Few organizations from the medieval world fascinate modern audiences to compare with the Knights Templar. This crusading Christian military order – famous for its red cross on white mantle – has become emblematic of the turbulent and controversial crusading period of history and, in a strange afterlife, has also become the subject of myth, legend, and conspiracy theories.
The Italian medievalist, philosopher, novelist, political and social commentator, and an emeritus professor at the University of Bologna, Umberto Eco (died 2016) expressed one view of how they have gripped many modern imaginations.
“The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy.
You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of
inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.”
(Foucault's Pendulum)
However, long before they became the go-to characters in many modern imaginations, the Templars were a highly influential part of medieval society, epitomising the contested culture wars that pitted Christians and Muslims against each other in the Middle East, and whose violent downfall reflected political infighting that was as much part of 14th-century politics as of aspects of the 21st century.
The origins of the Templars
Though commonly known simply as the ‘Knights Templar,’ the formal name of their order was the ‘Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon.’ The order was founded in AD 1119 in Jerusalem and was a direct result of the crusades. These were a series of wars, fought between the 11th and 13th centuries, involving Christian and Islamic forces fighting for control of the Holy Land, with the city of Jerusalem being the most coveted prize.
Prior to the rise of Islam, in the 7th century, the Middle East (including Jerusalem) was in the Eastern Roman Empire which had (along with the rest of the empire) been officially Christian since the 4th century. This part of the empire (often called the Byzantine Empire) survived the collapse of Roman imperial rule in the West and its capital, Constantinople (today Istanbul), would remain Christian – within a contracting empire – until it finally fell to Islamic forces in 1453.
Jerusalem fell to Islamic forces in 638. In 1071 the Byzantines were defeated at the Battle of Manzikert, which opened Anatolia (modern Turkey) to Muslim Turkoman settlement. The Byzantines appealed to the West for assistance and, in 1095, Pope Urban II called on Western Christians to come to the aid of the beleaguered Byzantines. This resulted in the First Crusade (1095–1099) which led to the Christian capture of Jerusalem and the establishment of several crusader states in the Middle East. However, Christian pilgrims visiting the Holy Places found the region a very dangerous place in which to travel.
In response, a French knight named Hugh de Payns, along with eight or nine companions, established an armed group which aimed to protect Christian pilgrims traveling to Jerusalem and other holy sites. King Baldwin II, the Christian king of Jerusalem, granted them quarters in a wing of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which was then under Christian control. The crusaders believed this to be the Temple of Solomon, which is why the group quartered there became known as ‘Templars.’
In 1128, at the Council of Troyes, the Templars were officially recognized by the Catholic Church as an armed military order. This was assisted by the support of Bernard of Clairvaux, who was a prominent abbot and church reformer. As part of this support, Bernard wrote In Praise of the New Knighthood (1136), which provided a spiritual justification for the idea of a monastic military order (fighting monks) that would defend Christians and the new Christian order in the Middle East.
In 1139, Pope Innocent II issued a bull (papal decree/charter) that granted the order special privileges. According to this, the Templars were allowed to build their own oratories (chapels) and were not required to pay tithes to the church. They were also exempt from episcopal jurisdiction, being subject to the pope alone. This last freedom created some tensions with local bishops.
The rule of the order was similar to that developed by Cistercians. Templars took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, very much like other monastic orders. Living communally, committed to a regular discipline of monastic services structuring the day and night, and prayer, they were expected to uphold high personal moral standards. But these ‘monks’ were also trained warriors, who were committed to fight and, if necessary, to die in defence of Christendom. This dual identity—both monastic and military—was both a strength and a source of tension. They were powerful military allies, but they stood apart from the usual church organisational set up, which could prompt resentment from bishops and other clergy. They also stood apart from the traditional feudal loyalties that bound most knights to secular lords.
The Templars were soon followed by a succession of similar military orders. Perhaps the next in terms of fame were the Hospitallers but there were others, including ones set up to fight Islamic rule in Spain, and pagans in the south-eastern Baltic. With this official papal recognition, and the ideological basis provided by Bernard, the Templars benefitted from a growing popularity and the order quickly expanded its scope and its influence.
The military might of the Templars
At their height, the Knights Templar were one of the most powerful and wealthy institutions in the whole of medieval Christendom. Attracting enthusiastic knightly volunteers and grants of land from those who believed they would be blessed by God for supporting these muscular Christian warriors, the order became renowned for its military skills and also its financial power.
