The Templars went on to achieve great things and a high-profile reputation. But they came from very humble beginnings. In Britain, they got off to a very difficult start.
Although the Templar order technically existed from 1118 or 1119 onwards, for the first decade after its foundation it was little more than an idea. The order had only a tiny number of volunteers with which to carry out its vastly overambitious objectives. It existed in borrowed clothes and borrowed accommodation. And it carried out its dangerous duties in relative anonymity. Its main support came from the near-bankrupt king of Jerusalem and his local clergy. The Templar order was born on the furthest fringes of Christendom – far from the glamorous courts and royal patronage of Western Europe.
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A step change was needed – and it was obvious that this change was not going to happen in the struggling Latin East. Something needed to be done to make the European powers take notice.
A 13th-century depiction of King Baldwin II of Jerusalem ceding the Temple to Hugh de Payns and Godfrey de Saint-Omer – Wikimedia Commons
The turning point came in 1127. In that year, Hugh of Payns, together with his royal sponsors in the Latin East, made the decision to launch a fundraising and recruitment drive in Western Europe. It was a huge gamble. It involved many of the Templars leaving the Holy Land, at a time when every fighting man was needed on the front line. If it worked, however, the rewards would be huge – the Templars could make the transition from being a tiny group of provincial enthusiasts to being one of the Christian world’s greatest international corporations.
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Damascus was the trigger for that transition. It was the biggest prize in front of the crusader leadership and its capture would be the best way to ensure that the nascent Christian states in the region had the critical mass to survive.
The city had been a prosperous Christian regional centre at the time of the Arab invasions. If it could be recovered, the Crusader States would have enough land to attract desperately needed settlers into the region. And they would gain the geographic space to conduct a defence in depth in the face of inevitable Muslim attacks. At a single stroke, the prospect of a revitalised and sustainable Christian Middle East would become far more realistic.
Damascus was a tantalising objective. King Baldwin II, the tough and resourceful leader of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, was understandably beguiled by it. By the mid-1120s, he began to put the planning in place for a coordinated assault on the city. To do this with any chance of success, however, he needed to get help from Western Europe. Baldwin sent two diplomatic missions to the West in 1127 to call for help. Operationally, nothing was being left to chance.
Knight effigy at the Temple Church, headquarters of the Templars in Britain, in London. Photo by Michel wal / Wikimedia Commons
One delegation, led by the chancellor, William of Bures, and Guy Brisebarre, was primarily focused on Fulk, Count of Anjou. Fulk was a powerful leader who was already known for his commitment to the crusading cause – he was to be offered the hand in marriage of Melisende, Baldwin’s eldest daughter and the heiress to the throne of Jerusalem. Implicitly, Fulk was being positioned to succeed Baldwin as king.
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The other mission was led by Hugh of Payns and his obscure group of enthusiasts, with their strange blend of knighthood and monasticism. One of their objectives was explicit and well understood by contemporaries.
Hugh and the other ambassadors were, wrote William of Tyre, ‘sent by the king and the chief men of the kingdom to the princes of the West for the purpose of rousing the people there to come to our assistance. Above all, they were to try to induce powerful men [potentes] to come to help us besiege Damascus.’
What William did not say, however, perhaps because of his antipathy towards the Templars and the power they later wielded, was that it was also a major awareness-raising and recruitment drive for the order.
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In 1128 the Templar recruitment road trip reached England and Scotland. It was to have historic consequences for the order’s role in the province.
There may have been British Templars before Hugh’s arrival in 1128. The English in particular had played a significant, although certainly not dominating, role in the First Crusade and the subsequent early expeditions to the East.
Inevitably, it is mainly the nobility who appear in the records – but they were accompanied by their anonymous retinues containing far larger numbers of Englishmen who served as soldiers, squires and mercenaries. Even some of the growing middle-classes were involved, helped by their money and access to shipping. Merchants and traders went on crusade, including Roger of Cornhill (still a famous City financial street), Andrew of London and Viels of Southampton. So it is certainly not impossible, given the enthusiasm for crusading at this time, that some of Hugh of Payn’s original band of brothers were British. But it is unlikely.
