Pope Clement V dissolved the Order of the Temple, but there were still former Templars living throughout Europe and in Cyprus, and some were still prisoners of the Mamluks. Ex-Templars lived long: in 1350 there was at least one Templar alive in Roussillon in Catalonia but, as many Templars had dropped out of the records, there may have been more survivors elsewhere in Europe.

Views of the Templars’ downfall remained mixed. As one French commentator wrote in around 1316, everyone had different opinions and there was great debate. Anyone who believed that the pope or the king of France would not have acted unjustly had to believe that the trial had been justified, because to disbelieve the pope was a form of heresy; but others condemned the trial nevertheless. Controversy continued: late in the fourteenth century the St. Albans’ chronicler Thomas of Walsingham followed two earlier English commen-tators, Adam Murimuth and Geoffrey le Baker, stating that the king of France attacked the Templars to get their property. But the so-called Sherborne missal, produced around 1399–1407, stated that the Templars were destroyed because of their idolatry.

The Templars were not forgotten. Obviously, their families and supporters would have remembered them. Templar properties continued to be called “the Temple” long after they had passed to the Hospital of St. John, and even a few Hospitaller properties acquired the suffix: such as Temple Grafton in Warwickshire, which had never belonged to the Templars. In other locations the suffix “Temple” had no connection to a military-religious order, but myths of Templar connections grew up to explain the name. The Templars continued to appear in fictional literature across Latin Christendom, almost invariably as good Christians, holy men, dedicated to serving God and helping Christians. The Templars’ heroic reputation as knights of Christ and their tragic and much-debated end made them an obvious subject for fiction, especially when there were no more living Templars to object.

The Templars’ primary function was to protect Christians: either Christian pilgrims, as stated by Archbishop William of Tyre, or Christian territory, as recorded by Ernoul–Bernard. Writers of epic, romance, and satire referred to the Templars’ military deeds as famous across Christendom. The author of the so-called Itinerarium peregrinorum 1, w ritten by an English crusader or crusaders early in the third crusade (1189–92), declared of the Templars that none were more illustrious than they. Yet contemporary commentators recorded remarkably little detail of the Templars’ military engagements with the non-Christian enemy, either in the Latin East or in the Iberian Peninsula.

This was partly due to the nature of conflict in these regions. Rather than constant battle, the Franks of Outremer and the neighbouring Muslims kept up raids against each other, plundering each other's territory and carrying off goods and slaves, but seldom engaging in major battles. Likewise, in the Iberian Peninsula the Templars were generally involved in raids on Muslim territory rather than full-scale battle, which occurred only rarely. In major conflicts, as they provided only a small part of the royal army their deeds could pass unnoticed. That said, because they depicted themselves as defenders of Christendom in their alms-collecting campaigns and newsletters to their supporters in Europe, when defeat came they were most likely to be blamed.

Warfare in the Middle East

In the late eleventh century, when the first crusade arrived in the Middle East, the region was not predominantly Muslim. The population was divided between Greek and other eastern Christians, Jews, Muslims, and minority religious groups which did not fit precisely into any of the three great religions. The Muslims were not united against other religions and were not necessarily anti-Frankish. The conflicts in this region were not fundamentally over religion; the key factor at stake was the need for land. What those who farmed this land and traded across it wanted from government were not so much rulers who followed their own religion as rulers who would keep the peace, so that they could carry on their agriculture and trade.

Between the years 1307 and 1312 the military-religious Order of the Temple was investigated on charges of heresy and dissolved by papal provision. Over seven hundred years later, there is still no consensus on the root cause of the fall of the Templars. Views divide roughly into two camps, both of which date from the original events: either the king of France destroyed the order for his own political and/or financial gain; or the order fell because of its failures and corruption within its ranks.

The Interrogations

In 1307–8, Templars were arrested in France, Cyprus, the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, the Low Countries, England, Scotland, and Ireland, and interrogated on charges of blasphemy (including denying Christ, spitting on the Cross, and worshipping an idol-head) and sexual depravity. As such sins were associated with heresy, normal procedures against heretics were used to investigate the case. There were apparently no Templars in Greece, Sicily, or Eastern Europe, the papal inquisitors to Britain and Ireland reported that there were no Templars in Scandinavia, and few Templars were arrested in Germany. The Templars arrested in France and the parts of the Low Countries controlled by the king of France were told that if they did not confess they would be tortured until they did; but if they confessed (as they were told that their com rades had done) they would be well treated. Despite these tried-and-tested interrogation techniques, contemporaries reported that thirty-six Templars in Paris died under torture rather than confess to any of the charges. Their testimonies were not recorded. Of one hundred and thirty-eight recorded Templar testimonies from the interrogations in Paris in October to November 1307, only four Templars appear not to have confessed to the charges.

