founding Templar or at the very least one of the Order’s first supporters – upon his return from his second visit to the East: ‘We have heard that … before leaving Jerusalem you made a vow to join the Militia of Christ, that you will enrol in this evangelical soldiery.’36 As the phrase ‘Militia of Christ’ would also be employed by St Bernard in reference to the Templars, and given the close ties between Hugh, Bernard and the fledgling Order, it is this comment from the Bishop of Chartres that is perhaps the most persuasive evidence we have that the Templars – in one form or another – existed at least as early as 1114.
The air of mystery that surrounds the Temple’s early years is compounded by the fact that the years before the Council of Troyes are the Order’s least documented period. Indeed, they are hardly documented at all. The Templars themselves had no official records of their foundation, which is unusual for a religious order. There were no Western chroniclers in Outremer until the time of the Second Crusade, and, more remarkably, the King’s chronicler, Fulk de Chartres, who was living in Jerusalem at the time of the Order’s supposed foundation, does not mention them at all. There are only four documents existing prior to Troyes that mention the Templars, two of them making note of the Order in connection with the Hospital.37 A later chronicle – that of Ernoul and Bernard the Treasurer – also suggests that there was some kind of close link between the two Orders. Interestingly, in this version, the Templars ‘asked the king to give them his palace in front of the Lord’s Temple’.38 Indeed, recent research39 seems to confirm that the Templars were initially given accommodation by the Augustinian Canons of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and that the buildings they occupied were part of the Hospital, which lay just to the south.
So if the Templars were originally based at the Hospital – and possibly as early as 1111 – what were they doing? Out of the four pre-1129 documents, none of them describes the Templars as protecting pilgrims. Could they have been simply providing security at the Hospital, or was something else going on? It has frequently been asserted40 that the Templars were part of some grand design that was inaugurated with the First Crusade. While this cannot be proved, it cannot be disproved either. Sufficient gaps exist in the historical record to allow the Templars a more nebulous role than that with which they have been traditionally ascribed. Certainly there were shady characters whose names have not come down to us who were moving in the background in the early years of Outremer. Godfroi de Bouillon, for instance, was accompanied to the East by a group of anonymous advisers. The name is known of only one of them, Peter the Hermit. Peter was possibly linked to a mysterious group of monks who arrived on Godfroi’s estates at Orval in the Ardennes sometime around 1090, having travelled en masse from Calabria in Italy. Peter is then thought to have become Godfroi’s personal tutor, and, in 1095, was one of those who called for a crusade. (Indeed, Peter actually led the first band of crusaders to leave Europe.) When Jerusalem fell, Godfroi was offered the crown of Jerusalem by a group of mysterious nobles, who included ‘a certain bishop of Calabria’, and Godfroi then seems to have had an abbey built just outside the city walls, on Mount Sion. The resulting Order of Sion is one of the most obscure religious fraternities of the period, and it has been suggested41 that it is from this group that the Templars derived.
Hugh, Count of Champagne, is an even more interesting figure than Godfroi. His departure for the East in 1104 seems to have been at the behest of a group of anonymous nobles, and it is possible that Hugh visited Outremer on some kind of fact-finding mission. By the time of his second visit in 1114, the Militia of Christ – quite possibly the Templars – had been formed. Although Hugh did not join immediately, he returned to France and donated land to St Bernard, who used it to found the new monastic house of Clairvaux. St Bernard later became the Templars’ chief apologist in the West, and the Cistercians and the Templars expanded at an exponential rate, with Hugh supporting both Orders. Was Hugh working in accord with some larger plan? At the very least he seems to have been a man who was acutely aware of the zeitgeist of his time. And when he did officially join the Templars in 1125, he had to swear an oath of fealty – as would any new recruit to the Order – to his own vassal, Hugues de Payen. This is remarkable in itself, and could suggest that even at this early stage, there was a powerful mystique surrounding the Order, which its members seem to have actively encouraged.
One tradition holds that while officially supposed to be protecting pilgrims, the Templars – or a group of them, at least – were involved in archaeological excavations that took place beneath the Temple platform, in what are known as Solomon’s Stables. There had long been rumours that the treasure of the Second Temple, which was destroyed in the conflagration of 70 AD, was hidden beneath the Temple Mount, and it is possible that Hugues de Payen, the Count of Champagne and others knew of this and undertook to find it. Alternatively, the Order could have stumbled across something in the stables while carrying out alterations, as they were known to have done a great deal of building work around the al-Aqsa mosque, starting from the 1120s.
If the Order did indeed find something beneath the Temple Mount, what could it have been? Speculation has been rife (indeed, where the Templars are concerned, speculation is always rife) that they found one or more priceless relics, such as the embalmed head of John the Baptist, documents pertaining to the true origins of Christianity, and the Ark of the Covenant. Then again, maybe the treasure of the Second Temple was unearthed, which was known to have been comprised of gold and other precious metals and stones. That a major find of this sort could have occurred is not beyond the realms of possibility; after all, the scrolls discovered at Nag Hammadi and Qumran in the mid 1940s had lain untouched and well preserved for almost 2,000 years.
If there is one priceless relic with which the Templars are most closely associated, it is the Holy Grail.42 In popular chivalric epics of the period, such as Wolfram von Eschenbach’s
The strong connection between the Templars and the Grail does not, of course, bring us any closer to understanding what the Grail actually is. Traditionally seen as the cup used at the Last Supper, which also caught the blood of Christ at Calvary, the Grail can also be seen as a Christianisation of the Celtic myths of the Cauldron of Plenty, which is said to have granted fertility to the land and to have been an endless source of renewal. But in the hands of Chretien, the Celtic story is merely the foundation to which he grafts new material. That he was writing in Troyes suggests that whatever new information he was privy to, it was quite possibly brought back to the city by Templars or those associated with the Order. A slightly later version of the Grail story, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s
It was after the failure of the Second Crusade that rumours began to circulate that the Templars had deliberately sabotaged the Crusade through their treacherous alliances with the infidel. The anonymous Wurzburg annalist believed that the Templars had accepted a massive bribe from Unur, the ruler of Damascus at the time of the campaign, to engineer the retreat which led to the failure of the crusade. Although accusations like these betray the usual inability of Western chroniclers to grasp the complexities of the situation in the East, where some
