Knights Templar Founded

This series has five easy 5 minute installments. This first installment: Nine Knights Pledge to Protect Pilgrims.

Introduction
Among the military orders of past ages, that of the Knights Templars, founded for the defense of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, with its lofty motive, its superb organization and discipline, and its history extending over nearly two centuries, is justly accounted one of the most illustrious. At the period when this extraordinary and romantic order came into existence, the contrasting spirits of warlike enterprise and monastic retirement were drawing men, some from the field to the cloister, others from the life of ascetic piety to the scenes of strife. There appeared a strange blending of these two tendencies, which indeed was the leading characteristic of the time. This union of the religious with the militant spirit had been promoted by the enthusiasm of the crusades which had already been undertaken, and among the crusaders themselves the blended spiritual and military ideal of the holy war had its complete development. Let us recall the reasons and the beginnings of the crusades themselves.

Upon the legendary discovery of the Holy Sepulcher by Helena, the mother of Constantine, about three hundred years after the death of Christ, and the consequent erection, as it is said, by her great son — the first Christian emperor of Rome — of the magnificent Church of the Holy Sepulcher over the sacred spot, a tide of pilgrimage set in toward Jerusalem which increased in strength as Christianity gradually spread throughout Europe. When in A.D. 637 the Holy City was surrendered to the Saracens, the caliph Omar gave guarantees for the security of the Christian population. Under this safeguard the pilgrimages to Jerusalem continued to increase, until in 1064 the Holy Sepulcher was visited by seven thousand pilgrims, led by an archbishop and three bishops. But in 1065 Jerusalem was taken by the Turks, who massacred three thousand citizens, and placed the command of the city in savage hands. Terrible oppression of the Christians there followed; the Patriarch of Jerusalem was dragged by the hair of his head over the sacred pavement of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and cast into a dungeon for ransom; extortion, imprisonment, and massacre were indiscriminately visited upon the people.

Such were the conditions that aroused the indignant spirit of Christendom and prepared it for the cry of Peter the Hermit, which awoke the wild enthusiasm of the crusades. When Jerusalem was captured by the crusaders under Godfrey of Bouillon in 1099, the zeal of pilgrimage burst forth anew. But although Jerusalem was delivered, Palestine was still infested with the infidels, who made it as hazardous as before for the pilgrims entering there. Some means for their protection must be found, and out of this necessity grew the great military order of which the following pages treat.

This selection is from History of the Knights Templars, the Temple Church, and the Temple by Charles G. Addison published in 1842. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Charles G. Addison (1812-1866) was an English lawyer and historical, travel and legal writer.

Time: 1118
Place: Jerusalem

To alleviate the dangers and distresses to which the pilgrim enthusiasts were exposed; to guard the honor of the saintly virgins and matrons, and to protect the gray hairs of the venerable palmers, nine noble knights formed a holy brotherhood-in-arms, and entered into a solemn compact to aid one another in clearing the highways of infidels and robbers, and in protecting the pilgrims through the passes and defiles of the mountains to the Holy City. Warmed with the religious and military fervor of the day and animated by the sacredness of the cause to which they had devoted their swords, they called themselves the “Poor Fellow-soldiers of Jesus Christ.”

They renounced the world and its pleasures, and in the Holy Church of the Resurrection, in the presence of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, they embraced vows of perpetual chastity, obedience, and poverty, after the manner of monks. Uniting in themselves the two most popular qualities of the age, devotion and valor, and exercising them in the most popular of all enterprises, the protection of the pilgrims and of the road to the Holy Sepulcher, they speedily acquired a vast reputation and a splendid renown.

At first, we are told, they had no church and no particular place of abode, but in the year of our Lord 1118 — nineteen years after the conquest of Jerusalem by the crusaders — they had rendered such good and acceptable service to the Christians that Baldwin II, King of Jerusalem, granted them a place of habitation within the sacred enclosure of the Temple on Mount Moriah, amid those holy and magnificent structures, partly erected by the Christian emperor Justinian and partly built by the caliph Omar, which were then exhibited by the monks and priests of Jerusalem, whose restless zeal led them to practice on the credulity of the pilgrims, and to multiply relics and all objects likely to be sacred in their eyes, as the Temple of Solomon, whence the “Poor Fellow-soldiers of Jesus Christ” came thenceforth to be known by the name of “the Knighthood of the Temple of Solomon.”

