By Dr. Margaret Hollis, Lead Editor Last reviewed 13 June 2026 First published 13 June 2026 Fact-checked by Dr. Sofia Carretta, Università di Bologna

The Knights Templar in the Holy Land

The Knights Templar were, above all else, a Levantine military order. They were founded to protect pilgrims in the Latin East, and they spent the next two centuries fighting on the frontiers of the Crusader states, garrisoning the great castles of the Latin Kingdom, and dying in the long series of wars known as the Crusades. Although the Order became famous for its European estates and its banking system, its heart was always in the Holy Land.

Key takeaways

The Templars were founded in 1119 on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and were recognised at the Council of Troyes in 1129. From the start, the Order was principally a Levantine military force.
The Order’s network of castles — Gaston, Safed, Jacob’s Ford, and others — was the backbone of the Crusader frontier. The Order suffered a catastrophic defeat at Hattin in 1187 and another at La Forbie in 1244, but fought on in the Holy Land until the fall of Acre in 1291.
The Order’s headquarters moved from Jerusalem to Tyre to Acre and, after 1291, to Limassol in Cyprus. The Order never recovered its pre-Hattin military strength in the East.
The Templars fought in almost every major campaign of the Crusader states — and the loss of the Holy Land in 1291 was the proximate cause of the political vacuum that led to the Order’s destruction in 1312.

This pillar page traces the military history of the Templars in the Latin East, from the First Crusade to the fall of Acre in 1291. It complements the complete history of the Templars and the article on the military orders of the Crusades.

The World of the Crusader States

The Latin East of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was a strange and unique political world. After the capture of Jerusalem in 1099, the victorious Crusaders established several Crusader states along the eastern Mediterranean coast:

The Kingdom of Jerusalem, the most important of the Latin states, stretching from the Sinai in the south to Galilee in the north.
The County of Tripoli, in what is now northern Lebanon.
The Principality of Antioch, in what is now southern Turkey.
The County of Edessa, the most easterly and most vulnerable of the Crusader states.

These states were ruled by a French-speaking Latin aristocracy, supported by Italian merchant colonies in the coastal cities, and defended by a constant flow of Crusaders from the West. They were surrounded by powerful Muslim neighbors: the Fatimids of Egypt, the Seljuk Turks, the Ayyubid dynasty of Saladin, and eventually the Mamluks. The Latin states survived for nearly two centuries, but they were always precarious.

It was into this world that the Templars were born.

The First Years: 1119 to 1139

The Templars were founded in 1119 by Hugues de Payens and a small band of French knights. For nearly a decade, the new Order remained tiny and obscure. The brothers lived on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, with quarters in what was believed to be the site of the old Temple of Solomon, and they made occasional small donations of money and arms to support the defense of the Holy Land.

Two events changed the Order’s fortunes. The first was the Council of Troyes in 1129, at which the Order received a formal Rule and was recognized by the papacy. The second was the bull Omne datum optimum, issued by Pope Innocent II in 1139, which placed the Order directly under papal authority and exempted it from paying tithes or other taxes to the local clergy. The Order’s privileges in the Holy Land were further expanded by Innocent’s successors.

The early years of the Order in the Holy Land are described in detail in the cluster page on the founding of the Order and in the biography of Hugues de Payens.

The Twelfth Century: Expansion and the First Crises

Throughout the twelfth century, the Templars built up a network of castles and preceptories across the Crusader states. Their principal military bases included:

Temple Mount, Jerusalem: the Order’s nominal headquarters, where the Master and the convent of the Order resided until 1187.
Gaston: a strategic castle in the Belvée plain, north of Jerusalem, controlling the road to Jaffa.
Jacob’s Ford (Chastellet): a massive castle on the upper Jordan, controlling the main crossing of the river. It was destroyed by Saladin in 1179.
Safed: a castle in Upper Galilee that became one of the Order’s most important strongholds.
La Feve and other smaller castles.

