By Dr. Margaret Hollis, Lead Editor Last reviewed 13 June 2026 First published 13 June 2026 Fact-checked by Dr. Helen Whitfield, Cardiff University

The Knights Templar: A Complete History

The Knights Templar are the most famous military religious order of the Middle Ages. Founded in 1119, they grew within two centuries into one of the most powerful institutions in Christendom — commanding armies in the Holy Land, managing an early international banking system, and holding vast estates across Europe and the Levant. Their sudden arrest in 1307, the spectacular trial that followed, and the burning of their last Grand Master in 1314 have ensured that, eight centuries later, the Order still exerts a powerful grip on the popular imagination.

Key takeaways

The Order of the Temple was founded in 1119 by Hugues de Payens and a small band of French knights, to protect pilgrims on the roads of the Holy Land. The Order took its name from quarters on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
The Order was formally recognised at the Council of Troyes in January 1129, with a Rule drawn up under Bernard of Clairvaux. Pope Innocent II’s bull Omne datum optimum (1139) placed the Order directly under papal authority.
For most of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Templars were a Levantine military force. They fought in the major Crusader battles — Hattin (1187), La Forbie (1244), and the fall of Acre (1291) — and maintained a network of castles and preceptories across the Latin East and the West.
The Order was suppressed by Pope Clement V in the bull Vox in Excelso (22 March 1312), not by a heresy conviction but by a special apostolic decree. The last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, was burned at the stake on 18 March 1314.

This page offers a complete, chronological history of the Order of the Temple, weaving together its military, religious, political, and economic story. From the small band of French knights who pledged to protect pilgrims on the roads of Jerusalem, to the international order brought down by a king and a pope, the rise and fall of the Templars is one of the defining stories of the medieval world.

A Note on Naming

The Order has been known by many names. In Latin, it was the Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Salomonici — the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon. This is why they are usually called the Knights Templar, the Order of the Temple, or simply the Templars. Their distinctive white mantle with the red cross earned them the popular nickname milites Christi — the soldiers of Christ. The symbolism of the white mantle and the famous red cross is examined in The Templar Cross and Mantle.

The World in Which the Templars Were Born

The Order was born from one of the most extraordinary upheavals of the medieval world: the Crusades. In 1099, after three years of march, siege, and massacre, the armies of the First Crusade captured Jerusalem and established the Kingdom of Jerusalem and several smaller Crusader states in the Levant. For the first time in centuries, Latin Christians ruled the holy places of the East.

The new territories, however, were precarious. They were surrounded by hostile Muslim powers, poorly defended, and located at the far end of long and dangerous supply lines. The most pressing problem of the early Kingdom of Jerusalem was the safety of the pilgrims who streamed to the Holy Land by the thousands each year, eager to venerate the sites of Christ’s life. Many of these pilgrims were robbed, beaten, or killed on the road from the coastal ports to the holy sites inland.

It was to address this specific problem that the Templars were founded.

The Founding of the Order (1119)

According to the chronicler William of Tyre, in 1119, a French knight named Hugues de Payens approached King Baldwin II of Jerusalem with a proposal. Together with a small band of relatives and friends — most sources give the number as eight or nine — he offered to form a small religious order dedicated to protecting pilgrims on the roads of the Holy Land. The king agreed and housed the new brotherhood in a wing of the royal palace, which tradition identified with the site of the former Temple of Solomon.

It is from this association that the Order would take its name. The knights who took up quarters in the Temple Mount were known as the “Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ,” but they quickly became famous across Latin Christendom as the “Knights of the Temple,” and finally, simply, as the Templars. The full story of these early years is told in our article on The Founding of the Order and in the biography of Hugues de Payens.

The Council of Troyes (1129)

For nearly a decade the new Order remained small and obscure. That changed dramatically in 1129, when Hugues de Payens traveled to France and presented himself to Bernard of Clairvaux, the most influential churchman of his generation. Bernard agreed to champion the Order, and with his support, the Council of Troyes was convened in January 1129.

