Knights Templar

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  At dawn on Friday, the 13th of October 1307, King Philip IV of France had Grand Master Jacques de Molay and scores of other French Templars arrested in a single coordinated sweep. The arrest warrant opened with a line meant to chill: "God is not pleased. We have enemies of the faith in the kingdom." The men seized that morning belonged to the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, an order of the Catholic faith that had existed for nearly two centuries. They had begun as a tiny band sworn to protect travelers. How did a brotherhood founded in poverty come to own farms, ships, castles, and at one point an entire island? Why did its emblem show two knights sharing a single horse? And what made a king willing to torture men into false confessions to be free of them? The answers run from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem to the flames of Paris, and into legends that still carry the Templar name today.

• 2. Nine Knights And A Mission

  ›

  In 1119, after bandits routinely slaughtered Christian pilgrims, sometimes by the hundreds, on the road from the coast at Jaffa toward the interior of the Holy Land, the French knight Hugues de Payens went to King Baldwin II of Jerusalem and Warmund, Patriarch of Jerusalem. He proposed a monastic Catholic religious order devoted to protecting those pilgrims. The king and patriarch agreed, probably at the Council of Nablus in January 1120, and granted the new order a headquarters in a wing of the royal palace on the Temple Mount, in the captured Al-Aqsa Mosque.

  The Temple Mount carried a mystique because it stood above what was believed to be the ruins of the Temple of Solomon. The founding band counted about nine knights, among them Godfrey de Saint-Omer and André de Montbard. They had few financial resources and lived on donations, a poverty captured in their emblem of two knights riding a single horse.

  Saint Bernard of Clairvaux changed everything. The French abbot, nephew of the founding knight André de Montbard, was largely responsible for the Cistercian Order of monks and one of the leading Church figures of his day. He wrote on the Templars' behalf in a letter titled In Praise of the New Knighthood. In 1129, at the Council of Troyes, he led leading churchmen to formally approve and endorse the order, and that blessing turned the Templars into a favoured charity across Christendom.

• 3. An Early Form Of Banking

  ›

  In 1150, the order began issuing letters of credit for pilgrims bound for the Holy Land. A pilgrim deposited valuables at a local Templar preceptory before setting out, received a document recording the value, then presented it on arrival to claim treasure of equal worth. This arrangement protected travelers from robbery while it enriched the order, and it may have been the first use of bank cheques.

  Non-combatant members made up as much as 90 percent of the order, and they ran an economic machine that stretched across Christendom. A nobleman heading off to the Crusades might hand all his assets to Templar management during his absence. The Templars bought and managed farms and vineyards, built stone cathedrals and castles, took part in manufacturing, import, and export, owned fleets of ships, and at one point owned the entire island of Cyprus. The order arguably qualifies as the world's first multinational corporation, with a network of nearly 1,000 commanderies and fortifications.

  The papal bull Omne Datum Optimum, issued by Pope Innocent II in 1139, sharpened that power. It exempted the order from local laws, letting the Templars cross any border, pay no taxes, and answer to no authority except the pope. In practice they still bent to the wishes of European rulers in whose kingdoms they kept funds for the local nobility.

• 4. Shock Troops Of The Crusades

  ›

  In 1177, at the Battle of Montgisard, some 500 Templar knights helped several thousand infantry defeat Saladin's army of more than 26,000 soldiers. It became one of the order's most famous victories. The heavily armoured knights on warhorses often served as advance shock troops, charging into enemy lines ahead of the main army.

  The first castle the Templars received sat four hundred miles north of the pilgrim road, on the northern frontier of the Principality of Antioch: the castle of Bagras in the Amanus Mountains. By 1137 at the latest, they held the mountainous border of Antioch and Cilician Armenia, including the castles of Bagras, Darbsak, and Roche de Roissel. Their first recorded battle came in 1138 at Teqoa, south of Jerusalem, where a force led by Grand Master Robert de Craon took the town, then lost it again when the Muslims regrouped.

  The Second Crusade tested them hard. At a meeting in Paris on the 27th of April 1147, Pope Eugenius III gave them permission to wear the red cross on their uniforms. During the dangerous march through Anatolia, the Templars guarded the rest of the army from Turkish raids. The siege of Damascus in the summer of 1148 failed, yet Everard des Barres, one of the few leaders whose reputation survived intact, rose to grand master after Robert de Craon died in January 1149.

  Ascalon broke a grand master. In August 1153, after the city wall was breached, Bernard de Tremelay led forty knights inside. The rest of the army did not follow, and every one of those Templars was killed by the defenders. He was eventually succeeded by André de Montbard, one of the order's founders.

• 5. Losing The Holy Land

  ›

  Jerusalem fell to Saladin in 1187, after Christian losses that included the pivotal Battle of Hattin. The Islamic world had grown more united under leaders like Saladin and the reborn Sunni regime in Egypt, while Christian factions feuded among themselves. The Templars were sometimes at odds with the Knights Hospitaller and the Teutonic Knights, and decades of internecine quarrels weakened the Christian position.

  The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II retook Jerusalem in the Sixth Crusade of 1229, without Templar aid, and held it little more than a decade. In 1244, the Ayyubid dynasty and Khwarezmi mercenaries recaptured the city, which did not return to Western control until 1917, when the British took it from the Ottoman Empire during the First World War.

