By Dr. Margaret Hollis, Lead Editor Last reviewed 13 June 2026 First published 13 June 2026 Fact-checked by Dr. Niamh O'Donnell, Maynooth University

The Founding of the Knights Templar

The Knights Templar were founded in 1119 in the city of Jerusalem, in the years immediately after the First Crusade. The story of the Order’s founding has been told and retold for nine centuries, and although many of the details remain obscure or contested, the basic shape of the story is well established by contemporary sources.

This cluster page tells the story of the founding of the Order. It complements the complete history of the Templars, the biography of Hugues de Payens, and the biography of Bernard de Clairvaux.

The World After the First Crusade

The Order was born out of the First Crusade (1096–1099), the great Latin Christian expedition to recover the Holy Land. The Crusade, called by Pope Urban II at Clermont in 1095, was an extraordinary enterprise in which armies of knights and pilgrims marched across Europe and Asia Minor, captured Antioch in 1098, and finally took Jerusalem in a bloody assault in July 1099.

After the capture of the city, the Crusaders established the Kingdom of Jerusalem and several smaller Crusader states in the Levant. The Latin Christian population was, however, tiny compared to the surrounding Muslim majority, and the new states were highly vulnerable. The most pressing practical problem was the security of the pilgrims who streamed to the Holy Land by the thousands each year.

Pilgrims arrived by sea at one of the Levantine ports — usually Jaffa, Acre, or Tyre — and then traveled inland to the holy sites. The roads were long, the terrain difficult, and the countryside full of bandits, both Christian and Muslim. Many pilgrims were robbed or killed. The kings of Jerusalem were well aware of the problem but lacked the resources to provide constant protection.

It was into this situation that the Templars were born.

The Founder: Hugues de Payens

The Order’s founder was a French knight named Hugues de Payens (c. 1070–1136). Hugues came from the small town of Payens in the County of Troyes in the County of Champagne, a region famous for its great religious houses, including the abbey of Molesme and, after 1115, the abbey of Clairvaux founded by Bernard. He was a minor lord of modest means, but he had powerful connections: he was related to several of the great noble families of France, and he had been a household knight of the Count of Champagne.

Hugues had gone to the Holy Land with the Crusade of 1101, one of the smaller follow-up expeditions to the First Crusade, and had stayed in the Latin East. By 1114 he was already in Jerusalem, where he may have been serving at the court of King Baldwin I.

For a full biography of Hugues, see Who Was Hugues de Payens?.

The Founding Event (1119)

According to the chronicler William of Tyre (c. 1130–1186), the future chancellor of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, in 1119 the French knight Hugues de Payens approached King Baldwin II of Jerusalem with a proposal. Together with a small band of relatives and friends, he offered to form a small religious community dedicated to protecting pilgrims on the dangerous roads of the Holy Land. The king, who had no military resources to spare, agreed.

The exact number of the founding brothers is unclear. William of Tyre, writing in the 1170s, says there were nine of them. Some later sources say eight or seven. The most common traditional list identifies the founders as:

Hugues de Payens (the first Grand Master)
Geoffroi de Saint-Omer
Payen de Montdidier
Archambaud de Saint-Aignan
André de Montbard (Bernard of Clairvaux’s uncle)
Geoffroi Bisol
Roral
Gondemare
Nivard de Montier

The first eight, including Hugues, were knights. The ninth, Nivard, was a chaplain. The list is first recorded in a thirteenth-century source, and the precise composition has been debated by modern historians.

The Temple Mount Headquarters

The new Order was given quarters on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Specifically, the king gave them the former royal palace that stood on the south side of the Temple platform, near the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The brothers, in the words of one chronicler, “lived in poverty and austerity, eating frugally, drinking sparingly, dwelling in common.”

It was from this association with the Temple Mount that the Order eventually took its famous name. At first, the brothers were called the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ, but they quickly became known as the Knights of the Temple, and finally, simply, the Templars. The Order’s formal Latin name — Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Salomonici — the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon — would only be established later, in the bull Omne datum optimum of 1139.

The connection with Solomon’s Temple gave the Order a powerful symbolic association. Medieval Christians believed that the remains of Solomon’s Temple lay underneath the royal palace, and the Order’s quarters on the Temple Mount were identified in the medieval imagination with the throne of Solomon and with the Ark of the Covenant itself. This association would later fuel an enormous mythology of secret knowledge, examined in Templar Mythology, Symbolism and Hidden Knowledge.

For more on the Temple Mount and its Templar sites, see Templar Sites in Jerusalem.

The Early Years (1119–1129)

For nearly a decade after the founding, the Templars remained a small, obscure community. They were a tiny brotherhood living on the Temple Mount, with little money, no estates in the West, and no formal rule. The brothers were personally devoted, but they lacked the resources to do more than assist the king’s forces in small ways.

Two important events changed the Order’s fortunes. The first was the visit of Hugues de Payens to Europe in 1127. Hugues traveled to France and England to seek support and recruits, and he returned with several new members and significant donations. The second was the Council of Troyes of 1129, at which the Order received a formal Rule and was recognized by the papacy.

The Council of Troyes (1129)

The most important event in the early history of the Order was the Council of Troyes, convened in January 1129 at the cathedral of Troyes in northern France. The Council was presided over by the papal legate Cardinal Matthew of Albano, and it was attended by the archbishops of Reims and Sens and by the great abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, who had been a major champion of the Order.

At Troyes, the Council:

Approved a Rule for the Order, drawn up under Bernard’s supervision. The Rule was based on the Cistercian customs of Clairvaux, adapted for a community that combined monastic life with the bearing of arms.
Formally recognized the Order as a religious order of the Church.
Granted the Order the protection of the Church and authorized it to recruit brothers throughout Latin Christendom.

The Council of Troyes was, in effect, the Order’s official founding as a major institution of Western Christendom. From this point, the Templars began to grow rapidly, with donations pouring in from nobles, kings, and prelates across Europe. The Council is examined in detail in the cluster page on Bernard de Clairvaux and the Templar Rule.

The Bull Omne Datum Optimum (1139)

The Order’s privileges were further expanded in 1139, when Pope Innocent II issued the bull Omne datum optimum. The bull placed the Order directly under papal authority, exempting it from the jurisdiction of local bishops and from the payment of tithes. The bull also authorized the Order to keep its own chapels, to receive donations, and to build its own churches.

The bull made the Templars a kind of international monastic corporation, with privileges that no other order in Christendom enjoyed. This independence from local ecclesiastical authority would later become a source of resentment and would, in part, lead to the dramatic conflict of 1307. The story. See The Trial and Suppression of the Knights Templar.

The Symbolism of the Founding

The founding of the Templars was quickly invested with a powerful symbolic meaning. The Order was the guardian of pilgrims, the protector of the holy places, the inheritor of the Temple of Solomon. The early chroniclers compared the knights to the maccabees of the Old Testament, who had fought to purify the Temple of Jerusalem.

In the De laude novae militiae — the In Praise of the New Knighthood — a treatise written by Bernard of Clairvaux in support of the Order, 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 treatise became one of the most influential pieces of Crusading literature and. See The Templar Cross and Mantle.

Conclusion

The founding of the Knights Templar in 1119 was a small event with enormous consequences. A handful of French knights, gathered in a corner of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, would within two centuries become one of the most powerful institutions in Christendom. Their Order would be dissolved, their Grand Master burned, and their memory transformed into one of the most powerful myths of Western culture. The story of that transformation is told in The Trial and Suppression of the Knights Templar and in Templar Mythology, Symbolism and Hidden Knowledge.