50 Fun Facts About The Knights Templar

What colour was the cross worn on the Templars' white mantles?

Red: the cross was a later addition to the white cloak, which the order's first rule reserved for full knights as a sign that they had sworn themselves to purity and chastity.

The Templars' original headquarters stood on which site in Jerusalem?

The Temple Mount: the king of Jerusalem gave them a wing of his own palace there, in the captured Al-Aqsa Mosque, and the knights took their name from the site.

For what purpose were the Templars originally founded?

To protect pilgrims travelling to Jerusalem: raiders were robbing and killing them on the roads, and the new crusader kingdoms had too few soldiers to keep the routes safe.

Which French knight founded the Templars and became their first grand master?

Hugues de Payens: in the late 1120s he toured the courts of Europe for recruits and gifts, and came back with the men and money that turned a handful of knights into an army.

What is the Templars' seal of two knights sharing a single horse traditionally said to symbolise?

The order's poverty: the image was only a symbol, since the Templars' own rule allowed every knight three horses and a squire.

Which influential abbot championed the Templars in his letter In Praise of the New Knighthood?

Bernard of Clairvaux: the first Templars themselves doubted that monks could rightly fight and kill, and his tract, written at their founder's repeated urging, gave them their answer.

At which church council in Champagne were the Templars officially approved and given their rule?

Council of Troyes: the rule it approved stripped away a knight's vanities, banning pointed shoes, shoelaces and hunting with hawks.

Which Walter Scott novel pits its hero against the Templar knight Brian de Bois-Guilbert?

Ivanhoe: the Templar carries off Rebecca, is ordered to fight against her champion in her trial by combat, and drops dead in the lists almost untouched.

The Templars took their name from quarters that crusaders called the Temple of which biblical king?

Solomon: the knights were lodged in the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which crusaders called his Temple, although the building he raised had been destroyed by the Babylonians some seventeen centuries before.

Which financial service did the Templars offer travellers to the Holy Land?

Letters of credit: a traveller paid money in at home and drew it out abroad instead of carrying cash that would tempt robbers, and the kings of France came to keep their treasury with the Templars.

Which crusader king sold the Templars an entire Mediterranean island in 1191?

Richard the Lionheart: he had seized the island on his way to the crusade and sold it to the order, but by the next year it had passed to the dispossessed king of Jerusalem, whose family ruled it for almost three centuries.

At Montgisard in 1177, Templar knights helped Jerusalem's teenage leper king rout which Muslim leader's army?

Saladin: surprised with his army spread out, he lost most of it in the rout and is said to have escaped capture only on the back of a fast camel.

Which Dan Brown thriller ties the Templars to a secret about the bloodline of Jesus?

The Da Vinci Code: Brown named his Grail scholar Leigh Teabing after the authors of an earlier book on the same theory, who then sued his publisher for copying it and lost.

Which ruined city on the road to Egypt did the king of Jerusalem rebuild and hand to the Templars around 1150?

Gaza: the fortress closed the ring around the last Egyptian-held port on the coast, whose garrison had been raiding the crusader kingdom for decades.

Grand Master Bernard de Tremelay and forty knights died charging alone through a breach at which 1153 siege?

The rest of the crusader army failed to follow them in; the city fell days later anyway.

Blunders by grand master Gerard de Ridefort contributed to which devastating 1187 defeat?

The Battle of Hattin: he urged the king to leave a well-watered camp and march across dry country, and after the rout every captured Templar was beheaded except Ridefort himself.

After the loss of Jerusalem, the Templars made which seaport their headquarters for the next century?

Acre: its fall in 1291 ended crusader rule on the mainland and took away most of the Templars' reason for existing, which left them exposed when the French king turned on them.

The Templars' last garrison in the Holy Land held out until 1302 on tiny Arwad, off the coast of which modern country?

Syria: the knights had been posted there to link up with a Mongol army that never came, and when the island fell dozens of them were carried off to prison in Cairo.

Which French king ordered the mass arrest of the Templars in 1307?

Philip IV: known as 'the Fair', he was chronically short of money and deep in debt to the order, and many historians think the arrests were his way to cancel what he owed and seize its wealth.

On what date in 1307 were the grand master and scores of French Templars arrested at dawn?

Friday 13 October: secret orders had gone out to the king's officers across France a month earlier, so the Templars were seized everywhere at once before any house could warn another.

Under torture, Templars confessed that recruits were made to do what at their admission ceremonies?

Spitting on the Cross: the charge was framed to horrify, and many knights who admitted it under torture took the confession back as soon as they were out of the king's hands.

The Templars were accused of worshipping an idol known by what name?

Baphomet: the name is thought to be a garbled medieval French form of 'Mahomet', so the charge amounted to saying the knights had secretly gone over to the faith they fought.

Which pope disbanded the Templars in 1312 under pressure from the French crown?

Clement V: a church council had voted against condemning the Templars, so the French-born pope, pressed hard by the king, abolished the order by his own decree instead.

At which church council of 1311–12 did the pope issue the bull Vox in excelso dissolving the Templars?

Council of Vienne: the assembled churchmen would not condemn the order and shelved the question, until the French king arrived in person and the pope settled it by decree.

Which famous knight, regent of England for the boy king Henry III, lies buried in the Templars' round church in London?

William Marshal: on crusade as a young man he had promised to end his days as a Templar, so he took the order's vows on his deathbed in 1219 and was buried among the knights.

