01Once unleashed, the knights rarely regained their formation.
36:05But the Templars and other military orders were different.
36:10Steady discipline, collective faith and brotherhood made them very dependable and often devastating.
36:19Military historians classify the Templars as lance attack cavalry.
36:25But this didn't mean that they just galloped wildly at the enemy.
36:29There's a problem with Hollywood and the way that people think about the way that cavalry are used,
36:35that they're not used as like a skein of geese to ride across a big open plain,
36:42because you actually lose all the impetus then.
36:45The reality, and it's the reality that continues into the 19th century when cavalry are used,
36:50is to keep a very good order, slow, boot to boot, as they would say, in order to have the
36:57maximum impetus at the right moment.
37:02A cavalry charge was all about careful timing.
37:08What they do is they develop a system whereby the cavalry and infantry work very closely together.
37:15The cavalry would be at the centre of the army with a hard shell of infantry around them,
37:20each with big shields to provide a protective screen for the cavalry.
37:24And what the commander had to do was to wait until the enemy formed a big enough bunch,
37:30it grouped together enough for the cavalry to have a chance of hitting that enemy group before it dispersed.
37:39And so sometimes commands have waited for hours for this to happen,
37:43but when the moment arose, the infantry would then part their ranks, the cavalry would charge through,
37:48and that would be their chance of victory.
37:54A lance, which is just a big spear, it's locked, kushed, embedded under your arm.
38:02You are one of the infantrymen in a Muslim army,
38:07with these guys charging at you in a cloud of dust,
38:11shouting deus volt, close-packed lances pointing straight at you.
38:17It must have been absolutely terrifying.
38:30For much of the 12th century, the Templar charge was the most respected weapon on the battlefield.
38:37But by 1187, even this couldn't stem the rising tide of Saladin's Muslim reconquest of the Holy Land.
38:46To the military orders, this must have seemed unthinkable.
38:50But they stuck to their training and faith.
38:53Surely that would see them win the day, unless God had deserted them.
38:59It's a matter of confidence teetering into overconfidence and the reasons for that.
39:07In the final months of the Kingdom of Jerusalem,
39:10two desperate Templar cavalry attacks ended in catastrophe for the order.
39:16One of the most important charges was a disaster, a bit like the charge of the Light Brigade at the
39:24Battle of the Springs of Cresson,
39:28when the Templar commander acted very rashly.
39:33In his defence, it can be said that according to later manuals, including the manual that my old professor was
39:38trained by,
39:39it does state very clearly that cavalry should take any opportunity attack if they think they have the initiative.
39:46So he might have been attempting to do that.
39:48But unfortunately, it's described in the Chronicles as a very rash attempt to attack a much larger body of Muslim
39:56enemy.
39:57And in fact, they were overwhelmed.
39:59And certainly at the Battle of Athene, there was the Templar master who famously counselled Guy of Lusignan to advance
40:05on the town of Tiberias,
40:06which played its role in bringing about the ultimate defeat of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1187.
40:13The Crusaders never again regained Jerusalem.
40:17The order fought on until just over a hundred years later, the rest of the Holy Land finally fell to
40:23the Muslims,
40:25with the capture of April in 1291.
40:29In Templar chapels across Europe, whether they were masters, knights, sergeants or squires,
40:36all of the fallen were commemorated.
40:40Everybody was remembered in afternoon prayers for the dead.
40:45And everybody got the same treatment when they died.
40:48Their body was laid out and their soul was prayed for for so many days.
40:52So there were no favourites in the order.
40:56In the early 14th century, the Templar order was accused of heresy and many of its brothers arrested.
41:04The charges were almost certainly false, likely fabricated by the French monarchy.
41:11Overall, fewer brothers than it's commonly thought were actually executed.
41:16But in France, more than 30 died under torture and dozens were burned alive with their master, Jacques de Molay.
41:26In England, as in many other countries, Templar lands and estates were given to other orders.
41:33The prestigious Templar Commandery at Cressing in Essex passed into the hands of the Hospitallers.
41:40When Cressing was excavated, a forgotten part of the medieval estate was rediscovered.
41:48Every Templar site, at a small chapel or church, for the many daily prayer meetings.
41:55And where the brothers, and often their donors or associates, could be buried.
42:03You look forward, you can see a joint in the brick wall.
42:07That's where the church was joined on.
42:09And down here on the ground, there's an old floor tile.
42:13We put that there in 1995 to mark the corner of the building.
42:18The early medieval chapel was demolished during the later Tudor period.
42:23The archaeologists had no clue that they would find what were the earliest Templar burials still here, just underground.
42:32We walk along the chapel and look down, there's three rows of five graves, starting with the Templars coming up
42:39to the Tudors.
42:40And just here, there were the seven most important graves, which would have been in front of the altar.
42:46We know that they were there because when we did the excavation, the Tudors had built a wall right through
42:52the middle of all of them when they squared the building off.
42:55The seven skeletons, all men, dated to possibly the early 1130s, within living memory, perhaps, of the earliest time of
43:06the Crusades.
43:08The time the Order was sanctioned by papal decree.
43:12A time when the Knights Templar carried the banner and the hopes of the medieval Christian world.
43:30The memory of theaciwork of the Legend and the intellect'sかった again已经
43:43time when the Knights Templar τ is firmly Stuckling,
44:01Transcription by CastingWords
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