Hugh of Payns and the nine knights: the foundation of the Order of the Temple (1119–1129)

I.Context: the Holy Land after the First Crusade (1099–1119)

The First Crusade culminated in the capture of Jerusalem on 15 July 1099, under the military leadership of Godfrey of Bouillon. The new Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem was born with fragile frontiers and a tiny Frankish population, surrounded by a Syriac, Greek and Arab majority. The so-called Latin East (Outremer) was an archipelago of four states —Jerusalem, Edessa, Antioch and, from 1109, Tripoli— connected by roads exposed to Bedouin and Turkmen pillage.

The safety of the European pilgrims who flocked to the Holy Places became an immediate pastoral priority. The itineraries from the ports of Jaffa and Acre to Jerusalem passed through woods and gorges where ambushes were frequent. William of Tyre, archbishop and historian of the Kingdom, born around 1130, relates that in the years following the conquest ‘many pilgrims were slain with impunity’ whenever they strayed from the walled cities, and that their corpses lay unburied on the roads.

Faced with this urgency, the nascent Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem —recognised as a canonical order by the bull Pie postulatio voluntatis of Pope Paschal II in 1113— was devoted to hospitality and the care of the sick, but not to armed escort. The Hospitallers derived from a Benedictine hospice founded before the conquest, and their charism was the care of the poor and suffering pilgrim, in keeping with the tradition of the Eastern Church.

The political geography of the Kingdom was likewise in transition. Baldwin I, brother and successor of Godfrey, king from 1100, died in 1118 during an expedition against Fatimid Egypt. He was succeeded by his cousin Baldwin II du Bourg, hitherto count of Edessa, crowned in Bethlehem on 25 December 1118 and in Jerusalem at Easter 1119. The new king had to defend simultaneously the northern frontier —Edessa and Antioch, recently shaken by the defeat at the Field of Blood (June 1119)— and the interior roads of the Kingdom.

This is the setting —fragile frontiers, unprotected pilgrims, the absence of a regular corps of armed escort— in which the Templar foundation is set. It was not born in secret, but as a response to a public urgency acknowledged by the king, the Latin patriarch and the faithful of Christendom. The Church, in her pastoral office, could not leave abandoned the pilgrims who, in fulfilment of the penitential precept, had crossed the sea to venerate the Holy Sepulchre.

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«In eodem quoque anno quidam nobiles viri, devoti scilicet et Deo accepti, in Hierosolymis commorantes, coeperunt novae religionis propositum in Christo, in manus patriarchae profiteri.»

In that same year, certain noble men, devout and acceptable to God, dwelling in Jerusalem, began to profess before the patriarch the purpose of a new religious life in Christ.

William of Tyre, Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum, XII, 7 (ed. R.B.C. Huygens, CCCM 63, Turnhout: Brepols, 1986)

II.Hugh of Payns: the Champagne knight

Hugh of Payns (French: Hugues de Payns; Latin: Hugo de Paganis) was born around 1070 in the lordship of Payns, a village situated a few kilometres northwest of Troyes, in the county of Champagne. He belonged to the minor regional nobility: his family held lands on the confines of the domain of the counts of Champagne and appears in the cartularies of Troyes from the late eleventh century. The toponym Payns (Pagani in medieval Latin) has given rise to much speculation among esoteric authors, but it simply designates the native village, without any pagan connotation.

Hugh is first documented in donation charters of the county of Champagne between 1085 and 1113, in which he signs as witness of Counts Hugh I and Odo. In 1114, Count Hugh I took the cross and marched to the Holy Land; it is probable that Hugh of Payns accompanied him. In 1115, a charter in the cartulary of the Cistercian abbey of Molesme mentions a knight named Hugh of Payns settled in Palestine, a datum that the medievalist Alain Demurger considers plausible.

Married to Isabel of Payns and father of at least one son, Theobald, Hugh subsequently opted for the religious life. His wife professed in the women's monastery of Saint Anthony of Tyre, and his son entered the canonical chapter of the Holy Sepulchre. This domestic renunciation —documented by donation charters of 1129–1130— places Hugh in the line of so many twelfth-century knights who reconciled the military office with a vow of evangelical poverty, in accordance with the spirit of the Gregorian reform.