The First Crusade was primarily a French affair and both Hugh of Payns and Godfrey of Saint-Omer were Frenchmen – instead it is far more likely that the vast majority, if not all, of the first generation of brothers were French. The British Templars were probably in the second wave of recruits.
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Photograph of stained glass window in Temple Church, Temple, Cornwall, England. Photo by Talskiddy / Wikimedia Commons
The earliest reference to the Templars in Britain was a testament to the effectiveness of Hugh’s bluff style of recruitment-preaching amongst the warrior classes – but the tone of the chronicles, written with the grim harshness of hindsight, was not encouraging.
While he was on his recruiting road trip around Europe, Hugh of Payns and his men had a very productive audience with King Henry I of England (r. 1100–1135). Not unusually (and this was a perennial problem for the crusading movement, of course), Henry was at war with France. In 1128 he spent much of the year campaigning in Normandy, but still found time to meet up with the charismatic emissaries from the Christian East.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle noted that:
Hugh of the Knights Templar came from Jerusalem to the king in Normandy; and the king received him with great ceremony and gave him great treasures of gold and silver, and sent him thereafter to England, where he was welcomed by all good men. He was given treasures by all, and in Scotland too; and by him much wealth, entirely in gold and silver, was sent to Jerusalem. He called for people to go out to Jerusalem. As a result, more people went, either with him or after him, than ever before since the time of the First Crusade, which was in the day of Pope Urban: yet little was achieved by it. He declared that a decisive battle was imminent between the Christians and the heathen, but, when all those multitudes got there, they were pitiably duped to find it was nothing but lies.
There are two different levels of bitterness in this rather sad and disappointed chronicle entry. Firstly, perhaps, there was bitterness at the thought of Englishmen being taken abroad, to their deaths, by foreigners – and French foreigners at that. The chronicle was, after all, written at a time when cultural friction between Normans and Anglo-Saxons had not entirely disappeared.
The author was also saddened by the fact that young men had died in large numbers on a failed campaign – men who had died, moreover, in a faraway land that had little tangible meaning, either to themselves or the writer. He could not know that there were no lies. King Baldwin II had done everything he could, both militarily and diplomatically, to ensure that the campaign had a realistic prospect of success. But they had still not been able to capture Damascus. While the writer of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was hazy about the details, he was all too aware of its ignominious outcome.
The resentful tone of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was a back-handed endorsement of King Baldwin’s vision of what the Templars might be able to achieve. The order he envisaged would go some way towards ensuring that the young Frankish states were provided with additional military resources – a crude but useful approximation of a ‘standing army’.
The success of Hugh’s initial recruitment drive in the West demonstrated that this might indeed be possible. Exceeding Baldwin’s expectations, over time the military orders assumed the lion’s share of the responsibilities for the defence of the crusader states.
This was a dangerous pointer for the future. The cause was just, so God would be on our side. The fault for any failure, so the harsh logic ran, must therefore lie with those who had failed to carry out His will. Frustration about an inability to achieve victory in what was, for all practical purposes, an unwinnable war, would return to dog the Templars throughout their existence.
Dr Steve Tibble is a graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge and London University. He is an Honorary Research Associate at Royal Holloway College, University of London. Steve is a leading authority on warfare and violence in the crusading era.
He is a contributor to ‘The Cambridge History of the Crusades’ and ‘The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades’, both forthcoming in 2023. You can learn more about Steve on his personal website, or follow him on Twitter or Instagram.
Further Reading:
Barber, M., The New Knighthood: A History of the Order of the Temple, Cambridge, 1994
Nicholson, N., The Knights Templar, Leeds, 2021
Tibble, S., Templars – The Knights Who Made Britain, London, 2023
Top Image: Templar effigies in London – photo by Kjetil Bjørnsrud / Wikimedia Commons
By Steve Tibble
The Templars went on to achieve great things and a high-profile reputation. But they came from very humble beginnings. In Britain, they got off to a very difficult start.
