By Dr. Margaret Hollis, Lead Editor Last reviewed 13 June 2026 First published 13 June 2026 Fact-checked by Dr. Tom Marsden, Trinity College Dublin

Bernard de Clairvaux and the Templar Rule

Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), the Cistercian abbot, mystic, and one of the most influential churchmen of the twelfth century, played a central role in the early history of the Knights Templar. He championed the new Order, helped draw up its Rule, and wrote one of the most influential documents in Crusading history, the treatise De laude novae militiae — In Praise of the New Knighthood. Without Bernard’s support, the Templars would probably have remained a small, obscure brotherhood of French knights; with it, they became one of the great institutions of medieval Christendom.

This cluster page tells the story of Bernard’s relationship with the Templars. It is a companion to the biography of Hugues de Payens and to the article on the founding of the Order.

The Rise of Bernard of Clairvaux

Bernard was born in 1090, the son of a knight of the Duchy of Burgundy. As a young man, he abandoned a promising career at the court of Hugh, Count of Champagne, and entered the new Cistercian monastery of Cîteaux in 1112. In 1115, he was sent out to found a new Cistercian house, the Abbey of Clairvaux, in the County of Champagne.

From Clairvaux, Bernard quickly emerged as one of the most influential churchmen of his generation. He was a brilliant preacher, a prolific letter-writer, and a fierce defender of the new Cistercian order. He was also a man of extraordinary personal magnetism, attracting to Clairvaux some of the brightest young men of the French aristocracy.

By 1120, Bernard was already famous across Latin Christendom. He had intervened in papal politics, had served as an arbiter in major ecclesiastical disputes, and had won a reputation as a defender of orthodoxy against heresy. It was in this context that he became involved with the Templars.

Bernard and the Founding Knights

Hugues de Payens was from a noble family of Champagne, and he was a vassal of the Count of Champagne, the same lord that Bernard had served as a young man. Through this connection, Bernard and the founders of the Templar Order were old acquaintances.

In 1127, when Hugues de Payens traveled to France to seek support for the new Order, he was a guest of Hugh, Count of Champagne, and the visit was coordinated with Bernard at Clairvaux. Bernard, who had a long-standing interest in the Crusade and the Holy Land, became an immediate supporter of the Order.

It was largely through Bernard’s influence that the Council of Troyes was convened in January 1129. The Council was held at Troyes, the principal city of the County of Champagne, and it was attended by the major churchmen of the region, including the archbishops of Reims and Sens and the papal legate, Cardinal Matthew of Albano. Bernard himself was a major force at the Council.

The Council of Troyes (1129)

The Council of Troyes was the most important event in the early history of the Templars. It was at Troyes that:

The Order received a formal Rule, drawn up under Bernard’s supervision.
The Order was recognized as a religious order of the Church.
The Order was granted the right to recruit brothers throughout Latin Christendom.
The Order received papal protection, which would later be expanded by Pope Innocent II’s bull Omne datum optimum in 1139.

The Rule that was approved at Troyes was based on the Cistercian customs of Clairvaux, adapted for a community that combined monastic life with the bearing of arms. It contained 72 clauses that regulated the daily life of the brothers, including their prayer, dress, food, sleep, and discipline. The Rule. See What the Rule of the Templars Said.

The bull Omne datum optimum, issued in 1139 by Pope Innocent II, completed the legal foundation of the Order. It placed the Templars directly under papal authority, exempting them from the jurisdiction of local bishops and from the payment of tithes. This independence would later become a source of resentment.

De Laude Novae Militiae (c. 1132)

The most famous product of Bernard’s involvement with the Templars was his treatise De laude novae militiae, written around 1132. The treatise, dedicated to Hugues de Payens, is a defense of the new kind of knighthood embodied in the Templars and is one of the foundational documents of the Crusading movement.

In the De laude, Bernard argued that the Templar knight was a new kind of warrior, who had renounced the world to fight for the cause of Christ. The knight, Bernard wrote, was a “soldier of God,” who used his sword only against the enemies of Christianity. The treatise was widely read in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and became one of the most important pieces of Crusading propaganda.

The De laude is also famous for its strict discipline: Bernard explicitly condemned the knights of his day as vain, greedy, and violent, and he held up the Templars as the model of true Christian knighthood. The treatise was, in effect, a charter of the new military religious orders, and it had an enormous influence on the development of Crusading ideology.

The treatise is also famous for its symbolism. Bernard argued that the Templar knight, in putting on his belt, took on the breastplate of righteousness; in putting on his shoes, he was prepared to walk in the path of the Gospel of peace; in his sword, he bore the Word of God. The De laude is examined in detail in The Templar Cross and Mantle and in The Meaning of Beauseant.

The 1138 Mediation at Chartres

In 1138, Count Geoffrey of Anjou invaded Normandy and was on a collision course with the forces of Theobald, Count of Champagne, the principal lay patron of the Templars in northern France. Bernard of Clairvaux, who had long-standing relationships with both men, intervened personally to prevent a battle. He met the two sides at Chartres and used his authority to negotiate a truce. The episode is recorded in Bernard’s letters and in the Vita Prima of St Bernard.

