GÜRTLER, Nicolaus
Historia templariorum observationibus.
Amsterdam, apud Henricum Westenium, 1691£2,450.00
FIRST EDITION. 8vo. ll. (iv) 231, wanting terminal blank. Roman and italic letter. T-p in red and black, typographical ornament, woodcut initials. T-p slightly dusty, a very good, clean copy in C18 half vellum over paper boards, a little soiled, edges stained blue. Ink number to blank upper corner of t-p, late C18 etched bookplate of Johann Conrad Feurlein (1725-88) to ffep, C20 bookseller’s oval inkstamp to fly, touching blank upper margin of bookplate, and to frep, recent inscription to front pastedown.
Scarce first edition of this historical account of the Order of Templars by the German Protestant theologian Nicolaus Gürtler (1654-1711), including salacious details of their pride, greed, and ultimate fall. A deeply polemical assault on Catholic institutions, this is nonetheless a scholarly account of the institutions of the Templars in Europe and especially in Jerusalem and the Holy Land, with numerous quotations in Greek from Eusebius and other late-classical authors. Gürtler provides an extensive historical background to the foundation of the Templars, including a complete medieval history of Jerusalem, covering the Byzantine era, the miraculous discovery of the Holy Cross, the rise of Muhammad and the Crusades.
The book was published in Amsterdam at the height of the Nine Years’ War, in which the Catholic King Louis XIV of France conducted an aggressive and expansionist war against the ‘Grand Alliance,’ including England under William of Orange and Queen Mary, the Dutch Republic, and the Holy Roman Empire. Gürtler even includes an extravagant paean to William and Mary as modern Protestant monarchs and saviours of their people from the clerical abuses of the Catholic Church. This attitude might explain his surprisingly sympathetic treatment of the medieval French king Philip the Fair, who abolished the Templars in 1307, partly because he was hugely in their debt. Gürtler, while acknowledging Philip’s greed, also praises him highly, instead blaming the notorious fabrication of criminal charges against the Templars on the duplicitous Pope Clement V. In the end, however, the knights were their own worst enemy: describing the situation in England, Gürtler claims the Templars used charitable gifts for debauched ends, including sexual encounters with women.
Johann Conrad Feuerlein (1725-88) was a bibliophile, banker and lawyer who also served as town councillor in Nuremberg, as stated on his bookplate. In 1768 he published a sizeable library catalogue arranged by size, the Suppelex Libraria, expanded with a second volume of ‘accessiones’ in 1779. This work appears in the later volume as number 10252, p. 877, where its binding is described as ‘Welschen Band,’ meaning a southern French or Italian-style bindings, and the purchase price is recorded as 36 kreuzer.
Rare outside Continental libraries. OCLC notes Delaware, Georgetown, Harvard, Chicago and Illinois in the US. USTC 1822037. [Travel/Middle Eastern REFS].In stock
