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