MED0020 – The Templar Knights

The Knights Templar: a standing order in the Holy Land

The Order of the Temple was founded around 1119 to solve a practical problem. Pilgrims travelling up to Jerusalem after the First Crusade were being robbed on the roads, and the Latin kingdom had no permanent force to protect them. Hugues de Payns and a handful of companions proposed something without precedent — monks who bore arms — unusual enough to require theological justification. Bernard of Clairvaux supplied it, and the Council of Troyes recognised the rule in 1129.

Permanence in a world of seasonal campaigns

Templar strength never lay in numbers. A few hundred knight brothers served in the East at any one time. It lay in continuity: European contingents fought a season and sailed home, while the brothers stayed. They knew the ground, the water sources and the habits of their opponents, and gave Latin armies a disciplined vanguard or rearguard. Muslim chroniclers, who had no reason to flatter them, note the cohesion of their charges and their refusal to break formation.

A European financial network

Maintaining that force was expensive. The order accumulated estates across Christendom — preceptories in France, England, Aragon and Italy — whose revenues funded operations in the East. Combined with a system of deposits and letters of credit for pilgrims, this made the Temple one of the most extensive financial institutions of its age. That wealth, as much as the collapse of the Latin states, explains the trial brought against the order by Philip IV of France from 1307.

Arms and equipment

Giuseppe Rava shows the knight brother in campaign order: white mantle with the red cross, mail hauberk, helm and shield, mounted on a warhorse whose very number the rule regulated. After Acre fell in 1291 the order lost its territorial purpose, and it was suppressed by the Council of Vienne in 1312.