The Templars were counted among the elite Christian fighting forces during the crusades. They were a highly disciplined and centralised organisation with loyalty to their grand master and, above him, to the pope. This gave them a unity and effectiveness that caused them to stand out both in warfare and in the management of their economic resources. They were easily recognized by their white mantles with prominent red crosses. Consequently, they played crucial roles in major battles, including the Battle of Hattin (1187) and the Siege of Acre (1291).
At Hattin, the Muslim army, under the Kurdish leader, known in the West as Saladin, defeated the crusaders and captured the holy relic of ‘The True Cross.’ At Hattin the Templar grand master and huge numbers of Templar knights were either killed in battle or executed afterwards, with only a few high-ranking members surviving.
As a result of the battle, Muslims re-captured Jerusalem and most of the other crusader-held cities and castles. These huge Christian defeats prompted the Third Crusade (1189–1192), which included King Richard I of England. It was partially successful, recapturing the cities of Acre and Jaffa, and reversing many of Saladin's conquests, but it failed to recapture Jerusalem.
As the power of the crusader states waned in the 13th century, the raison d'être of the Templars was steadily undermined, while their wealth attracted the envy of secular rulers. The last crusader city, Acre, fell to Islamic forces in 1291. The Templars would outlive it by just sixteen years. The two trajectories were connected and the fall of one was inextricably linked to the fall of the other.
Templar economic power
The Templars became very wealthy, being granted farming estates and other resources across Western Europe, the income from which underpinned their activities. They were exempt from local taxes and laws due to the papal privileges granted to them. Alongside this, they pioneered an early form of international banking. With their properties and treasuries spread across Europe and the Middle East, they established financial networks which made it possible for pilgrims and nobles to deposit money in one Templar base and withdraw it in another. It was a very sophisticated system. Due to their wealth, the Templars also became trusted financiers and advisors to kings and other members of the elite. As a result, they loaned large sums of money to monarchs. This included (fatally) the king of France.
How and why were they destroyed?
The destruction of the Knights Templar is one of the most shocking and astonishing events in European medieval history. From a position of holy defenders of Christendom, they fell to the state of being accused of heresy and – with regard to their leadership – physically eliminated. And in this, the king of France played a crucial role.
King Philip IV of France, also known as ‘Philip the Fair,’ orchestrated the destruction of the order. With the collapse of the Middle Eastern crusader states and the attendant diminution of the military role of the Templars, they found themselves in a highly vulnerable position. Philip IV was deeply in debt to the Templars, having borrowed large sums from them to fund wars and his lavish court lifestyle. Their destruction offered him an opportunity to accelerate an ambition to increase his power over both secular and religious institutions, write off his debts, and secure control of the Templar assets in estates and moveable wealth. Most historians interpret it as a cynical and brutal display of realpolitik.
On Friday, 13 October 1307, Philip ordered the mass arrest of all the Templars in France. As a result of the order, large numbers of knights were taken into custody. These included Grand Master Jacques de Molay. Being the Middle Ages, the charges against them were from a well-established playbook of ‘othering’ opponents in order to destroy their reputations as well as the person physically. As a result, we cannot assume that what followed revealed what was happening within the order. Put to torture, many of those arrested confessed to heretical practices, which included: idol worship (of a bearded male head), worship of a cat, denying Christ and spitting on the cross, and homosexual rituals.
Pope Clement V – who was himself French – initially tried to resist Philip’s interference in what was a church matter. However, he was not in a strong position. He came under immense pressure from the French crown, he had been elected pope after a closely divided papal election, and was dependent on French support. Given the way that the anti-Templar campaign was being driven from the French court there was a real possibility that he might be sidelined and his authority weakened further.
At the Council of Vienne, in 1311–12, he officially dissolved the Templars, citing the damage to its reputation. This was despite no definitive proof of heresy being produced and the refusal of the council to convict the order of being heretical. On 18 March 1314, Jacques de Molay, grand master of the Knights Templar, and another senior Templar, were burned at the stake in Paris after retracting their confessions and declaring their innocence of all charges.
