Knights Templar: The Crusading Order from Founding to Downfall

The Knights Templar were a Catholic military order founded in Jerusalem around 1119–1120 to protect Christian pilgrims after the First Crusade. Combining monastic vows with knighthood, they became the best-known fighting force of the crusader states and built an international network of estates and financial services. In 1307 King Philip IV of France had the Templars arrested on charges now generally seen as false, and in 1312 Pope Clement V dissolved the order.

Origins in Jerusalem

The capture of Jerusalem in 1099 brought a stream of pilgrims from Europe, but the roads from the coast remained dangerous. Around 1119 or 1120 a knight from Champagne, Hugh de Payns, and a small group of companions, including Godfrey of Saint-Omer, vowed to protect pilgrims while living like canons under vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.

King Baldwin II of Jerusalem gave them quarters in part of the al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount, which the crusaders called the Temple of Solomon. The group took the name the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon. The chronicler William of Tyre later wrote that there were only nine knights for the first nine years, but this tidy number may be exaggerated or symbolic.

Approval and growth

The new idea of monks who fought was controversial. In 1127 Hugh de Payns travelled to Europe to seek support and recruits. At the Council of Troyes in January 1129 the Church approved a rule for the order, drawing on Cistercian practice and supported by the abbot Bernard of Clairvaux.

Bernard then wrote In Praise of the New Knighthood (De laude novae militiae), a treatise defending the Templars as a holy alternative to worldly knighthood. In 1139 Pope Innocent II issued the bull Omne datum optimum, which made the order answerable only to the pope and exempt from local bishops and tithes. Further privileges followed in the 1140s.

Gifts of land, money and churches poured in from across Western Europe. Within a few decades the Templars held hundreds of properties, from manors and mills in England and France to estates in Spain, Italy and Germany, all run to send money and supplies to the East.

How the order worked

The Templars were led by a grand master based in the Holy Land, with officials such as the seneschal and marshal and provincial masters in Europe. Members were divided into knights, who wore white mantles, sergeants in black or brown, and chaplains. From around 1147 the knights wore a red cross on their mantles.

Their rule regulated almost everything: meals, silence, clothing, horses and conduct in battle. Knights were forbidden to retreat unless the odds were overwhelming and were expected to fight to the death rather than flee the field without orders. Most members of the order, however, were not knights at all but sergeants, servants and administrators working in European houses called preceptories or commanderies.

The Templars at war

The Templars took part in almost every major campaign in the Levant. During the Second Crusade they protected the French army of Louis VII on its march through Anatolia in 1147–1148. They garrisoned great castles such as Safed, Tortosa and, from 1218, Château Pèlerin (Atlit), and served as the disciplined core of crusader armies.

Their record was mixed. At the Battle of Hattin in July 1187 the grand master Gerard de Ridefort was among those who urged the fatal march that ended in the destruction of the kingdom’s army. Saladin ordered the execution of the Templar and Hospitaller prisoners, around 200 or more men, regarding them as the Franks’ most dangerous soldiers.

The Templars were later part of the Third Crusade and the Fifth Crusade, and fought in the disastrous Battle of La Forbie in 1244. When the Mamluks took Acre in May 1291, the grand master William of Beaujeu was killed and the Templars’ fortress in the city held out for days before collapsing. The order withdrew to Cyprus, and its last outpost in the region, the island of Ruad off the Syrian coast, fell in 1302.

Bankers of Christendom

Because they moved money and goods constantly between Europe and the East, the Templars developed financial services. Pilgrims and crusaders could deposit funds at a Templar house in Europe and receive money in the Holy Land. The order kept valuables for kings and nobles, lent money and managed revenues.

The Paris Temple acted for long periods as a treasury for the French crown, and the London Temple played a similar role in England. King Louis VII relied on Templar loans during the Second Crusade, and Louis IX’s ransom in 1250 was partly paid with Templar funds. The Templars were not the only medieval bankers, and they did not invent banking, but their reputation for wealth became central to their downfall. Contemporaries often exaggerated that wealth, since most Templar income was spent on maintaining castles, horses and troops in the East.