William of Tyre describes him as ‘a noble and devout man, prudent in counsel and courageous in arms’. His portrait is that of the pious knight of the first crusading generation: not a visionary mystic, but a layman devoted to the service of the Church and of pilgrims. Hugh's relationship with Bernard of Clairvaux —whose abbey of Clairvaux lay in the heart of Champagne, a day's journey from Payns— decisively facilitated the canonical recognition of the new order in 1129. Andrew of Montbard, one of the nine founders, was a blood uncle of Bernard, which further strengthened the spiritual bond between the Cistercian abbey and the new militia.

• Birth: c. 1070, in the lordship of Payns (Champagne, near Troyes)
• Family origin: minor Champagne nobility; vassal of the counts of Champagne
• Civil status: married to Isabel of Payns; at least one son, Theobald
• Documented presence in the Holy Land from 1114–1115
• Spiritual bond with Bernard of Clairvaux and with the Cistercian abbey of Clairvaux
• Death: 24 May 1136, in Palestine; succeeded by Robert of Craon

III.The foundation (1119): nine knights and a vow

The traditional date of the foundation is 1119, the year that William of Tyre fixes as that of the solemn profession of the first group before the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, Gormond (Warmund) of Picquigny. Some modern authors —Pierre-Vincent Claverie, Rudolf Hiestand— have proposed 1118 or even 1120, but the manuscript tradition and the canonical reading of the Council of Troyes retain 1119, the date followed in this article.

The founders were nine knights. William of Tyre explicitly names Hugh of Payns as first master and Godfrey of Saint-Omer as second. The canonical list, consolidated by thirteenth-century historiography (Ernoul, the Grandes Chroniques de France), further includes Payns of Montdidier, Archambaud of Saint-Aignan, Andrew of Montbard —uncle of Bernard of Clairvaux—, Gondemar, Roland, Godfrey Bisol, and a ninth whose name varies according to the sources.

The vow they professed was threefold: poverty, chastity and obedience, after the Benedictine monastic model, to which they added the specific commitment to escort and defend pilgrims on the roads of the Kingdom. Patriarch Gormond gave them an initial rule, now lost in its primitive form, probably a brief formula of vows on the model of the regular canons of the Holy Sepulchre, to whose liturgy they were at first attached.

King Baldwin II granted the nine knights, as lodging and quarters, a wing of the royal palace situated within the precinct of the al-Aqsa mosque, which the crusaders then identified with the Temple of Solomon. From this lodging —the ‘Temple’— they took their definitive name: ‘Poor fellow-soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon’ (Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Salomonici). The topographical identification, we now know, was inaccurate —al-Aqsa stands on the site of the Herodian, not of the Solomonic, temple—, but it stamped the Order forever.

The scope of the charge was modest, but theologically audacious: for the first time in the history of the Church, a group of professed monks received authorisation to shed human blood in combat, provided it was in defence of pilgrims and of the faith. This tension between the Benedictine Rule —which forbids the monk the exercise of arms— and the new military charism would be resolved canonically by Bernard of Clairvaux in the De laude novae militiae, composed a few months after the Council of Troyes.

• Hugh of Payns — first Master of the Order (1119–1136)
• Godfrey of Saint-Omer — second in William of Tyre's list
• Payns of Montdidier
• Archambaud of Saint-Aignan
• Andrew of Montbard — blood uncle of Bernard of Clairvaux
• Gondemar
• Roland
• Godfrey Bisol
• A ninth name whose identity varies according to the sources

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«Primi autem, qui hoc religionis propositum ceperunt, fuerunt Hugo de Paganis et Godefridus de Sancto Aldemaro; quibus rex Baldwinus in palatio suo juxta Templum Domini habitaculum concessit.»

The first to embrace this religious purpose were Hugh of Payns and Godfrey of Saint-Omer; to them King Baldwin granted a dwelling in his palace, next to the Temple of the Lord.