At Troyes, the bishops and abbots gathered there approved a rule for the Order drawn up under Bernard’s guidance. This Rule of the Templars was based on the Cistercian customs of Bernard’s own monastery, adapted to a community that combined monastic life with the bearing of arms. The Order was placed directly under the authority of the Pope, an unusual privilege that freed it from the jurisdiction of local bishops and helped it grow rapidly. The relationship between the Order and the great Cistercian abbot is explored in Bernard de Clairvaux and the Templar Rule.

The Latin Rule

The Rule of the Templars eventually developed into a complex legal code known as the Latin Rule (Regula Latina), with over 600 clauses regulating every aspect of the knights’ lives: how they prayed, how they ate, how they fought, how they were punished. The Rule is one of the most important primary sources for the early history of the Order, and an article on what the Rule actually said is included in this site.

Growth Across Christendom

The Council of Troyes was the launching pad for the Templars’ extraordinary expansion. Across Europe, donations of land, money, and men poured in. Within a generation, the Order held hundreds of preceptories — local houses that served as administrative, agricultural, and recruiting centers — and a network of estates that stretched from Portugal to Hungary and from Scotland to the Holy Land. The political and economic power that came from this network made the Templars one of the wealthiest institutions in medieval Europe, second perhaps only to the papacy itself.

Their growth was so rapid, and their privileges so generous, that other institutions occasionally grew jealous. The most famous rivalry was with the Knights Hospitaller, the other great military order of the Crusades. The two Orders competed for donations, territory, and royal favor for two centuries. The differences and similarities between the two Orders are explored in Templars vs. Hospitallers.

The Templars in the Holy Land

For most of the twelfth century, the Templars were primarily a Levantine military force. Their principal headquarters in the East was on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, which they shared with the Hospitallers until 1187, when the city fell to Saladin. They were a constant presence on the frontier, garrisoning castles such as Gaston, Safed, and Jacob’s Ford, and fighting in most of the major campaigns of the Crusader states.

Major Battles

The Templars fought in almost every major battle of the Crusades in the East. Some of the most famous include:

The Battle of Hattin (1187), the catastrophic Crusader defeat that led to the fall of Jerusalem. The Templars fought to the end in the fighting around the True Cross. To learn more, see The Battle of Hattin and The Fall of Acre 1291.
The Battle of La Forbie (1244), another devastating defeat in which the Order suffered heavy losses and lost its Grand Master, Armand de Périgord.
The Siege of Acre (1291), the final great battle of the Crusades in the Holy Land, in which the last Templar strongholds fell to the Mamluks. The Order’s headquarters moved briefly to Cyprus.

Their role in the Crusades is examined in greater detail in our pillar page on The Knights Templar in the Holy Land.

A Pan-European Organization

Although their military fame was forged in the East, the Templars were always a pan-European institution. By the mid-thirteenth century, the Order held lands in nearly every Christian kingdom of Latin Europe. The Grand Master, seated in Acre and later in Cyprus, ruled the Order with the help of a complex hierarchy of provincial commanders. The regional divisions of the Order included the Kingdom of France, the Kingdom of England, the Kingdom of Aragon, the Kingdom of Portugal, the Kingdom of Castile, the Kingdom of Germany, the Kingdom of Italy, and the Kingdom of Hungary.

The economic heart of the Order, however, lay in the West, not the East. Through their extensive landholdings and network of preceptories, the Templars developed an early version of international banking. Pilgrims and nobles could deposit money at a Templar house in Paris and withdraw the equivalent in Jerusalem, less a small commission. Kings borrowed from the Templars, as did the pope. The story of this remarkable financial system is told in Templar Banking and the Temple in London.

The Templars in Iberia

While the Order was being built up, it also became deeply involved in the Reconquista, the centuries-long campaign by the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula to retake territory from the Muslim states of al-Andalus. Templars fought in Portugal, Aragon, and Castile, and received extensive grants of land and privileges in return. When the Order was suppressed in 1312, the Portuguese branch simply transformed itself into a new order, the Order of Christ, which continued to function for centuries and which played a central role in the Age of Discovery. The full story of this remarkable transformation is told in The Order of Christ in Portugal.

