- 6/15/2025
The Knights Templar, a medieval military order founded in the Holy Land in 1118, rose to prominence during the Crusades. These religious wars were launched by Western European Christians to reclaim the Holy Land from Muslim control. The Templars, with their distinctive red crosses and white mantles, were initially tasked with protecting Christian pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land. However, they soon evolved into a formidable military force, renowned for their discipline, courage, and strategic brilliance.
Directed by: Guilain Depardieu
Directed by: Guilain Depardieu
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TVTranscript
00:00The Knights Templar.
00:03A secret brotherhood, born in the throes of the Middle Ages,
00:08only to vanish after two centuries in existence.
00:18Of these men who left their mark on history,
00:21remains the legends that made them famous.
00:23Their white overcoats bearing the iconic Red Cross.
00:30The riches they amassed.
00:33Their discipline and ferocity in battle.
00:40These were the elite troops, the special forces of the 12th century.
00:44After 1,000 years, mysteries still surround the myth of these soldiers of Christ.
00:51Are they priests? Are they monks? Are they knights?
00:56What are they?
00:57An English chronicler called them a certain new monster.
01:04Who was behind the creation of the Order of the Temple?
01:07What was its mission?
01:09And how did the Templars become so powerful so quickly?
01:14By the end of the 12th century,
01:15the Templars had become a substantial international organization.
01:19Thanks to experts on the Order of the Temple,
01:22along with an investigation where the only written evidence of this period is kept,
01:27we discover the birth of a legendary brotherhood,
01:30a unique paradox of men simultaneously monk and soldier.
01:35It's truly unheard of that there's a military code within a religious rule.
01:44There were Christian thinkers who felt that it was an abomination to try to bring together prayer and battle.
01:49From the arid lands of the East, to the royal courts of France and England, discover the rise of the first Templars.
02:04See how they rallied the Pope, kings and people all across Europe to their cause.
02:09People began to offer huge sums of money, large numbers of donations to the Templar order.
02:17The county of Champagne, Burgundy, Ile de France, saw the birth of networks of Templar houses and commanderies every 30 to 40 kilometers.
02:25It was completely unprecedented to become that powerful that quickly.
02:35This is the story of the birth of the Knights Templar.
02:39A handful of men who transformed a simple brotherhood of soldiers into a religious order prepared to reign over Europe.
02:47Jerusalem.
03:01It was here, in the heart of the Middle Ages, that the first Knights Templar emerged.
03:12At the time, only a handful of knights.
03:17Nearly destitute.
03:21But all are of great piety, and have been trained in combat.
03:30Sworn to dedicate their lives to a new cause.
03:35The protection of the Holy Land, and of the Christian pilgrims who come there to worship.
03:48To understand the origins of their existence, we must go back to the end of the 11th century.
03:54At the time, the religious world was divided.
03:57In the West, the vast majority of Europe was under the authority of the Christian Church and the Pope.
04:01Islam dominates North Africa, southern Spain and the Near East, while the Turks threaten the Byzantine Empire and its capital, Constantinople, territory of the Orthodox Church.
04:13With Pope Urban II's call to action, the First Crusade witnessed thousands of Christians marching across Europe to reconquer the Holy Land.
04:27After three years of violent fighting, these Crusaders reclaimed many possessions, in particular, the city of Jerusalem, where Jesus Christ was crucified and where his tomb lies.
04:43They got to Jerusalem in the summer of 1099 and camped outside the city walls for about a month, laid siege to Jerusalem, and once they finally breached the city walls in July, there was a bloodbath.
04:58It was said that, you know, blood was running, you know, knee-deep.
05:01This could be a medieval exaggeration.
05:04I mean, medieval chronicles are prone to exaggerate the scale of carnage, but it was pretty bad.
05:10Muslims were slaughtered.
05:11Muslims were slaughtered.
05:14The First Crusade gave birth to the Crusader States, the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch, the County of Tripoli, and the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
05:25The irony was that after this three-year epic journey with tens of thousands of people laying waste to various cities, a lot of them just went back to Europe after that.
