Patrick Masters - The Knights Templar in Popular Culture

The Order of the Knights Templar has appeared in popular fiction dating back to the 13th century. The Templars first appeared in Arthurian literature as guardians of the Holy Grail before emerging in the 19th-century novels of Sir Walter Scott, this time as the evil extremist knights. Scotts books did not include the Templars as guardians of the grail but reintroduced the Order to popular culture as antagonists to the chivalric hero. This story theme has been repurposed for other fictional works such as the Hollywood film Kingdom of Heaven (Scott, 2005) and the computer game Assassins Creed (Ubisoft, 2007). The Templars role within popular fiction would become more contradictory as the Knights Templar became the subject of medieval conspiracies in novels such as Dan Browns The Da Vinci Code (2003) and as the chivalric multicultural hero in Jan Guillous book, The Road to Jerusalem (1998). The Order of the Knights Templar continues to be a popular theme for directors and producers to draw upon, with the multifaceted Templar knight being recycled to produce new Templar texts. These new texts have further embedded popular perceptions of the historical order and created different Templar representations within popular culture.

The 21st-century legacy of the Knights Templar is not only confined to recycling and expanding Templar aspects for fiction but has a new association with extreme right-wing groups. The most horrific and infamous of these associations are the claims made by the mass murderer, Anders Behring Breivik, who carried out two terrorist attacks in 2011. After the attacks, a manifesto appeared in which Breivik claimed to be ordinated as the 8th Justiciar Knight for the PCCTS, Knights Templar Europe (BBC News, 2011) . Breiviks identification with the order of warrior monks is not the only instance of extremist propaganda. Groups such as The Knights TemplarUK ignore the monastic lifestyle of the order and [use] it as a platform for the right-wing views (Masters, 2017). Although significant, the Templars right-wing appropriation is not the object of this study; instead, the book examines the Knights Templar as a multifaceted, thematic narrative recycled within popular culture. The Templar phenomenon as depicted in film, television and computer games is based on contradictory historical perceptions through the emergence of four defining thematic aspects: the good Templar, the bad Templar, the quest of the knight and the quest to follow in the Templars footsteps. This study consists of two narrative parts: the narrative of the knight and the narrative of the quest. This book addresses the gap of understanding in Templar scholarship by linking the historical Knights Templar to their depiction in popular culture. How the historical Templar influences the myth has been well documented, but this study argues how that myth influences the popular culture depiction. This book establishes the key Templar archetypes in fiction and investigates how this narrative has evolved over the centuries within popular culture, thus addressing the gap of understanding of the Knights Templar phenomenon.