The Templars also held extensive properties in the cities of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. In Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, and Tripoli, the Order had substantial urban holdings, including houses for pilgrims and warehouses for the storage of supplies.

The Order’s military strength grew in step with its network of castles. The Templars became famous for their discipline, their heavy cavalry, and their willingness to fight to the last man. The Rule of the Order, the famous Latin Rule, prescribed in detail how the brothers were to fight, how they were to be commanded in battle, and how they were to be rewarded for valor.

The Battle of Hattin (1187)

The Templars’ golden age came to an end in 1187. On July 4, 1187, the combined armies of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, led by King Guy of Lusignan, met the army of the Ayyubid sultan Saladin on the volcanic plain of Hattin, near the Sea of Galilee. After a long and grueling march in the summer heat, the Crusader army was surrounded and annihilated. The True Cross, the holiest relic of the Kingdom, was captured by Saladin. King Guy and most of the Latin nobility were taken prisoner. The Grand Master of the Templars, Gerard de Ridefort, was captured in the fighting; ransomed by Saladin in 1188, he died two years later at the siege of Acre.

The battle was followed by the fall of almost every major city of the Kingdom. On October 2, 1187, Jerusalem itself surrendered to Saladin after a short siege. The Templars, who had been stationed in the city, withdrew to Tyre, which was still held by the Italian merchant Conrad of Montferrat, and which became the new base of the Latin Kingdom. The Order’s headquarters moved to the coastal city of Acre when that was recaptured by the Third Crusade in 1191.

The battle and its consequences are explored in detail in the cluster page on the Battle of Hattin.

The Thirteenth Century: The Long Decline

The thirteenth century was a long, slow decline for the Latin East. The Crusader states, rebuilt after the disasters of 1187, gradually shrank as the Muslim powers reasserted themselves. The Templars, now based in Acre, remained a major military force, but they were fighting a losing battle.

The major campaigns of the Templars in the thirteenth century included:

The Barons’ Crusade (1239–1241): a disastrous expedition led by Theobald I of Navarre and Richard of Cornwall. The Templars joined the campaign but the Crusade was largely unsuccessful.
The Battle of La Forbie (1244): a catastrophic defeat in which the combined forces of the Templars, the Hospitallers, the Teutonic Knights, and the secular Crusaders were annihilated by a coalition of Egyptian and Khwarezmian forces. The loss of life was so great that the Order’s military strength in the East was severely reduced for a generation.
The Crusade of Louis IX of France (1248–1254): the Seventh Crusade, in which the Templars played a supporting role. The Crusade ended in disaster when Louis was captured at the Battle of Al Mansurah (1250).
The Mongol Crisis (1250s): the Templars and Hospitallers sent embassies to the Mongol great khan, hoping to forge a Christian-Muslim alliance against the Mamluks. The embassy was led by David of Ashby and included the famous Hethum I of Armenian Cilicia. The plan came to nothing.
The Crusade of Prince Edward of England (1271–1272): the future Edward I fought briefly in the Holy Land, but the Crusade achieved little.

Through all these campaigns, the Templars fought on, but they were now fighting for the survival of the Latin presence in the East, not for its expansion.

The Templars’ Castles

The Templars’ castles in the East were some of the most sophisticated fortifications of the medieval world. They were built in a distinctive style that combined Islamic and Western European military architecture. The most famous Templar castles include:

Temple Mount, Jerusalem: the Order’s original headquarters, on the site of Solomon’s Temple.
Gaston: a major castle north of Jerusalem, captured by Saladin in 1177.
Jacob’s Ford: a massive castle on the upper Jordan.
Safed: a fortress in Upper Galilee, captured by the Mamluks in 1266.
Acre: the Order’s headquarters from 1191 to 1291.

The Latin East’s castles in general are the subject of a vast literature, but the Templar castles are particularly well documented because of the rich archaeological and textual record left by the Order. The Templar preceptories of the West, by contrast, are described in The Preceptories and Commanderies.