05:43At the dawn of the 12th century, the security of these Crusader States, threatened from all sides, rested on only a few knights of very diverse backgrounds who chose to settle there.
06:00The challenge facing those who remain in the East after the First Crusade is to try and turn their fairly small territorial gains into permanent territories that can last in the long term.
06:20From a military perspective, they have enemies in Damascus who can raise armies of several thousand troops.
06:26And in Aleppo, a slightly larger army, and also Fatimid, Egypt, which could raise about 15,000 troops.
06:34Now, given that the Crusader States, at least in the early years, can't put together more than a few hundred knights with a slightly larger contingent of infantry, that's a very serious challenge.
06:43In Jerusalem, Christian pilgrimage is on the rise and is organized by the authorities of the Holy City, the King of Jerusalem, the Latin Patriarch at the head of the church, and the canons of the Holy Sepulchre, which govern religious life in the city.
07:07The Holy Sepulchre is the church that is located at the site of both the crucifixion and the burial of Christ.
07:20It's a church that attracted Christian veneration early on, and therefore it's the Holy Sepulchre which happens to be the main church of Jerusalem.
07:29And therefore it's around the Holy Sepulchre, the Patriarch and the Canons, that the Church of the East is really structured.
07:38At their side are the members of the Order of the Hospitallers of Saint John of Jerusalem to help welcome pilgrims and care for the sick.
07:50But guaranteeing their safety is becoming increasingly difficult.
08:00Pilgrims arriving in Jerusalem were under constant threat of guerrilla raids from ambushes.
08:06So all pilgrims arriving in Jerusalem could be attacked in a vicinity or near the Holy City.
08:12The outskirts of this Holy Land were by no means safe.
08:29At the time, the Knights Templar didn't yet exist.
08:32The soldiers charged for the safety of the pilgrims were called the Milites Sancti Sepulchri, the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre.
08:49It's a brotherhood of armed civilians who organize themselves to protect the Holy Sepulchre,
08:55to protect men and to protect property throughout the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
09:01The Milites Sancti Sepulchri are neither part of the canonical Order of the Holy Sepulchre, nor of the Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem.
09:16It could be said that the Milites Sancti Sepulchri, who are committed to protecting pilgrims, to protecting canons,
09:23if need be, those areas which may be insecure, are in a kind of dual dependence.
09:30They are dependent on the Canons who direct their spiritual life,
09:36and they are dependent on the Hospitallers of Saint John of Jerusalem, who maintain and nourish them.
09:43Among these Milites Sancti Sepulchri, one Knight will claim his independence.
09:54His goal is to form a more powerful group, a hybrid order, which no one had ever dared to imagine before.
10:06Soldiers of a new kind, both religious and warrior.
10:12This Knight is the founder of what will much later be known as the Order of the Temple.
10:19His identity and history are mentioned for the first time in a 12th century chronicle,
10:24written by Michael the Syrian, patriarch of the Jacobite Church of Antioch.
10:31At the beginning of the reign of Baldwin II, a Frenchman came from Rome to Jerusalem to pray.
10:39He had made a vow not to return to his own country, but to become a monk,
10:43after having helped the King in the war for three years.
10:46Along with the 30 knights who accompanied him, he would spend the rest of his life in Jerusalem.
10:52When the King and his barons saw that the Frenchmen and his knights had achieved remarkable things in battle,
10:58they advised the man to serve in the militia with his 30 knights and defend the place against bandits,
11:04rather than become a monk in the hope of saving only his own soul.
11:09Now this man, whose name was Hugh Dupin, accepted this council and the 30 knights who accompanied him,
11:15joined and united with him.
11:18Hugh Dupin, born in the Champagne region around 1070, in a small village that he's named after,
11:34located 12 kilometers from the city of Troyes.
11:38He's a knight in the service of Count Hugh of Champagne.
11:42With his suzerain, Hugh Dupin will spend three years in the Holy Land at the beginning of the 12th century,
11:48before returning to Europe.
