ShermanAndGreg Technology and Business

Last week, Hilary Mantel was a critically praised but commercially lukewarm novelist, whose Tudor corridors-of-power saga “Wolf Hall” was receiving rave reviews for its vivid depiction of 16th-century England.
Then she won the Booker Prize, the career-changing literary award that attracts attention from bookies and bookstores alike. Overnight, she shot up best-seller lists in Britain and the United States.
Now, says a bemused Mantel, “I’m chasing Sarah Palin on Amazon.”
The $82,000 prize is a huge boost for a book that turns the historical figure of Thomas Cromwell — Henry VIII’s shadowy political fixer — into a compelling, complex literary hero. Cromwell was an architect of the Reformation who helped the king realize his desire to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. The Vatican’s refusal to annul Henry’s first marriage led the monarch to reject the authority of the pope and install himself as head of the Church of England.

Henry’s reign has inspired fictional treatments from the acclaimed play and film “A Man for All Seasons” to the soapy TV series “The Tudors.” It’s a dramatic era that saw England transformed from a Roman Catholic to a Protestant nation, from medieval kingdom to emerging modern state.
“It’s one of those periods of history that is so good you couldn’t make it up, really,” Mantel said.
“I think it’s the parade of the archetypes. We’ve all known people like these. We’ve all known some kind of saintly wife like Catherine of Aragon, whose career is wife as well as queen and who will hang on to a dead marriage. We’ve all known someone like Anne Boleyn, the mistress on the make. We’ve all known men like Henry — clinging onto his youth, denying that he’s getting fat, denying that he’s going bald.”
Mantel’s Cromwell more than holds his own against these larger-than-life figures. One of history’s great self-made men, he left home at 15 and fought as a mercenary in the French army before learning the workings of Italian banks and Low Countries cloth markets. When he returned to England, he became a prosperous lawyer and finally a powerful political player.
Mantel said Cromwell is fascinating because he went from “blacksmith’s son to Earl of Essex, in this incredibly rigid, stratified, hierarchical society.”
How did he do it?
“I think it’s the kind of story that’s just got a universal quality about it,” she said. “He’s the boy who leaves home and can’t go back. He’s got to go forward. You find those people in every society, at every time. And some of them are smarter and harder than the rest, and they break through.”
Sitting in her agent’s London office less than 48 hours after the Booker win, 57-year-old Mantel is sleep-deprived but still buzzing. She says she’s “taking it half an hour at a time.”
A softly spoken former social worker and film critic, Mantel has written novels, short stories and the memoir “Giving Up the Ghost”— which chronicled years of ill-health, including the undiagnosed endometriosis that left her infertile. She has said the years of illness wrecked her dream of becoming a lawyer but made her a writer.
Her novels range widely in subject, from “Eight Months on Gazzah Street,” set in Saudi Arabia, to the French Revolution saga “A Place of Greater Safety.”
Jack Macrea, Mantel’s editor at publisher Henry Holt in New York, said her strength as a writer was “the ability to imagine the situation in such a profound manner, which not only gives the reader a feeling for being there, but being a participant in the whole situation.”
“It draws you right in,” he said. “It simply sings with truth, whether one has any knowledge of the Tudor period or not.”
“Wolf Hall” combines a convincing sense of the sights and sounds of Tudor London with a very modern sense of immediacy. James Naughtie, chairman of the Booker Prize judges, called it “a thoroughly modern novel set in the 16th century.”
That modern tone comes partly from Mantel’s decision to tell the story in the present tense — and in language free from cliches — and partly from the figure of Cromwell himself.
A model civil servant, he champions efficiency and merit over tradition and privilege. He is frustrated by Henry’s aristocratic advisers, who fail to grasp that the world is run “not from castle walls but from countinghouses, not by the call of the bugle but by the click of the abacus.”
Mantel said Cromwell is “a man who understands money.”
“I think it was an era when a lot of people understood the counting of the cash, but few people understood the banking system — which was already quite complex — and the way financial muscle underlies everything.”
That hardheaded savvy has left Cromwell with an image as a ruthless, Machiavellian manipulator. His sinister reputation was reinforced by Cromwell’s villainous depiction in “A Man for All Seasons,” Robert Bolt’s 1960s play about statesman and Catholic saint Thomas More, who was executed for treason after falling foul of Henry.
Mantel says she stuck closely to the historical record for her account, but is happy to challenge received wisdom.
In “Wolf Hall,” More is a prudish bully who persecutes heretics with what Mantel calls “unsavory” enthusiasm.
Cromwell, in contrast, emerges as pragmatic, charismatic — and likable.
“If the reader likes him I am happy, because I like him,” Mantel said. “That’s not what I expected, though. I started off thinking, ‘He’s bad, but he’s fascinating.’ I did find to my surprise some … engaging qualities in him, which are absent from most historians’ accounts.”
Mantel is now working on a sequel that will chart Anne Boleyn’s fall from favor and Cromwell’s continuing rise.
Those who have studied history, read Shakespeare or even watched “The Tudors” will know how Anne and Cromwell’s stories end. But Mantel hopes they will be swept along by the narrative anyway.
“I’m very keen on the idea that a historical novel should be written pointing forward,” she said. “Remember that the people you are following didn’t know the end of their own story. So they were going forward day by day, pushed and jostled by circumstances, doing the best they could, but walking in the dark, essentially.
“That’s what I’m asking my reader to do — walk that road with us.”

