The Knights Templar and the Mameluks

The brotherhood of warrior monks, the Knights Templar is legendary in the western world, from their defence of Christendom to their bloody downfall. And yet there existed a group that the Arab cronicler Ibn Wasil called 'Islam's Templars - the Mameluks. These muslim defenders of the faith were elite soldier slaves in the service of the Egyptian sultans, who held back Crusader and Mongol invasions and who rose to great power and influence, ridding the Holy Land of Christian authority. In the Knights Templar and the Mameluks, Gordon Napier relates the intertwined history of two groups of warriors who fought for their respective faiths and made the Holy Land their battlefield. He compares the aristocratic Templars with their enslaved counterparts, two factions at once alike ande dissimilar, and reveals their respective ethos, the men who fought and the evolution of the brotherhoods, as well as their famous battles.