11:51Hugh Dupin led a family life. He had a wife and children.
11:57And then in 1114, touched by a deep piety that must have inhabited him for a long time,
12:04he went back to the Holy Land. And this time he left with the idea that he would never come back.
12:17Hugh Dupin is a military strategist, a defender of the Holy Land.
12:21He truly experienced what Jerusalem was, and it must have been a revelation for him.
12:25In Jerusalem, one could not be a knight like any other.
12:28One could only be a knight turned towards God, towards the service of Christ.
12:33So this idea must have germinated when he arrived in Jerusalem.
12:40Over several years, Hugh Dupin refined his project.
12:45And in 1119, one event will change his destiny.
12:55On June 28th, 1119, Muslims of the city of Aleppo attacked the Principality of Antioch.
13:03The intensity of the fighting will be of such violence that the event will be baptized in Latin as the Ager Sanguinis,
13:12the Battle of the Field of Blood.
13:18It is Baldwin II, the new king of Jerusalem, who will come in person to repel the invaders.
13:24This battle reinforced the sovereign's belief that the threat to the Crusader states was becoming too great.
13:37The new king, Baldwin II, realized that he needed more military presence than he had on the ground.
13:42He needed border guards, escorts on the roads to protect the pilgrims.
13:48He needed additional forces.
13:50It was on January 16th, 1120, in the small city of Nabalus, north of Jerusalem,
14:01that a council was to take place that would change the course of history.
14:04Assembled around the king of Jerusalem, Baldwin II and the patriarch Gaumont de Piquigny,
14:11the council brought together the main clergymen and nobles of the kingdom.
14:17On that day, the two men approved the project conceived by Hugh Dupin,
14:22the formation of a new order of knights, both religious and military,
14:28dedicated entirely to the defense of the Holy Land.
14:35The opportunity was seized by the king and the patriarch together
14:39to gamble that these knights could be operative,
14:43and the patriarch played this game, which was not a foregone conclusion,
14:47because these knights, who had gathered in the shadow of the Holy Sepulchre,
14:52were empowered.
14:54They detached themselves from the patriarch.
14:57They claimed to lead a religious life of their own,
15:00to no longer obey the directive of the Holy Sepulchre,
15:03but a master chosen from among themselves,
15:07without ceasing to be what they were, that's to say, knights and warriors.
15:18It is King Baldwin II himself, who will offer the members of this new order of chivalry a place to settle.
15:27This place is mentioned in another manuscript, written by William of Tyre,
15:32known for being the first historian of the Crusades.
15:39Over the course of the same year, some noble knights devoted themselves to the service of Christ,
15:44and professed to live forever in chastity, obedience and poverty.
15:52As they had neither church nor fixed residence,
15:55the king granted them accommodations in his palace,
15:59which was located near the Temple of the Lord.
16:06King Baldwin II made a very strong gesture by offering his palace to them in Jerusalem.
16:11Baldwin's palace actually extended south of the esplanade of the mosques,
16:17south of the Temple Mount,
16:19it extended into the area of Al-Aqsa Mosque,
16:22the former palace of King Solomon.
16:25And so, Hugues Dupin and his associates,
16:28somehow took on the name by association,
16:31by calling themselves
16:33the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon.
16:36Later, this name will be shortened,
16:37and the group will become one of the most significant orders in all history.
16:40The Order of the Temple.
16:41The Order of the Temple.
16:44Faced with the ongoing conflicts in the Holy Land,
16:47the members of this new Brotherhood must now find a way to grow.
16:49The Temples in the 1120s,
16:50if they were going to expand,
16:53what they really needed was troops,
16:55high quality recruits,
16:57money,
16:58and the power of the empire.
16:59The Temples of the Temple had become one of the most significant orders in all history.
17:02The Order of the Temple.
17:03the members of this new brotherhood must now find a way to grow.
17:10The tempers in the 1120s, if they were going to expand,
17:13what they really needed was troops, high-quality recruits,
17:17money and land in Western Europe that would supply them with the resources they need to carry on their vacation.