Decoding the Past: The Templar Code. The History Channel, 2007. 1hr 20min.

If you’ve watched much of The History Channel, you will know that the documentaries on that network embroider history (if you’re being kind) or butcher it (if you’re not), or downright lie (if you’re feeling cranky and contentious, and probably accurate). The Templar Code is one of the more egregious examples of this approach.

Despite the presence of writers like Dr. Karen Ralls and Sean Martin, who have both written popular histories of the Order, The Templar Code is riddled with errors and outright stupidity. This isn’t helped by writers like Tim Wallace-Murphy, who has insisted for years that something (maybe the Grail) is hidden under Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland (much to the annoyance of the Rosslyn Trust). Someone named George Smart, author of something called “The Knights Templar Chronology” also pops up to make gross generalizations.

The word “fanatic” comes up frequently in The Templar Code, with little or no basis in reality. The Templars were, in fact, hard-headed monks who traded with everyone and were even actively sought as lords and associates by non-Christians who found them less fanatical than many secular lords. We also get a lot of stuff and nonsense about their battle technology. One “expert” informs us that the Templars used “two-handed swords” and massive “destriers”. Two-handed swords were not commonly used in the Templar heyday (12th and 13th centuries) and did not become popular until plate mail came into widespread use in the late 14th century.

Plus, the Templars would have had little use for a two-handed sword on horseback. Not only are such swords unwieldy from that angle, but a Templar soldier would also need to carry a shield, which he couldn’t do if he were using a two-handed sword. “Destriers”, in the Templar Rule, basically just mean horses trained for war. What, exactly, they were trained for and how is not clear, but they were not likely to have been the huge beasts of later centuries and it’s doubtful that they were trained to kick and bite and whatnot. The Templars suffered from a constant shortage of horses and wouldn’t have been able to be choosy about what their horses could do. Of course, most of the horses bought and raised by the Order, just like most of the Templars themselves, would never have seen battle.

“We know almost nothing about what went on behind the doors of Templar preceptories,” declares Wallace-Murphy in relation to the initiation ceremonies. I would suggest that he read 1. the Templar Rule and 2. any collection of the thousands of surviving Templar documents. The Templar Rule includes the wording of the initiation ceremony and both the Rule and the documents include many, many details about the activities of your average preceptory or commandery. The “problem” is that the documents of the Order’s Trial, which reflect the fantasies of their interrogators far more than reality, are more exciting material than the mundane public documents in the Templars’ own voices. The documents for the French interrogations, incidentally, are available online, though they are all in the original Latin.

