Those Templars again

The BBC has an article by Amanda Ruggeri about the Templars:

It was rush hour on a weekday, and I was weaving my way down the Strand, one of central London’s most famous thoroughfares. The street hummed with tourists, students and lawyers. Double-decker buses rattled. Cyclists sweated. Black cabs swerved.
Just east of the where the Strand turns into Fleet Street, beyond the nineteenth-century legal bookshop of Wildy and Sons, stood a small stone archway (photo). Compared to the imposing structure above it, a timber-framed, Jacobean townhouse, it was almost unnoticeable. I turned in.
Here, on tiny Inner Temple Lane, was a hidden world, one that was lovely, leafy, and serene, overlooked by graceful Gothic and Victorian buildings and patch-worked with gardens and miniature courtyards.
The area, known as Temple, remains far less known to tourists than other nearby attractions like St. Paul’s Cathedral or Trafalgar Square. And most of those who do find their way here don’t realize Temple’s biggest secret: this whole area was once the stronghold of the Knights Templar.
The medieval order, known for their role in the Crusades and as one of the Middle Ages’ most powerful and wealthy religious orders, lived, prayed and worked here from about 1185 up until their dissolution in 1312. They built monastic dormitories, chambers, and two dining halls, now known as Middle Temple Hall and Inner Temple Hall, though they’ve been rebuilt many times over the years and, most famously, Temple Church.
“They lived right here,” said Robin Griffith-Jones, the reverend of Temple Church and a historian of the Knights Templar. (In a sign of how historic and traditional this area is, his official title is Reverend and Valiant Master of the Temple). “The hall of the Templars was what is now Inner Temple Hall, right over there. And the priest’s house was where my house is.”
In 1120, Christian knights had just captured Jerusalem in the First Crusade. But even while the holy city was safe, the pilgrimage routes to get there were not, and travelers were routinely attacked, robbed and even killed.
A handful of knights took monastic vows and devoted themselves to protecting the pilgrims and their routes. In return, the king of Jerusalem gave them headquarters on Temple Mount. The Knights Templar was born, and were soon world-renowned for their courage. “They were a very disciplined fighting force, and hugely self-sacrificial. If there was a disaster in battle, they were decimated. They didn’t run away; they just got killed,” said Griffith-Jones.
They also became extraordinarily rich. As well as owning land and other assets, they didn’t have to pay tithes. They were also the first to issue what today we would call checks. If a pilgrim was leaving home, they could give the Templars all the money they’d want in the Holy Land, get a promissory note in return, and collect that amount when they arrived. By 1191, they were so wealthy they were able to buy the island of Cyprus. Little surprise then that, by the mid-twelfth century, they needed a grander headquarters for their London chapter. By 1185, they had built Temple Church.
Today Temple Church does not seem that grand, particularly when compared to nearby St. Paul’s or Westminster Abbey. The surrounding buildings dwarf it, making its dome invisible from just a short distance. The circular nave in the west, which was built first, is just seventeen meters in diameter. There is no elaborate gold gilding, no side chapels, no mosaic or paintings. But, as a round church modeled after the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem (there are only three others in Britain), Temple Church had one of the grandest claims of them all: to those in the Middle Ages, walking through it was the closest you could get to Jerusalem without actually undertaking the dangerous pilgrimage to get there.
Inside, the round nave has the fortress-like walls, small windows, and heavy, pointed arches of the early Gothic. Effigies of some of the knights, including William Marshal of Pembroke, without whom England’s Magna Carta would not exist, lie grasping their swords in the stone.
The ‘new’ chancel, built sixty years later, extended the church east, this time with all the hallmarks of the fully-flowered Gothic style: thin, graceful columns, wide-span arches and huge windows that flooded the interior with light.
In the time of the Knights Templar, the painted walls and metal-plated ceiling would have shimmered in the candlelight. The floor was tiled. There were probably banners down the columns. And the windows, now mostly plain, may have been made of stained glass.
It was in that lovely, light-filled environment that the English order of the Knights Templar would meet and worship. It was also here that they would be initiated into the order. According to charges levied against them in 1307, when King Philip IV ordered the arrest of the Templars in France, the initiation rites included spitting on the cross, denying Christ, and kissing each other on the mouth, belly button, and base of the spine.
By that point, the knights were no longer needed as crusaders. Their military stronghold of Acre, in present-day Syria, had fallen in 1291. The knights were still engaging in smaller-scale raids, but the Crusades had effectively ended and, for the Church, had not ended well.
As well as no longer having any military purpose, the Knights Templars’ wealth had made them potential enemies of some powerful people, including King Philip IV, who owed them a vast sum of money.
The charges of devil-worship in their initiation rites quickly followed. Scores of knights were arrested on Friday the 13th in October of 1307, and those who wouldn’t confess were burned at the stake. The rest scattered. In 1312, the order was dissolved.
The land at Temple went to the Knights Hospitaller, another military religious order. That order leased the land to lawyers in 1346, and today the Temple area is well known to England’s barristers, all of whom must belong to one of London’s four Inns of Court, the medieval legal associations, in order to practice. Two of these Inns of Court, the Inner Temple and Middle Temple, are based here.
The Inner Temple still has a section of its medieval hall, complete with fifteenth-century fireplace. With its hammered-beam ceiling and rich oil paintings, Middle Temple’s hall is largely what it would have looked like when it was built under Queen Elizabeth I in 1562.
Today, though, you’ll see London’s barristers walking through the courtyards with small, rolling suitcases, the preferred method for transporting the stiff horsehair wigs they have to don at court. And visitors can usually peek in over lunch hours, or, even better, advance book a tour of the Inner Temple.
Until thirteen years ago, hardly any tourists came to this area at all. “It was the classic hidden gem,” said Griffith-Jones. “Part of its joy is that it is really tucked away: it’s as if you go into a secret garden as soon as you come in from Fleet Street. It is absolutely, ravishingly beautiful. It was a disappointment to us that London’s residents, the people who work here, the people who visit it, so few knew about it.”
But then a certain novel was published.
“One Monday morning in 2003, there was a queue of young Americans standing outside the door,” Griffith-Jones said. “The verger opens up and they ask him, ‘Have you read the book?’ And of course the verger thinks they’re talking about the Bible.”
Instead, they were talking about Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code. It would turn out to be one of the most popular novels of the twenty-first century, and one of its main scenes was set at Temple Church.
In those boom years, the church saw around five hundred visitors every day. However, those days seem to be over. When I was there, there were just two families and a couple wandering through the space.
Today, Temple Church and Temple are back to feeling like a hidden world in the heart of London, one that’s serene and rich with secrets. And that, in many ways, feels how it should be.

Rico says he's read the book (The Da Vinci Code; excellent) and seen the movie (bad, even though it stars Tom Hanks) of the same name about the Templars...