The Knights Templar: From Crusader Monks to Masonic Legend

The Order of the Temple—better known as the Knights Templar—was founded in Jerusalem in 1119 by a small band of French knights who pledged to protect pilgrims traveling to the holy sites of the Latin Kingdom. Over the next two centuries the Templars became one of the most powerful religious and financial institutions in medieval Christendom, and after their dramatic suppression in 1307–1314 they became one of the most mythologized institutions in Western history. The Templars’ subsequent transformation, into a symbolic chivalric order within modern Freemasonry and into a fixture of modern conspiracy theory, is one of the great afterlives of any medieval institution.

This page provides a documentary history of the Templars and traces the path from their Jerusalem foundation, through their vast medieval financial network, to the 1307 Friday the 13th arrests, the trial under Philip IV of France and Pope Clement V, the 1314 burning of the last Grand Master Jacques de Molay, and the order’s remarkable reinvention within modern Western fraternalism. For a focused treatment of the legends that have grown up around the order, see Knights Templar myths debunked; for a broader account of medieval secret societies, see medieval secret societies.

Founding in Jerusalem (1119)

The Latin Kingdom and the Pilgrim Problem

The First Crusade (1096–1099) had established a Latin Christian kingdom in Jerusalem and along the Syrian coast, but the pilgrim routes from the Mediterranean ports to the holy sites in the Holy Land remained dangerous. Banditry, skirmishes with Muslim forces, and the sheer difficulty of the journey meant that thousands of pilgrims were vulnerable to robbery, ransom, and worse in the years after the crusade. Several pious projects attempted to address the problem. A German brotherhood of pilgrims established a hospital in Jerusalem around 1080; this community would later be known as the Knights Hospitaller. A second project, founded around 1119 by a French knight named Hugues de Payens and eight companions, focused on escort duties and was given quarters near the Temple Mount, the location of the former Jewish Temple. The community took its name from this site, and the chronicler William of Tyre would later identify the order’s patron as the Temple of Solomon.

The Rule and the Cistercian Connection

The early Templars took vows much like those of a monastic order—poverty, chastity, obedience—and were assigned a rule by the abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, the powerful Cistercian statesman of monastic reform. Bernard’s De laude novae militiae (“In Praise of the New Knighthood”), written in praise of the new order around 1130, established the theological case for an order that combined the monastic life with the bearing of arms. The Rule of the Temple, a long document modeled on Cistercian usages, governed the order for the rest of its history and provided a tight, hierarchical structure of chapters, provinces, and commanderies.

The Cistercian connection gave the Templars an unusually clean line of monastic legitimacy. The order was confirmed by the Pope at the Council of Troyes in 1129, and over the next decades it received a long series of papal bulls, endowments, and privileges that exempted it from episcopal jurisdiction, granted it the right to have its own churches and cemeteries, and authorized it to receive tithes. The combination of monastic discipline and arms-bearing made the Templars a powerful tool of the Latin Church and a magnet for aristocratic piety across Western Europe.

The Order at Its Height (Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries)

Military Operations

The Templars’ military role was central to the Latin Kingdom. They participated in nearly every major campaign of the Crusader states, provided garrisons for the great castles of the Holy Land, and at the peak of their power maintained a network of commanderies stretching from the British Isles to the Levant. Their disciplined heavy cavalry became a model for European military organization, and the order’s most celebrated commanders were the stuff of contemporary legend. By the mid-thirteenth century, however, the Crusader states were shrinking, and the Templars’ military position deteriorated. The fall of Acre in 1291, the last major Crusader stronghold, was effectively the death of the Crusader Kingdom, and the Templars relocated their headquarters to Cyprus.

Financial Operations

Less well known to the general reader, but in many respects more important in the long run, was the Templars’ role as a financial institution. The order developed an early form of international banking. Pilgrims and crusaders could deposit funds at a Templar preceptory in their home country and withdraw an equivalent sum at the Holy Land, less a small fee. The order lent money to kings, sometimes against the security of crown jewels, and acted as a financial intermediary for the papacy. The Templars’ commanderies functioned as a network of early modern banks, holding deposits, making loans, and arranging transfers.

This financial sophistication, however, has sometimes been overstated in popular accounts. The Templars were not “the first bankers” in any meaningful sense, since a banking economy existed in the medieval Mediterranean long before the order was founded. They were, however, an unusually well-organized example of a monastic order operating in the credit economy, and their network laid the groundwork for the later banking houses of Florence and Lombardy.

