In Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, they’re an equally shadowy organization still in operation in the modern era. In the video game Assassin’s Creed, the Knights Templar is presented as a shadowy millennia-old power. The Order also shows up in all kinds of pop culture. Members must pledge to protect and defend the Christian faith. Today, Freemasons can still become part of a fraternal order informally referred to as the Knights Templar. In the eighteenth century, fraternal organizations, particularly the Freemasons, adopted ideas and imagery from the Templars. They remained influential long after they were gone READ MORE: Why Friday the 13th Spelled Doom for the Knights Templar 10.
Where the Church has previously stood behind the Order, Pope Clement V now sided against them. By this time, the failure of the Crusades and the enviable wealth of the Templars had diminished their reputation. The knights were also talking about forming their own state in southeastern France. The king was deeply in debt, and the Order refused to grant him new loans. But King Philip IV was not an eager host for them. The Knights Templar established a new central base in Paris. Muslim forces retook Jerusalem in 1187, and over the century that followed the Crusader forces were driven from the Middle East. They were so powerful a king went to war with them Walter De Merton, a businessman with ties to the Order, founded Merton College, which pioneered this system in England.
The waqf, a legal device in Islamic law, similarly helped scholars maintain their independence in the medieval Middle East. The system of maintaining colleges through a perpetual endowment may also owe its origins to Muslim models observed by the Knights Templar. This connection could help explain why English common law differs from Roman systems in significant ways. For example, the Inns of Court in London, legal institutions formed in the medieval period with ties to the Templars, have some striking similarities to madrassas built around mosques, where Sunni scholars debated the law. Some scholars believe the Knights Templar helped import Muslim ideas that transformed Western legal and educational systems. They understood how Islamic institutions worked
They just wanted to build up bigger armies so that they could effectively crush the Muslim forces.ħ. Of course, that didn’t make the Knights Templar any sort of pacifists. “It would not be unlikely that the Templars at times seemed insufferably know-it-all to those who had just arrived from the West,” according to Ann Gilmour-Bryson, a historian at the University of Melbourne. The Templars, who had been in the area for years and had some friendly relationships with local Arabs, sometimes had to explain that picking a particular fight wasn’t a great idea. European Christians reaching Jerusalem for the first time often wanted to do battle with Muslims as quickly as possible. While they were known for their piety and their readiness to fight for the spread of Christianity, the Knights Templar sometimes counseled their fellow Crusaders against rash action. They were strategic thinkers as well as zealous fighters The Rule of the Knights Templar called for them to never retreat, surrender, or charge without being ordered to do so-excellent features for any army that needs to remain disciplined. A part of that fierceness probably came from religious devotion, which allowed them to see breaking their vows as a fate worse than death. They acted as the advance force in a number of battles of the Crusades, including the Battle of Montgisard, when they helped greatly outnumbered Christian forces defeat an army led by the great Muslim commander Saladin. They were highly trained, and became known as fierce fighters. They refused to ever surrenderĭuring the Crusades, some Christian forces were ragtag armies with minimal training. The Knights Templar or Templars existed for nearly two centuries during the Middle Ages and were among the most skilled fighting units of the Crusades.