William of Tyre, Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum, XII, 7

IV.The Council of Troyes (1129): canonical recognition

After nine years of precarious existence and reduced numbers, Hugh of Payns understood that the Order needed canonical recognition in order to grow and to receive donations in the West with legal security. In 1128 he set out for Europe with five of his knights and a letter from King Baldwin II addressed to Bernard of Clairvaux. The Cistercian abbot, a kinsman of Andrew of Montbard —one of the nine founders—, took up the cause with enthusiasm and presented it to Pope Honorius II.

The Council of Troyes was held in January 1129. Traditional chronologies dated it to 1128, but the modern dating of Rudolf Hiestand and Alan Forey places it securely in January 1129. It was convoked by Pope Honorius II and presided over by the papal legate, Cardinal Matthew of Albano. Present were the archbishops of Reims and Sens, the bishops of Châlons, Laon, Paris and other sees, as well as several Cistercian abbots, among them Bernard himself, whose role was decisive in the drafting of the Rule.

The acts of the council, preserved in the Collectio of Mansi (Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova Amplissima Collectio, vol. XXI, cols. 227–230), record the formula of approval. The council approved the Order, gave it a Latin Rule —the Primitive Rule, of some seventy chapters— and placed it under the direct obedience of the patriarch of Jerusalem, leaving it outside ordinary episcopal jurisdiction, in accordance with the principle of the Gregorian reform of libertas Ecclesiae.

The Primitive Rule, drafted in Latin under Bernardine inspiration, adopted evangelical poverty, conjugal chastity, obedience to the master and the canonical liturgy of the secular clergy; it substituted the choral office by a fixed number of Lord's Prayers —proportional to the canonical hours— for the lay brothers, since many were illiterate; it forbade contact with women, even with the brother's mother and sister; it regulated military discipline, equipment, the table and the habit of the professed knight. On the white mantle, symbol of monastic chastity, would later be sewn, around 1147, the red eight-pointed cross, the distinctive mark of the knights of the Temple.

The council was no mere formality. The twelfth-century Church, marked by the Gregorian reform and by the condemnations of private violence (Peace of God, Truce of God), was naturally reticent before the theological novelty of the monk-soldier. The conciliar approval, sustained by the moral authority of Bernard and by the pastoral urgency of the Holy Land, was a doctrinal act of great consequence: it legitimised a new form of religious life, neither purely monastic nor purely clerical, that would spread in the following decades throughout Latin Christendom.

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«Nos, attendentes quod nova religionis species in Christo Domino nostro pullulaverit, eam dignam duximus laude et augendo ampliare, ne forte, dum per paucitatem augentium minus succrescat, id quod est laudabile in praefata religione in contrarium vertatur.»

We, considering that a new species of religion has sprung up in Christ our Lord, have judged it worthy of praise and of increase, lest perhaps, by the paucity of those who foster it, what is laudable in the said religion be turned to its contrary.

Council of Troyes (January 1129), Praefatio ad Regulam primitivam, in Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova Amplissima Collectio, vol. XXI, col. 227

V.The exception: why so few at the beginning?

William of Tyre relates that during the first nine years of the Order —from 1119 to 1128— the number of knights did not increase: they remained nine. This datum has been one of the arguments most exploited by esoteric literature to suggest that the founders pursued a hidden objective —the search for relics, excavations beneath the Temple, secret knowledge— incompatible with mass recruitment. A careful reading of the sources dismantles this interpretation.

The documentary explanation is much simpler and more prosaic: poverty. The Order possessed no lands, rents or churches in the West before 1128. It lived on the charity of King Baldwin II —who granted them lodging in the Temple precinct— and on the scant donations arriving from Champagne. A twelfth-century armed knight cost per year, between horses, arms, equipment and rations, the equivalent of the produce of an entire village. To maintain nine was already a heavy burden; to maintain more was impossible without stable resources.

To this material poverty was added the absence of a recognised canonical framework. Until the Council of Troyes, the Order had no written Rule nor statute approved by Rome. Many knights eager to join might legitimately doubt: was this a religious order properly so called, or a confraternity of pious knights attached to the canons of the Holy Sepulchre? Only the approval of 1129, with the authority of Bernard of Clairvaux and of the papal legate, gave the enterprise the canonical legitimacy that permitted recruitment in Europe on a large scale.

