De Tempel Manor near Rotterdam - A Vanished Estate and Its Unresolved Mysteries

Near Rodenrijs, north of Rotterdam, lay a tiny lordship called De Tempel. Its old manor farm decayed, and from 1715 the surrounding land was dug away for peat. Yet this estate of twelve morgen held high jurisdiction, even a gallows. Was De Tempel a water management post, or a former house of the Tempeliers, the Templars?

Jacques de Molay - Grand Master, Prisoner, Martyr

Every 13 October Jacques de Molay (in the Latin records Jacobus de Molayo) is back in the news. He led the Templars from 1292, was arrested in 1307, confessed, recanted and died at the stake in Paris in 1314. Who was the last Grand Master of the Temple (the Ordre du Temple), and what do the sources actually say?

The 1307 Templar Interrogation Roll - Heresy, Coercion and Royal Power

The 1307 Templar interrogation roll emerges not as a record of heresy but as a documentary apparatus for its juridical fabrication. Confessional uniformity, archival design, and eschatological framing reveal how Philip IV transformed coercive procedure into institutionalised juridical truth. Were the Templars' confessions ever anything more than a royal script?

Intelligence as Instrument - Cross-Cultural Information Flows During the Crusades

Between the mid-twelfth and late thirteenth centuries, the flow of political and military intelligence between the Latin West and the wider Orient underwent a profound structural transformation, from ad hoc forgeries and isolated embassies to regularised, institutionally embedded diplomatic networks spanning three continents. This intelligence was not neutral: it was systematically shaped by its transmitters to serve strategic ends. Were the Crusades ultimately won or lost on the battlefield, or in the intelligence gap between what the West was told and what was actually true? Some examples.