Books: The Templar Curse

THE IRON KING (269 pp.)—Maurice Druon—Scribner ($3.50).

Tied to a stake, wearing the paper miter of heresy, Jacques de Molay, Grand Master of the Knights Templar, was burned to death in the year 1314. But before he died, his stentorian voice cried out a terrible curse against his enemies: Pope Clement V. his prosecutor, Guillaume de Nogaret, and the coldly handsome King Philip IV of France. Historians still argue over the guilt or innocence of the Templars,*but most agree that they had to be swept away before Philip's kingdom could become a nation of Frenchmen instead of warring congeries of Burgundians, Gascons, Provengals, Normans. To unite France, Philip set out not only to destroy the Templars but to defeat the great barons, carry blood and sword to the rebellious Flemings, even capture the Papacy and remove it from Rome to Avignon.

Maurice Druon's lucidly written novel (the first of a series to be called The Accursed Kings) plunges deep into a time when man's life was full but brutally short, when kingdoms were often handed to adolescents who, "hardly grown out of the age in which it is fun to tear wings from flies, might now amuse themselves by tearing the heads from men.'' Such precocious youngsters crowded Philip's court. Two of his three sons were deceived by their highborn wives, who paid for their sins with shaven skulls and imprisonment, while their lovers were broken on the wheel, flayed alive, castrated and decapitated. His intriguing daughter Isabella was unhappily married to Edward II of England, a king who would rather drape his arm with "suspect familiarity" around a young workman than em brace his queen. Courtiers, prelates, Lom bard bankers and the rising burghers scrabbled greedily for power.

French Novelist Druon (The Film of Memory) seems perfectly at home in this stormy period. It was a time of flagging religious faith and burgeoning superstition, when witchcraft seemed more plausible than sainthood, and not even King Philip was surprised to find that a dying man's curse was as deadly as a knife: within a year of De Molay's howled imprecation from the fire, Pope, prosecutor and the King himself had followed the Templar to the grave.