The Order of the Temple

They began as a handful of knights in Jerusalem and ended as a corporation that spanned the Latin world. Between those two facts sits almost two centuries of war, land, liturgy, and credit.

Hugues de Payens and his companions took a monastic vow and a military one at once: poverty, chastity, obedience, and the defence of pilgrims. Baldwin II housed them on the Temple Mount. The Latin Rule, shaped at Troyes in 1129 under Bernard of Clairvaux, turned that household into an order. Knights in white. Sergeants in brown or black. Chaplains to say the hours. No man was to hunt, to wear point, to own a lock of his own. The sword was a prayer with an edge.

Innocent II’s Omne Datum Optimum of 1139 is the hinge. Exempt from tithe and from the bishop, answerable to Rome, the Temple could hold a farm in Yorkshire and a fortress in Tripoli under one master. Donations poured in: younger sons, mills, whole manors. The preceptory became the cell of a body that reached from Portugal to Armenia. Out of that body came a payments network. Deposit at one house, a letter, withdrawal at another. Kings treated the Paris and London Temples as treasuries. Henry II and John used the New Temple. The round church in London, consecrated in 1185 on the plan of the Holy Sepulchre, is the stone that remains.

In the east they were the standing army of the crusader states, for better and worse. They fought at Hattin, held Tortosa and Atlit, and after 1291 they were a court in exile on Cyprus under Jacques de Molay. Philip IV of France, indebted and centralising, moved against them at dawn on 13 October 1307. The charges (idolatry, denial of Christ, obscene reception) were the ordinary smear of a rigged heresy trial. Torture did the rest. Clement V’s Chinon hearing of 1308, recovered in the parchment Frale published, absolved the chiefs of heresy even as the pope prepared to dissolve the order at Vienne in 1312. Molay recanted his confession and burned with Geoffroi de Charny on 18 March 1314, asking to face Notre-Dame.

What followed in story (the Grail, the hidden fleet, the curse on the king) is not what followed in the record. The record is preceptories, bulls, ledgers, and a last master in Paris. The map below keeps to attested ground: Molay’s road, 1265 to 1314, and the earlier itinerary of Robert de Boron and Gautier de Montbéliard.