Knights Templar: How the History of the Order Became a Myth
Hidden treasure, esotericism, secret societies, the Grail, Assassins… More than seven centuries after the disappearance of the Order of the Temple, the Templars still occupy a unique place in the collective imagination. But where does history end and myth begin? Florian Besson, for Actuel Moyen Âge, looks back at the gradual construction of the Templar legend.
Few medieval institutions have enjoyed such an extraordinary afterlife.
The Order of the Temple has officially ceased to exist since 1312. Yet the Templars seem more present than ever: novels, films, video games, secret societies, theories about a lost treasure, esoteric stories and connections with the Grail and the Assassins.
This fascination raises an essential question: are we still talking about the historical Templars, or about a figure reconstructed over the centuries?
To explore this question, The Temple Journal spoke with Florian Besson, historian, medievalist and coordinator of the research-outreach blog Actuel Moyen Âge, about the birth and evolution of Templar myths.
The historical Templar and the mythical Templar
The first distinction is fundamental.
For Florian Besson, when a historian speaks of a “myth,” this does not necessarily mean a lie or a negative judgment. Above all, it means distinguishing what the sources allow us to establish about the historical Order from what was constructed after its disappearance.
The Order of the Temple was dissolved in March 1312. From that point on, the historical Templars ceased to exist as an institution.
Everything that came afterward — rewritten histories, modern orders claiming a Templar legacy, occult narratives or more or less fanciful interpretations — therefore belongs to another history: the history of Templar memory and myth.
In other words, there are almost two parallel histories: the history of the Order of the Temple, followed by the history of what later generations wanted to make of the Templars.
Templar legends are not all modern
One might assume that the myths appeared very late, with novels or cinema.
The reality is more complex.
According to Florian Besson, some distortions were already beginning in the Middle Ages.
He points in particular to French translations of the chronicle of William of Tyre, bishop of Tyre in the twelfth century. After the disappearance of the Order, some texts appear to have been reworked in ways that presented the Templars in an especially dark light.
This reconstruction already answered a need: to explain retrospectively why the Order had disappeared.
But the true rise of Templarism — the many appropriations and reconstructions of the Temple after its disappearance — came much later.
Florian identifies an important turning point in the eighteenth century, when certain Masonic traditions began establishing links with the Templars.
Then, toward the end of the nineteenth century, new layers were added: the Grail, certain occult traditions and the famous Assassins of the Middle East.
Our present-day image of the Templars is therefore the result of an accumulation of narratives produced in very different periods.
The Templar trial: an extraordinary factory of legends
The trial of the Templars naturally occupies a central place in this process.
To secure the condemnation of the Order, accusations focused on practices regarded as especially serious: secret rites, heretical behavior, scandalous acts or satanic practices.
These accusations helped establish the lasting idea that the Templars practiced a secret religion behind an outward appearance of Christian orthodoxy.
This is one of the roots of the image of the esoteric Templar.
Over the centuries, these accusations were reread and transformed. They notably fueled the idea that the Templars may have practiced a marginal form of Christianity, or even been influenced by their contacts with the East.
This period is inseparable from the figure of Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Order of the Temple, whose execution in 1314 itself gave rise to several legendary narratives.
The problem arises when stories constructed several centuries later are used to explain how the Order actually functioned in the Middle Ages.
Why do the Templars fascinate us so much?
Not every medieval religious or military order has enjoyed exactly the same afterlife. But the Templars are not the only figures from the Middle Ages to have been constantly reinvented.
Cathars, the Inquisition, witches, Vikings and the Crusades have all been repeatedly reconstructed in the collective imagination.
For Florian Besson, the Templars are particularly malleable: each era can easily reuse them and assign new meanings to them.
Several ingredients obviously help explain their success: the Crusades, the East, their rapid rise, their sudden disappearance and the motif of the lost treasure.
But another phenomenon plays an essential role: the cumulative effect of representations.
The more writers, artists, filmmakers and creators draw on Templar myths, the more present those myths become in the collective imagination.
And the more familiar they become to the public, the more new creators are tempted to reuse them in turn.
The phenomenon therefore perpetuates itself from generation to generation.
Florian nevertheless reminds us that this is also a cultural phenomenon subject to fashions. Some representations can survive for several centuries, while others eventually disappear or give way to new medieval imaginaries.
From the Grail to secret societies
Today, the Templars stand at one of the major crossroads of the Western esoteric imagination.
They have successively been credited with a lost treasure, secret knowledge, clandestine survival, links to Freemasonry, guardianship of the Grail and special relationships with Eastern traditions.
But these stories do not all belong to the same period.
This is precisely one of the important lessons from the interview with Florian: the Templar myth was never constructed as a single block.
Each century added its own interpretation.
The result today resembles a layered accumulation of traditions more than a single legend that appeared immediately after 1312.
This need to distinguish history, tradition and interpretation also applies to signs associated with the Temple. The cross pattée, for example, is now immediately associated with the Templars, but belongs to a symbolic history that is older and broader than that of the Order of the Temple alone.
