Roger Moore to the Rescue?

Someone once told me that Umberto Eco had said something to the effect: “If anyone in the audience asks you a question about the Knights Templar, you can immediately deduct 10 points from his I.Q.”

I wish I had never heard that line. It has poisoned more than one reading for me, when I’m going on about the Cathars or the Crusades – and then someone perfectly reasonable asks the inevitable Templar question. I silently curse Eco for saying something so mean and memorable.

Of course, he exorcised his inner Templar by writing Foucault’s Pendulum, an intellectual parlor-game of a novel in which three bored editors dredge up the effluvium of 600 years of esoteric conspiracy theory and postulate some grand Templar Plan of world domination that is swallowed whole by talentless, credulous writers. Eco’s playful, leviathan of a book – think Dan Brown with an education.

Now it just so happens that I, at last, am obliged to write about the Templars. I have successfully avoided the topic, aside from little excursions with them in the Crusader chapter of Sea of Faith. To be more specific, I have to write about the elimination of the Templars. This event is to Cathar-Mary Magdalene-Freemason-Templar conspiracy theorists what the Big Bang is to the universe.

I’m somewhat daunted; it’s akin to writing something new about Dealey Plaza and the grassy knoll. For those unfamiliar with the tale: on Friday, October 13^th, 1307, every Templar knight in France was arrested. They were subsequently tortured, many of them executed. The charges laid against them were the usual medieval suspects: sorcery, sodomy, heresy, etc. The order was disbanded, their vast wealth appropriated by the king.

Ahh, yes, but was every Templar ensnared? And why were they arrested? What were they hiding? After all, hadn’t they lived for a century on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem? You see what I mean – to take that course is to court madness. Or end up as Nicolas Cage in National Treasure.

But the event itself is interesting. It is distinctly unmedieval, such a large and coordinated dragnet. To find another example of such finely tuned state terror one would have to time-travel to the Saint Bartholomew Day’s Massacre (August 24, 1572) or, using Godwin’s Law, to Kristallnacht (November 9, 1938).

And therein lies my salvation, I think. I shall talk not about the Templars but about the organization men who orchestrated their demise. The main guy is William of Nogaret, a steely political operative who makes Karl Rove and Lee Atwater look like Boy Scouts. And, better still, Nogaret was the king’s point man in dealing with the hero of my story, Bernard Délicieux.

The curse of the Templars has been lifted.