The incident is sometimes loosely called the “Battle of the Standard” in popular literature, but the actual Battle of the Standard was a separate engagement — at Northallerton, Yorkshire, on 22 August 1138, between King Stephen of England and King David I of Scotland. The two events are often conflated; the correct account is that Bernard’s intervention at Chartres ended the Angevin–Champagne crisis without a battle.

The Templar connection is through Theobald of Champagne, the Order’s principal patron in northern France. The story illustrates the close relationship between the Order, the Cistercians, and the noble families of Champagne in the early years of the Order.

Bernard and the Second Crusade (1147–1149)

In 1145, Pope Eugenius III, a former Cistercian monk and a former student of Bernard, called for a new Crusade, the Second Crusade, in response to the fall of Edessa to the Muslim leader Imad al-Din Zengi. The Pope asked Bernard to preach the Crusade, and Bernard did so with great enthusiasm, traveling across France and Germany and winning recruits by the thousands.

The Second Crusade ended in disaster. The army of the French king Louis VII and the German king Conrad III was badly beaten in Asia Minor, and the joint French-German army in the Holy Land failed to capture Damascus. The failure of the Crusade was a serious blow to Bernard’s reputation, and he died in 1153 with the disillusionment of the Second Crusade still heavy on his mind.

The Templars, however, were deeply involved in the Second Crusade, and the disaster reinforced the Order’s military role in the East. The story of the Templars in the Crusades. See The Knights Templar in the Holy Land.

Bernard’s Death and Legacy

Bernard died on August 20, 1153, at the Abbey of Clairvaux. He was canonized in 1174 by Pope Alexander III, and he became one of the most famous saints of the Catholic Church, the Doctor Mellifluus — the “Honey-Sweet Doctor.”

Bernard’s relationship with the Templars was, in many ways, the foundation of the Order’s later greatness. He had given the Order its Rule, had written its charter in the De laude, and had helped recruit its early members. The Order venerated him as its patron and protector, and his feast day (20 August) was celebrated in the Order’s liturgical calendar. In a 19th-century legend, Bernard was even said to have been a Templar himself, although this is not historically accurate — he remained a Cistercian monk throughout his life.

For more on the modern mythology of the Order, see Templar Mythology, Symbolism and Hidden Knowledge.

From the primary source

“De laude autem militie que dicitur Templi, diligentiam scribendi impendere non aspernor, quia satis mirabilis et satis omnibus infidelibus et paganis formidolosa est, satisque toti mundo et in omni eventu prosperitatis et aduersitatis sue sub fide Christiani nominis et Religione conspicua, et non immerito, sicuti arbitror, adhuc in primordio nascentis ecclesie sudasse, … vestra autem, o milites, et illorum similium defensio, … non minus uestigia magis uehementer premit, in quantum uim non minus armatam in manibus portat, quam subintrat loricam pectori. Sane hostes Christi uestro mucrone transfodiuntur, sed amici Christi uestra protectione muniuntur.”

(“Now, the labour of writing a treatise in praise of the so-called military order of the Temple I do not refuse, because the order is sufficiently marvellous, and fills the infidels and pagans with a wholesome terror, and shines forth conspicuously throughout the world under the name and religion of Christ, in every event of its prosperity and adversity, having — as I judge, not undeservedly — sweated even in the first days of the infant Church … The defence, then, of you knights, and of such as you, … is no less potent to smite down, because the violence which you bear in your hands is no less than that which you inflict with the whole breast under the breastplate. The enemies of Christ are run through by your sword, but the friends of Christ are protected by your arms.”)

— Bernard of Clairvaux, De laude novae militiae (c. 1132–1136), ch. 1, trans. by the editorial team from the critical text in J. Leclercq and H. M. Rochais (eds), Sancti Bernardi Opera, vol. III (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1963), pp. 213–225, and the English translation in Conrad Greenia (trans.), In Praise of the New Knighthood (Cistercian Publications, 2000).

Sources & Further Reading

The standard modern work on Bernard and the Templars is Jean Leclercq, Saint Bernard et les Templiers (in Recueil d’études sur saint Bernard et son temps, vol. II, Rome, 1953). The principal modern English biography of Bernard is Brian Patrick McGuire, Bernard of Clairvaux: A New Assessment (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2016). The standard modern edition of Bernard’s works is Jean Leclercq and H. M. Rochais (eds), Sancti Bernardi Opera (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 8 vols, 1957–1998).

For the De laude, see the English translations in Conrad Greenia (trans.), In Praise of the New Knighthood (Cistercian Publications, 2000) and the older Robert T. Meyer (trans.) in The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux, vol. VII (Cistercian Publications, 1974). For the controversial modern reading of the De laude as a charter of violence, see R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society (Oxford, 1987; 2nd ed. 2007), and the responses in J. M. Powell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Cistercians (CUP, 2013).