Later traditions claimed that de Molay cursed both the king and pope from the flames. Both men died within the same year as de Molay. According to one tradition (accounts vary), when Clement’s body was lying in state, the church was struck by lightning, caught fire, and his body was consumed by the flames. King Philip died in a hunting accident, aged forty-six. His sons died without heirs and, by 1328, his male line ended, and the throne passed to the line of his brother, the House of Valois. It is the raw material of legend and later generations have run with it!
Following the suppression, Templar properties were nominally transferred to the Knights Hospitaller, which was another military order. However, in practice, many of their assets were seized by the French crown and other local elites. In other parts of Europe, Templars were treated more leniently, and some were absorbed into other orders or allowed to live out their lives without molestation. The destruction of the Templars was more than simply the suppression of a military order, it was part of a process of centralising royal power at the expense of papal authority.
The legacy of the Templars
The Templars, arguably, influenced later developments in international finance; if not directly then by example. Their military organisation inspired later martial imitators, and some have claimed echoes of their centralised structure and transnational identity in later organisations such as the Jesuits. Even if not directly related, the Templars left a blueprint for how such an organisation could be run – and its potential power. They also provide a cautionary tale regarding the way that the politically powerful can cynically manipulate faith and ideology to bring down rivals and gain control of their assets.
More obviously, the sudden and catastrophic fall of the Templars has left a legacy of speculation, much of it wildly fantastical. The highly disciplined nature of the order, combined with the French prosecution’s lurid accusations of heresy and sexual sin, have fuelled claims of the most extraordinary kinds. These include: Templar possession of forbidden secret knowledge; their vast wealth including the Ark of the Covenant (presumably prompted by their original quarters on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem); possession of the Holy Grail; being associated with guardians of the claimed bloodline of Christ through Mary Magdalene (something that may be familiar to readers of Dan’ Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code), a claim which is, of course, highly offensive to Christians.
Others have claimed that surviving Templars went underground, used their wealth, influence, and organisational skills to create a secret continuation of the order, and reemerged centuries later as Freemasons, who (in this version of the post-Templar myth) possessed secret knowledge and ancient rituals. They have even been accorded a place among the European discoverers of North America with – highly unconvincing – assertions being made that surviving Templars sailed to America in the 14th century.
In the digital age, the secret-society theme has been reflected in Templar appearance in video games like Assassin’s Creed, in the form of a secret transnational organization which strives to control humanity, in order to implement the ‘New World Order’ through a world government under their control. Here, one might suggest, the world of 14th-century French accusations meets the 21st-century preoccupation with the machinations of a ‘deep state.’
The Templar memory still echoes in the real world of the 21st century. British place-names containing ‘Temple’ remind one of estates and manors once held by the order. Those arriving by train in Bristol will disembark at Temple Meads Railway Station. In London, in a famous centre of English law, two of the four Inns of Court are named the Inner Temple and the Middle Temple. Temple Newsam is an electoral ward in east Leeds and suggests that Templar land was once located there. There are many other examples. The Templars founded or developed towns like Baldock in the late 12th century and, in the example of Baldock, were inspired by their Middle Eastern connections to name it from ‘Baldac,’ the Old French name of Baghdad (now capital of Iraq).
What is clear is that – despite all the later imagination – the Templars were a product of their time. They arose in the turbulent 11th century, when a clash of civilisations between Christendom and Islam led to the crusading movement and the rise of the order combined monasticism with muscular defence (as they saw it) of Christendom.
The Templars saw themselves as holy warriors, fearless of death. They open a window on a historical period when personal piety was expressed in such martial devotion and in the support it inspired among those who donated land to the order in order to gain merit to access heaven. Their financial acumen reveals how sophisticated medieval society could be and was a pointer to later financial structures.
Finally, they were destroyed by a centralising secular ruler, who used state power and ideological spin to create and control a narrative in order to bring ruin on an opponent. On reflection, though of their time, perhaps they do connect rather surprisingly to the world of the 21st century as well.
Martyn Whittock is a historian, commentator, columnist and a Licensed Lay Minister in the Church of England. The author, or co-author, of fifty-seven books, his work includes: Daughters of Eve (2021), Jesus the Unauthorized Biography (2021), The End Times, Again? (2021), The Story of the Cross (2021), Apocalyptic Politics (2022) and American Vikings: How the Norse Sailed into the Lands and Imaginations of America (2023). His latest book (published in April) is: Vikings in the East. From Vladimir the Great to Vladimir Putin – the Origins of a Contested Legacy in Russia and Ukraine.
