For more than nine centuries the tales and legends about the Knights Templar have enthralled the world, this is an exciting new study of the origins, secrets, and deeds of history's most legendary and mysterious order of knights. Modern culture has been so fascinated by the story of the Templar Order that it has conjured numerous legends and mystifications about the Order and its historical roots. This book aims to restore historical accuracy and comprehensively explore the myth of the Knights Templar, their genesis, and the crucial role played by Bernard of Clairvaux, the great saint, scholar, and charismatic official of the Order of the Temple. To better understand the Order's story we feel it is necessary to start at the very beginning by first analyzing how the code of conduct we now call chivalry came into existence and what it originally consisted of. In addition to the history of the Templar Order, the book will extensively discuss the vast and composite phenomenon of the so-called Templarism. From its origins in the eighteenth century, Templarism has unceremoniously mixed pseudo-chivalric ideals with Freemasonry and the occult, which allowed it to survive to this day and become a masterpiece of myth fabrication, and even, ended up immortalized in recent mediocre best-selling fiction. After The Apogee of the Middle Ages renowned medievalist Franco Cardini brings to the English speaking public another of his best-selling history books. Professor of Medieval History at the University of Florence and at the Florence Institute of Humanistic Studies, he has taught as visiting professor in VIII-Vincennes University of Paris, in the Freie Universitat of Berlin, in Alcalà de Henares University and at the Middlebury College in the USA. He worked as Directeur de Recherches at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris in 1991 and 1992, as Fellow of the Harvard University and as Gastprofessor at the Max-Planck-Institut of Gottingen. Author of numerous essays and novels, he also writes for various newspapers and magazines and collaborates with the Italian Public Television RAI. Professor Cardini has published more than fifty books including the academically acclaimed L’apogeo del medioevo. I secoli XII-XIII (2001), Le crociate in Terrasanta nel medioevo (2003), L’invenzione dell’Occidente (2004), La globalizzazione. Tra nuovo ordine e caos (2005) and Testimone del tempo. Ritorno a Coblenza (2009). Already published in English are his best-selling works Europe 1492: Portrait of a Continent Five Hundred Years Ago (1989), Europe and Islam (2001) and The Companion of Medieval Society (2012).