17:23Hugh Dupin decides to return to Europe to embark on a vast recruitment and fundraising operation.
17:34He went from country to country, France, Champaign, Flanders, England, to try to recruit and promote his project.
17:44As an agent seeking crusaders for the King of Jerusalem, he went into all the major courts of Western Europe.
17:50People began to get curious about who he was, what his order was trying to achieve,
17:55and when they found out, they were immensely impressed and began to offer huge sums of money,
18:01large numbers of donations to the Templar order, so much so that it became very, very wealthy very, very quickly.
18:10But Hugh Dupin and the founders of the order of the Temple know that to bring more men and money to the Holy Land,
18:18they need to be recognized by the highest authorities of the time.
18:30At the beginning, people were asking questions like, are they priests? Are they monks? Are they knights? What are they?
18:38Because a priest and monk is not supposed to kill, but they are fighters, they are knights.
18:48There were Christian thinkers who considered it an abomination to want to unite prayer and combat under the same religious order.
18:55In his desire to consolidate the community, to transform it into an order,
19:10Hugh Dupin had to obtain the permission of the Roman Church and therefore of the Pope.
19:14To obtain the Pope's approval, Hugh Dupin will use his connections in a region close to his birthplace, Burgundy.
19:27His first wife, Emeline de Touillon, is a relative of the de Montbar family,
19:34in which we also find another man in ascendancy within the Christian Church,
19:39and recognized throughout Europe, Bernard de Fontaine, who later becomes Bernard de Clairvaux,
19:46and after he is canonized, Saint Bernard.
19:49Saint Bernard entered the order of Citeaux, and in 1115 he founded a new abbey, the Abbey of Clairvaux.
20:01He also came from chivalry, from the border of Burgundy and Champagne.
20:05So he had all the characteristics of a man of combat, with a great strength of conviction,
20:10a very great orator, eager to lead an aesthetic life, a rigorous life in the order of Citeaux,
20:15which was really the figurehead of the Church at the beginning of the 12th century.
20:21Saint Bernard was already in 1129 a considerable figure in the Church,
20:26a sort of moral figure of the Kingdom of France, both for the clergy and for the common people.
20:31He saw in the Knights Templar not only a chance to support the continued defense of Jerusalem,
20:38but he also wanted to reform Western European knights.
20:41For over a hundred years, even before the First Crusade, one of the biggest problems facing the Catholic Church as a whole,
20:48was to reform Western knighthood.
20:51Knights were seen to be troublemakers, they fought vendettas against each other,
20:56they caused trouble, they were seen to be arrogant and proud,
20:59and so Bernard de Clairvaux saw in the Knights Templar the idea of using the Templars as a role model for Western knights,
21:06say, this is how you should be, try to steer them away from their internal feuds,
21:12and into what he perceived to be a more godly form of vocation.
21:17Convinced that this new order of the Temple represented an opportunity for the Christian Church,
21:24Bernard de Clairvaux wrote a manifesto which would go down in history entitled,
21:29in praise of the new chivalry.
21:32This is a new kind of militia, which fights a dual battle against flesh and blood and against evil spirits.
21:39They live without wives or children, dwell under one roof, have no property of their own.
21:45They have no fear of sin by killing an enemy, because it is for the sake of Jesus Christ that they give or receive the blow of death.
21:52They are more gentle than lambs and fiercer than lions, so much so that we do not know whether to call them monks or soldiers.
22:01What is stating is the Laude Nove Militia was, of course, justification of the killing of the enemy, but it wasn't just that.
22:18What is most important is the opposition that he makes between two types of chivalry.
22:28The profane chivalry, where the knights are rich or seek after richness and fight for it,
22:37and love their beautiful dresses, the beautiful horses, and another kind of new chivalry.
22:43This new chivalry was impersonated by the Templar knights that really don't care about richness, individual richness, of course.
22:53And they put their lives and all they have in support of Jerusalem, the Holy End, and Christianity in the end.