The figure of nine knights is therefore a datum of accounting and of canon law, not the trace of a secret enterprise. The expansion after 1129 —several hundred professed knights recruited in less than five years— shows that the initial ceiling was circumstantial, not programmatic. The Church, in granting canonical recognition at Troyes, opened the channel through which the Order could grow organically and according to law.

• Absence of patrimonial resources: the Order possessed no lands or rents in the West before 1128
• High cost of maintaining an armed knight: horses, arms and annual rations equivalent to the produce of a village
• Lack of canonical framework: no written Rule nor statute approved by Rome until January 1129
• Logistical difficulty of sending knights from Europe to the Holy Land
• Experimental character of the monk-soldier model: the Church had not yet formally legitimised this form of life

VI.The European expansion (1129–1147): donations and commanderies

After the Council of Troyes, Hugh of Payns undertook a European tour (1129–1131) that changed the destiny of the Order. He travelled through France —where Count Theobald IV of Champagne received him solemnly—, Flanders —where Count Theodoric of Alsace made substantial donations—, England and Scotland. King David I of Scotland granted him lands in Midlothian, the origin of the commandery of Balantrodoch, known today simply as Temple (Midlothian).

In 1130–1131, Hugh visited the Iberian Peninsula. Ramon Berenguer III, count of Barcelona, donated to him the castle of Grañena (1131) and other lands in Catalonia. Alfonso I the Battler, king of Aragon, had already granted in 1126 an initial donation —the first documented in favour of the Order on Hispanic soil— and, in his testament of 1134, bequeathed his kingdom to the orders of the Temple, the Hospital and the Holy Sepulchre, a legacy that the Pope and the Aragonese nobles eventually annulled through the marriage of Ramiro the Monk to Agnes of Poitou.

The volume of donations was extraordinary. In twenty years, from 1129 to 1149, the Templars received in Europe more than six hundred documented commanderies: arable lands, mills, churches with their tithes, toll and fair rights, woods and vineyards. The cartularies of the Crown of Aragon, the English records (Testa de Nevill, 1242) and the French cartularies —of Troyes, of Provins, of the Sainte-Chapelle— document this patrimonial transfer without interruption. Each donation was accompanied by its canonical title: the local Church inscribed it as ‘alms in favour of the defence of the Holy Places’.

This European network sustained the Order economically in the Holy Land: each commandery sent annually to the Central House of Jerusalem a ‘responsion’ —typically a third of its income—. The financial flow thereby established was the origin of the celebrated thirteenth-century Templar banking network, not a foundational objective. The Church, in approving the donations, framed them juridically as alms and pious pensions in favour of the custody of the Holy Places.

In 1136, shortly after Hugh's return to Palestine, the master died. He was succeeded by Robert of Craon (1136–1147), a former knight of the household of Aquitaine, who obtained in 1139 from Pope Innocent II the bull Omne datum optimum —‘every perfect gift’—, the foundational charter of the pontifical privileges of the Order: exemption from episcopal jurisdiction, the right to have its own chaplains, exemption from the tithe on the lands of the Order and free circulation of money between commanderies. The Order thus entered fully into the institutional system of Latin Christendom, under the direct protection of the Apostolic See.

VII.The foundational legacy: the Primitive Rule and the model of military order

The Primitive Rule of 1129 established an unprecedented model of religious life: the professed knight who combines monastic vows with the legitimate exercise of arms. The underlying theology, set forth by Bernard of Clairvaux in the De laude novae militiae, distinguished two forms of militia: the militia saeculi, motivated by ambition and booty, and the militia Christi, which fights ‘not for blood, but for justice’ and kills the wicked man without loving the death of the man.

Upon this theological basis, the Rule organised the life of the Order in three categories of brothers: the professed knights (nobles, with major arms and warhorse), the sergeants (non-nobles, with minor arms, escort and logistical functions) and the chaplains (ordained clerics charged with the sacraments and the liturgy). Alongside them were admitted the donates —laymen who offered themselves to the Order without full vows— and the affiliates, who retained their secular state but participated in the prayers and merits of the brothers.

