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Guardians of the Holy Grail!

The Knights Templar have held an inexplicable sway over the world’s collective imagination ever since their full name has been recorded. Users will still find it ineffective to list personalities, entities, and even facts that seem or are associated with the Order, directly or indirectly – then, now, and in the future.

We usually organize our own thoughts about them as if they were a fuzzy urban myth, camouflaging the unknown with stories, legends, and only partially reliable news. Several works were at least partly written on the subject with the sole purpose of demystifying it, but the imaginative exercise has expanded anew. In the following, we shall try and dip the pen of the geometer – and scientist – into the fountainhead of this same imagination, by carefully collecting all relevant reliable information.

Probably we shall contribute to shatter the dreams of those fancying adventurous and mysterious aspects, while producing a more appealing share of real and non-valiant peculiarities. Temples going under many different names are located in Europe, Asia, America, Africa, and Australia. For good or ill, the association of the Templars with both the sacred and valorous drives contemporary initiatives.

Those aimed at the restoration of crumbling buildings and reabsorbing them into the community are driven by an interest in collective memory and the promotion of culture; those purporting a return to the ancient roots, mainly for ethical and spiritual reasons but occasionally also to declaim properties or aim at the creation of a religious movement, rely, voluntarily or involuntarily, on the organization of the medieval knights.

The Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, commonly known as the Knights Templar, was an organization founded in about 1118-19 to ensure the safe passage of Christian pilgrims from the West to Jerusalem and back.

The inspiration behind the military missions of the earliest knights was St. Bernard, and the great Pope Urban II had helped ignite the First Crusade at Claremont. With these two formidable champions, whose combined efforts ensured the establishment of the Templars, it was inevitable that the fledgling Order would rapidly achieve international acclaim.

Its celebrity, of course, has not waned over the ensuing centuries — much of this owed to the aura of mystique that surrounds the Knights Templar. It is an aura that has its roots in history but today embraces a dateless legacy of myths, legends, and falsehoods cherished by fans.

The true story of the Templars, though, is far from uninteresting or prosaic. For 170 years, the Knights played a formidable part in Christendom, and their propagation of a budget-style monasticism made their large, financially self-sufficient network so popular that they came to dominate Europe, even though their number — never exceeding 20,000 knights, squires, and serving brothers at any time of their existence — was only a small fraction of the total mass of Christian soldiers in the Holy Land.

Their empty suits of armor, helmets, and seals, fixed on not being posthumously forgotten, have become symbols of the mysterious plane of existence that people reserve for them. Their rapid rise lasted a mere sixteen years, from 1128 to 1144. This presents a balanced — it is hoped, balanced — account both of this growth and of the twisted legacy of fantasies that fascinate people with epilogues to the Templar story.

Origins and Founding

The original design for the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ, as the new order was first called, is still in dispute, but it is known that their purpose was defined in 1128 by St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who became their most active promoter after they had been approved and recommended by the Church Council of Troyes. At Bernard’s suggestion, the soldiers took vows of poverty and chastity, and they added a vow of obedience to the patriarchal vicar of Jerusalem.

However, their members were not required to renounce the world to the same extent as monks, for they might become professed knights or clerks, had the right to hold and bequeath property, and thus formed men-at-arms with the consolidated financial strength of determined cells of equal brothers abiding in Provence, the narrow French dominions of the ancient Romans, and in Jerusalem.

The nature of their vows, considered by some historians as a generality and by others as an innovation, and their hybrid character were not without influence upon their rites and upon their merit and account, which, as in the case of the regular orders, were severe but often easy. Planning, financing, and recruiting from among the drug-addicted aristocracy of Latin Europe, and possibly from among the loathsome Greek emperor’s militia, had each been left to Agnes of Courtenay, who was always closely associated with Bernard.

Warned by the patriarch Evremar of Jerusalem that his policy was too lean to counter with hostile races who feared the custodians of the temple and the simple pilgrims and their rich possessions, as the knights of the order claimed to be, Baldwin II, the boy-king of Jerusalem, and his more experienced barons at first repudiated the idea of a new standing army. Even so, Agnes was able to make some important preparations for the order before the pope’s recognition.

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