What role did the Templars have in building Chartres Cathedral, if any?
Having studied Chartres for a number of years, I have come to have little confidence in the “false mysteries” that are the subject of many books and articles. Louis Charpentier, for example, takes a few facts and distorts them into rather unbelievable theories. All of the writers who suggest that Gothic just suddenly appeared out of nowhere, and that it must have been the result of the Templars or some other single event, are failing to look at a whole centruy of architectural experimentation and discovery which slowly evolved the architectural features that eventually became Gothic. The analogy that I use is a musical one. For a century, in northern France, they were inventing individual instruments, such as a flying buttress here and an ogival arch there. Then, at Chartres, for the first time, the whole orchestra played. Other Gothic cathedrals developed variations on the theme, but never was it so pure and sweet as in Chartres. So when a book is published on sacred sites around the
