The Templars — Dan Jones

Jones traces the Templars from their founding in Jerusalem in the twelfth century to their destruction by Philip IV of France in the early fourteenth. The arc is dramatic — warrior monks who became bankers, who became politically inconvenient, who were destroyed by a king who wanted their money — and Jones is alert to both the genuine history and the mythology that has accumulated around the order. The trial and its confessions are handled with appropriate scepticism.