The Twilight of the Crusades

By the late thirteenth century, the Crusader states in the Levant were reduced to a single city, Acre, surrounded by hostile powers and increasingly dependent on Italian merchant fleets for survival. In 1291, Acre fell to the Mamluk Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil. The Templars evacuated to Cyprus, but their military role in the East was effectively over. The Order was now a wealthy, prestigious, and well-connected institution without an obvious purpose.

This political vacuum would be fatal.

Philip IV and the Fall of the Templars

The destruction of the Order was the work of two men: King Philip IV of France and Pope Clement V. Philip, a king chronically short of money, deeply in debt to the Templars, and locked in a struggle with the papacy, saw the destruction of the Order as a way to seize its French assets and a way to break the power of a powerful independent institution within his kingdom. The detailed story is told in our pillar page on The Trial and Suppression of the Knights Templar and in the biographies of Jacques de Molay and Philip IV of France.

The Arrests of 1307

On the morning of Friday, October 13, 1307, royal officers acting on sealed letters that had been sent out weeks earlier moved simultaneously against every Templar house in France. The Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, was seized in Paris. Hundreds of brothers, including preceptors, chaplains, and serving knights, were arrested and imprisoned. The charge was heresy.

The story of that day is explored in Friday the 13th: The Templar Connection.

The Trials

The trials that followed were long, complex, and uneven. Under torture, many Templars confessed to a range of obscene and heretical practices: spitting on the cross, denying Christ, worshipping a head called Baphomet, and obscene kisses at the ceremony of initiation. When the torture stopped, however, most of the brothers retracted their confessions.

The proceedings were complicated by the struggle between Philip and Pope Clement V, who wanted the trial to be conducted by the Church, not the crown. Eventually, the papacy set up its own inquiries, including the famous Chinon Parchment of August 1308, in which Clement personally absolved the leading Templars of the charge of heresy. To read more about this remarkable document, see The Chinon Parchment.

The Council of Vienne (1312)

The political solution was the Council of Vienne, held in 1311–1312. In March 1312, Clement issued the bull Vox in Excelso, suppressing the Order, not for heresy, but because its very existence had become a scandal and a danger to the Church. The full text and meaning of this bull is examined in The Papal Suppression: Vox in Excelso and in What the Council of Vienne Decided.

The Burning of Jacques de Molay (1314)

In March 1314, Jacques de Molay and Geoffroi de Charney, Preceptor of Normandy, were burned at the stake on a small islet in the Seine just downstream of the royal palace, near the present Square du Vert-Galant — sometimes called the île aux Juifs in contemporary chronicles, and now absorbed into the riverbank. According to legend, de Molay, while the flames were rising, summoned both Philip and Clement to appear before the judgment of God within the year. Clement died within a month; Philip within seven months. The prophecy of the last Grand Master has echoed through eight centuries of Templar legend. The full story is in The Trial of Jacques de Molay.

What Happened to the Templars’ Wealth and Lands?

The suppression of the Order transferred its assets, by the bull Vox in Excelso and the related bull Ad providam, to the Knights Hospitaller. In practice, however, much of the Templars’ wealth was seized by the very kings who had brought them down. In France, the bulk of the Templars’ lands were simply confiscated by the crown. In England, the crown also kept a substantial share, although some lands did pass to the Hospitallers. The question of what happened to the legendary Templar treasure is one of the most enduring myths of the Order, and is examined in What Happened to Templar Treasure?.

The Myth of the Surviving Templars

Almost as soon as the last Grand Master had been burned, legends began to circulate that the Order had survived in secret. Stories of hidden treasure, of brothers who had escaped to Scotland or to Switzerland, of mysterious ceremonies in underground chapels, appeared in pamphlets and chronicles within a few years of the suppression.

These legends grew through the centuries and merged with other traditions, including the legends of the Holy Grail, of Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, and of the Freemasons. The full story is told in our pillar page on Templar Mythology, Symbolism and Hidden Knowledge.

