The Templars built churches in the circular plan of what they thought was Herod’s Temple, puzzlingly ignoring the fact that it had been destroyed by the Romans, and not realizing that the building that they were imitating was actually the Muslim Dome of the Rock (with an equally puzzling triumph of wishful thinking, they confidently identified the Al-Aqsa Mosque, standing beside the Dome of the Rock, as Solomon’s Temple).
