GÜRTLER, Nicolaus

by Nicolaus Gürtler

£2,450 · Offered by Sokol Books

.Scarce first edition of this historical account of the Order of Templars by the German Protestant theologian Nicolaus Gürtler (1654-1711), including salacious details of their pride, greed, and ultimate fall. A deeply polemical assault on Catholic institutions, this is nonetheless a scholarly account of the institutions of the Templars in Europe and especially in Jerusalem and the Holy Land, with numerous quotations in Greek from Eusebius and other late-classical authors. Gürtler provides an extensive historical background to the foundation of the Templars, including a complete medieval history of Jerusalem, covering the Byzantine era, the miraculous discovery of the Holy Cross, the rise of Muhammad and the Crusades. . . ..The book was published in Amsterdam at the height of the Nine Years War, in which the Catholic King Louis XIV of France conducted an aggressive and expansionist war against the Grand Alliance, including England under William of Orange and Queen Mary, the Dutch Republic, and the Holy Roman Empire. Gürtler even includes an extravagant paean to William and Mary as modern Protestant monarchs and saviours of their people from the clerical abuses of the Catholic Church. This attitude might explain his surprisingly sympathetic treatment of the medieval French king Philip the Fair, who abolished the Templars in 1307, partly because he was hugely in their debt. Gürtler, while acknowledging Philip s greed, also praises him highly, instead blaming the notorious f

• Binding: Hardcover

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