Structure and Membership

At its height the order had perhaps 15,000 to 20,000 members, of whom only a small fraction were knights serving in the East. The bulk were chaplains, sergeants, and brother-knights who served in the order’s European commanderies. The Master of the Temple in Jerusalem sat at the apex; below him were regional commanders and a General Chapter that met annually. The order’s records include detailed rules for the care of horses, the conduct of chapters, the treatment of captured Saracens, and the management of funds. Their financial administration, surviving in part through records seized by Philip IV in 1307, is one of the most thoroughly documented medieval institutional archives.

The Fall of Acre and the Crisis of the Order (1291–1307)

The fall of Acre in May 1291 ended the Latin Kingdom and with it the order’s reason for being as a Crusading military force. The Templars relocated to Limassol in Cyprus, where they attempted to maintain a fleet and a residual military presence, but the order’s great days on the Holy Land were over. The Grand Master Theobald of Gaudelon died defending Acre, and his successors faced the difficult question of what the order was for, in a Europe that no longer offered easy prospects for a renewed Crusade.

The answer, in practice, was finance. The Templars had, by 1300, become a largely financial order, holding substantial deposits, lending to kings, and managing estates in every Christian kingdom. This made them fabulously wealthy and correspondingly tempting as a target.

Philip IV, Clement V, and the Suppression

The French Crown’s Need for Money

Philip IV of France—“Philip the Fair”—was a French king in chronic financial trouble. His wars with England and Flanders had emptied his treasury, and his conflicts with Pope Boniface VIII had weakened his standing with the papacy. Clement V, the Avignon pope of French influence, was politically aligned with the French crown. A coordinated attack on the Templars, who were among the largest holders of French aristocratic deposits, would serve multiple purposes: it would replenish Philip’s treasury, eliminate a powerful independent military-religious order, and consolidate French influence over the Church.

The Friday the 13th Arrests

On Friday, October 13, 1307, Philip’s officers moved simultaneously against the Templars across France, arresting Grand Master Jacques de Molay, the visiting dignitaries of the order, and a great many French Templars. The charge, publicized in advance by Philip’s chancery, included heresy, apostasy, sodomy, idol worship, and a host of related crimes. The simultaneous nature of the arrests took the order by surprise; the lack of a coordinating signal to other kings meant that the suppression was initially a French action, to which the papacy was forced to respond.

The Papal Process

Clement V, caught off-guard by the French action, attempted to take over the process in 1308 by issuing the bull Faciens misericordiam and convening a council at Vienne. The subsequent inquiry produced a mass of testimony, much of it extracted under torture. The standard charges against the Templars—that they denied Christ, that they spat on the crucifix at initiation, that they worshipped an idol called Baphomet, that they engaged in obscene kissing rituals—are well-attested in the trial records, but the question of how literally to take them has been debated by historians for centuries. Modern scholarship tends to read them as a mixture of malicious fabrication, political pressure, and confessions produced under duress. The Baphomet myth is examined in detail elsewhere.

The Council of Vienne and the Dissolution

The Council of Vienne met in 1311–1312. Clement V issued the bull Vox in excelsis on March 22, 1312, suppressing the order and transferring its assets to the Knights Hospitaller, who were charged with continuing the Templars’ work in the Holy Land. In practice, much of the Templars’ French property was retained by the crown; the Hospitaller inheritance was a smaller share than originally promised.

The Burning of Jacques de Molay

In March 1314, the aged Grand Master Jacques de Molay and the Preceptor of Normandy, Geoffrey de Charney, were burned at the stake on a small island in the Seine near the royal palace. The tradition that de Molay, while burning, summoned Philip and Clement to meet him before God’s tribunal within a year, and that both died within twelve months (Clement in April 1314, Philip in November 1314), is one of the most durable of the medieval curses attributed to a public figure. The dramatic end of de Molay has done a great deal to fix the popular image of the Templars as innocent victims of royal greed, and the related myths of a Templar treasure hidden in Templar churches across Europe are treated in Knights Templar myths debunked.

The Legend of Survival

The Larmenius Charter Hoax

Almost from the moment of the suppression, stories circulated that the Templars had survived in secret. The most famous document supporting such a claim is the so-called Larmenius Charter, said to be a transmission-of-authority document in which the last Grand Master passed the order’s leadership to a successor, Johannes Marcus Larmenius, in 1324. The charter is almost certainly a fabrication of the early eighteenth century, produced in a context in which Jacobite and Catholic Europeans were interested in the legend of a hidden Templar succession. The charter’s existence, however, illustrates the persistent belief that the order did not die in 1314.

