Michael Haag

Michael Haag is the author of The Templars: The History and the Myth. From his Q & A with Nick Owchar at The Siren's Call:

TSC: There are so many books now out there about the Templars, thanks in large part to the interest Dan Brown created with his "Code." Was there something that these books weren't saying about the Templars that you felt needed to be told?

MH: Books about the Templars fall into two categories. Some are strictly history and confine themselves to the two centuries of the Templars' existence. Others are speculative and deal in the many stories surrounding the Templars, in what you might call the afterlife of the Templars that continues in the popular imagination to this day. I wanted to take a serious look at both the history and the mythic afterlife and to show how they are intimately related and always have been -- how the Templars became the subject of popular imagination already at their inception, celebrities, you might say, the superstars of the Middle Ages.

Superstars?

Already during their heyday, the Templars attracted to themselves many associations, legends, rumors and romances. When the story of the Holy Grail first began circulating in medieval Europe, it was immediately associated with the Templars. This star quality of the Templars was due partly to their prominent role in the central movement of the times, the Crusades and the defense of the Crusader states in the East, where the Templars were surrounded by potent historical and sacred associations. After all, the Templars were founded on Christmas Day 1119, within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the spot which marks the crucifixion, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and they were headquartered on the Temple Mount, which indelibly associated them with stories surrounding the Temple of Solomon -- and nothing in medieval Christendom could beat that!

But being in the spotlight...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue