Templars, a famous military order, which, like the Hospitallers and the Teutonic Knights, owed its origin to the Crusades. In the year 1119 two comrades of Godfrey de Bouillon, Hugues de Payen and Geoffroi de Saint-Adhémar, bound themselves and seven other French knights to guard pilgrims to the holy places from the attacks of the Saracens, taking before the patriarch of Jerusalem solemn vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. King Baldwin II. gave them for quarters part of his palace, which was built on the site of the Temple of Solomon close to the church of the Holy Sepulchre. Hence they took their name as Templars (pauperes commilitones Christi templique Salomonici), and the houses of the order, as at Paris and London, that of the Temple. At the Council of Troyes (1128) Bernard of Clairvaux drew up its rule in seventy-two statutes, substantially the groundwork of the statutes as finally revised in the middle of the 13th century. The order at first consisted of knights alone, but later its members were grouped as knights, all of noble birth, chaps, and men-at-arms (fratres servientes), besides mercenaries, retainers, and craftsmen affiliated, and enjoying its protection. The knights took the vows for life or for a certain period, and they alone wore the white linen mantle, with the eight-pointed red cross on the left shoulder (granted by Pope Eugenius III.), and white linen girdle; black or brown garments were worn by all others. The seal of the order showed the Temple, later two riders—a Templar and a helpless pilgrim—on one horse. The discipline of the order was austere, excluding all needless luxury or display in food, dress, or armour, and all worldly pleasures were forbidden—hawking and hunting all animals, with the characteristic exception of the lion. Married brethren were admitted, but no woman might enter the order, and all brethren were enjoined to shun the kiss of woman, even of mother or sister. The beard was worn, the hair cut short, and all slept alone in shirt and breeches, with a light constantly burning. At the head of the whole order stood the Grand-master; under him Masters, Grand Priors, Commanders, or Preceptors ruled the various provinces of Jerusalem, Tripoli, Antioch and Cyprus, Portugal, Castile and Leon, Aragon, France and Auvergne, Aquitaine and Poitou, Provence, England, Germany, Italy (Middle and Upper), Apulia and Sicily. Second in command to the Grand-master stood the Seneschal, his deputy; next the Marshal, whose business, moreover, was to provide arms, horses, and all the material of war. Visitors-general conveyed the commands of the Grand-master and convent or chapter of Jerusalem to the various provinces, exercised discipline, and settled disputes. The Prior or Preceptor of the kingdom of Jerusalem, also styled 'Grand-preceptor of the Temple,' was also general treasurer of the order. The Drapier had general charge of the clothing; the Standard-bearer (baleanifer) bore the glorious bauscant or war-banner (half black and half white, with the legend, Non nobis, non nobis, Domine, sed nomini tuo da gloriam) to the field; the Turcopilar commanded the Turcoples, a body of light horse, natives of Syria and Palestine, in the pay of the order; the Guardian of the Chapel (eustos capelle) had charge of the portable chapel and the appurtenances of the altar, always carried into the field. The Templars were, by a papal bull in 1172, rendered independent of the authority of the bishops, owning allegiance to the pope alone, the immediate bishop of the entire order; and, moreover, they were allowed to have chaplains within their own ranks to whom they might confess, to erect oratories for divine worship within their bounds, and to enjoy exemption from all taxes and tithes, and from interdict. Their houses enjoyed right of sanctuary, and they often preserved the treasure of kings and nobles.
The Templars, at once knights and monks, realised the two dearest of mediæval ideals, and men of the highest courage and purest devotion flocked into their ranks, bringing with them their wealth to fill their coffers. Already by 1260 the order is said to have numbered 20,000 knights, and these perhaps the finest fighting men the world has seen. Never in the history of the world did men fling away their lives more gloriously for a hopeless cause; never did a Templar play the coward in the hour of danger, nor, when all hope was lost, barter his soul to a Moslem conqueror in return for his life. Charges of pride, of immorality and impieties, of secret heresies, and even of betraying Frederic II. to the infidel (1229) and St Louis to the Soldan of Egypt (1250) were yet to be hurled against the order; never, from the beginning to the end of their two centuries of history, was a Templar charged with cowardice before the enemy. It was their proud boast that 20,000 of their number perished for the cause in Palestine; of their twenty-two Grand-masters seven died on the field of battle, five of their wounds, one of voluntary starvation a prisoner in the hands of Saladin. The most famous successors of Hugues de Payen (died 1136) were Bernard de Tremelai, who fell at Ascalon in 1153; Eudes de Saint-Amand (died 1179), who won a glorious victory over Saladin at Ascalon (1177), only to fall next year into the sultan's hands after a disastrous battle; Gerard de Riderfort, who suffered a terrible defeat near Nazareth in 1187, a second at Hittin two months later, and died in battle under the walls of Acre in 1189; Robert de Sable, who aided
Richard Cœur de Lion to gain a glorious victory in the plain of Arsouf (1191), and bought from him the island of Cyprus, which was soon transferred to Guy de Lusignan, whereupon Acre became the seat of the order, the famous stronghold of Pilgrim's Castle being built, whose stupendous ruins exist to this day; Peter de Montaigu, whose courage helped to take Damietta in 1219; Hermann de Perigord, who rebuilt the fortress of Safed; Guillaume de Sonnac, slain beside St Louis at the Nile in 1250; Thomas Berard, an Englishman, under whom Safed was lost in 1266, Jaffa and Antioch in 1268; and Guillaume de Beanjeu, who lost Tripoli in 1290, and fell in the bloody capture of Acre in 1291. The remnant of the Templars sailed to Cyprus, and the latest dying gleams of the order's vigour in the East were the rash attempts to capture Alexandria (1300), and to establish a settlement at Tortosa (1300-2) under the last and most ill-fated of its grand-masters.
The Templars had failed in their work; their usefulness was past; the order had now only to sink into extinction in one of the darkest tragedies of history. Their wealth and pride had sowed a harvest of fear and hatred; their loyalty to the pope and their exceptional privileges had long since aroused the jealousy of the bishops; their bitter quarrels with the Hospitalers, which blazed into open warfare in Palestine in 1243, had shocked the moral sense of Christendom; and the exclusiveness and secrecy with which all their affairs were conducted opened a door for all manner of sinister suspicions among the populace. Philip the Fair of France was a king who covered with a thin veneer of piety a character of complete unscrupulousness; he had succeeded in placing Clement V., a miserable creature of his own, upon the papal throne (1305), and in his minister Guillaume de Nogaret and the officers of the Inquisition he found servants of character unscrupulous as his own. His unfortunate Flemish wars had brought him into desperate financial difficulties, and his treasury was now completely exhausted in spite of extortionate taxation, a shameful debasement of the currency, and the merciless plunder of the Jews and the Lombard bankers. In the wealth of the Templars he saw a tempting prize, and the train of treachery was soon complete. Doubtless their numbers and even their wealth are enormously exaggerated by historians; Schottmüller assumes that in France alone there were 15,000 brethren, and over 20,000 in the entire order; Mr Lea thinks that at the end there may have been as many as 1500 knights. The Grand-master, Jacques de Molay, was summoned from Cyprus by the pope in 1306; he came, bringing with him the treasure of the order, and awaited his fate in France. On the 13th October 1307, which Döllinger in one of his latest lectures calls an outstanding dies nefastus in human history, the Grand-master and 140 Templars were seized at the Temple and flung into prison. Two degraded Templars supplied some of the charges the king required; tortures, infamous beyond the infamies of the Inquisition, provided the remainder. A habitual denial of Christ, spitting upon the cross, the worship of hideous images, travesty of the holy communion and of the sacrifice of the mass, sorceries, unnatural lusts, oseula inhonesta and other indecencies—such were the confessions suggested to and wrung from men racked by the agonies of inhuman tortures to which as many as thirty-six knights succumbed in Paris alone. In August 1308 Clement sent throughout Christendom the 127 articles of interrogation for the accused, and evidence in detail self-contradictory beyond all parallel was quickly accumulated. In the 225 witnesses sent to the papal commission (1310-11) from various parts of France the depositions, as Mr Lea points out, occur most suspiciously in groups of identity according to the bishops from whose preliminary tribunals they had come. Philip held a so-called national assembly at Tours (May 1308) which obsequiously expressed its approval of the condemnation. The pope now took the formal responsibility upon himself by personally examining seventy-two Templars brought before him, when those who had already confessed under torture confirmed their confessions, knowing well that the penalty of retraction was burning forthwith as a relapsed heretic. The pope contended that the fate of the order as an institution must be submitted to a general council. Meantime, to the public commission appointed to examine into the charges at Paris, to give the order an opportunity of being heard in its defence, and to report there came (March 1310) as many as 546 Templars who offered to defend the order against all the charges—blunt, unlearned soldiers, deprived of their chiefs, and weak with torture, long imprisonment, cold and hunger. Four of these were at length commissioned to be present at the investigation on behalf of the order, when suddenly the commission was startled by the news that the provincial council of Sens was about to sentence without further hearing those Templars who had offered to defend the order as relapsed heretics in regard to their former confessions. On 12th May 1310 fifty-four knights were slowly burned to death, refusing in the midst of the most awful agonies to perjure themselves by false confessions. The commission at once suspended its sittings, but at length, after many delays, on June 5, 1311, transmitted its report to Clement to help the General Council in its deliberations. The closing act in this dreary and tangled drama of papal duplicity was Clement's failure to gain over the Council at Vienne, and the suppression of the order without formal condemnation, by the bull Vox in excelso (March 22, 1312). The bull Ad providam (May 2) laid it under perpetual inhibition, and transferred its property to the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem. The persons of the Templars were handed over to the provincial councils, with the exception of the chiefs of the order, who were reserved to the jurisdiction of the holy see—a vain hope for which they had left their inferior brethren to their fate. At length, on March 19, 1314, Jacques de Molay and the gray-haired Geoffroy de Charney, Master of Normandy, were brought from prison to receive judgment, when, to the dismay of the churchmen and the astonishment of all, they rose and solemnly declared their innocence and the blamelessness of the order. That same day, on the Isle des Juifs in the Seine, they were slowly roasted to death, declaring with their last breath that the confession formerly wrung from them by torture was untrue. A strange tradition asserts that from the stake the Grand-master summoned both the pope and the king to meet him at the bar of Almighty God within a year, and history tells us that within the year both went to their account.
In England the trials were conducted with much less inhumanity, and it was only direct pressure from the pope that persuaded the king to permit torture to be applied. The charges for the most part failed to be established, and most of the prisoners were granted penances and permitted to escape with a formal abjuration, while a fair provision was made for their support. The last Master of the Temple in England, William de la More, died a prisoner in the Tower, to the last maintaining the innocence of the order. The memory of the various preceptories and possessions in England, Scotland, and Ireland survives in place-names; the round Temple Church in London, consecrated in 1185, was restored by the Benchers of the Inner and Middle Temple (1839-42) at a cost of £70,000. In Spain, Portugal, and Germany the order was found innocent; almost everywhere in Italy, save in the case of six at Florence, the charges broke down. Everywhere the larger part of their property was given to the Hospitalers, and even in France the king was in great part forced by public opinion to forego his prey.
The literature almost forms a library; here we can name only Raynouard, Monumens hist. rel. à la Condamnation des Chevaliers du Temple (1813); Wilcke, Geschichte des Tempelherrenordens (3 vols. Leip. 1826-35; new ed. 1860); Michelet, Histoire de France (vol. iii.) and Procès des Templiers (2 vols. 1841-51); Havemann, Geschichte des Ausgangs des Tempelherrenordens (Stutt. 1846); Loiseleur, La doctrine secrète des Templiers (1872), an ingenious but unreliable work; Merzdorf, Geheimstatuten des Ordens der Tempelherren (Halle, 1877), a work not to be trusted; H. de Curzon, La règle du Temple (1886), the most reliable book on this part of the subject; Konrad Schottmüller, Der Untergang des Templer-Ordens (2 vols. Berlin, 1887), the most thorough-going of later apologies, and perhaps the best work on the subject; Hans Prutz, Entwicklung und Untergang des Tempelherrenordens (Berlin, 1888), the most learned of more recent attacks upon the order, but marred by laborious attempts to construct a preposterous case of Catharist heresy. Ranke (Weltgeschichte, 8 Theil, 1887) follows Hammer-Purgstall (Die Schuld der Templer, 1855) in thinking that the order had fallen away from Christian faith, and adopted a body of secret and heretical doctrine, which had originated in their contact with Islam in the East; but, as Döllinger points out (Akademische Vorträge, vol. iii., Munich, 1891), he is hesitating and cautious, and makes many reservations, while he was evidently not acquainted with the most recent works on the subject. In English there are Addison's excellent History of the Knights Templars, the Temple Church, and the Temple (2d ed. 1842); Haye's Persecution of the Knights Templars (Edin. 1865); Froude's three interesting but superficial lectures (Good Words, 1886; reprinted in Spanish Story of the Armada, &c., 1892); and especially Henry C. Lea's admirable History of the Inquisition (vol. iii. 1888). The Templars' Trials (1888), by J. Shallow, contributes little to the question.