The Templars: The Rise and Spectacular Fall of God's Holy Warriors - Softcover

Jones, Dan

 
9780143108962: The Templars: The Rise and Spectacular Fall of God's Holy Warriors
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0143108964 ISBN 13: 9780143108962
Verlag: Penguin Books, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

An instant New York Times bestseller, from the author of Crusaders, that finally tells the real story of the Knights Templar—“Seldom does one find serious scholarship so easy to read.” (The Times, Book of the Year) 

A faltering war in the middle east. A band of elite warriors determined to fight to the death to protect Christianity's holiest sites. A global financial network unaccountable to any government. A sinister plot founded on a web of lies...

In 1119, a small band of knights seeking a purpose in the violent aftermath of the First Crusade set up a new religious order in Jerusalem, which was now in Christian hands. These were the first Knights Templar, elite warriors who swore vows of poverty and chastity and promised to protect Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. Over the next 200 years, the Templars would become the most powerful network of the medieval world, speerheading the crusades, pionerring new forms of finance and warfare and deciding the fate of kings. Then, on October 13, 1307, hundreds of brothers were arrested, imprisoned and tortured and the order was disbanded among lurid accusations of sexual misconduct and heresy. But were they heretics or victims of a ruthlessly repressive state? Dan Jones goes back to the sources to bring their dramatic tale, so relevant to our own times, to life in a book that is at once authoritative and compulsively readable.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dan Jones is the New York Times bestselling author of The Templars, The Plantagenets, Wars of the Roses, and Magna Carta. He wrote and presented the popular Netflix series Secrets of Great British Castles and appeared alongside George R.R. Martin in the official HBO film exploring the real history behind Game of Thrones. He is the historical consultant to Knightfall, an A&E drama on the legend of the Templars produced by Jeremy Renner.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

"A Golden Basin Filled with Scorpions"

It was a foul autumn morning in Jaffa when the pilgrims came out of the church. They were immediately swept up in the stampede of a crowd heading toward the sea, drawn by a dreadful cacophony: the scream of timber being wrenched apart and, scarcely audible below the roar of the wind and explosions of waves, the shrieks of terrified men and women fighting for their lives. A violent storm, building over the previous day, had burst during the night and thirty or so ships anchored off Jaffa's steeply shelving beach were being hurled about upon great mountains of water. The largest and most robust among them were ripped from their anchors, driven into sharp rocks and hammered into sandbanks until, in the words of one onlooker, all had been "torn to pieces by the tempest."

The crowd on the shore watched helplessly as sailors and passengers were washed from the decks. Some tried to stay afloat by hanging on to splintered masts and spars, but most were doomed. "Some, as they were clinging, were cut apart by the timbers of their own ships," wrote the observer. "Some, who knew how to swim, voluntarily committed themselves to the waves, and thus many of them perished." On the shore, corpses had begun to wash up with the surf. The dead would eventually number one thousand, and only seven ships would survive the storm unwrecked. "A greater misery on one day no eye ever saw," the pilgrim wrote. It was Monday, October 13, 1102.

The pilgrim to whom we owe this account was an Englishman known as Saewulf. He had been traveling for several months, having left Monopoli, on the coast of Apulia (the heel of the boot in modern Italy) on July 13, a day he described as hora egyptiaca, as it had been thought since the age of the Pharaohs that this was an astrologically accursed date on which to begin an important task. And so it had proved to be. Saewulf had already suffered one shipwreck on his passage from England to the eastern Mediterranean. Mercifully he had survived. His subsequent route had taken him to Corfu, Cephalonia and Corinth, overland via Thebes to the Aegean Sea, then southeastward through the Cyclades and Dodecanese islands to Rhodes. Several more days at sea had brought him to the Cypriot port of Paphos from where, after exactly thirteen weeks during which he had traveled some two thousand miles, he finally arrived in Jaffa, the main port of the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem. He was rowed to shore just hours before the fatal storm struck.

Despite the many privations and terrible risks of seafaring, Saewulf had seen great things on his journey east as he and his fellow travelers had alighted their boat every few days to beg accommodation from islanders whom he called, generically, the Greeks. He had gazed on the silk workshops of Andros and had been to the site of the long-vanished Colossus of Rhodes. He had visited the ancient city of Myra, with its beautiful semicircular theater, and had been to Finike, a windswept trading port founded by the Phoenicians in an area known by the local people as "sixty oars," due to the roughness of the seas. He had prayed at the tomb of Saint Nicholas and had walked, in Cyprus, in the footsteps of Saint Peter. Yet his real prize lay one step farther. Once the storm had abated, he would be heading to the most important city on earth: he would set out on the road southeast to Jerusalem, where he intended to pray at the tomb of Jesus Christ, the Son of God and savior of mankind.

