Talk:Knights Templar today

This article was nominated for deletion on March 5, 2006. The result of the discussion was merge.

Knights Templar today?

A user named Davidsolomon has created the Knights Templar today article probably without reading the Talk:Knights Templar (military order) page. Should this new article be improved and intergrated in the Knights Templar series OR merged with the History of the Knights Templar article OR simply deleted? --Loremaster 21:39, 3 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think it should probably be listed for deletion - it incorporates a lot of legend as fact, and the rest is almost all redundant with the articles already existing.....we should probably ask for his take as well - see why he posted the article in the first place..... DonaNobisPacem 00:06, 4 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've begun the deletion process. See Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Knights Templar today. --Loremaster 19:44, 5 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knights_Templar_%28military_order%29"

Davidsolomon 6 March 2006:

Hello everybody,

I have exhaustively read the Talk:Knights Templar (military order) page, the History of the Knights Templar section, the Knights Templar in England page and other articles around the subject area as well and frankly there is a lot missing. Why is nobody interested in the Templars in England, or the post-disbandment history of the men in the Order there?

The Knights Templar in England page makes no reference of Baldock or its County, Hertfordshire whatsoever! That is where the Templars had their HQ between 1199 and 1254!! They founded the town and gave it its name!! Other Templar locations still exist in Hertfordshire, such as Hitchin and Hertford Castle (where Templars from Temple Dinsley - ALSO IN HERTFORDSHIRE - were locked up during the persecution. How can any serious page on the Templars, let alone the Templars in England, exclude this factual historical information? Some Templar historians seem to be terrified of Hertfordshire because they know that some people believe the Templars are still there.

Sorry for the typos, I only just created the article and I have not yet finished editing it (in face the drastic response to it may be a little premature!)

I created this article because there is not a single word elsewhere about the Knights Templar after the official disbandment in 1312. There is information about the Freemasonic Knights Templar, but they have no connection with the original Order whatsoever. In fact the only basis for a connection between the two is that somebody once claimed that crusaders formed Freemasonry to make sure they could tell the difference between themselves and the local Muslim population!

Where else in this entire encyclopedia is there information about what happened to the Templars who were not killed (only a tiny minority were killed.)

Is there no reasonable reference to legend anywhere else in this encyclopedia? I see mention of the Holy Grail in other articles but nobody wants to delete them. The Templars are positively steeped in myth and legend as I have pointed out and no piece on the Templars is complete without mention of some of the main legends that surround them.

I've only used solid information and I've also included my sources so I don't see the problem.

I urge you not to delete or make drastic changes to this article because it contains important information - with sources - that is not included anywhere else. That is why I spent so many hours creating the article!

Where else is there material on the Templars in England (the last place they went unpersecuted and the country that bears their flag as its own)? Where else is there information about what happened to the men of the Temple after the persecution began?

Please do not ignore the research of experts with specialist local knowledge like Helen Nicholson, Sylvia P. Beamon and F. M Page simply because it does not fit the usual brand of Templar material, which deliberately avoids the subject of the activities of Templar men after the Order ceased to exist. The men themselves did not spontaneously cease to exist after 1312 and indeed the activities of Templar fugitives after 1312, including the construction of Royston Cave, are fascinating. So why do many historians fearfully ignore them?! These are not modern Freemasonic Templars studying the Order from the United States.

The experts I invoke are people who live and work in towns like Baldock, towns founded by the Templars. These experts have studied the structures the Templars built after the dissolution and some of them indeed have had contact with people today who are involved with the genuine underground Templar order that continued directly from the original. Why does this create so much fear? Perhaps it is because in a cosy, neat and tidy world, if somebody important says, "your organisation no longer exists" that is the final word on the matter. But what if the people concerned don't share that view? What if they still consider themselves a part of something?

Removing or seriously altering this article will denude and rob this encyclopedia of information on a subject that appeals to a great many people. And the legends surrounding it only add to its appeal.

Thank you for reading my response.

God bless.

My main issue is that legends have been incorporated without indentifying them as such:

In October 2004, almost 700 years after the start of the persecution on Friday the 13th of October 1307, it emerged that the Knights Templar had been writing to the Pope every year on October 13 for a great many years. A copy of the 2004 letter was leaked to The Times newspaper who printed the story on November 29

This, for example: the organisation is of alleged KT background (as the newspaper article states) - basically, they are the only people who believe they are descendents. The comment by Ben Acheson is also misleading: after 1291, although the organisation ceased to be active in Outremer itself, they did launch a few campaigns, and were still actively planning crusading activity in 1307. And again, the mention of the Church's inquisitors is misleading - the French process was carried out only nominally under the inquisition, but in reality under the control of French secular authority - one of the main reasons Clement V intervened, as he did not approve of the usurpation of his authority. The pressure of Philip was only one reason the Order was disbanded - it is important to note that by the end of the trial (and even before, as people saw donations go down the tubes in failed crusading campaigns) public opinion was not in favour of the Order in many cases.

The disbandment in 1312 did not precipitate the sudden spontaneous deaths of all Templars. Many Templars carried on as normal, only in secret. The Order was a tightly-bound group of men who relied upon eachother for survival in battle and shared a distinctive style of worship, as well as secret practices which remain mysterious to this day. Their shared suffering and secrecy only served to bind the Templars more closely together and harden their commitment to the innocent and wrongfully accused Order.