Most of the Order (the sergeants and chaplains) gets ignored until almost halfway in and then the Templars’ agricultural and banking infrastructure gets all of two minutes of discussion, most of it from Alan Butler, author of The Warriors and the Bankers. And there are blithe statements that Templars had to be knights and legitimate to join (only the knights and only in the 13th century). Then there is Smart’s uncorroborated and rather slanderous claim that the Templars received vast holdings and taxes as “hush money” so that they wouldn’t discuss the secret, occult writings that they discovered in the Holy Land. Never mind that every other religious order at the time (including other military religious orders like the Hospitallers and Tuetonic Knights) received such donations for their daily maintenance. Nothing sinister about it.

It is, unfortunately, all too typical of the focus of many popular Templar historians that Wallace-Murphy and Smart spend far more time on the (often inconclusive) battles than on the Order’s daily life. More time is spent on the Battle of Hattin than on either the Order’s agricultural and financial network or the Order’s continuing existence in Palestine after the fall of Jerusalem in 1187. Never mind that the Crusaders persisted there for another 104 years. Let’s spend only a minute and a half on it.

The documentary isn’t as bad in some respects as others (no attempts to call the Templars a bunch of dope-smoking orgiasts like a Terra X doc from the ’90s), but as in pretty much every popular history of the Templars, there is an odour of anti-Catholicism. The documentary, for example, refers to St. Bernard, the patron (not patron saint, that was Mary) of the Order as “a Catholic saint”. Bernard was simply a Christian saint, neither Catholic nor Protestant, since he predated the Reformation split of the Western Church into Catholic and Protestant by four centuries.

But that’s not quite as annoying (and typical) as the entire hour that the show spends on the Trial and legends about Templar survivals. Invariably, nobody ever seems interested in the Templars’ actual existence. They only care about the legend, which gets larger and more ridiculous with every silly book. We get the usual insistence that the charges (made by the greedy and ruthless King of France, Philip IV, in a quest for money) had some kind of reality to them, though at least Ralls and Martin acknowledge that the charges were made up beforehand out of standard accusations against heretics. Butler calls France “poor” during Philip IV’s reign. This is inaccurate. France was the largest, richest and most powerful kingdom in Western Europe at the time and Philip ruled with an iron hand. But it is true that his kingdom had been left in heavy debt by his grandfather, Louis IV’s, crusades. Still, calling France “poor” because it was in debt would be like calling the U.S. in the 21st century “poor” because it has a massive budget deficit and must borrow foreign money.

A major problem of the documentary is its casual unconcern for precision in chronology or geology. Countries outside of France (which was the only kingdom, aside from Cyprus, that vigorously prosecuted the Order) might as well not exist. Some torture methods (such as pulling the victim up by ropes or using the strappado) likely weren’t used that early on in the Inquisition’s history. The most common methods that we see in the Trial documents are deprivation of sleep, starvation (the two most likely used on high-status victims like the knights), an early form of waterboarding, and the holding of feet over a fire. The confession and recantation of Jacques de Molay, last Grand Master of the Order, are telescoped. According to The Templar Code, de Molay recanted only two months after his confession, did so publicly and was burned at the stake. However, de Molay’s recantation actually occurred seven years after his initial confession, four years after a defense of the Order by the sergeants (in which he did not participate) was brutally crushed by the burning of 62 brethren. This, of course, is totally ignored. God forbid we care about the servants.

Smart claims that “every” site called “Temple” was Templar originally. This is a gross exaggeration. It’s not true of Ireland, for example, where “Temple” could be applied to other types of Church sites. And don’t get me started on the claims that the Templars were the first organized military group since the fall of the Roman Empire (in the West). Yes, let’s not pay any attention whatsoever to the Byzantine Empire (capital of Rome in the East) which didn’t fall until 1453.

We then get the usual Indiana-Jonesish cant about how the Templars found the Holy Grail and other magical artifacts like the Head of John the Baptist. Wallace-Murphy brings up a very iffy interpretation of a painting in Templecombe in southern England at this point. The Shroud of Turin also comes up. The Templar Code also claims that the Order was “dissolved”. It was actually suppressed (there is a difference). The Templars were never found guilty of the charges, but Pope Clement V, in fear of Philip, found the Order too tainted by the charges of the seven-year-long trial to continue. He ordered the surviving brethren and property of the Order distributed to the Hospitallers. In the Crown of Aragon, the property was divided among the Hospitallers and the new local order of Montesa. In Portugal, the Templars and Hospitallers were combined into the Knights of Christ.