The choral office was adapted: the knights, mostly illiterate, recited a fixed number of Lord's Prayers in place of the psalms of the Monastic Breviary. The Rule fixed the number in relation to each canonical hour: fourteen Lord's Prayers for Matins, ten for Lauds, seven for each of the Lesser Hours. The substitution was canonically legitimate, since the conciliar authority of Troyes had expressly approved it, and it responded to the secular tradition of the Church that admits the commutation of the divine Office by vocal prayers in the case of lay religious.

The Templar model was imitated by the Church during the twelfth century and the first half of the thirteenth: the Order of Calatrava (1158, founded by Cistercian monks under Sancho III of Castile), the Order of Santiago (1170, regular canons of Cáceres), the Order of Alcántara (1176, originally of Pereyro), the Order of Monte Gaudio (c. 1173, Aragonese, later merged with Calatrava) and the Teutonic Knights of Saint Mary of Jerusalem (1190–1198, at Acre and later in Prussia). Each adopted a variant of the Templar Rule adapted to its specific charism.

The Church, far from being an obstacle, was the mother and protectress of this model. Without the legitimisation of Bernard, without the council of Troyes, without the bulls Omne datum optimum (1139), Milites templi (1144) and Militia Dei (1145) of Popes Innocent II and Celestine II, the Order of the Temple would not have survived a single decade. The foundation of Hugh of Payns is a paradigm of how the Church, in her office of Mother and Teacher, knows how to assume and canonise the new forms of Christian life that spring up in history, without renouncing the deposit of faith or the discipline of religious.

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«Nova militiae species ortu novo, qua in terries et quadrupedante equite, ne dicam inaurato, munitur aduersus hostem. Ibi secura est pugna, ubi etiamsi corpus occiditur, anima vivit.»

A new species of knighthood has arisen in these new times, which fights the enemy not on foot but on horseback, not to say mounted on chargers caparisoned in gold. There the battle is secure: even if the body be slain, the soul lives.

Bernard of Clairvaux, De laude novae militiae ad milites Templi, cap. I (Sancti Bernardi Opera, vol. III, ed. J. Leclercq and H.M. Rochais, Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1963)

VIII.The counterpoint: myths about the origin (Sion, Grail, excavations)

The figure of Hugh of Payns and the nine founders has been the object, since the nineteenth century, of a dense esoteric mythology that does not withstand documentary analysis. This mythology proceeds from a literary genre —the ‘hidden history’ of the Temple— born in France around 1818 with the work of Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, Mysterium Baphometis revelatum, and prolonged into the twentieth century by figures such as Louis Charpentier, Gérard de Sède and, in a novelistic key, the so-called Priory of Sion of Pierre Plantard.

The myth of the Priory of Sion, supposedly contemporary to the foundation of the Temple and older than the Order itself, was fabricated by Pierre Plantard between 1956 and the 1960s, and presented to the public through apocryphal documents deposited in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The work of the medievalist Jean-Luc Chaumeil, the French police reports and the final confession of Plantard himself in 1993 demonstrated beyond all doubt the falsehood of the narrative, today definitively disproven by academic historiography.

The legend of the excavations beneath the Temple of Solomon lacks all documentary basis. The nine knights did indeed live in the precinct of al-Aqsa —granted by Baldwin II—, but the contemporary sources (William of Tyre, the letters of Hugh of Payns, the cartulary of the Holy Sepulchre) agree that their occupation was residential and military: custodianship of the roads and escort of pilgrims. No twelfth-century text mentions excavation, search for relics or arcane discovery beneath the Haram al-Sharif.

The connection with the Holy Grail proceeds from an allegorical reading of the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach (c. 1200–1210), where the guardians of the Grail are called ‘Templeise’. Wolfram, however, is writing a chivalric novel of the Arthurian tradition, not a chronicle; his mention of the Temple is a literary borrowing in the fashion of his time, as Wolfram himself declares in attributing his source to an imaginary Kyot of Provence. No Templar source —neither the Rule, nor the letters of the masters, nor the conciliar acts— ever associates the Order with the Grail.