Here is the main problem: there is no concrete evidence the Order carried on in secret, at least none that is accepted among mainstream scholarship (more on that below). There are some accounts of Templars (two in the Holy Land, according to Barber's or Peter Partner's book - I can't remember which) who had no idea the Order had been dissolved, but these were extremely isolated individuals no longer working with the Order. And in the Church's investigation, they found no evidence for secret practices outside of the Latin/French rules - hence the majority of the papal investigators actually wanted the maintenance of the Order. The initiantions/chapter meetings were secret, but it is unlikely any arcane rituals would have been kept secret for a few hundred years before being found out in the trial - it is more commonly accepted the secrecy was for military purposes (a "Loose lips lose ships" idea argued by Barber).

The Jesuit Order was supressed in several countries around 1767 and its members went underground in those places during that time. The order did not officially exist in those places at that time, but nobody would seriously contend that the people were not Jesuits. Catholicism was at one time supressed in England, but Catholics remained there and continued to be Catholic, only in secret. Like the Templars, they did not advertise their activities, but nobody would seriously cast doubt upon their continued existence. The Templars also continued to have contact with eachother and to consider themselves Templar after the official 1312 disbandment - and indeed there is proof of this in Hertfordshire's Royston Cave.

This is an argument for the talk page - you are arguing why to include post-1312 info, which is not really needed for the purposes of the page, if the information you present is factual.

Part of the issue is also what | Wikipedia NPOV policy - if only a small number of historians (ie, what would be identified as a "fringe" element) ascribe to certain theories, it needs to be identified as such in an article - but I myself will admit I am not knowledgeable enough on the English Templars to pick out all such entries in your article. But it is important that readers of the article get an idea of what is accepted by the majority of historians (fringe or mainstream), what is accepted among academics (being that they almost always have the most info - archeological, written works, previously published works - available, and tend to be both cautious and methodical), and what is accepted among only small minorites/fringe historians, so as to have a reasonable idea of the credibility of the information presented. In that regard, a suggestion is to format your footnotes such that the info on the page directly identifies what info goes with what sources, if possible. As well, Butler and Dafoe are not even properly regarded as fringe historians - their histories are - well - crackpot (hence I don't take info at http://www.templarhistory.com very seriously).

I hope you can see where I am coming from - should the article remain, perhaps it will give some starting points to begin improving the article. It appears you are a new contributor, so I do not wish to scare you away by the above: I merely hoped to point out a few issues I myself had with the article, and hopefully a few others might point out their issues as well, to help you out in your contributions. Cheerio, DonaNobisPacem 22:04, 6 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Davidsolomon 08:00, 7 March 2006:

Many thanks for your detailed and constructive guidance. I am indeed a new user and I apologise if I have already created issues through my slowly ebbing ignorance of rules and etiquette. I am studying to improve this. I am now in the slow process of sifting through the details and trying to make the less popular ideas sound less like mainstream history. I hope you will bear with me. This is rather a fuzzy area and it frustrates me. The serious, expert, lifelong historians who live in Hertfordshire and have studied the likes of Royston Cave and the history of towns like Baldock are in the minority and have little fame, whereas foreign authors with strong affiliations (and bias) towards Masonic Templarism have produced a deluge of material about the Templars, containing vast gaping chasms of missing information on the subject of the Templars in England and specifically Hertfordshire. These kind of famous but remote, armchair historians (who have never visited Hertfordshire) also (and perhaps more understandably) reject the possibility of the Templar continuation, because it left no records. But that's only because the Templars were experts in secrecy). Royston, for example, Cave remained undiscovered right under a major high street and crossroads for over 300 years and was only discovered by accident. This is evidence of how thorough and secret their activities were. For those 300 years no historian would have taken the suggestion of secret Templar caves seriously. Secrecy does not produce lots of nice evidence so sometimes accepted history is just plain lacking.Anyway, I've lots of reading and amendments to make, so I'll get on with the task. I hope you will find the result mroe acceptable because it would be tragic to lose some of the mainstream material I've posted which does not appear anywhere else, such as the Templars in Hertfordshire, where they had their HQ in Baldock for over 50 years after founding the town! The sad fact is that most Templar 'experts' only want to visit Rosslyn Chapel and perhaps Temple Church in London if they're very serious. (That's if they stray outside France and the Middle East at all!) Butler and Dafoe are exactly the kind of people I'm talking about (although there is some valid history on their website.) Trouble is, what is history? Most people wanting to know about the Templars will do a search on Google and guess what! The main results they'll get are templarhistory.com and then loads of rubbish about the Freemasons and the Holy Grail.

Davidsolomon 15:00, 7 March 2006:

As you will see, I have now begun to edit and correct the article in an attempt to make it agreeable to whom it must be agreeable. I hope that my efforts are not in vain. I firmly believe that much of this information is worthy of a place in this prestigious global encyclopedia and I hope that its readers will agree.

I hope that after due consideration this article might be unflagged for deletion and again be searchable using the term, "knights templar".

Warm wishes to you all. (Posted by User:Davidsolomon)

I still feel strongly that the best way to handle things is to merge the information on this page, into more appropriate locations, since we already have several different articles on different aspects of the Knights Templar. If one of our articles is missing information, then as long as you can supply a reference, feel free to add more information to that article! From a quick read, it looks like the information in this "Knights Templar today" article should instead be merged into:

Thanks for the help! --Elonka 18:00, 7 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I shall proceed with copying the information into the relevant places. Davidsolomon 11:16, 8 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

AfD closed

The AfD on this article has closed, the result was merge, per Elonka's suggestion to split the content between four different articles. I have no specialist knowledge about this topic, so I'll leave the merging to the people watching this article. --bainer (talk) 00:57, 11 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the admin cleanup. I'll go ahead and keep an eye on the article content, since I've been re-reading all my Templar books lately. :) --Elonka 19:49, 11 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]