Customer Reviews

The Templar Pirates: The Secret Alliance to Build the New Jerusalem

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This is a good little book. As mentioned by another reviewer, it lacks adequate notation, but despite that the author has laid out a plausible enough scenario. His central premise is that the original pirates were outcast Knights Templar who took to the seas to take their revenge upon Catholic shipping. Over time, they evolved but maintained much of their original philosophy and traditions. Most importantly, they knew of America long before 1492 and later planned its colonization as a Templar homeland. Unfortunately, a great deal of the book only scatches the surface of its subject matter, so the interested reader must search elsewhere for a more in-depth analysis. Nevertheless it is a perfect start for anyone with doubts about the conventional Columbus mythology.

This book could be an absolute knockout, but the author fails in one key area... absolutely no citations. The author advances a few key ideas in the book but fails to validate them by citing any peer reviewed or published works (not even in the back). He also devotes a single paragraph to Captain Kidd in which he writes him off as simply a pirate, when in fact, Kidd's story is vastly more complex. With citations and a proper bibliography this book would be a winner, without it, its hard to take anything too seriously.

When the Vatican condemned the Order of the Temple in 1312, many who escaped took to sea intent on revenge on the Church. The missing Templar fleet later reappeared in the Mediterranean and later the Caribbean and posed a threat to the Church's maritime commerce. THE TEMPLAR PIRATES tells the story of the birth and conduct of piracy on the New World seas, providing an important link between Templar history and Church interactions and piracy as a whole. Any collection strong in Templar or Catholic history will find this absorbing and unusual - and many a general interest library will find it interesting for its insights on early pirates, as well.