The Mystery that is the Knights Templar
Oct. 6th, 2007 06:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bibliogrammaKnights of the Black and White, Jack Whyte
Novels about the Knights Templar are one of my fetishes, and when I learned that Jack Whyte, who has written a number of novels that give a plausible historical treatment of one of my other fetishes, the Arthurian legend, was writing a sereis about the Templars, well, you can imagine my delight.
This, the first book of the proposed trilogy, covers the founding of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, as the Knights Templar were originally known. Yet it is not, strictly speaking, a historical novel, although it does not diverge from anything that is known about the Templars. Instead, Whyte is drawing on the large body of myth about the Templars (and far more skillfully than He Who Shall Not Be Named, the author of that ubiquitous Da Vinci thing), and selelcting bits and pieces of legend to create something that seems as plausible as it is in fact unlikely.
His premise is that, at the height of Catholic Christendom, the time of Pope Urban's Crusade, a secret society of proto-Masons descended from Essene Jews who fled to western Europe at the time of the destruction of the Temple has survived within selected noble houses of France and newly Norman England.
In Whyte's version of the tales of the Templars, the founders of the Order of the Temple, Hugues de Payens and Godfrey de Saint-Omer, knights and veterans of the first Crusade, are scions of these secret families, sent on Crusade to find a way to locate the ancient mysteries of their Essene ancestors hidden beneath the ruins of the Temple.
It's well-researched, inventive, interesting and good fun. A valuable addition to the Templar mythos.
Novels about the Knights Templar are one of my fetishes, and when I learned that Jack Whyte, who has written a number of novels that give a plausible historical treatment of one of my other fetishes, the Arthurian legend, was writing a sereis about the Templars, well, you can imagine my delight.
This, the first book of the proposed trilogy, covers the founding of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, as the Knights Templar were originally known. Yet it is not, strictly speaking, a historical novel, although it does not diverge from anything that is known about the Templars. Instead, Whyte is drawing on the large body of myth about the Templars (and far more skillfully than He Who Shall Not Be Named, the author of that ubiquitous Da Vinci thing), and selelcting bits and pieces of legend to create something that seems as plausible as it is in fact unlikely.
His premise is that, at the height of Catholic Christendom, the time of Pope Urban's Crusade, a secret society of proto-Masons descended from Essene Jews who fled to western Europe at the time of the destruction of the Temple has survived within selected noble houses of France and newly Norman England.
In Whyte's version of the tales of the Templars, the founders of the Order of the Temple, Hugues de Payens and Godfrey de Saint-Omer, knights and veterans of the first Crusade, are scions of these secret families, sent on Crusade to find a way to locate the ancient mysteries of their Essene ancestors hidden beneath the ruins of the Temple.
It's well-researched, inventive, interesting and good fun. A valuable addition to the Templar mythos.