The historiographical conclusion is unambiguous: the foundation of the Temple was a public and canonical act, attested by contemporary sources, approved by a council and ratified by pontifical bulls. The ‘mysteries’ that popular literature has added to it are post-1800 constructions, with no trace in the archives of the twelfth century. The Church, which canonised the Order at Troyes, is also the one that has preserved in her archives the primary sources that today permit the dismantling of the esoteric mythology.

"The Priory of Sion never existed as a medieval institution. It is a creation of Pierre Plantard, documented as a fraud in 1993 and disproven by French medievalists." — Jean-Luc Chaumeil, La saga de Rennes-le-Château, Paris, 1998

"The hypothesis of secret archaeological excavations in the Temple precinct must be firmly rejected: no contemporary source attests it, and the topography of the precinct makes it implausible." — Alain Demurger, Les Templiers: Une chevalerie chrétienne au Moyen Âge, Paris: Seuil, 2005, p. 78

IX.Hugh of Payns in modern historiography

Modern historiography on the foundation of the Temple is abundant and rigorous. The critical starting point, still fundamental today, is the work of Heinrich Finke, Papsttum und Untergang des Templerordens (Münster, 1907), which first published the bulk of the pontifical documents relating to the Order preserved in the Vatican Secret Archive, laying the bases of modern documentary research.

The reference English synthesis is Malcolm Barber, The New Knighthood: A History of the Order of the Temple (Cambridge University Press, 1994), which devotes its first chapters to the figure of Hugh of Payns, to the context of the foundation and to the Council of Troyes with an exhaustive critical apparatus. Barber insists on the initial poverty of the Order and on the charismatic character of the European mission of 1128–1129, stressing that the expansion was posterior and not foundational.

The French synthesis of Alain Demurger, Les Templiers: Une chevalerie chrétienne au Moyen Âge (Seuil, 2005, 2nd ed.), updates the bibliography and proposes a prudent chronology of the foundational years, placing the presence of Hugh in the Holy Land from 1114–1115. Helen Nicholson, in The Knights Templar: A New History (Sutton, 2001), pays special attention to the Western dimension of the Order —commanderies, networks, daily life— and to the reception of the Rule in the various Latin kingdoms.

The source editions of Barber and Bate, The Templars: Selected Sources (Manchester University Press, 2002), and of Judith Upton-Ward, The Rule of the Templars (Boydell, 1992), make available to the non-Latinist reader the primary texts —Rule, letters, bulls, acts of Troyes—. For the precise dating of the Council, the canonical study remains Rudolf Hiestand, ‘Zum Datum und zur Entstehung der frühen Templerregel’ (Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 51, 1995), which fixes the date in January 1129. Pierre-Vincent Claverie, in his studies published in the journal Crusades (2014–2015), has revised the figure of Honorius II and the approving role of the Roman curia.

X.Chronology

The chronology that follows gathers the documented milestones of the foundational decade (1119–1129) and of the first Templar generation up to the Second Crusade (1147). The dates prior to 1129 are based principally on William of Tyre and on the cartularies of Champagne; the later ones, on the pontifical bulls and on the records of the European commanderies.

For the events whose dating is debated (foundation in 1118/1119; Council of Troyes in January 1128/January 1129), the canonical dating accepted by recent historiography (Hiestand, Forey, Claverie) has been followed, which leans towards 1119 and January 1129 respectively. The documentary references for each entry are found in section XI of this article.

XI.Sources and bibliography

Set out below are the primary sources (12th century) and the reference modern bibliography. The primary sources are preconciliar and proceed entirely from the manuscript or printed patrimony of the Church or from the royal and comital archives of the Middle Ages. The editions cited are those current in contemporary historiography.

The secondary sources are limited to academic reference works, excluding sensationalist popular literature. When a modern translation is cited, the original critical edition that serves as basis is indicated. Works that present the origin of the Temple as a secret society, bearer of esoteric knowledge or linked to the Grail, have been excluded in principle, as lacking any primary documentary basis.

XII.Frequently asked questions

The frequently asked questions that follow address the most common objections that popular literature has spread about the origin of the Order of the Temple. The answers are grounded in the primary sources of the twelfth century and in modern academic historiography (Barber, Demurger, Nicholson, Hiestand, Claverie), and are coherent with the rest of the subsection ‘The Templar Order’ of Astrogoy.