The Templars: The Rise and Spectacular Fall of God's Holy Warriors

by Dan Jones

The word “Templars”—shorthand for “the Poor Knighthood of the Temple” or, less frequently, “the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Jerusalem”—advertised their origins on the Temple Mount in Christianity’s holiest city.

Even in their own lifetimes the Templars were semilegendary figures, featuring in popular stories, artworks, ballads and histories.

Yet—perhaps strangely—the Templars also had broad popular appeal. For many people they were not distant elites but local heroes.

Not to us, O lord, not to us, but to your name give glory, for the sake of your steadfast love and your faithfulness!

Following a bitter and sustained war that raged between 1096 and 1099, major parts of the Holy Land had been conquered by the armies of what would come to be known as the First Crusade.

Several large expeditions of warrior pilgrims had traveled from Western Europe to the Holy Land (sometimes they called this “Outremer,” which translates simply as “overseas”).

These pilgrims were known collectively by Christian writers as the “Latins” or the “Franks,” a term mirrored in Muslim texts...

So it was that the Christians of the First Crusade had enjoyed a staggering series of victories. Jerusalem had fallen on July 15, 1099, an astonishing military coup that was accompanied by disgraceful plundering and massacres of the city’s Jewish and Muslim inhabitants,

THE KNIGHTS OF THE TEMPLE were founded in Jerusalem in 1119 and officially recognized at some point between January 14 and September 13 of the year 1120.1

By the time Hugh of Payns set up his order in Jerusalem, the Temple Mount had been refashioned once again: not by Jews or Christians, but by the Umayyads—the all-powerful Sunni caliphate whose armies had conquered the city a few decades after Muhammad’s death in the late seventh century A.D.

His name was Alfonso, king of Aragón, and he was at the forefront of the struggle against Islam—not battling Seljuqs and Fatimids in the Holy Land, but fighting the Moors of southern Spain, in the war known as the Reconquista.

Like all papal bulls, this one was known by the first words of its text, Omne Datum Optimum (“Every good gift”), a quotation from the Epistle of James.*

Not yet three decades had passed since the first master of the Temple had petitioned at the Council of Nablus for his ragtag band to be given official recognition, a place to sleep and some charitable donations to keep them going day to day. By the late 1140s, the Templars were famous all over the Christian world.

By the late 1150s they had been established in the Spanish peninsula for three decades, and had built up a large portfolio of fortresses and properties granted to them by the monarchs fighting the Reconquista.

When Amalric was crowned king on February 18, 1163, he was twenty-seven years old.

Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, a charismatic, politically agile, relentlessly ambitious and extraordinarily self-assured soldier,

Not to us, Lord, not to us, But to your name be the glory, Because of your love and faithfulness.

Albert of Aachen, Historia Ierosolimitana: History of the Journey to Jerusalem, ed. Susan B. Edgington (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 881. Albert of Aachen was not an eyewitness to events in the kingdom of Jerusalem, but rather compiled his long and very detailed account from oral testimony he collected from crusading veterans in Germany.