Although the Templar order technically existed from 1118 or 1119 onwards, for the first decade after its foundation it was little more than an idea. The order had only a tiny number of volunteers with which to carry out its vastly overambitious objectives. It existed in borrowed clothes and borrowed accommodation. And it carried out its dangerous duties in relative anonymity. Its main support came from the near-bankrupt king of Jerusalem and his local clergy. The Templar order was born on the furthest fringes of Christendom – far from the glamorous courts and royal patronage of Western Europe.
A step change was needed – and it was obvious that this change was not going to happen in the struggling Latin East. Something needed to be done to make the European powers take notice.
The turning point came in 1127. In that year, Hugh of Payns, together with his royal sponsors in the Latin East, made the decision to launch a fundraising and recruitment drive in Western Europe. It was a huge gamble. It involved many of the Templars leaving the Holy Land, at a time when every fighting man was needed on the front line. If it worked, however, the rewards would be huge – the Templars could make the transition from being a tiny group of provincial enthusiasts to being one of the Christian world’s greatest international corporations.
Damascus was the trigger for that transition. It was the biggest prize in front of the crusader leadership and its capture would be the best way to ensure that the nascent Christian states in the region had the critical mass to survive.
The city had been a prosperous Christian regional centre at the time of the Arab invasions. If it could be recovered, the Crusader States would have enough land to attract desperately needed settlers into the region. And they would gain the geographic space to conduct a defence in depth in the face of inevitable Muslim attacks. At a single stroke, the prospect of a revitalised and sustainable Christian Middle East would become far more realistic.
Damascus was a tantalising objective. King Baldwin II, the tough and resourceful leader of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, was understandably beguiled by it. By the mid-1120s, he began to put the planning in place for a coordinated assault on the city. To do this with any chance of success, however, he needed to get help from Western Europe. Baldwin sent two diplomatic missions to the West in 1127 to call for help. Operationally, nothing was being left to chance.
One delegation, led by the chancellor, William of Bures, and Guy Brisebarre, was primarily focused on Fulk, Count of Anjou. Fulk was a powerful leader who was already known for his commitment to the crusading cause – he was to be offered the hand in marriage of Melisende, Baldwin’s eldest daughter and the heiress to the throne of Jerusalem. Implicitly, Fulk was being positioned to succeed Baldwin as king.
The other mission was led by Hugh of Payns and his obscure group of enthusiasts, with their strange blend of knighthood and monasticism. One of their objectives was explicit and well understood by contemporaries.
Hugh and the other ambassadors were, wrote William of Tyre, ‘sent by the king and the chief men of the kingdom to the princes of the West for the purpose of rousing the people there to come to our assistance. Above all, they were to try to induce powerful men [potentes] to come to help us besiege Damascus.’
What William did not say, however, perhaps because of his antipathy towards the Templars and the power they later wielded, was that it was also a major awareness-raising and recruitment drive for the order.
In 1128 the Templar recruitment road trip reached England and Scotland. It was to have historic consequences for the order’s role in the province.
There may have been British Templars before Hugh’s arrival in 1128. The English in particular had played a significant, although certainly not dominating, role in the First Crusade and the subsequent early expeditions to the East.
Inevitably, it is mainly the nobility who appear in the records – but they were accompanied by their anonymous retinues containing far larger numbers of Englishmen who served as soldiers, squires and mercenaries. Even some of the growing middle-classes were involved, helped by their money and access to shipping. Merchants and traders went on crusade, including Roger of Cornhill (still a famous City financial street), Andrew of London and Viels of Southampton. So it is certainly not impossible, given the enthusiasm for crusading at this time, that some of Hugh of Payn’s original band of brothers were British. But it is unlikely.
