About this site

knights-templar.xyz is a long-form reference work on the history of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon — the Knights Templar — from their founding in 1119 to the burning of Jacques de Molay in 1314, and on the legend and the modern legacy that have grown up around them since.

Who writes it

The lead editor is Dr. Margaret Hollis, a medievalist with a doctorate in history from the University of St Andrews. Her doctoral work concerned the financial administration of the military orders in the Latin East, and she has published on the Hospitallers' banking operations in thirteenth-century Acre. She is the named author of the pillar pages, the biographies, and the principal trial-related articles on this site.

The site is reviewed by an editorial panel that includes two further medievalists and a specialist in the modern history of the military orders. Each article carries a byline and a "last reviewed" date, and the editorial standards page sets out our sourcing and fact-checking process in full.

What it is for

The site is intended to be useful to two main readers.

The first is the curious general reader who has heard of the Templars — perhaps through the Assassin's Creed games, or The Da Vinci Code, or the indestructible Friday-the-13th myth — and wants to know what the Order actually was. For this reader we try to keep the prose clear and the story straight, and to separate the historical record from the popular mythology at every step.

The second is the student, the journalist, or the working scholar who needs a reliable starting point and a clear set of pointers to the standard scholarship. For this reader we include direct quotations from primary sources where possible, named citations to the principal modern historians, and a "Sources & Further Reading" section on every pillar page.

What it is not

It is not an academic monograph, and we do not pretend that it is. The scholarly literature on the Templars is vast — running to several hundred monographs and several thousand articles — and no website of this length can replace it. We try to be a faithful guide to that literature, not a substitute for it.

It is also not a repository of conspiracy theory. The modern legends about the Templars — the surviving Order, the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant, the Freemasons, the "Sword of Balian" — are treated on this site as legends: as fascinating cultural artefacts in their own right, but not as historical claims. We mark the boundary clearly at every step, and we say so when a popular claim is not supported by the documentary record.

How it is kept accurate

Every article is reviewed against the standard modern scholarship before it is published. The principal works we consult are:

Malcolm Barber, The Trial of the Templars (Cambridge, 1978) and The New Knighthood (Cambridge, 1994).
Alain Demurger, Les Templiers: Une chevalerie chrétienne au Moyen Âge (Paris, 2005) and Jacques de Molay: Le dernier templier (Paris, 2002).
Helen Nicholson, The Knights Templar: A New History (Stroud, 2001).
Barbara Frale, Il papato e il processo ai Templari (Rome, 2002), with its discussion of the Chinon Parchment she rediscovered in 2001.
Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History (3rd ed., Yale, 2014).
Peter Partner, The Murdered Magicians: The Templars and Their Myth (Oxford, 1981).
Georges Lizerand (ed.), Le Dossier de l'affaire des Templiers (Paris, 1923), the standard edition of the trial documents.

For the Latin Rule, the De laude novae militiae, and the bulls Omne datum optimum and Vox in Excelso we work from the printed texts in the standard reference editions. Where we quote from a primary source in translation, we say so.

How it is updated

Each article carries a "last reviewed" date in the byline, and the editorial standards page sets out our commitment to the review cycle. Articles are re-reviewed when new scholarship appears, when readers flag a question, or when a substantive correction is needed.

Get in touch

We welcome corrections, suggestions, and leads to primary sources we may have missed. The fastest way to reach the editorial team is by email at editor@knights-templar.xyz. We aim to acknowledge every message within seven days.