Under King Denis I, the Portuguese Templars survived by changing their name to what?

The Order of Christ: a century later Prince Henry the Navigator ran it and used its funds to pay for Portugal's voyages of discovery, whose ships carried the order's cross on their sails.

Outside which Paris church did the last Templar grand master publicly take back his confession in 1314?

Notre-Dame: a platform had been built there so that Paris could hear him sentenced to life in prison, but he declared the order innocent instead and was burned at sunset the same day.

Where in Paris was the pyre built for the last Templar grand master's execution?

On a small island in the Seine: the islet lay just below the royal palace garden and no longer exists, having been joined to the Île de la Cité when the Pont Neuf was built.

What did the last Templar grand master cry out from the flames, according to legend?

A curse on king and pope: he is said to have summoned both to meet him before God within the year, and the pope was dead a month later and the king before the year was out.

Which misfiled Vatican document, found in 2001, shows the pope absolved the Templars in 1308?

The Chinon Parchment: it records cardinals questioning the order's jailed leaders at Chinon and granting them absolution, four years before the same pope dissolved the order anyway.

What was the title of the Templars' second-in-command?

Seneschal: the title was borrowed from great noble households, where it meant the steward who ran the estate, and the post could lead to the top, as it did for the founding knight André de Montbard.

What colour did Templar sergeants, drawn from non-noble families, wear?

Black or brown: the order's rule kept white for full knights after impostors in white cloaks had passed themselves off as Templars and brought scandal on the house.

Which famous relic has been proposed as the idol the Templars were accused of worshipping?

The Shroud of Turin: the cloth first appears on record in the 1350s in the hands of a French knight named Geoffroi de Charny, a near namesake of the Templar leader burned beside the last grand master.

The Templars' rule let the knights eat which food only three times a week?

Meat: the same rule guarded against too much zeal, pairing the brothers at table so that each could see the other was not fasting in secret.

When did the Templar rule allow a knight to leave the battlefield?

Only after all the Christian flags had fallen: a knight who lost sight of his own banner had to rally to the nearest Christian one and fight on, and leaving early meant expulsion from the order.

Which customary feature did many arrested Templars get rid of before their hearings in Paris?

Their long beards: the rule never demanded them, but they had become a badge of the order, and scores of the brothers questioned in Paris turned up clean-shaven, whether to renounce it or to pass unnoticed.

Squires who served Templar knights were generally what?

Hired outsiders, not members of the order: the Templars trained no knights of their own, so a recruit had to arrive already knighted and his squire was simply a servant taken on for a set term.

In the film National Treasure, the map to the Templars' hoard is hidden on the back of which document?

The Declaration of Independence: the plot passes the hoard from the Templars to Freemasons among the Founding Fathers, borrowing an 18th-century Masonic boast of descent from the order that historians reject.

London's Temple Church, built as the Templars' English headquarters, was consecrated in 1185 by whom?

Patriarch Heraclius of Jerusalem: he had come bearing the keys of Jerusalem to beg Henry II to rescue the crusader kingdom, went home with only money and promises, and saw the city fall two years later.

London's round Templar church is jointly owned by which two institutions?

The Inner and Middle Temple Inns of Court: lawyers began renting the site after the Templars fell, and in 1608 James I granted it to them for ever on condition that they keep up the church.

Which 19th-century occultist's book fixed the image of the Templars' supposed idol as a winged, goat-headed figure?

Eliphas Lévi: he drew the Sabbatic Goat himself, although the confessions wrung from Templars under torture disagreed about the idol, some making it a cat, and his picture is now its best-known image.

What did the French king do in 1306, the year before he destroyed the Templars?

Expelled the Jews: he was deep in debt to them, as he was to the Templars, and he had already seized the assets of the Lombard bankers who had lent him money.

Which medieval romance calls the knights who guard the Grail 'templeisen'?

Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival: written about a century before the real order fell, it turned the Templars into the Grail's guardians, a link storytellers have been reworking ever since.

Legend says a Freemason dipped a cloth in Louis XVI's blood at his execution and declared whom avenged?

Jacques de Molay: the last grand master had been burned by a French king in 1314, and the tale, probably invented, cast the Revolution as the Templars' long-delayed revenge on the crown.

Which Masonic body's 'Order of the Temple' is inspired by the Knights Templar?

The York Rite: unlike basic Freemasonry, its Templar order admits only Masons who profess Christianity, and historians find no real line of descent from the medieval knights.

What were the two colours of the Baucent, the Templars' battle banner?

Black and white: a 13th-century writer explained that the black stood for the Templars' ferocity towards their enemies and the white for their kindness towards their friends.

The Templars' rule and white habit were modelled on which order of monks?

The Cistercians: the knights took over their strict round of prayer along with the white cloth, and in their first years were even treated as a branch of that order.

After the fall of the mainland, the Templars moved their headquarters to Limassol on which island?

Cyprus: the island was still a crusader kingdom, and from its ports the Templars joined the last raids on the coast they had lost, hoping to win the Holy Land back.

In 1305 the pope proposed merging the Templars with which rival military order?

The Hospitallers: neither grand master wanted the merger, yet the rival order got the better half of it anyway, inheriting most of the Templars' property once they were abolished.

Which Star Wars actor joined the Templar drama Knightfall in its second season as a veteran knight?

Mark Hamill: he played Talus, a Templar who had survived ten years as a prisoner in the East and now drilled the order's recruits, but the show was cancelled after that season.