The Trial of the Templars

Malcolm Barber's The Trial of the Templars, published by Cambridge University Press in its second edition in 2006, is the standard scholarly history of the suppression of the Knights Templar and the trial proceedings brought against them beginning in 1307. Barber is an established historian of the crusading orders. Its strength is that it works directly from the trial records and papal correspondence surrounding the case. Its limit is that some questions the trial record itself leaves open, particularly how far the confessions extracted under torture reflect any real practice within the order, remain genuinely debated among historians, so a claim asserting a settled answer to that question needs to be checked against that ongoing disagreement.