The author of Born in Blood: The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry (1989)
- which provocatively argued that the Freemasons are a descendant
order of the medieval Knights Templar - now concentrates, in a
highly detailed but far less captivating addendum, on the Knights'
role in the Crusades. Robinson's fascination with the military
monastic order organized by a band of knights in the aftermath of
the First Crusade and originally dedicated to the protection of
pilgrims in the Holy Land continues. Here, he sets out to recount
the Knights' role as trained warriors and, eventually, as
international bankers during the nearly 200 years from Pope Urban
II's call for the First Crusade in 1095 through the last Crusaders'
abandonment of the Holy Land in 1291. Unfortunately, in this
version the fascination of the Templar tradition (including the
order's secret initiation rites, its rules of chastity and
individual poverty, its provision against bathing, and its
recruitment from the ranks of murderers, exiles, and excommunicated
Catholics) is submerged beneath deadly masses of historic detail
concerning the ever-changing political alliances, royal
successions, and battle plans that comprised the Christian
invasions of the Holy Land. Isolated incidents featuring such
swashbucklers as Richard the Lion-Hearted, Frederick Barbarossa,
and the Syrian Assassins sparkle occasionally against the otherwise
monotonous accounts of skirmishes against the Muslims, disputes
among Christian noblemen, and struggles for the crown of Jerusalem
- but the Knights themselves are often lost in the background of
these events, and only regain their undeniable mystique when Pope
Clement V disbands the order at the behest of France's avaricious
King Philip IV, and the Knights are reduced to a fugitive,
underground existence whose traditions may continue in some form to
this day. Lacking the power and focus of Robinson's earlier work,
this serves as little more than reference material for die-hard
Crusade fans. (Kirkus Reviews)
Over the past thousand years, the bloodiest game of the
king-of-the-hill has been for supremacy on the Temple Mount in
Jerusalem, the site of the ancient Temple of Solomon. This book
recounts the stirring saga of the Knights Templar, the Christian
warrior-monks who occupied the sacred Mount in the aftermath of the
butchery of the First Crusade. Recruited to a life of poverty,
chastity and obedience intended to lead only to martyrdom on the
battlefield, they were totally dedicated to the pious paradox that
the wholesale slaughter of non-believers would earn the eternal
gratitude of the Prince of Peace. The Templars amassed great
wealth, which they used to finance their two hundred years of war
against Muslims on the desert, in the mountains, and up the broad
sweep of the Nile valley. The Templars' reward for those two
centuries of military martyrdom was to be arrested by pope and
king, tortured by the Inquisition, and finally decreed out of
existence. But their legend and legacy just would not die. In
telling the incredible story of the Knights Templar, the author's
clear explanation of the cultural and religious differences among
the Templars' enemies and friends in the Middle East gives fresh
understanding of the people who populate this restless region. Here
are the Sunnies and the Shiites, the Kurds and Armenians, the Arabs
and Turks, who figure so prominently in today's headlines. The
similarity of their antagonisms today and those of eight hundred
years ago are often so striking as to be eerie. Dungeon, Fire &
Sword is a brilliant work of narrative history that can be read as
an adventure story, a morality play, or a lesson in the politics of
warfare.
General
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