However, not all rulers outside France wished to arrest the Templars and few Templars within their realms confessed. The trial continued in fits and starts until March 1312, when Pope Clement V dissolved the Templars by papal provision at the Church council of Vienne. There was no detailed discussion of the case at the council, and Clement himself indicated that the evidence against the Templars was not conclusive, stating that he was dissolving the order because its reputation had been damaged beyond repair.

The Templars were almost everywhere in medieval Europe: at royal courts, in towns, overseeing markets and fairs, taking care of parish churches, and supervising farm workers. They loaned money and offered safe deposit and money transfer facilities. They developed underproductive land, maintained flood defences, and provided employment for clerks, household servants, and farmworkers. They invested in modern technology, notably fulling mills. Their houses, scattered across the countryside, provided hospitality to travellers and distributed alms to the needy on three days a week.

The Templars’ reason for existence was to defend Christendom and Christians, and to this end they used their European properties to raise money, supplies, and personnel for their military activities on the frontiers. Leading Templars in the Latin East sent regular newsletters to their brothers and leading secular and religious figures in Europe, with the latest news of their activities, an overview of events on the frontier, and requests for aid. Their alms-collectors travelled regularly around Europe, preaching and collecting donations. They had papal authority to visit churches under interdict once a year, and to judge from contemporary complaints they visited more often.

Yet, their patrons, tenants, and estates away from the frontiers of Christendom also made demands on them. Although they were founded to fight physical battles in defence of Christians, by the time of the Templars’ arrests in 1307 and 1308 the brothers in Latin Europe were spending a considerable amount of time and money providing post-mortem care for their patrons. They were known (in fact and in fiction) for providing fine tombs for their patrons. A substantial number of the chapels that they maintained, at least in England, supported priests who performed mass for the souls of past patrons; and a large proportion of these chapels did not also serve a Templar house—in other words, their primary purpose was to commemorate the Templars’ benefactors and provide post-mortem care for their souls.

Parish Work

Templars were popular providers of pastoral care. One possible reason for this was that popes had allowed the brothers exemption from observing interdicts, so that they could keep their churches open when other local churches were closed. What was more, during the trial of the Templars in England, some non-Templar witnesses stated that the Templars lifted excommunications from their own people—employees, associate members, and perhaps even tenants—without episcopal permission.

The Knights Templar began in obscurity, and grew to be one of the most influential organizations in Christendom. From a small group of warriors who set out to serve God in the best way that they knew, the Knights Templar became a trans-European multinational organization at a time when the only trans-European multinational organizations were branches of the Christian Church. They held property in almost every Christian country in Europe, they had a permanent presence at the papal court and at most royal courts in Latin Christendom, and their members served governments as diplomats, treasurers, and advisors. They were the living embodiment of the Latin Church's reform movement of the eleventh and twelfth century, demonstrating that non-noble people could be virtuous and could serve God in action. The Templars and other new religious movements of their time showed that to reach God, it was no longer necessary to shut oneself up in a religious community and spend one's days in prayer and self-denial; a Christian could go out into the world and serve God in whatever way they knew best. Some Christians served in hospitals, some travelled the roads of Europe preaching God's Word; the Templars defended Christians and Christian territory.

The Templars began in Jerusalem, in the decades following the first crusade's capture of that city in 1099. They acquired their title from their base in the Aqsa mosque, which the Franks called “Solomon's Temple.” It took them a decade to get the attention of their contemporaries in Europe, but the reaction—when it came—was almost entirely positive. True, Templars did not fit the traditional model of servants of God: they were not of noble birth, they did not spend their lives shut away in prayer and fasting, and as warriors they could not adhere to the ideals of poverty and austerity held by the early Church because they had to invest in military equipment and horses. Yet they gained fame for their discipline, their courage on the battlefield, and their self-denying piety. In the wake of the first crusade, clearly military skill was needed as much as prayer to defend Jerusalem and the other holy places which the crusaders had won. The Templars embodied contemporary warriors’ view that warriors could serve God with their military skills at least as well as monks could serve God with prayer.

The Templars were Latin—that is, Catholic—Christians. Their faith was the faith of pre-Reformation Europe, a broad Church which expected believers to attend church only three times a year and did not expect the laity to take an active role in church services. The Templars were not educated in theology and would not have been aware of or even interested in the complex theological debates that were taking place in the Latin Church in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Their function was to serve the Holy Land, not to engage in intellectual debate.

