Knights Templar

Also known as Order of the Temple, Pauperes commilitones Christi templique Salomonici

Military religious order founded c. 1119 to protect pilgrims on the road from Jaffa to Jerusalem; became one of the two great striking arms of the Crusader states and a major financial power across western Europe.

The Order of the Temple was founded around 1119 by the Champenois knight Hugues de Payens and a small band of companions who took monastic vows and pledged themselves to the protection of pilgrims travelling the road from Jaffa up to Jerusalem. King Baldwin II gave them quarters on the Temple Mount, in the al-Aqsa Mosque, which the Crusaders identified as Solomon's Temple — hence their name.

Within a generation, with the patronage of Bernard of Clairvaux and the rule of the Council of Troyes (1129), the Templars had grown into a transnational military religious order with houses across western Europe and a defensive role second only to the Hospitallers in the Latin East. They held the great fortresses of Tortosa, Atlit (Castle Pilgrim), Safed, and Gaza-Darum; in the 13th century, with their European preceptories handling deposits and credit transfers for pilgrims and the French crown, they became one of the principal banking institutions of Latin Christendom.

After the fall of Acre in 1291 the Order retreated to Cyprus. In 1307 King Philip IV of France, deeply in debt to the Templars, had its members arrested across his kingdom on charges of heresy and sodomy; under torture many confessed. Pope Clement V suppressed the order at the Council of Vienne in 1312, and the last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, was burned at the stake in Paris in 1314.

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