The Knights Templar Trivia
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50 free The Knights Templar trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Knights Templar trivia quiz covers the rise, fall and afterlife of the most famous military order of the Middle Ages. The easy questions are the ones any history buff should know: what colour cross they wore, which city held their headquarters, which French king had them arrested, and the date that gave Friday the 13th its reputation. From there it goes deeper into the record: the nine knights and their two-to-a-horse seal, the abbot who wrote In Praise of the New Knighthood, the papal bull that freed them from taxes and local law, the letters of credit that made them early bankers, the island they once owned outright, the grand master who charged into Ascalon with forty men, Hattin, Acre and Arwad, the Chinon Parchment, the last grand master's curse from the pyre, and the Portuguese order that quietly carried on. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on the order, Jacques de Molay, Hugues de Payens, Philip IV, Temple Church and Baphomet before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Crusades, medieval history and Holy Roman Empire quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What colour was the cross worn on the Templars' white mantles?
Red
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.
Q 02The Templars' original headquarters stood on which site in Jerusalem?
The Temple Mount
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.
Q 03For what purpose were the Templars originally founded?
To protect pilgrims travelling to Jerusalem
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.
Q 04Which French knight founded the Templars and became their first grand master?
Hugues de Payens
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.
Q 05What is the Templars' seal of two knights sharing a single horse traditionally said to symbolise?
The order's poverty
The order's poverty: the image was only a symbol, since the Templars' own rule allowed every knight three horses and a squire.
Q 06Which influential abbot championed the Templars in his letter In Praise of the New Knighthood?
Bernard of Clairvaux
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.
Q 07At which church council in Champagne were the Templars officially approved and given their rule?
Council of Troyes
Council of Troyes: the rule it approved stripped away a knight's vanities, banning pointed shoes, shoelaces and hunting with hawks.
Q 08Which Walter Scott novel pits its hero against the Templar knight Brian de Bois-Guilbert?
Ivanhoe
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.
Q 09The Templars took their name from quarters that crusaders called the Temple of which biblical king?
Solomon
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.
Q 10Which financial service did the Templars offer travellers to the Holy Land?
Letters of credit
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.
Q 11Which crusader king sold the Templars an entire Mediterranean island in 1191?
Richard the Lionheart
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.
Q 12At Montgisard in 1177, Templar knights helped Jerusalem's teenage leper king rout which Muslim leader's army?
Saladin
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.
Q 13Which Dan Brown thriller ties the Templars to a secret about the bloodline of Jesus?
The Da Vinci Code
Q 21Under torture, Templars confessed that recruits were made to do what at their admission ceremonies?
Spitting on the Cross
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.
Q 22The Templars were accused of worshipping an idol known by what name?
Baphomet
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.
Q 23Which pope disbanded the Templars in 1312 under pressure from the French crown?
Clement V
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.
Q 14Which ruined city on the road to Egypt did the king of Jerusalem rebuild and hand to the Templars around 1150?
Gaza
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.
Q 15Grand Master Bernard de Tremelay and forty knights died charging alone through a breach at which 1153 siege?
Ascalon
The rest of the crusader army failed to follow them in; the city fell days later anyway.
Q 16Blunders by grand master Gerard de Ridefort contributed to which devastating 1187 defeat?
The Battle of Hattin
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.
Q 17After the loss of Jerusalem, the Templars made which seaport their headquarters for the next century?
Acre
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.
Q 18The Templars' last garrison in the Holy Land held out until 1302 on tiny Arwad, off the coast of which modern country?
Syria
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.
Q 19Which French king ordered the mass arrest of the Templars in 1307?
Philip IV
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.
Q 20On what date in 1307 were the grand master and scores of French Templars arrested at dawn?
Friday 13 October
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.
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.
Q 24At which church council of 1311–12 did the pope issue the bull Vox in excelso dissolving the Templars?
Council of Vienne
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.
Q 25Which famous knight, regent of England for the boy king Henry III, lies buried in the Templars' round church in London?
William Marshal
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.
Q 26Under King Denis I, the Portuguese Templars survived by changing their name to what?
The Order of Christ
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.
Q 27Outside which Paris church did the last Templar grand master publicly take back his confession in 1314?
Notre-Dame
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.
Q 28Where in Paris was the pyre built for the last Templar grand master's execution?
On a small island in the Seine
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.
Q 29What did the last Templar grand master cry out from the flames, according to legend?
A curse on king and pope
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.
Q 30Which misfiled Vatican document, found in 2001, shows the pope absolved the Templars in 1308?
The Chinon Parchment
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.