Founding
The Knights Templar — formally the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon — were founded in Jerusalem around 1119, two decades after the First Crusade had captured the city. The founder was a French knight named Hugues de Payens, who with eight companions vowed personal poverty, chastity, and obedience and committed to the protection of Christian pilgrims travelling between the coast and the holy sites of the interior.
King Baldwin II of Jerusalem gave them quarters in the captured Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount — the supposed site of the destroyed Temple of Solomon, from which the order took its name. The founding period was extremely modest; the original nine knights had so few horses that contemporary depictions show two knights sharing one mount (a recurring Templar iconographic motif).
The order received formal papal endorsement at the Council of Troyes in January 1129, with a written Rule drafted with the assistance of Bernard of Clairvaux — the most influential Western European theologian of the 12th century. Bernard’s influential treatise De laude novae militiae (In Praise of the New Knighthood, c. 1135) provided the theological justification for the new concept of the warrior-monk and made the Templar career attractive to the European nobility. The papal bull Omne Datum Optimum (1139) exempted the order from local ecclesiastical authority and gave it the right to keep all spoils from Muslim opponents.
The financial network
The Templars became, almost accidentally, the largest international financial institution of the 12th and 13th centuries. The mechanism was the letter of credit: a pilgrim or merchant could deposit money at a Templar preceptory in Europe and withdraw the equivalent at a Templar preceptory in the Holy Land (or vice versa), with the order managing the actual currency exchange and movement. The system was secure because every Templar preceptory was a fortified compound run by armed monks under common discipline. It was profitable because the order charged a small per-transaction fee that, multiplied across the entire Mediterranean and most of Western Europe, produced enormous total revenue.
By the mid-13th century the Templars operated approximately 1,000 fortified preceptories across Western Europe and the Levant, banked for most of the senior European royal courts (the Capetian kings of France held substantial portions of the royal treasury in the Paris Temple), and managed the international cash flows of the European nobility on a scale not exceeded in Western Europe until the 16th-century Fuggers.
The military role
The Templars’ military function in the Crusader states was substantial but secondary in volume to the financial operations. They garrisoned approximately a dozen major Crusader fortresses (some of them shared with the Hospitallers). They fielded approximately 300 to 500 knights in any given Crusader campaign — a small fraction of total Crusader forces, but the most disciplined and most experienced contingent. Templar knights fought with red crosses on white surcoats. They lost most of their senior leadership at the Battle of Hattin (1187), at which Saladin personally executed the surviving Templar and Hospitaller prisoners.
After the fall of Acre in 1291 — the end of the Crusader presence in the Holy Land — the order relocated its operational headquarters to Cyprus, while continuing to operate the European banking and preceptory network from Paris.
Suppression
The destruction of the Templars in the early 14th century was driven by King Philip IV of France (Philip the Fair, reigned 1285–1314), who was substantially indebted to the order and looking for a way to repudiate the debt and seize the order’s accumulated French assets. The pretext was a heresy accusation: that Templar initiation rites involved spitting on the cross, kissing other initiates’ lips, and worshipping a mysterious idol called Baphomet.
On Friday, 13 October 1307, Philip’s officials simultaneously arrested approximately 15,000 Templars across France in a coordinated police operation. Most were tortured. Many confessed under torture to the heresies named in the royal indictment. The confessions varied wildly in detail and were almost certainly fabricated. The Friday 13th date is the conventional origin of the European cultural association of that date with bad luck.
Pope Clement V — based at the Avignon papacy and substantially controlled by Philip — initially resisted but then capitulated. Templar arrests were extended to the order’s properties in other European countries through 1308 and 1309. The pope dissolved the order by the bull Vox in excelso on 22 March 1312 at the Council of Vienne. Templar properties were transferred to the Hospitallers (with substantial portions retained by the relevant secular rulers).
The last Grand Master Jacques de Molay and the Preceptor of Normandy Geoffroi de Charney were burned at the stake on a small island in the Seine in Paris on 18 March 1314, after public retractions of their forced confessions. According to a 14th-century tradition, Molay shouted from the pyre that the king and the pope would face him at God’s judgment within a year. Pope Clement V died on 20 April 1314; King Philip IV died on 29 November 1314. The historical accuracy of the curse is uncertain.
Legacy
The Templars’ substantive institutional legacy was inherited by the Hospitallers, who continue today as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. The financial-institutional model — international letters of credit, multi-branch deposit banking — was inherited by 14th-century Italian banking families (the Bardi and Peruzzi of Florence) and is the medieval ancestor of modern commercial banking.
The Templars’ posthumous cultural reputation has been one of the most heavily mythologized in European history. Conspiracy theories from the 18th century onward have associated them variously with the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant, Freemasonry, the Priory of Sion, the Vatican gold reserves, and assorted other inventions. The historical Templars were a successful medieval religious order destroyed by political-financial pressure in the early 14th century. The cultural Templars are still being reinvented.