Andrew Latham

Author Andrew Latham never dreamed he’d write an historical novel. “I’d always loved reading historical military adventures, but it simply never occurred to me that I might write one someday. Scholarly books, yes. But a novel?”

All that changed as Latham was working on his recently published non-fiction book Theorizing Medieval Geopolitics. “I’d been reading pretty widely about war and political violence in later medieval Europe and had just begun to get handle on the crusades when I first encountered the Templar knights. Like most people, I thought I knew what these guys were all about: either religious fanatics or cynical thugs using religion to camouflage their all-too-worldly motives. Like most people, though, I was wrong. Turns out, there was much more to these warrior-monks than I had initially thought or than is commonly supposed. The more I read, the more I became fascinated by these warrior-monks, the Templars in particular – not by the caricature of them that is so prevalent in popular culture, but by the historical reality.”

Latham says he contemplated writing a non-fiction book on the military religious orders, but ended up writing something very different instead – a work of historical fiction. “The more I thought about what I wanted to achieve, the more it seemed that non-fiction would not be the best tool. I was interested in the Templars, not because of their supposed secrets or mysteries, or their fabulous wealth and influence, but because of what they were: warrior-monks. Think about it for a moment. On the one hand, Templars, like all medieval knights, were warriors, bred to be brutal and merciless killers. On the other, they were pious monks, committed to a life of prayer and works of charity. How was that possible? How did they reconcile these two personas? How, as it were, did they manage to sustain the hyphen between the words ‘warrior’ and ‘monk’? Answering these questions, it seemed to me, required reconstructing the imaginative world of these self-styled ‘knights of Christ’. And the best medium for that sort of project has always been fiction.”

From the outset, Latham was committed to taking seriously the religious convictions and motivations of the typical Templar knight. “My point of departure was not to assume that these guys were all saints – they weren’t. Rather, it was to accept that the people of this era understood the world in terms of religious categories and concepts. For them, religious belief was neither a form of mental illness nor a cynical ideology concealing their real material motives. Instead, rather like the laws of physics are for us, it was the fundamental imaginative matrix through which they made sense of the world around them. And if this was true of the average medieval person, it was true in spades for consecrated religious like the Templars. As I see it, not taking their religious worldview seriously would simply be to get things wrong.”

Committed to getting the historical details right, Latham began the writing process by embarking on an ambitious research program. “I read everything I could get my hands on, starting with Malcolm Barber’s authoritative primer The New Knighthood. A History of the Order of the Temple,” he says. Beyond that, Latham also began researching the setting for the novel, the Third Crusade. “I chose the Third Crusade because I could see great possibilities in contrasting the world’s premier secular knight, England’s Richard the Lionheart, with my protagonist – a heroic figure who would embody Saint Bernard’s ideal of the ‘New Knighthood’.” Latham was already familiar with the history and nature of the crusades, having written several scholarly articles and a non-fiction book on the topic. “If I were to meet the standard of historical fidelity established by other writers in the genre, I knew that I would need to delve much more deeply into the specific history of Richard’s twelfth century campaign against Saladin.” Several years of reading this literature resulted in a novel that is faithful to the actual history of the Third Crusade. “Every action is consistent with the historical record as it has come down to us. Where I have invented things, I have done so only where that record is silent or ambiguous.” Latham worked hard to ensure the accuracy not only of the military, social and political details, but the sartorial and even culinary ones as well – going so far as to submit the manuscript to the most accomplished scholar of the Templars. “He approved, suggesting only a few minor changes that I was more than happy to make.” If members of the target audience are interested in historical fidelity, and Latham believes they are, they will find little to quibble about in this work.

Latham is careful to point out, however, that The Holy Lance is not simply an academic work dressed up as fiction. “I grew up reading the classics in historical military adventure: series like C.S. Forester’s Hornblower, Alexander Kent’s Bolitho, and Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin. And in more recent years I have enjoyed the novels of Ben Kane, Conn Iggulden, Si Turney, Robyn Young, Steven A. McKay, Robert Fabbri, Gordon Doherty and, of course, Bernard Cornwell. These novels taught me what good military historical fiction looks like. My goal in writing The Holy Lance was to apply everything I learned from these great writers to provide a truthful yet entertaining account of the Templars and the Third Crusade.”