Templars II

Who Were the Templars?

The Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon was founded in Jerusalem around 1119, twenty years after the First Crusade had taken the city. Its first members were a handful of French knights led by Hugues de Payens, who took monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience but kept their swords. Their original task was modest: to escort pilgrims along the dangerous road from the port of Jaffa up through the hills to Jerusalem, where bandits and raiders preyed on the unarmed faithful. King Baldwin II gave them quarters in a wing of the royal palace on the Temple Mount, on the site Christians believed to be Solomon's old temple, and from that lodging they took the name by which history would remember them.

Homeland and Way of Life

The Templars had no homeland in the ordinary sense. Their headquarters was wherever the order was strongest, first Jerusalem, then Acre after the loss of the holy city in 1187, and finally Cyprus after the fall of Acre in 1291. But their true country was a network of preceptories scattered across Latin Christendom, from Scotland to Sicily, each one a fortified manor or commandery that ran farms, vineyards, mills, and stables to fund the war in the East. A brother knight took his meals in silence with his fellows, slept in a common dormitory, owned nothing of his own, wore the white mantle with the red cross over his armor, and rode a horse the order provided. Discipline was harsh and the daily round was monastic, broken by drill and by the long sea voyages that carried men, money, and remounts from the western preceptories to the Levant. The order also kept sergeants in brown mantles, chaplains, and a vast supporting staff of servants and tenants who never took the vows but lived on Templar land.

Warfare, Power, and Limits

On the battlefield the Templars were the shock troops of the crusader states. A charge of Templar knights, tightly drilled and forbidden by their rule to retreat unless their banner fell, could break a much larger force, and Muslim chroniclers learned to single them out from ordinary Frankish cavalry. They held some of the strongest castles in the Latin East: Safed in Galilee, Tortosa on the Syrian coast, the great fortress of Athlit south of Haifa. Yet for all their courage they could not save the kingdom they served. The disaster at the Horns of Hattin in 1187, where Saladin destroyed the army of Jerusalem and beheaded most of the captured Templars on the spot, was the beginning of a long retreat. Acre, the last mainland stronghold, fell in 1291 after a siege in which the order's grand master died in the breach. After that the Templars were a military order without a war, and that was one of the things that doomed them.

Beliefs, Customs, and Society

The Templars were the answer to a question that had troubled Christian thinkers for centuries: could a man kill and still save his soul. Bernard of Clairvaux, the great Cistercian abbot who wrote the order's first defense around 1130, argued that a knight who killed a pagan in defense of the faith committed not murder but what Bernard called malicide, the slaying of evil itself. The argument was uncomfortable, but it gave the new order both a rule and a conscience. The Templars heard mass daily, fasted often, and were buried in their mantles. Their internal life was hidden from outsiders, and the secrecy that surrounded their chapter meetings would later feed every rumor used against them. In practice they were less mysterious than their enemies claimed and more worldly than their rule demanded. They handled enormous sums of money for popes, kings, and ordinary pilgrims, issued letters of credit that let a traveler deposit silver in Paris and draw it in Acre, and effectively invented international banking in the Latin West.

Contacts, Conflicts, and Legacy

By the late thirteenth century the Templars were creditors to half the crowns of Europe. The kings of France in particular owed them a great deal of money, and after the loss of the Holy Land the order's wealth began to look less like a tool of the crusade and more like a temptation. On Friday the thirteenth of October 1307, Philip IV of France ordered the simultaneous arrest of every Templar in his kingdom. The charges, assembled by his lawyers and extracted under torture, accused the brothers of denying Christ, spitting on the cross, and worshipping idols. Pope Clement V, weak and dependent on the French crown, hesitated, then bowed. In 1312 he formally dissolved the order at the Council of Vienne. Two years later the last grand master, Jacques de Molay, was burned alive on an island in the Seine in front of Notre-Dame, having retracted his forced confession at the stake. The Templar lands were transferred, on paper at least, to the rival Hospitallers; the Templar gold was never satisfactorily accounted for; and the order itself passed almost at once into legend, where it has remained ever since.