The Templars: from nine knights to the pyre on the Île aux Juifs

Nine knights, a new idea

Around 1119 or 1120, in Jerusalem, a minor lord from Champagne, Hugues de Payns, and eight companions — among them Godefroy de Saint-Omer, a Fleming — vowed before the patriarch to live as religious, poor, chaste and obedient, and to protect pilgrims by force of arms on the roads of the Holy Land, where the Latins held the towns but where the roads from Jaffa to the Jordan remained deadly. King Baldwin II gave them as lodging a wing of his palace, the former al-Aqsa mosque, which the crusaders called the Temple of Solomon: the “poor knights of Christ” became the knights “of the Temple”. The idea was new and, to many, scandalous: a monk does not shed blood. It was recounted sixty years later by Archbishop William of Tyre, who disliked the order and who nevertheless remains the main source on these beginnings — together with his mention of nine men who remained nine for nine years.