The Knights Templar God's Elite Warriors

Dan Jones tells the story of a crack unit of holy hard-men who spent 200 years defending crusaders’ interests in the Middle East with unblinking ferocity

- Dan Jones

On a cripplingly hot day at the start of July 1187, Saladin, the sultan of Egypt and Syria, stood beside his son al-Afdal and peered across the battlefield towards a red tent on a hill. The sultan’s face was pale with worry. The armies before him had been fighting for hours, tortured by near-unbearable heat, dust and smoke, which billowed up from the desert scrub Saladin’s own men had set alight. Thousands of men and horses lay dead. The enemy – a vast force led by the Christian king Guy of Jerusalem – was badly battered and falling back, but until the king’s red pavilion fell, victory would not be complete. Al-Afdal, youthful and bullish, cheered every Christian charge that the Muslim army repulsed. Saladin scolded him. “Be quiet!” he said. “We have not beaten them until that tent falls.” Moments later, the sultan’s angst turned to tearful jubilation. The tent collapsed, King Guy was captured and the battle of Hattin was over. The Christians’ holiest relic – a fragment of the True Cross – was seized. The dead were left to rot where they lay, while the living were led off in disgrace: the lowliest Christian prisoners for slaves, and the more valuable for ransom.

But there was one category of captives who received quite different treatment from all the rest. A reward of 50 dinars was offered to anyone who could present the sultan with a member of the military orders: Hospitallers and Templars. These knights and sergeants were the elite special forces within the armies of the cross. They were the most dedicated and highly trained warriors in the Holy Land. And Saladin had special plans for them.

BAND OF BROTHERS