From Survival Myth to Masonic Legend

The transition of the Templars from a historical order to a Masonic one is one of the most consequential myth-making episodes in Western fraternal history. Early modern Freemasons, like the eighteenth-century antiquaries who reconstructed chivalric orders and Templar romance, were drawn to the dramatic story of the order’s suppression. By the mid-eighteenth century, degrees dramatizing the Templar legend had been incorporated into the higher grades of French and Scottish Freemasonry. The “Knight Templar” degree of the York Rite, the various “Kadosh” or “Templar” degrees of the Scottish Rite, and the Continental Rectified Scottish Rite all draw on the Templar mythos. The Masonic Order of the Temple has, since 1813, been an exclusively Christian order, and its rituals make the legend of Jacques de Molay central. The modern chivalric orders of the United Grand Lodge of England are descended from these Masonic developments rather than from the medieval order.

The Templars in Modern Western Imagination

Romantic, Novelistic, and Esoteric Uses

The Templars have been a central fixture of Western esoteric and romantic literature from the late eighteenth century onward. Voltaire, Goethe, and the Romantic historians all worked with the Templar material. The nineteenth-century occultist revival—Josephin Péladan, Stanislas de Guaita, the Theosophical Society, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and the offshoots of the Rosicrucian tradition—made the Templars a stock character of esoteric Western fantasy. Theosophical and Hermetic orders that incorporated Templar symbolism are discussed in Hermetic orders and Theosophy and in the broader account of esoteric traditions and mystical orders.

Conspiracy Theories

The Templars are also a fixture of modern conspiracy theory. A long tradition of twentieth-century writing has linked the Templars to the Freemasons, to alleged secret survivors, to the alleged concealment of religious objects in Templar churches across Europe, to a supposed guarding of the Holy Grail, and to the alleged discovery of the Ark of the Covenant. These claims are addressed in detail in Knights Templar myths debunked, and the broader pattern of which they are a part is surveyed in conspiracy theories and hidden power.

The Templar Order in Comparative Perspective

The Templars were one of several military orders in the medieval West. The Knights Hospitaller (later Knights of Malta) were the Templars’ closest analog, with a similar monastic-military rule and a similar network of commanderies. The Teutonic Knights were a German parallel that became a sovereign power in the Baltic. The Livonian Brothers of the Sword, the Order of Santiago, the Order of Calatrava, and the Order of the Holy Sepulchre are other examples of the same broad movement. The fall of the Templars was unusual; the other orders largely survived into the early modern period and gradually transformed into chivalric orders of honor. The Templars’ suppression was, in fact, the only major dissolution of a military order by the papacy, and it was a function of the specific political crisis of Philip IV and Clement V.

The Templars and the History of Western Fraternalism

For the history of fraternalism, the Templars are significant for three reasons. First, they are a model of the international religious brotherhood, with a Grand Master, a rule, an oath, a system of commanderies, and an explicit ideology of brotherhood-in-arms. Second, they are a major source of the symbolic vocabulary of later fraternal orders: the white mantle, the red cross, the closed chapter, the dramatic initiatory ritual, the fraternal kiss of peace. Third, the story of the order’s fall—its sudden suppression, the charges of heresy and obscene conduct, the dramatic execution of the last Grand Master—has become the fraternal order’s archetypal myth of persecution and survival, a story that resonates with the experience of fraternal orders in many later political contexts, from revolutionary France to Nazi Germany to McCarthyite America. The persistence of this mythos in modern fraternalism is one of the most striking continuities between medieval and modern Western fraternal traditions.

Sources and Further Reading

The standard scholarly references are Malcolm Barber, The New Knighthood: A History of the Order of the Temple (1994) and The Trial of the Templars (1978); Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Knights of St John in Jerusalem and Cyprus, c.1050–1310 (1967) for the Hospitallers as the comparative order; and the modern popular synthesis by Dan Jones, The Templars (2017). The trial records themselves are published in Jules Michelet, ed., Le Procès des Templiers (1841–1851), available in the 2007 reprint. The financial operations of the order are treated in Jonathan Riley-Smith, “Were the Templars Faulty Bankers?” in The Experience of Crusading (2003), and by John H. Pryor in the same volume.

The Knights Templar myths debunked long-tail page addresses the most popular errors. The medieval secret societies, Freemasonry explained, fraternal orders and lodges, and symbols, rituals and initiation treat the surrounding context. The history of secret societies treats the larger arc.