The Fall of Acre (1291)

The final disaster of the Crusader states came on May 18, 1291, when the great coastal city of Acre fell to the Mamluk Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil. The Templars, with the Hospitallers, the Teutonic Knights, and the Italian merchant fleets, defended the city to the last. The Grand Master, Guillaume de Beaujeu, was killed during the final assault. According to legend, his last words were a call to surrender the city to save the civilian population, but the city was nevertheless sacked. Thousands of its inhabitants were killed or enslaved. The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem effectively ceased to exist.

The fall of Acre is examined in detail in The Fall of Acre 1291.

The Templars in Cyprus (1291–1312)

After the fall of Acre, the Templars retreated with the other Crusaders to the island of Cyprus, which had been a Crusader possession since Richard I of England conquered it in 1191. The Order established its new headquarters at Limassol and continued to exist as a sovereign military force, but the military purpose of the Order in the East was over.

For the next twenty years, the Templars lived in a kind of limbo, occasionally attempting small-scale raids against the coast of Syria, but without the resources to mount a major Crusade. The Order’s political and financial activities continued, but the brothers in the East were now a small and aging community.

It was during this period, between 1291 and 1307, that the Order’s financial dependence on the French crown became acute. King Philip IV of France had borrowed heavily from the Order, and the suppression of the Order became an attractive option for the cash-strapped king. The story is told in The Trial and Suppression of the Knights Templar.

Sites to Visit Today

Many of the Templar sites in the Holy Land are still standing or have been excavated. Some of the most important include:

Temple Mount, Jerusalem: the original headquarters of the Order, still the third-holiest site in Islam and a major site in Jewish tradition. The Templars’ original quarters on the Temple Mount are described in Templar Sites in Jerusalem.
Acre: the great Crusader city that was the Templar headquarters from 1191 to 1291. The Templar tunnel and the refectory are still visible.
Safed: a Crusader castle in Upper Galilee, partially restored in modern times.
Limassol, Cyprus: the Order’s last Levantine headquarters.
Tartus, Syria: the site of the Templar castle of Tortosa, which is among the best-preserved Crusader castles.

From the primary sources

“[The Templars] held the passes of the mountains and the strong places of the land of Israel, and went out on campaign every summer, sometimes two or three times a year, against the enemies of the Cross.”

— William of Tyre, Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum (c. 1170s–1184), Book XII, ch. 7, trans. by the editorial team from the printed edition in the Recueil des historiens des croisades: Historiens occidentaux (Paris, 1844), vol. I.

Sources & Further Reading

The standard modern works on the Templars in the Holy Land are:

Malcolm Barber, The New Knighthood: A History of the Order of the Temple (Cambridge, 1994) — chapter 3 (“The Templars in the East, 1119–1187”) and chapter 4 (“The Order in the Thirteenth Century”) are the standard treatments.
Alain Demurger, Les Templiers: Une chevaliers chrétienne au Moyen Âge (Seuil, 2005; English The Templars: A New History, 2005) — particularly strong on the castles and the frontier.
Helen Nicholson, The Knights Templar: A New History (Sutton, 2001) — accessible and well-illustrated.
Ronnie Ellenblum, Crusader Castles and Modern Histories (Cambridge, 2007) — the standard modern treatment of the archaeology of the Crusader castles, including the Templar castles.
Denys Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: A Corpus (4 vols, Cambridge, 1993–2009) — the standard reference for Crusader-period architecture, including the round chapels.
Hugh Kennedy, Crusader Castles (Cambridge, 1994) — accessible introduction to the military architecture.
Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History (3rd ed., Yale, 2014) — the standard short history of the Crusading movement.

For the narrative primary sources, see the William of Tyre Continuations (the Eracles and the Colleccionist versions), which cover the period 1184–1229 and are the principal source for the 13th-century history of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.