The Templars

The Templars The Secret History Revealed by Barbara Frale

In recent years the mystique surrounding the templars has become popular thanks to author Dan Brown. The Templars is not another fictitious book. Frale is well educated in templar, papacy and crusade history. She works in the Vatican archives. Frale was able to use old and forgotten documents to put together this insightful book.

She explains how and why the templars were formed, to whom they answered, how long they supposedly lasted, their secret rituals, and how they finally came to an end.

The book read like a text book. The information was good and considering this was non fiction it did get dry. I had a hard time following the people and the time. She jumped around on the timeline because her layout was more topic based. Also at times I felt like a needed a diagram to figure out where the people belonged. I am not entirely familiar with far reaching Catholic history so I spent some time confused over what seemed like quick change of papacy and other leaders.

By the time I reached around pg. 150 I was able to keep it all straight but I think that is because the book stayed to mostly one time period and there were fewer historical players.

Rating 3 for the information but I would have to rate it lower for the confusion.

Rating PG Rituals include homosexuality and hazing.