Arrest, trial and suppression

After 1291 the order lost its main purpose, and critics proposed merging it with the Hospitallers. King Philip IV of France, deeply in debt and determined to assert royal authority over the Church, moved first. At dawn on Friday 13 October 1307 royal officers arrested Templars across France, including the grand master Jacques de Molay.

The charges included denying Christ and spitting on the cross at reception into the order, obscene kisses, idol worship and sodomy. Under torture or threat of it, most of those questioned, including Molay, confessed to some charges. Pope Clement V, under heavy pressure, ordered arrests throughout Christendom in November 1307, though outside France few Templars confessed.

A papal commission heard Templars who tried to defend the order in 1310, but in May of that year the archbishop of Sens had 54 brothers burned at Paris as relapsed heretics. At the Council of Vienne, on 22 March 1312, Clement issued the bull Vox in excelso, suppressing the order by papal decree without a formal verdict of guilt. The bull Ad providam of 2 May 1312 gave its property to the Knights Hospitaller, except in Spain and Portugal.

In March 1314 Jacques de Molay and Geoffroi de Charney retracted their confessions and proclaimed the order innocent. They were burned the same day on an island in the Seine in Paris. The full story of the arrests is told in the article on the suppression of the Knights Templar.

Key people

• Hugh de Payns (died c. 1136): knight from Champagne and first master of the order, who won papal and royal backing on his tour of Europe in 1127–1129.
• Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153): Cistercian abbot whose writing gave the Templars their spiritual justification; he was related to one of the founding knights, André de Montbard.
• Gerard de Ridefort (died 1189): grand master at the time of Hattin, captured and later released; he was killed at the siege of Acre in 1189.
• William of Beaujeu (died 1291): grand master killed defending Acre.
• Jacques de Molay (c. 1240s–1314): last grand master, burned in Paris after retracting his confession.
• Philip IV of France (reigned 1285–1314): king who ordered the arrests and pressed the pope to condemn the order.
• Pope Clement V (pope 1305–1314): French pope, resident in France and later at Avignon, who suppressed the order in 1312 while avoiding a formal condemnation.

Myths and facts

Myth: Friday the 13th is unlucky because of the arrests. The arrests did take place on a Friday the 13th, but the superstition is not recorded before the nineteenth century and the Templar link is a modern invention.

Myth: The Templars found the Holy Grail or a hidden treasure. No medieval evidence supports this. Such stories grew from eighteenth-century Masonic legends and modern fiction.

Myth: The Templars survived in secret and founded the Freemasons. Historians find no continuity between the medieval order and Freemasonry, which emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Fact: The pope did not condemn the order as heretical. In the Chinon Parchment of August 1308, rediscovered in the Vatican archives and published in 2007, papal envoys absolved Molay and other leaders. The final suppression of 1312 was an administrative decision.

Timeline

• c. 1119–1120: Hugh de Payns and companions found the order in Jerusalem.
• 1129, January: The Council of Troyes approves the Templar rule.
• 1139: Bull Omne datum optimum grants papal exemption.
• 1187, July: Templar prisoners executed after Hattin.
• 1291, May: Fall of Acre; William of Beaujeu killed.
• 1302: Loss of Ruad, the last Templar base off the Syrian coast.
• 1307, 13 October: Mass arrests of Templars in France.
• 1310, May: 54 Templars burned near Paris.
• 1312, 22 March: Bull Vox in excelso suppresses the order.
• 1314, March: Jacques de Molay burned in Paris.

Why it matters

The Templars embodied the crusading ideal of the warrior-monk and were central to the defence of the Latin East. Their pioneering financial network showed how a religious institution could operate across kingdoms. Their dramatic fall revealed the growing power of monarchs over the papacy, and the legends that grew around them have made them one of the most mythologised groups in European history.