The Templars’ admission ceremony instructed that new members should make their vows to “God and Our Lady” (the Blessed Virgin Mary, Christ's Mother). They swore to be obedient to the master of the order, to preserve their physical chastity, and live without personal property. They also promised to keep the customs of the order, to help to conquer the Holy Land of Jerusalem, never to leave the order without permission from the master, and never to be in a situation where a Christian might be wrongfully deprived of his or her possessions through their authority or advice. When they had made these promises, they were welcomed into the house and promised “the bread and water and poor clothing of the house and much pain and suffering.” Although Jacques de Vitry, bishop of Acre (d. 1240), suggested that some brothers joined a military-religious order to gain prestige and an easier life, the order's official line was that life would not be easy, and that members could expect to sacrifice all their own interests for the sake of God and Our Lady.

Although they formed an active rather than a praying religious order, the Templars expected to focus their lives on prayer and serving God. Their regulations show that their daily timetable was based on the timetable of the monastic Rule of St. Benedict, with prayers to be said at fixed times during the day, known as the “Hours.” If brothers could not say the Hours in chapel because they were travelling on the order's business, they should recite the Lord's Prayer at the appropriate times. They should also say the Lord's Prayer when they went to bed, before and after meals, and in a daily service for the members of the order and their benefactors, living and dead.

Christianity has always been in at least two minds over the validity of violence. On the one hand, the Ten Commandments prohibit murder; on the other, there is a moral imperative to defend the defenceless.

Some leading churchmen expressed approval of the concept of the military-religious order. Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux insisted in his letter for Master Hugh de Payns that the Templars were a new concept, a new militia or knighthood, and that when the brothers fought non-Christians in defence of Christians their fighting was necessary and spiritually valid. Bishops Otto of Freising and Anselm of Havelberg agreed. Abbot Guigo of La Grande Chartreuse wrote to advise the Templars in their spiritual battles and prayed that the mercy and power of God would enable them to triumph gloriously in spiritual and physical battles. Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, wrote positively to Everard des Barres, third master of the Temple (d. 1152), praising the brothers for fighting both spiritual and physical wars and for being monks by their virtues, knights by their deeds (writing to Pope Eugenius III he was less positive, describing the Templars as simply a militia).

However, the contemporary writer who called himself Hugo Peccator (that is, “Hugh the Sinner”) indicated that other, nameless, commentators had criticized the Templars’ military activity, calling it illicit, harmful, and an obstacle to spiritual process. Hugh argued that the Templars followed a religious lifestyle, with fasting and self-denial. They were not guilty of hatred, because they hated wickedness, not humans; they were justified in taking plunder, because they had earned it through their work; and their active work for God was as valuable, or more valuable, than prayer and contemplation. He urged the Templars to remain at their posts and continue their valuable work for God.

Scholars have not agreed who Hugo Peccator was: perhaps he was Hugh de Payns, first master of the Templars; perhaps he was the eminent theologian Hugh of St. Victor; he might even have been Count Hugh of Champagne, Hugh de Payns's overlord, who joined the Templars in around 1125. There are strong arguments for the first two of these. In any case, the letter—which survives in only one copy, suggesting that it did not circulate widely—shows both the objections which could have been made against the concept of the Templars and how the brothers and their supporters could have answered them.

How exactly how did the Templars begin, and what did they originally set out to achieve? These should be easy questions to answer, but they began so quietly that no contemporary noted the fact. By the time that they were sufficiently important to be noticed, each commentator had their own view on what the Templars were for. So both the date of the Templars’ foundation and their original function remain uncertain.

Written between 1165 and 1184, Archbishop William of Tyre's history of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem is the most comprehensive account of the kingdom in the twelfth century. Educated at the Universities of Paris and Bologna, William wrote in excellent Latin, and as chancellor of the kingdom of Jerusalem he had easy access to the records of the kingdom. According to Archbishop William, in the year 1118:

The military orders are best known as knights: the Knights Templar, Knights Hospitaller, Teutonic Knights, Knights of Santiago and so on. Their houses resembled knightly residences, castles or manor houses, and their leading officials used heraldic insignia. Yet during the middle ages the majority of their members were not knights but ‘servientes’ or ‘serjans’ – ‘serving brothers’ or ‘sergeant–brothers’– who might be warriors but did not hold knightly rank. The bulk of their recruits came not from the high nobility but from lesser knightly, gentry and burgess families. These Latin Christian institutions also included priests and sisters among their full members and married men and women of every social rank among their associates. Arguably, then, they were not primarily chivalric, but resembled other new religious movements of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries such as the regular canons and friars – except that most of their members were not priests.