For a Christian like Saewulf, who piously described himself as "unworthy and sinful," a visit to Jerusalem was a redemptive journey to the center of the world. God had told the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel that he had set Jerusalem "in the midst of the nations," and this was regarded as more than a mere figure of speech. Maps produced in Europe at the time represented the Holy City as the kernel around which all of earth's kingdoms, both Christian and pagan, grew. This fact of geography was also a fact of cosmology. Jerusalem was understood to be a place where the heavenly was made manifest, and the power of prayer magnified by the presence of relics and holy sites. It was not just seen, but felt: a visitor could personally experience the sacred details of biblical stories, from the deeds of the Old Testament kings to Christ's life and Passion.

Approaching Jerusalem on the road from Jaffa, Saewulf would have entered through David's Gate, a heavily fortified portal in the city's thick defensive walls, guarded by a large stone citadel built on the remains of a fortress erected by Herod: the king who the Bible claimed had put every baby in Bethlehem to death in an attempt to kill the infant Christ. In the southeastern quarter of the city was the Temple Mount, crowned with the shimmering cupola of the Dome of the Rock, which the Christians called the Temple of the Lord. Beside this was the al-Aqsa Mosque, a wide, low, rectangular building also topped with a dome, built in the seventh century and converted to Christian use as a palace for the Christian king of Jerusalem, a wealthy soldier from Boulogne known as Baldwin I.

Beyond the Temple Mount, on the other side of Jerusalem's eastern wall, lay a cemetery, and beyond that Gethsemane, where Christ had prayed with his disciples, and where he was betrayed by Judas on the night of his arrest. Farther on lay the Mount of Olives, where Jesus had spent many weeks teaching, and from where he had eventually ascended to heaven. Saewulf wrote in his diary that he himself climbed the Mount of Olives and looked down over the city of Jerusalem, examining where the city's walls and boundaries had been expanded during its occupation by the Romans.

The most holy place of all, and the real object of every Christian pilgrimage, lay within Jerusalem. It was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which Saewulf called "more celebrated than any other church, and this is meet and right, since all the prophecies and foretellings in the whole world about our Saviour Jesus Christ were all truly fulfilled there."

It was a double-storied complex of interlinked chapels and courtyards, many of which commemorated, and were thought literally to mark the sites of, the central events in the Passion. Saewulf listed them: the prison cell where Jesus was kept after his betrayal; the spot where a fragment of the Cross had been found; a pillar against which the Lord had been bound when he was flogged by Roman soldiers and "the place where he was made to put on the purple robe and crowned with the crown of thorns" and Calvary, where Christ was crucified-here Saewulf examined the hole in which the Cross had been held, and a rock split in two, as had been described in the Gospel of Matthew. There were chapels dedicated to Mary Magdalen and Saint John the Apostle, to the Virgin Mary and Saint James. Most important and impressive of all, though, was the great rotunda at the western end of the church, for here lay the Sepulchre itself: the tomb of Christ. This was the cave in which Jesus had been buried following his Crucifixion, before the Resurrection. The shrine was surrounded by continuously burning oil lamps and paved with slabs of marble: a still, fragrant place for prayer and devotion. Nowhere on earth or in history was more sacred to Christians. Saewulf acknowledged as much in the very first line of his memoir: "I was on my way to Jerusalem to pray at the Lord's tomb." To stand before the Sepulchre was to venture to the cradle of Christianity, which was why pilgrims like Saewulf were willing to risk their lives to go there.

Pilgrimage was a centrally important part of Christian life in the early twelfth century, and had been for nearly one thousand years. People traveled incredible distances to visit saints' shrines and the sites of famous Christian deeds. They did it for the good of their souls: sometimes to seek divine...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Penguin Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0143108964
ISBN 13 
9780143108962
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
448
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Harder
https://www.edel.com

Neum�hlen 17
Hamburg
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9781781858929: Templars: The Rise and Fall of God´s Holy Warriors

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  1781858926 ISBN 13:  9781781858929
Verlag: Bloomsbury UK, 2018
Softcover