So, when I do a search for the Templar Knights, I get quite a few links, but none of them offer legitamate info. Most are crackpot pages touting conspiracy theories. So are there any links that detail what the Knights Templar were really about?
Thanks in Advance
Ficer67
Peter Partner, The Murdered Magicians: The Templars and Their Myth. Oxford University Press, 1982.
G’day
I Googled “Knights Templar Seward” and got a list of sites that cite Desmond Seward’s well-researched ‘Monks of War’. Some of them look okay. But you might have to hit the books.
Regards,
Agback
There are a couple of fantasy books out now that have short stories of the Knights Templar… in between the stories there is a bunch of interesting factual info as well as a bibliography in the back telling you what books they got some of the info from. Let me look for my copy and I’ll give you some titles.
I’ve got a book called “The Templars” by Piers Paul Read. Ratings on Amazon seem to vary between “Great Book” and “Utter Crap”. I can’t give you my opinion, cause I haven’t read it yet.
Okay… the fantasy novels which have historical tidbits tossed in between the short stories are Tales of the Knights Templar, Crusade of Fire: Mystical Tales of the Knights Templar and On Crusade: More Tales of the Knights Templar all edited by Katherine Kurtz.
Some of the books in the bibliography include such books as
The Trial of the Templars by Malcolm Barber
The Templars: Knights of God by Burman Edwards
The Murdered Magicians Peter Partner (also published as The Knights Templar and Their Myth)
The Piebald Standard: A Biography of the Knights Templar by Edith Simon
The Rule of the Templars JM Upton-Ward (Translated from French and derived from 3 medieval manuscripts)
And running a quick scan of Amazon it seems like it won’t be too hard to find them and others (though no garuntees that the ones popping up on Amazon at the bottom aren’t somewhat crackpot theories as well. There have been legends and tales of the Knights Templar for centuries and I doubt that will change much in this day and age.)
Just finished the Knights of War. Horribly written, but provides a ton of information about the Templars and the other military orders. I know you were asking for links, but this may be a case where paper is still better.
I just want to know what happened to the old-fashioned phrase “Knights Templars.”
At some point the extra -s was dropped and now they’re just “Knights Templar.”
I can’t help you with the OP but I am a Middle Templar, that is to say I’m still (as far as I know) a student member of the legal profession successor to the original order (at least in England). ‘We’ began occupation of the Temple after the Knights fell from grace and the remaining priests needed to raise rent (sometime in the early 1300’s, I believe).
So, it might be fair to say modern-day members of Temple aren’t strictly successors in the religious, ‘Knightly’ sense but are in terms of influence and location. I lived in Temple for a year as a student, which was a pretty radical experience.
Curiously, the accommodation was huge and one room had been, at some point, very obviously been a meeting room of a Masonic Lodge - one might argue they are, in a very narrow ‘secret-society’ sense, the modern-day successor to the Knights. It’s a tenuous link but it did make me think.
I don’t think much of modern-day Temple dates back to the 12th century (the Germans took away a little more in WW2) apart from the church (which has effigies of very old and very short Knights laid out on plinths.
Besides Middle Temple, there is Inner Temple – both of these being physically located on the site of the old home of the Knights – and Greys Inn and Lincolns Inn (the latter being Inns of Court (like Middle and Inner) but nothing to do with the Knights).
Temple is the largest area of Medieval London remaining (most was lost in the Great Fire of 1666) and worth a nosey if you ever find yourself over this way.
Can’t help you with non-English Knights Templar but links obviously extended across Europe.
I always thought there was a Hollywood adventure in there somewhere. . .
A great book which will detail the emergence and the death of these warrior monks is: “Dungeon, Fire and Sword” by John Robinson.
A definate must read if you want some interesting information about the Knights Templar.
The book will focus on their role in the crusades and the time between those crusades spent in the holy land.
Very educational and engaging historical book.
I suspect Amazon is indeed the answer. It lists 58 books for the search term ‘Knights Templar’, with extensive reviews of many. Not as cheap as the Internet but a more extensive and reliable read, one imagines.
Only about 16 weeeks to Christmas, Ficer67 
Save yourself some dough, Ficer67, and ask your local librarian about “Interlibrary Loans”.
Raise your eyes up to the toolbar---------type in Knights Templars---------hit go -------knock y’self out!
Google retrieved about 86,100 hits for “Knights Templar”—the current standard.
And about 13,000 hits for the old-fashioned phrase “Knights Templars” with the extra -s.
So I wasn’t just hallucinating it. The first hit using “Knights Templars” was for the Catholic Encyclopedia, which has a very robust Googleosity, as you veteran Googleists know (i.e., it turns up #1 in many Google searches). The Catholic Encyclopedia dates from the early 20th century, which is why they still have the older spelling. I remembered hearing my 10th-grade history teacher using the phrase “Knights Templars” back in 1974, but he was an immigrant from Italy and I think the phrase was already long obsolete by then.