The First Crusade was primarily a French affair and both Hugh of Payns and Godfrey of Saint-Omer were Frenchmen – instead it is far more likely that the vast majority, if not all, of the first generation of brothers were French. The British Templars were probably in the second wave of recruits.
The earliest reference to the Templars in Britain was a testament to the effectiveness of Hugh’s bluff style of recruitment-preaching amongst the warrior classes – but the tone of the chronicles, written with the grim harshness of hindsight, was not encouraging.
While he was on his recruiting road trip around Europe, Hugh of Payns and his men had a very productive audience with King Henry I of England (r. 1100–1135). Not unusually (and this was a perennial problem for the crusading movement, of course), Henry was at war with France. In 1128 he spent much of the year campaigning in Normandy, but still found time to meet up with the charismatic emissaries from the Christian East.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle noted that:
Hugh of the Knights Templar came from Jerusalem to the king in Normandy; and the king received him with great ceremony and gave him great treasures of gold and silver, and sent him thereafter to England, where he was welcomed by all good men. He was given treasures by all, and in Scotland too; and by him much wealth, entirely in gold and silver, was sent to Jerusalem. He called for people to go out to Jerusalem. As a result, more people went, either with him or after him, than ever before since the time of the First Crusade, which was in the day of Pope Urban: yet little was achieved by it. He declared that a decisive battle was imminent between the Christians and the heathen, but, when all those multitudes got there, they were pitiably duped to find it was nothing but lies.
There are two different levels of bitterness in this rather sad and disappointed chronicle entry. Firstly, perhaps, there was bitterness at the thought of Englishmen being taken abroad, to their deaths, by foreigners – and French foreigners at that. The chronicle was, after all, written at a time when cultural friction between Normans and Anglo-Saxons had not entirely disappeared.
The author was also saddened by the fact that young men had died in large numbers on a failed campaign – men who had died, moreover, in a faraway land that had little tangible meaning, either to themselves or the writer. He could not know that there were no lies. King Baldwin II had done everything he could, both militarily and diplomatically, to ensure that the campaign had a realistic prospect of success. But they had still not been able to capture Damascus. While the writer of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was hazy about the details, he was all too aware of its ignominious outcome.
The resentful tone of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was a back-handed endorsement of King Baldwin’s vision of what the Templars might be able to achieve. The order he envisaged would go some way towards ensuring that the young Frankish states were provided with additional military resources – a crude but useful approximation of a ‘standing army’.
The success of Hugh’s initial recruitment drive in the West demonstrated that this might indeed be possible. Exceeding Baldwin’s expectations, over time the military orders assumed the lion’s share of the responsibilities for the defence of the crusader states.
This was a dangerous pointer for the future. The cause was just, so God would be on our side. The fault for any failure, so the harsh logic ran, must therefore lie with those who had failed to carry out His will. Frustration about an inability to achieve victory in what was, for all practical purposes, an unwinnable war, would return to dog the Templars throughout their existence.
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Yale University Press
Dr Steve Tibble is a graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge and London University. He is an Honorary Research Associate at Royal Holloway College, University of London. Steve is a leading authority on warfare and violence in the crusading era.
His Templars: The Knights Who Made Britain (Yale) is due out in September 2023, and his two most recent books (‘The Crusader Armies’, Yale 2018, and ‘The Crusader Strategy’, Yale 2020) were received to critical acclaim. The latter was short-listed for the Duke of Wellington’s military history award, 2021.
He is a contributor to ‘The Cambridge History of the Crusades’ and ‘The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades’, both forthcoming in 2023. You can learn more about Steve on his personal website, or follow him on Twitter or Instagram.
Further Reading:
Barber, M., The New Knighthood: A History of the Order of the Temple, Cambridge, 1994
Nicholson, N., The Knights Templar, Leeds, 2021
Tibble, S., Templars – The Knights Who Made Britain, London, 2023
Top Image: Templar effigies in London – photo by Kjetil Bjørnsrud / Wikimedia Commons
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