Nevertheless, the knight–brothers were always the most visible and bestknown group within these orders. Contemporaries called them ‘a new knighthood’ and claimed that they had restored ‘the order of knights’ to its proper role in society. It is not clear, however, whether their impact on the development of chivalry was as substantial as such assertions suggest.

In his study Chivalry, Maurice Keen considered how it was influenced by crusading and the military orders that arose from the crusading movement. The military orders offered a form of knighthood that fused ecclesiastical and military ideals but, in Keen's view, they were too monastic and ecclesiastical to have had a significant effect on secular knighthood. The military orders did generalise ‘the idea of knighthood as an order’. Yet, tied to the three religious vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, they were cut off from some of the central themes of chivalry, such as the cult of love and the ideal of the solitary knight seeking personal honour, the hero–figure of the secular chivalric romances.

The fictional literature of the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries presented the military orders as an example of Christian knighthood, but mainly to those outside Christendom. Although writers and audiences approved of their vocation, chivalric literature was primarily interested in secular knighthood, depicting it as created by God and pleasing to him without need of ecclesiastical trappings.

How far were the military religious orders involved in secular warfare? The vocation of the Knights Templar, Knights Hospitaller, Teutonic Knights, and similar medieval institutions bound them to fight in defense of Christians, to prevent injustice to Christians and to lay down their lives for their brothers. Hence modern scholars of the medieval military religious orders have argued that the Templars, Hospitallers, and Teutonic knights generally avoided involvement in secular warfare and any warfare outside their own vocation.

Yet there were also occasions when the military religious orders were physically involved in hostilities against Christians: not necessarily in battle, but in various forms of conflict. This article will examine some of these instances and discuss how the military religious orders saw their role in the West, asking whether the military religious orders’ role in “worldly” conflict was much more fundamental to their overall activity than previous studies suggest. The subject of religious orders’ involvement in secular warfare calls into question the division between the ecclesiastical and secular realms and how far these were divided in practice during the later Middle Ages; the relationship between the religious orders and wider society; and the difference between canonical theory and practice. However, before proceeding into detailed discussion, it will be useful to set out how these Christian institutions were founded, and to investigate their original purpose.

The military religious orders first appeared in the city of Jerusalem in the early twelfth century, in the wake of the conquests of the First Crusade. Their members took life-time monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, combining permanent religious vows and military activity within their religious vocation.

While the Third Crusade (1189–92) re-established Latin Christian control of the coastal regions of the Holy Land, arguably the most long-lasting consequence of the crusade was Richard the Lionheart's conquest of the island of Cyprus in 1191. The Anglo-Norman crusading army, accompanied by leading Templars and Hospitallers, overthrew the Greek Orthodox ruler Isaac Ducas Comnenus and took control of the island as a supply base for the forthcoming campaign on the Syrian-Palestinian mainland. Richard subsequently sold the island to the Templars, but when they decided not to keep it he sold it to the deposed former Latin king of Jerusalem Guy of Lusignan. Guy and his successors established a Latin dynasty which ruled Cyprus until the 1480s.

During 1392 and 1393 the French writer Jean d'Arras composed a story of the Lusignans’ legendary fairy ancestress, Mélusine, which depicted their acquisition of Cyprus rather differently. In this account the Lusignans acquired Cyprus through marriage and the heroism of Mélusine's sons, with the assistance of the Order of St John of Rhodes – otherwise known as the Hospitallers. Jean d'Arras claimed to have based his work on historical sources, but he was very selective in the information that he used, excluding the dominant versions of history in favour of an invented past which gave the Lusignans free agency and full ownership of the island. This chapter will consider Jean's use of both past and present, and what he could have intended to gain for his patrons by restating the Lusignans’ rights over Cyprus at a time when their control of the island was being challenged.

The legend of the fairy ancestress of the rulers of the castle of Lusignan in Poitou, the kings of Jerusalem and Cyprus, and the counts of La Marche and Parthenay already existed before 1362, although no written version has survived. Jean d'Arras's story tied the legend into historical events and particularly to war against Sarrazins – a generic term for non-Christians, especially Muslims. He stated that he was writing for Jean, duke of Berry, and his sister Mary, duchess of Bar, who were children of King Jean II the Good of France (reigned 1350–64). The kings of France had long been leading proponents of the crusade.