Cinema, novels and video games continue the process
This construction obviously did not stop in the nineteenth century.
The twentieth and then the twenty-first century gave the Templars a new existence through popular culture.
Florian points in particular to the worldwide success of The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown, 2003), which helped renew certain imaginaries associated with the Temple.
The mechanism remains broadly the same: a popular work takes elements that already exist, transforms them and spreads them to a much wider audience.
Video games now play a comparable role.
The Assassin’s Creed series is probably one of the most spectacular examples.
Millions of players have encountered a fictional universe presenting Templars and Assassins as two opposing organizations continuing their conflict across the centuries.
From a narrative standpoint, it is extremely effective.
Historically, however, Florian stresses that the real connection between these two groups is far more limited than this contemporary representation suggests.
A construction developed over several centuries has therefore become, for part of the public, almost more familiar than the medieval reality.
Were the Templars fanatical warriors?
When comparing popular representations with historical sources, Florian Besson nevertheless urges caution.
The historian’s role is not necessarily to become a censor of contemporary imagination: novels, films and video games naturally have every right to transform the past.
But some representations become problematic when they are taken as historical realities.
In the case of the Templars, Florian particularly highlights the image of the fanatical Christian knight engaged in a permanent struggle between Christianity and Islam.
This representation fits poorly with the political complexity of the medieval Middle East.
The Templars were of course tasked with helping defend the Latin states and the holy places.
But their relations with Muslim powers were by no means limited to permanent warfare.
The sources instead reveal their political pragmatism.
Depending on circumstances, the Templars could fight certain Muslim princes while concluding truces or alliances with others.
Florian notably recalls the testimony of the Syrian prince Usama ibn Munqidh, who famously refers to his Templar “friends.”
The Crusader Middle East was therefore a much more complex political space than the simplified image of a permanent clash between Christians and Muslims.
When the Templar myth leaves the realm of entertainment
The appropriation of the Templars is not always harmless.
Florian notably discusses the contemporary use of Templar references in some far-right circles, where the figure of the knight can be used as a symbol of an alleged confrontation between the Christian West and Islam.
He specifically mentions Anders Breivik, perpetrator of the 2011 attacks in Norway, whose ideological worldview also drew on Templar references.
This obviously does not mean that the history of the Templars is responsible for these contemporary appropriations.
Quite the opposite.
This example shows precisely why it is important to distinguish the historical Templar from modern uses of the Templar image.
The reality of political relations during the Crusades was far more fluid, pragmatic and complex than these contemporary representations suggest.
The myth is now part of Templar history
Should all these stories therefore be dismissed as useless?
Not necessarily.
They tell us less about the Templars of the twelfth or thirteenth century than about the societies that produced them.
The Templars of Freemasonry tell us something about the eighteenth century.
The esoteric Templars tell us something about nineteenth-century concerns.
The Templars of cinema, novels and video games tell us something about our own relationship with the Middle Ages.
The myth therefore becomes a historical subject in its own right.
This distinction is also useful when examining traditions now strongly associated with the Temple. For example, Non Nobis Domine has a biblical origin predating the Order, even though the phrase has become deeply connected to Templar memory.
Likewise, certain directly documented objects provide much more concrete traces of the medieval institution, such as the Templar seal and its two riders.
Studying the Templars today therefore means following two trajectories: that of a medieval religious and military order that disappeared at the beginning of the fourteenth century, and that of an imagined figure that has never truly disappeared.
Beyond the legends: where should you begin?
For anyone wishing to seriously explore the history of the Order of the Temple, Florian recommends several works in particular.
Alain Demurger — Les Templiers, une chevalerie chrétienne au Moyen Âge (2008)
A work that places the Order of the Temple within its medieval religious, political and military context.
Philippe Josserand — Jacques de Molay (2019)
A study devoted to the last master of the Order of the Temple and to the period preceding the institution’s disappearance.
Florian also notes the forthcoming publication of a collective volume edited by:
Arnaud Baudin, Florian Besson and Philippe Josserand — Templiers et templarisme : raisons et déraisons d’un mythe.
A title particularly well suited to the subject, since it focuses precisely on the different constructions that developed around the Templars after their disappearance.
Seven centuries later, why are the Templars still with us?
The history of the Temple officially ended in 1312.
But the history of the Templars never really stopped.
In every era, new generations have projected their own questions onto these medieval knights: religion, secrecy, the East, power, treasure, war, secret societies and spiritual quests.
It is probably this ability to be constantly reinterpreted that partly explains their extraordinary longevity in our imagination.
Understanding the Templars today therefore requires a double effort: recovering what the sources genuinely allow us to know about the Middle Ages, and understanding how, for seven centuries, we have continually reinvented the Order of the Temple.
About Actuel Moyen Âge
Actuel Moyen Âge is a collective devoted to medieval history, communicating it to the general public and studying contemporary representations of the Middle Ages.
Discover their articles and work: Actuel Moyen Âge.