23:00On January the 13th, 1129, the authorities of the Christian Church, under the direction of Bernard de Clairvaux, organized the Council of Troyes, bringing together a representative of the Pope, members of the clergy, nobles and representatives of the Order of the Temple.
23:24During this Council, the very first rule of the Temple was enacted and put down in writing.
23:32Today, only ten original copies remain in the world. Among them is this work, written in Old French and kept in the National Library of France.
23:42The manuscript first contains the rules of the Temple, which continues through page 13 and 14.
23:55Then there's a list of celebration that the Templars received from the Pope, and then the bulk of the manuscript is formed by the rules of the Temple.
24:03So, for all of the Temple's legislation. This allows us to say that the manuscript belonged to the Templars.
24:14It most probably even belonged to an important House of the Order, because it is a beautiful manuscript with a beautiful layout.
24:22With the watermarked letters in red and blue, so this is something important.
24:27In the beginning of the book, we find the names of those who participated in the Council.
24:40The first is perhaps the most important, Cardinal Matthew of Albano, a representative of the Pope.
24:47The following is a list of several people gathered in the Cathedral of the city of Troyes. Among them, important religious leaders.
24:58The Archbishops of Reims and Sence. The Bishops of Soissons, Paris, Troyes, Auxerre and Beauvais.
25:06Eight Abbots, including of course, Bernard de Clairvaux. Noblemen such as Count Thibaut of Champagne and William the Count of Nevers.
25:14At the end, are named the six Templars present at the Council of Troyes. Among them, Brother Hugh Dupin, Master of Chivalry.
25:25On the twelve pages of manuscript, written on goatskin parchment, are all the recommendations of the Council of Troyes for members of the Order of the Temple.
25:40The rhythm of prayer is when they are in battle. The care required to give their horses, or the food they are advised to eat.
25:50You are to eat meat three times a week.
25:53Everything is accounted for, down to the last detail. Because unlike monks, the knights cannot fast or be lacking in sleep. They must maintain their strength to be ready for battle.
26:08The brothers who are exhausted from the great services rendered to the Order can avoid getting up for the night prayers, with the permission and discharge of the Master.
26:21It's a really incredible and innovative thing, the fact that inside a religious code, there is a military part.
26:31So there's even a military code which is integrated perfectly inside of a religious order.
26:36A little further reads that the participants in the Council of Troyes will bring the Christian Church into a new era.
26:50We believe that this new kind of religious life was born in the Holy Land, thanks to Divine Providence.
26:58This means that this armed knighthood can, without committing a sin, kill the enemies of the cross.
27:05For this reason, we deem that you have the right to be called Knights of the Temple.
27:10For the first time, the Church formalizes the idea that one can kill in the name of Christ, and that its armed branch in the Holy Land has a name, the Order of the Temple.
27:23It was the Council of Troyes which marked the birth of the Temple, and which transformed the community gathered around Hugues de Pain in Jerusalem into a structure of the Latin Church.
27:39To some people, the idea of the Knights Templar was actually quite almost heretical.
27:49One of the English chronicler by the name of Henry of Huntingdon called them a certain new monster.
27:55The Council of Troyes, therefore, marks the beginning of a new era for the Order of the Temple.
28:14And the celebrity of these new Knights of God immediately spreads throughout Europe.
28:19After the Council of Troyes, everything changed rapidly, because this new Order looked interesting to the Western world.
28:31Especially, of course, to the aristocracy of the Western world that had to find a way to invest their donations in something that was different from the traditional monastic orders.
28:47And so donations became to grow, became to increase.
28:52They grew constantly and quickly in a very few years, and in the 30s already, they are powerful in the East.
29:05They are starting to build the power in the West too.
29:09They effectively became Europe's first standing army since the days of the Roman Empire.
29:14And, you know, Rome had collapsed in the 5th century, so we are talking, you know, the first standing army in about 600 or 700 years.
29:21So this was a really radical shift.
29:23You had a permanent military force in the East defending Christendom, defending Christian interests.
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