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The word ‘Templars’ – shorthand for ‘The Poor Knighthood of the Temple’
The Templars were founded in 1119 on the principles of chastity, obedience and poverty
‘Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give the glory, for your steadfast love and faithfulness.’
Beside this was the al-Aqsa mosque, a wide, low, rectangular building also topped with a dome, built in the seventh century and converted to Christian use as a palace for the Christian king of Jerusalem, a wealthy nobleman from Boulogne known as Baldwin I.
Urban promised, alluringly, that going on crusade could be substituted for all penances the church had imposed on an individual for their sins – an entire lifetime’s wrongdoing could theoretically be wiped out in a single journey.
Jerusalem had fallen on 15 July 1099, an astonishing military coup that was accompanied by disgraceful plundering and massacres of the city’s Jewish and Muslim inhabitants, whose beheaded bodies were left lying in piles in the streets, many with their bellies slit open so that the Christian conquerors could retrieve gold coins their victims had swallowed in a bid to hide them from the marauding invaders.
Jerusalem was, as a Muslim writer noted, quoting the Torah, ‘a golden basin filled with scorpions’.
The Knights of the Temple were founded in Jerusalem in 1119 and officially recognized at some point between 14 January and 13 September of the year 1120.
The notion that churchmen might go into battle armed not only with prayer but with deadly weapons was hardly new. It spoke to a tension that had existed at the heart of Christian thought for a thousand years, as the pacifism suggested by the example of Christ’s life rubbed against a martial mentality embedded in the language of Christian rhetoric and scripture.14 It also followed naturally from the ideas underpinning the whole crusading movement.
Indeed, given the strain on resources in the crusader states in the 1120s, it was a matter of necessity to concede that a cleric could from time to time wield weapons without reproach – as Patriarch Bernard had done at Antioch. Several months later, at a grand gathering of clerical and secular leaders from the kingdom of Jerusalem, the idea of churchmen bearing arms was institutionalized for the first time.
The Council of Nablus convened on 16 January 1120 under the auspices of King Baldwin II and Warmund, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem.
The purpose of this gathering at Nablus (a town nestled in a valley between two mountains in central Palestine, notable for its plentiful olive trees) was to provide a set of written laws, or ‘canons’, by which the kingdom could be properly governed in a manner pleasing to God.20
Part bodyguards, part paupers, a tiny brotherhood devoted only to arms and prayer: the Templars now had a purpose.
The twelfth-century archbishop and chronicler William of Tyre explained that ‘because... they live next to the Temple of the Lord in the king’s palace they are called the brothers of the Knighthood of the Temple’.34
By the end of the council, Jean Michel had drafted in Latin a 68-point code of Templar conduct, later known as The Primitive (or Latin) Rule.
Bernard emphasized the profound difference between homicide – the sin of killing a man – and malicide, the act of killing evil itself, which God would consider a noble deed.
But Bernard was not the only one thinking seriously about the Templars; far away from the Holy Land another patron was thinking about how he could help support the newly founded order. His name was Alfonso, king of Aragon, 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.
During Hugh of Payns’ tour of England in 1128 the order had established a house in London known as the ‘Old’ Temple, near Holborn.24 During the Anarchy a torrent of other royal gifts followed, including land and property in Oxfordshire, Hertfordshire, Essex, Bedfordshire, Lincolnshire, Berkshire and Sussex.
Dozens of Templar houses sprang up from the Gulf of Genoa to the new Atlantic kingdom of Portugal, which was also being clawed out of Islamic hands and resettled by Christians under the self-proclaimed first King of Portugal, Afonso I Henriques. During the 1140s, Afonso Henriques cleared the valley of the lower Tagus, eventually conquering as far south as Lisbon, where the river empties into the Atlantic Ocean. As early as 1128 Afonso Henriques described himself as a brother (confrater) of the Templars.26 He placed several magnificent strongholds in Templar hands, including the castles at
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The most enthusiastic patron in the region was Afonso Henriques, count of Portugal, who had as a young man declared himself a brother to the Templars, suggesting that he had at some time formally become an associate member of the order.
The first castle the Templars held in Portugal was a sprawling fortress at Soure, which the ambitious ruler had bestowed on them as early as 1128, in the first decade of their existence.
To his admirers he was ‘one of the great heroes, mighty in spirit, strong in courage and of great firmness, terrified of nothing’.18 To those who suffered the worst of his wrath he was ‘the rod of the Lord’s fury’, sent to ‘rage and exterminate the obstinate people’.19 His name was Saladin.
Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub,
Ever since the earliest years of the thirteenth century, the whole world had trembled at the name of the Mongols. Their story began when an orphaned warlord by the name of Temüjin rallied together the nomadic tribes of the north-east Asian steppe and began to strike out at the ruling dynasties all around him. After a series of initial successes Temüjin took the name Genghis Khan
(sometimes rendered as Chinggis Khan, and loosely meaning Great Ruler).