A few remarks in elucidation of the name “Templars,” or “Knights of the Temple,” may not be unacceptable.

By the Mussulmans the site of the great Jewish Temple on Mount Moriah has always been regarded with peculiar veneration. Mahomet, in the first year of the publication of the Koran, directed his followers, when at prayer, to turn their faces toward it, and pilgrimages have constantly been made to the holy spot by devout Moslems. On the conquest of Jerusalem by the Arabians, it was the first care of the caliph Omar to rebuild “the Temple of the Lord.” Assisted by the principal chieftains of his army, the Commander of the Faithful undertook the pious office of clearing the ground with his own hands, and of tracing out the foundations of the magnificent mosque which now crowns with its dark and swelling dome the elevated summit of Mount Moriah.

This great house of prayer, the most holy Mussulman temple in the world after that of Mecca, is erected over the spot where “Solomon began to build the house of the Lord at Jerusalem in Mount Moriah, where the Lord appeared unto David his father, in the place that David had prepared in the threshing-floor of Oman the Jebusite.”

It remains to this day in a state of perfect preservation and is one of the finest specimens of Saracenic architecture in existence. It is entered by four spacious doorways, each door facing one of the cardinal points: the Bab el D’Jannat (or “Gate of the Garden”), on the north; the Bab el Kebla, (or “Gate of Prayer”), on the south; the Bab ibn el Daoud (or “Gate of the Son of David”), on the east; and the Bab el Garbi, on the west. By the Arabian geographers it is called Beit Allah (“the House of God”), also Beit Almokaddas or Beit Almacdes (“the Holy House”). From it Jerusalem derives its Arabic name, El Kods (“the Holy”), El Schereef (“the Noble”), and El Mobarek (“the Blessed”); while the governors of the city, instead of the customary high-sounding titles of sovereignty and dominion, take the simple title of Hami (or “Protectors”).

On the conquest of Jerusalem by the crusaders, the crescent was torn down from the summit of this famous Mussulman temple, and was replaced by an immense golden cross, and the edifice was then consecrated to the services of the Christian religion, but retained its simple appellation of “the Temple of the Lord.” William, Archbishop of Tyre and Chancellor of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, gives an interesting account of this famous edifice as it existed in his time, during the Latin dominion. He speaks of the splendid mosaic work, of the Arabic characters setting forth the name of the founder and the cost of the undertaking, and of the famous rock under the center of the dome, which is to this day shown by the Moslems as the spot whereon the destroying angel stood, “with his drawn sword in his hand stretched out over Jerusalem.” This rock, he informs us, was left exposed and uncovered for the space of fifteen years after the conquest of the Holy City by the crusaders, but was, after that period, cased with a handsome altar of white marble, upon which the priests daily said mass.

To the south of this holy Mussulman temple, on the extreme edge of the summit of Mount Moriah, and resting against the modern walls of the town of Jerusalem, stands the venerable Church of the Virgin, erected by the emperor Justinian, whose stupendous foundations, remaining to this day, fully justify the astonishing description given of the building by Procopius. That writer informs us that in order to get a level surface for the erection of the edifice, it was necessary, on the east and south sides of the hill, to raise up a wall of masonry from the valley below, and to construct a vast foundation, partly composed of solid stone and partly of arches and pillars. The stones were of such magnitude that each block required to be transported in a truck drawn by forty of the Emperor’s strongest oxen; and to admit of the passage of these trucks it was necessary to widen the roads leading to Jerusalem. The forests of Lebanon yielded their choicest cedars for the timbers of the roof; and a quarry of variegated marble, seasonably discovered in the adjoining mountains, furnished the edifice with superb marble columns.

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