Dr Nicholas Morton, Senior Lecturer at Nottingham Trent University, will be giving two fascinating online lectures on the history of the Templars and their popularity in the UK today.

The first talk on Thursday 26th November at 7pm is quite simply titled, 'The Templars'. This talk will look at the history of the order and how varied and exciting, it is seeing its fair share of ups and downs in the time of holy knights and crusades. The original Knights Templar went into decline in the early 1300s so what is it about the extraordinary legacy of this particular group which has survived to the modern day, when the majority of its contemporaries have been banished to the history books?

The follow up talk, 'The Foundation of the Crusader States: 1099-1128: A History' is on 18th December at 7pm. The outline of the talk is as follows: In 1095 the armies of the First Crusade marched into the Near East on their journey to Jerusalem. En-route they conquered many of the region’s major cities and fortresses - often brutally -, the most important being Antioch in 1098 and the holy city itself in 1099. Then in the wake of the campaign the vast majority of the crusaders returned home to Western Christendom, leaving only a cluster of garrisons to maintain control over the lands they had seized. Despite these inauspicious beginnings, within a few decades, the settlers who remained in the east managed to establish a group of powerful territories known as the “Crusader States” three of which would survive -in various forms- for almost two centuries. This lecture will explore how they achieved this and why they were not simply destroyed within a few months of the main crusading armies’ departure. To this end, we shall discuss a whole of themes including war, shipping, commerce, castle-building and inter-faith diplomacy. We shall also consider these events from multiple-perspectives, examining how the Near East’s other societies responded to the crusaders’ sudden arrival. On a broader canvas we shall discuss the tools employed by medieval conquerors seeking to transform military conquests into permanent states.”

You can attend both talks for a combined price of £10 if you are a member of Heritage Lincolnshire. It's £15 if you are a non-member. Individual tickets available too, at £6 for members and £8 for non-members.

For more information on any of the talks, please go to https://www.heritagelincolnshire.org/shop/tickets/ or contact us on hannah.thompson@heritagelincolnshire.org