The Modern Legacy

Today, the Templars are remembered in very different ways. For historians, they are one of the most important institutions of the High Middle Ages: a prototype of an international military order, a pioneer of international finance, and a key player in two centuries of Crusading history. For popular culture, they are the mysterious warrior-monks of countless novels, films, and video games, from Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and the video game Assassin’s Creed. For some modern organizations, including several orders of chivalry that claim direct descent from the medieval Order, the Templars remain a living tradition.

The modern legacy is explored in our pillar page on The Modern Legacy of the Knights Templar.

Major Sites Associated with the Templars

Many sites across Europe and the Middle East preserve the memory of the Order. Some of the most important include:

Temple Mount, Jerusalem: the original headquarters of the Order. The Templars took their name from this site. See Templar Sites in Jerusalem.
Temple Church, London: the principal Templar church in England, still standing in the heart of the City of London. See Temple Church in London.
Tomar, Portugal: home of the Convent of Christ, the headquarters of the Order of Christ that succeeded the Templars in Portugal. See The Order of Christ in Portugal.
Tours and Metz, France: important early Templar houses.
Rosslyn Chapel, Scotland: a late medieval chapel built by the Sinclair family with strong Templar associations. See Rosslyn Chapel and the Sinclair Connection.
Cyprus: the Order’s last Levantine headquarters, with remains at Limassol and elsewhere.

From the primary sources

“A new kind of knighthood has appeared on the earth, and, fittingly, in the very place where our Lord first appeared in the flesh … [The Templar] is at once a monk and a soldier … He wears the white mantle, in sign of the purity of his life, and the red cross, in sign of the blood he is ready to shed for Christ.”

— Bernard of Clairvaux, De laude novae militiae (c. 1132–1136), trans. by the editorial team from the critical edition in Sancti Bernardi Opera, ed. J. Leclercq & H. M. Rochais (Rome, 1963), vol. III, pp. 213–225.

“We, having considered, with mature deliberation, the said charges and confessions, and also the denials of the said brethren, and everything else which ought to be considered, do absolve the said Master and brethren, both individually and collectively, from the aforesaid charges of heresy, on the form and conditions contained in the letters patent made in this behalf.”

— Pope Clement V, the Chinon Parchment, 17–20 August 1308 (Vatican Secret Archives, A.A. Arm. D 208), rediscovered by Barbara Frale in 2001, trans. by the editorial team from the printed edition in Il papato e il processo ai Templari (Rome: Viella, 2002), pp. 118–119.

“We suppress … not by way of definitive sentence, but by way of apostolic provision, the said Order of the Temple, and its name, and its habit … and we ordain that the goods of the said Order … shall be transferred to the Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem.”

— Pope Clement V, the bull Vox in Excelso, 22 March 1312, trans. by the editorial team from the printed edition in J. D. Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio (Venice, 1784), vol. XXV, cols. 369–371.

Sources & Further Reading

For scholars and serious readers, the standard modern works on the Order are:

Malcolm Barber, The New Knighthood: A History of the Order of the Temple (Cambridge, 1994) and The Trial of the Templars (Cambridge, 1978) — the standard Anglophone scholarship.
Alain Demurger, Les Templiers: Une chevalerie chrétienne au Moyen Âge (Paris, 2005; English: The Templars: A New History, 2005) and Jacques de Molay: Le dernier templier (Paris, 2002) — the standard French scholarship.
Helen Nicholson, The Knights Templar: A New History (Stroud, 2001) and Templar Families (Stroud, 2019) — the most accessible recent single-volume treatment.
Barbara Frale, The Chinon Parchment: The Absolution of the Templars (in Italian, 2001; English 2009) — the Italian scholar who rediscovered the Chinon Parchment in the Vatican Secret Archives in 2001.
Régine Pernoud (on Joan of Arc and medieval women, with a chapter on the Templars), The Templars (Kensington, 2002).
Peter Partner, The Murdered Magicians: The Templars and Their Myth (Oxford, 1981) — the standard critical book on the modern mythology.
Georges Lizerand (ed.), Le Dossier de l’affaire des Templiers (Paris, 1923) — the standard modern edition of the trial documents.