Butler claims that most Templars were not even arrested because only the Templars France and England were arrested – not true. Most of the Order was based in France and Cyprus. Most of the Templars in France and Cyprus were arrested. So, no, most did not escape. Smart puts out figures like “600 knights” out of two thousand were arrested. In fact, we don’t know how many Templars were actually in the Order, in France, or whatnot, though we have a pretty good idea of how many Templars were arrested there. Butler claims that Templars simply “drifted away” into the Alps and founded the modern Swiss banking system (because apparently, the Swiss were too stupid to do it themselves). However, few could have done this. They were either under arrest and only slowly released after the Order was suppressed or were simply reassigned to other orders. To “drift away” into the Alps would have entailed starving to death. Reassignment to another religious order, on the other hand, ensured that you would continue eating for the rest of your life.

It is true that the Templars engaged in banking practices, beginning in the 12th century, that were not seen among the Italian bankers (considered by banking historians to be the ancestors of our modern banking) until the 13th and 14th centuries. So, claims that the Templars were pioneers in European banking are valid. Claims that renegade Templars created the current banking system in Switzerland? Less valid.

There are also claims that the Templar fleet “vanished”. In fact, the Templar fleet consisted of a collection of merchant vessels and privateers, many of them owned and administered by associates of the Order and scattered all over the Mediterranean. Since ships and their cargoes were valuable, but ships only had a working life of a couple of decades or so, these simply would have been commandeered by their crews or local authorities and parceled up. Like the rest of the Temple holdings (much of it credit extended to secular lords and non-noble associates), the fleet “evaporated” for the same reason the rest the Order’s financial system “vanished”: with the central authority imprisoned and discredited, the entire network simply fell apart during the seven years of the Trial and the subsequent five years it took for the Hospitallers to gain final control of the Temple holdings.

We get the usual nonsense about Rosslyn Chapel (which wasn’t built until over a century after the Order’s suppression) and the Templars allegedly fleeing to Scotland (a country in which they had few footholds and little interest), the “theory” that they traveled with Henry Sinclair (Lord of Rosslyn) to Canada and left a treasure on Oak Island, that they founded the Freemasons, and so on, and so forth. Especially annoying is Smart’s assertion that the reason why the Historical Society of Scotland stopped digging into an alleged “crypt” under Rosslyn was because they didn’t want anybody to find anything. In reality, excavating Rosslyn might actually undermine the structure, which is on a hill, and bring Rosslyn crashing down. At any rate, there is a cellar/crypt that is open to the public (or was the last time I was there) and there is nothing much down there of interest at all.

Other blatantly wrong “facts” are the assertion that the central Templar archive (in Cyprus) disappeared immediately after the Order was suppressed in 1312 and was [gasp!] perhaps even ordered burned by Jacques de Molay before his arrest. In fact, the central archive was incorporated into the Hospitaller archives and survived until the Ottomans overran Cyprus toward the end of the 16th century. Then it disappeared. But these were only documents from Palestine (of which less than a hundred now survive). Thousands of documents from the western commanderies, however, still survive and tell us a great deal about the Order (or would, if the “experts” on the popular side of Templar historiography ever bothered to learn some Latin, Old French, Old Catalan, Old Castillian, etc. and read them).

The bad info only get worse with the claim that Aleister Crowley (who was dead by then) was obsessed with the Templars in the 1960s. Perhaps he was one of the extras in one of a series of Italian films that apparently came out around that time and cast the Templars as zombies. Silvia reviews them this week for us.

It would be really nice if somebody did a Templar-related documentary that didn’t involve silly lines like, “The Templars were the rock stars of their time.” Until then, for those who refuse to pick up a good book like Malcolm Barber’s or Helen Nicholson’s histories of the Order, you’re stuck with documentaries like this one.

If you would like to buy The Templar Code, you can find it here on Amazon.com.