Crusade of Fire

Introduction

Other than King Arthur?s Knights of the Round Table, perhaps no other chivalric body in the world has inspired more intense or more long-lasting fascination than the Poor Fellow Soldiers of the Temple of Christ of Jerusalem, better known as the Knights Templar. Since this is the third anthology in this series about the Knights, any detailed account of their real-world history might rightly be regarded as unnecessary padding, but a brief summary is certainly in order for the benefit of readers as yet unacquainted with the Order.

They arose in the early twelfth century, in the immediate aftermath of the First Crusade and the formation of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem—warrior monks, melding the hitherto disparate concepts of chivalry and monasticism. Within less than twenty years, they would become the most formidable and feared fighting machine in all of Christendom. While their initial purpose was to protect the pilgrim roads of the Holy Land, now that travel was again possible in the land where Jesus once walked, they soon began to function as a.crack military force for protection of the Holy Land itself—in effect, a private army answerable only to the pope—and a financial institution that would serve as banker for most of Europe and its crowned heads. In this latter function, they developed fiscal practices still in use today.

The success of the Templars rightly earned them a reputation for ferocity in battle and solidity in finance, but they also accrued an aura of mystery and even notoriety that has persisted to this day, underscored by the dramatic circumstances surrounding the Order?s eventual demise. Even those who have never heard of the Knights Templar will be aware of the popular superstition that any Friday the Thirteenth is a probable occasion of bad luck—a combination long linked as ill-fated because of Christ?s crucifixion on a Friday, after being betrayed for thirty pieces of silver by Judas Iscariot, the thirteenth disciple. The association was only reinforced when, on such a day in October of 1307, nearly all the Templars in France were simultaneously arrested and thrown into imprisonment.

Many were tortured horribly to extract confessions of an incredible variety of offenses including blasphemy, heresy, idolatry, and homosexuality. Apart from a few isolated instances of the latter, inevitable in any all-male organization, it is highly unlikely that any of the charges were true. Nonetheless, more than a hundred of the Knights perished at the stake before the Order was finally suppressed in 1312, and many had died as a result of their torture.

The manner of their ending, and persistent traditions of some kind of Templar survival, have fueled endless speculation about their actual influence, the true extent of their wealth and activities, their ultimate fate, and a thriving cottage industry that perpetuates even more speculation. Interested readers will find a bibliography of some of these titles at the back of this volume, along with those of more conventional histories.

The stories in this collection, while mostly set within the historical timeframe of the Order?s existence, explore these persistent assertions that the Knights were far more than warriors and monks and bankers and counselors to royalty; that there was some mysterious and even mystical aspect to their existence and function that sometimes enabled them to operate outside and beyond the norm. And though their "official" status as a religious order spans less than two hundred years, put to an end by royal betrayal and lurid accusations, with the Order suspended by papal decree and its grand master burned at the stake, rumors of the Order?s survival were rife even at the time.