  The order kept retreating north. It held the seaport of Acre for nearly a century until losing it in 1291, then lost its last mainland strongholds at Tortosa and Atlit. Headquarters moved to Limassol on Cyprus, and the Templars clung to a garrison on tiny Arwad Island off the coast from Tortosa. In 1300 they tried coordinated military efforts with the Mongols there. When the Egyptian Mamluk Sultanate took Arwad in 1302 or 1303, the Crusaders lost their last foothold in the Holy Land.

• 6. Confessions Under Torture

  ›

  By 1305 the new Pope Clement V, based in Avignon, wrote to Grand Master Jacques de Molay and the Hospitaller Grand Master Fulk de Villaret about merging the two orders. Neither warmed to the idea. De Molay arrived in France in early 1307 and, while waiting for the delayed de Villaret, discussed criminal charges that an ousted Templar had raised two years earlier. It was generally agreed the charges were false. Yet King Philip IV, already deeply in debt to the Templars from his war against England, seized on the rumours to free himself from what he owed.

  The accusations were lurid and politicised, without real evidence. Recruits were said to spit on the Cross, deny Christ, and engage in indecent kissing; the order was charged with worshipping idols and a figure called Baphomet, or a mummified severed head found at the original Temple Mount headquarters. Some theorised the head belonged to John the Baptist. Many of these tropes echoed accusations once leveled at Jews, heretics, and accused witches.

  Men broke under torture. One prisoner confessed: "I, Raymond de La Fère, 21 years old, admit that I have spat three times on the Cross, but only from my mouth and not from my heart." On the 22nd of November 1307, Clement issued the bull Pastoralis praeeminentiae, ordering Christian monarchs across Europe to arrest all Templars and seize their assets. When papal hearings let many recant, Philip moved to block them. In 1310 he appointed the archbishop of Sens, Philippe de Marigny, to lead the investigation and used the forced confessions to burn dozens of Templars at the stake in Paris.

• 7. The Fire And The Curse

  ›

  On the 18th of March 1314, the elderly Jacques de Molay and Geoffroi de Charney, Preceptor of Normandy, were sentenced to burn alive in Paris. Both had retracted earlier confessions and insisted on their innocence, and both were declared relapsed heretics. De Molay reportedly stayed defiant, asking to be tied so he could face the Notre Dame Cathedral with his hands together in prayer.

  From the flames he is said to have summoned his judges before God. His recorded words ran: "God knows who is wrong and has sinned. Soon a calamity will occur to those who have condemned us to death." Clement died only a month later, and Philip died while hunting within the same year.

  At the Council of Vienne in 1312, Clement had already dissolved the order through the bull Vox in excelso, while Ad providam handed most Templar assets to the Hospitallers. Most remaining Templars across Europe were tried with virtually none convicted, absorbed into other orders, or pensioned off. A document called the Chinon Parchment, dated the 17th to the 20th of August 1308 and found in the Vatican Archives in September 2001 by Barbara Frale, shows Clement had absolved the Templars of all heresies in 1308, before he disbanded them. The Catholic Church now holds that the persecution was unjust.

• 8. How They Lived

  ›

  Knights ate meat no more than three times a week, took their meals in silence, and were forbidden any physical contact with women, even their own relatives. These were among the 72 clauses of the code modern historians call the Latin Rule, devised by Bernard de Clairvaux and Hugues de Payens. As the order grew, that list expanded to several hundred clauses in its final form.

  The white mantle marked the knights. Assigned at the Council of Troyes in 1129, it had to be worn at all times, even at meals, and the red cross added around 1147 stood for martyrdom. There was a cardinal rule: warriors never surrendered unless the Templar flag had fallen, and even then they first tried to regroup with another Christian order such as the Hospitallers. Only after all flags fell could they leave the battlefield.

  Beards became their signature. Around 1240, Alberic of Trois-Fontaines called them an "order of bearded brethren." During the Paris interrogations of 1310 to 1311, out of nearly 230 men questioned, 76 were described as bearded, some "in the style of the Templars," while 133 had shaved, either renouncing the order or hoping to escape detection. At its peak the order numbered between 15,000 and 20,000, of whom about a tenth were actual knights, ruled through masters in regions from France and England to Tripoli, Antioch, Hungary, and Croatia, all under a grand master appointed for life.

  Some of the Templars' lands in London were later rented to lawyers, which gave rise to the names of the Temple Bar gateway and the Temple Underground station. Two of the four Inns of Court, the Inner Temple and Middle Temple, still carry the name in the area known as Temple, London. Templar buildings often used round designs meant to echo the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

  Portugal kept the order alive in all but name. Templars had settled there only two or three years after the order's founding in Jerusalem. King Denis I refused to persecute them, and in 1319 the Order of Christ absorbed many former knights and their properties, with its headquarters at a castle in Tomar that had belonged to the Templars. The Portuguese carried the Order of Christ to Kongo and Brazil. In Spain, the Order of Montesa likewise took in Templar knights and assets.

  Legends filled the silence left by the order's abrupt disappearance. Temperance groups borrowed the name, claiming the original knights drank sour milk and waged a great crusade against the vice of alcohol; the largest, the International Order of Good Templars, spread worldwide from the 19th century. In 1805, the physician Bernard-Raymond Fabré-Palaprat declared himself grand master of a revival order, claiming a document proving an unbroken line of Templar grand masters. Scholars call such descent claims dubious. The mystique reaches back centuries: Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival calls the knights guarding the Grail Kingdom templeisen, a deliberate echo of the templarii.