Clara’s Verdict
Dan Jones has made a career of writing medieval history that reads like a thriller without sacrificing scholarly rigour, and The Templars may be his most compelling subject yet. The Knights Templar have attracted so much conspiratorial mythology – secret treasures, occult rituals, the Priory of Sion, and about thirty novels I could name – that finding the actual historical story beneath the accretions requires both scholarship and nerve. Jones has both. His account strips away the fantasy while preserving everything that makes the Templars genuinely extraordinary: their rapid rise from homeless crusaders to international bankers, and their catastrophic fall at the hands of a French king in need of their money. At fifteen and a half hours, narrated by Jones himself, this is a model of popular history at its best.
About the Audiobook
Jones begins, necessarily, with the crusades – the conflict that created the conditions in which the Templars could emerge. The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon were founded around 1119 in Jerusalem, their original purpose the protection of pilgrims on the road from Jaffa. What follows is one of medieval history’s more extraordinary institutional stories: within decades, the Order had become the most powerful military force in the Latin East, a network of international finance (the first traveller’s cheques, essentially, were a Templar innovation), and a political actor with enough influence to make and break kings.
Jones is particularly good on the internal culture of the Order – the strict Rule, the hierarchy, the peculiar combination of monastic piety and military aggression – and on the personalities who shaped it. The final act, Philip IV of France’s engineered destruction of the Order in 1307 and the subsequent torture and confessions, is handled with exactly the moral complexity it deserves. Jones doesn’t sentimentalise the Templars, but he is clear-eyed about what was done to them and why. The Holy Grail connection, he notes, is entirely mythical. Some readers will be disappointed. I find this kind of scrupulousness refreshing.
The Narration
Jones narrating his own history is an increasingly reliable pleasure. He has the rare combination of academic credibility and broadcaster’s instinct for pace, and his voice – familiar from various television documentaries – brings an authority to the material that an outside narrator couldn’t replicate. The military scenes are delivered with appropriate urgency, the political analysis with measured clarity, and the biographical passages with genuine human interest. At fifteen and a half hours, there are naturally passages where the density of names and dates requires concentration, but Jones’s narrative momentum carries you through them.
What Readers Say
At 4.4 stars from UK listeners, the response is warm with a few principled dissents. Jules, giving four stars, writes: “Wonderfully researched and lyrically told, this is real history” – and describes discovering that the Grail connection is mythical as “slightly disappointing” but ultimately worth the honest account. Carolyn gives five stars and specifically praises the way the book contextualises the Templars within the broader crusade narrative. Steve E adds five stars with praise for Jones’s portrayal of the Order’s Christian commitment. The one significant critique, from Polly, takes issue with what she sees as Jones’s “popular” style sacrificing depth for accessibility – a consistent criticism of Jones’s approach, and one that ultimately comes down to what you want from your history.
Who Should Listen?
For anyone interested in medieval history, the crusades, or the specific story of religious military orders, this is the book to start with on the Templars. It is also excellent for listeners who enjoy Dan Jones’s other work – The Plantagenets, Powers and Thrones – and want to see him operating in a more focused biographical mode. The long runtime rewards patient listening; this is not a book to race through. Give it the fifteen hours it deserves and you will emerge knowing considerably more about the Middle Ages than most people who claim an interest in the period.
Listen to The Templars on Audible UK – find it via this link. Also available on Kobo, Scribd, and Storytel.
