Founding of the Knights Templar

After the First Crusade took Jerusalem in 1099, Latin pilgrims flocked to the holy places, but outside the walls the roads were unsafe: bandits and raiders preyed on travellers on the way up from the port of Jaffa. In 1119 Hugues de Payens, a knight from Champagne who had probably come east with his lord Count Hugh of Champagne and stayed on, proposed to King Baldwin II and the Latin patriarch Warmund a new kind of community: knights who would live like monks under religious vows, yet bear arms to protect the pilgrims. The king and the patriarch agreed — probably at the assembly of the kingdom's lords and prelates at Nablus in January 1120 — and Baldwin gave the brothers quarters in a wing of his palace, the former al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount, which the crusaders called the Temple of Solomon. Hence their name: the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon.

The beginnings were modest. The founders were a handful of knights, among them Godfrey of Saint-Omer and André de Montbard, who lived on alms; the order's seal, showing two knights riding a single horse, recalled that poverty. Their fortunes changed when André's nephew Bernard of Clairvaux, one of the leading churchmen of the age, took up their cause. At the Council of Troyes in 1129 (1128 in some accounts) the order received a rule, and Bernard's treatise In Praise of the New Knighthood defended the idea of the monk who fights. Donations of land and money poured in from all over Latin Europe, and in 1139 Pope Innocent II's bull Omne datum optimum took the Templars under papal protection, exempting them from every authority but the pope's.

From escorts the Templars soon became a standing army. Their first recorded battle was fought at Teqoa, south of Jerusalem, in 1138; they received frontier castles in the north of the Principality of Antioch and at Gaza, and their heavily armoured knights served as shock troops in the great battles of the century. Most brothers, however, were not fighters but managed estates and money across Europe, and from the mid-12th century the order issued letters of credit to pilgrims, an early form of banking. Their prominence came at a price: after Hattin in 1187 Saladin had the captured Templars and Hospitallers beheaded. The order was suppressed by Pope Clement V in 1312.