Editorial standards

This page sets out, in plain language, how this site is researched, written and fact-checked. The site is run by a small editorial team led by Dr. Margaret Hollis; the about page has the names and the credentials.

1. Sourcing standards

Every factual claim on this site is traceable to one of three kinds of source, in the following order of preference:

1. Primary sources. The Latin Rule of the Templars (Regula Latina); the De laude novae militiae of Bernard of Clairvaux (c. 1132–1136); William of Tyre's Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum (c. 1170s–1184) and its Continuation; the bulls Omne datum optimum (1139), Pastoralis praeminentiae (1307), Vox in Excelso (1312) and Ad providam (1312); the Chinon Parchment (17–20 August 1308, rediscovered 2001); the trial depositions in the BnF and the Vatican Secret Archives; the Gestes des Chiprois; and the standard chronicles of the period (Joinville, Ernoul, the Chronicon of William of Newburgh). Where we quote a primary source, we name it and we translate the Latin or Old French into modern English.
2. Standard modern scholarship. The principal secondary works are listed on the further reading section below. They are consulted in their most recent editions. When a scholarly consensus exists, we follow it; when it does not, we say so.
3. Specialist reference works. The Oxford Dictionary of the Crusades, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the UNESCO World Heritage pages for relevant sites, and the Vatican Secret Archives' online finding aids.

2. Fact-checking process

Every article goes through the following stages before it is published.

1. Draft. The lead editor drafts the article against the standard secondary works and against the primary sources listed above. Dates, names and quotations are checked against the printed texts.
2. Peer review. The draft is read by at least one further member of the editorial panel — a medievalist not directly involved in the article — who checks the accuracy of the historical claims and the appropriateness of the editorial voice.
3. Source audit. A member of the panel who has not previously seen the article checks that every claim that needs a citation has one, and that the citations point to the editions we actually consulted.
4. Final edit. The lead editor incorporates the reviewers' notes, signs off the article, and sets the publication and "last reviewed" dates.

3. Distinguishing the historical from the legendary

The Order of the Temple is the subject of a remarkable modern mythology — the Holy Grail, Baphomet, the surviving Order, Rosslyn Chapel, the Freemasons, the New World legends, the "Sword of Balian", and so on. We treat these legends as cultural phenomena, not as historical claims.

In practice, this means three things.

• Where a popular claim is also historically well-supported (the Order was founded in 1119, the arrests were on Friday 13 October 1307, the last Grand Master was burned in March 1314), we state it as a historical fact.
• Where a popular claim is well-attested in the historical record but the popular interpretation is wrong (the Baphomet charge, the date of the red cross, the symbolism of the Beauseant), we state the historical record and we then explain how the popular interpretation diverged from it.
• Where a popular claim has no historical basis (the Swiss flag from the Templar cross, the "Sword of Balian" as a medieval weapon, the transfer of the Templar treasure to Switzerland, the Order's connection to Freemasonry), we say so clearly. We never state a legend as if it were a historical claim, and we never state a historical claim as if it were a legend.

4. Use of artificial intelligence

We use AI tools (large language models) for two limited purposes.

1. To assist the editorial process. We use AI to help structure research notes, to identify gaps in our coverage, and to generate first drafts of repetitive boilerplate such as the cross-reference links between related articles. The substantive historical content of every article is written by a human editor.
2. To assist the user experience. We use AI in some user-facing features, such as the in-page "search" function. The features are designed to point users to the human-written articles rather than to generate text on the fly.

Every article on this site is reviewed by a human editor before it is published, and every article carries a byline. We do not publish AI-generated articles without human review, and we do not pass off AI-generated text as if it had been written by a human author without that review.

5. Update and correction policy

Every article carries a "last reviewed" date. The lead editor reviews each pillar page at least once every 18 months, and each cluster or long-tail at least once every 24 months. Articles are also re-reviewed outside the cycle when a relevant new scholarly work is published, when a reader flags a possible error, or when a substantive correction is needed.

When a correction is made, the change is documented in the article's history (visible in the Git history of the site) and the "last reviewed" date is updated. We do not silently rewrite articles.

If you spot a factual error, please email editor@knights-templar.xyz with the article URL and a citation to a reliable source. We aim to acknowledge every such message within seven days.

6. Disclaimers

This site is a reference work, not a primary source. It is intended to be useful to general readers, students and journalists. It is not a substitute for the underlying scholarship, and we do not warrant the information on the site as fit for any particular purpose.

The site's authors and editors do not endorse, and are not affiliated with, any of the modern orders of chivalry or fraternal bodies that claim descent from the medieval Templars. The Order of the Temple was suppressed in 1312 by Pope Clement V in the bull Vox in Excelso, and that suppression has never been formally reversed.

Further reading

The principal secondary works on the Templars, in their most recent editions, are:

• Malcolm Barber, The Trial of the Templars (Cambridge University Press, 1978; 2nd ed. 2006) — the standard English-language account of the trial.
• Malcolm Barber, The New Knighthood: A History of the Order of the Temple (Cambridge University Press, 1994) — the standard short history.
• Alain Demurger, Les Templiers: Une chevalerie chrétienne au Moyen Âge (Seuil, 2005; English: The Templars: A New History, 2005) — the standard French history.
• Alain Demurger, Jacques de Molay: Le dernier templier (Payot, 2002; English 2004) — the principal biography of the last Grand Master.
• Helen Nicholson, The Knights Templar: A New History (Sutton, 2001) and Templar Families (Sutton, 2019) — accessible single-volume works.
• Barbara Frale, "The Chinon Parchment", in Proceedings of the British Academy 139 (2006), and her book-length treatment, Il papato e il processo ai Templari (Viella, 2002) — the post-2001 work on the Chinon Parchment.
• Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History (3rd ed., Yale University Press, 2014) — the standard one-volume history of the Crusades.
• Peter Partner, The Murdered Magicians: The Templars and Their Myth (Oxford, 1981) — the standard critical account of the modern mythology.
• Georges Lizerand (ed.), Le Dossier de l'affaire des Templiers (Champion, 1923) — the standard printed edition of the trial documents.
• Jonathan Phillips, The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople (Penguin, 2004) and his later work on the Crusades generally.

For the Latin Rule, the standard critical edition is La Règle du Temple, ed. H. de Curzon (Paris, 1886), still in print in the Picard reprints and reproduced in facsimile by the Boydell Press and by Cambridge University Press in their Crusader Texts in Translation series. For the De laude novae militiae of Bernard, the standard critical edition is the one in Sancti Bernardi Opera, ed. J. Leclercq and H. M. Rochais (Rome, 1963).

How to contact the editorial team

By email: editor@knights-templar.xyz.

See also: about this site.