Different Crusader Knights and Crusader Military Orders: A Comprehensive Overview

Start hereWilliam of Tyre says the Templars' main duty was guarding pilgrims against robbers. Yet in Paris, the Catholic Encyclopedia notes, the royal treasure was kept in the Temple. How far did each order move from the job it was founded for?

01The six orders at a glance

The crusades are usually dated from Pope Urban II’s call at the Council of Clermont in 1095 to the capture of Acre in 1291. Its fall ended the kingdom of Jerusalem.

Out of them came a new kind of institution, the military order: men who took religious vows like monks and fought like knights. This page covers six of them.

Order	How it began	Its cross	What became of it
Knights Templar	Guarding pilgrims, about 1118 to 1120	Red cross on a white mantle	Dissolved in 1312
Knights Hospitaller	A hospice in Jerusalem, named in a papal bull of 1113	White cross on a black mantle	Continues as the Sovereign Order of Malta
Teutonic Knights	A field hospital at the siege of Acre, 1190	Black cross on a white habit	Built a state on the Baltic coast
Knights of the Holy Sepulchre	Uncertain; its knights first appear in documents in 1336	Not covered here	Restored in 1868
Order of Saint Lazarus	A twelfth-century leper hospital	Not covered here	Suppressed in 1490
Order of Calatrava	A frontier castle in Castile, 1158	Red cross with lily-tipped arms, on white	Lost its castle in 1195, won it back in 1212

02Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights

Each of these three began with a different job.

Knights Templar

Founded to guard pilgrims. William of Tyre, writing about fifty years later, says a group of knights bound themselves to Christ’s service before the Patriarch of Jerusalem. Their main duty, he says, was protecting the roads against robbers, “especially in order to safeguard pilgrims”.

The Catholic Encyclopedia names their leader as Hugues de Payens, a knight of Champagne, with eight companions. William gives no year of his own; the Fordham translation adds 1118 in brackets. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica gives 1119, and modern reference works give about 1119 or about 1120.

Named after their headquarters. King Baldwin II gave them part of his palace in Jerusalem. It stood next to the Temple of the Lord, so, William explains, they were called the Brothers of the Militia of the Temple.

White mantle, red cross. A church council at Troyes, in France, gave them a rule and a white habit. According to William, it was said that the knights began adding red cloth crosses to their mantles in the time of Pope Eugenius III.

Soldiers who also kept money. Their houses in Paris and London held deposits. The Catholic Encyclopedia notes that many princes and private people banked there, and that in Paris the royal treasure was kept in the Temple.

The end of the order. The Templars in France were arrested on 13 October 1307 on the orders of King Philip IV. Pope Clement V dissolved the order, without condemning it, by a bull of 22 March 1312.

Its property went to the Hospitallers, except in the Iberian kingdoms; in Portugal it passed to the new Order of Christ in 1319. Jacques de Molay, the last grand master, withdrew his confession in public in March 1314. He was burned in Paris with another leader of the order.

Knights Hospitaller

A hospital first. The order grew out of a hospice for pilgrims in Jerusalem. The order’s own history traces it to merchants from Amalfi, who built a hospital there in the second half of the eleventh century. The Catholic Encyclopedia rejects that link.

Both name its founder as a man called Gerard. A bull of Pope Paschal II dated 1113 is addressed to him as founder and head of the Jerusalem hospice.

Soldiers later. Under his successor Raymond, the Catholic Encyclopedia says, the hospital paid for an armed escort for pilgrims. In time that escort became a real army, with knights in it.

White cross on black. The Hospitallers wore a black mantle with a white cross, and in war a red surcoat with the white cross. The Templars, by contrast, wore a white habit with a red cross.

A network across Europe. The order’s estates were grouped into tongues, priories and commanderies. A commander collected the revenues of his lands and sent a fixed share to the houses in the Holy Land.

Rhodes, then Malta. The knights ruled Rhodes from 1309 to 1522, when they surrendered it after a six-month siege by the Ottoman sultan Suleiman. They held Malta from 1530, when Emperor Charles V granted it to them, until they surrendered it to Napoleon Bonaparte on 12 June 1798. On both islands they kept a fleet.

Today. The order continues as the Sovereign Order of Malta. It describes itself as having “medical, social and humanitarian projects in most countries in the world”.

Teutonic Knights

A field hospital at Acre. During the Third Crusade, in 1190, merchants from Bremen and Lübeck set up a hospital outside the besieged city of Acre. The Catholic Encyclopedia describes it as a large tent made from the sails of their ships. The brothers cared for sick pilgrims and wounded crusaders.

Knights by the end of the decade. In March 1198 the brothers were raised to an order of knights. In 1199 Pope Innocent III gave them the Templars’ rule for their fighting members. In 1205 he granted them the white habit with a black cross.

From the Holy Land to the Baltic. From 1229 the order fought the pagan Prussians and built a state of its own on the Baltic coast. Its grand master moved from Venice to Marienburg, now Malbork in Poland, in 1309.

Malbork Castle. UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site in 1997. It calls Malbork “the most complete and elaborate example” of a Gothic brick-built castle complex in the Teutonic Order’s style.

03Three more orders

Other orders grew up beside these three, in the Holy Land and in Spain. Each has a different story about its own origins.

Knights of the Holy Sepulchre

Where it began is uncertain. The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem traces the order to the canons of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre set up after the First Crusade, with armed knights among its members.

The order’s own history is more careful. It calls its origins “somewhat obscure” and the link to the First Crusade “an undocumented tradition”. It dates the first documentary evidence of knights of the Holy Sepulchre to 1336.

Restored in the nineteenth century. Pope Pius IX restored the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem in 1847. He issued apostolic letters restoring the order in 1868.

Today. It is the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem. The Patriarchate describes its members’ contributions as its institutions’ main source of funding.

Order of Saint Lazarus

A leper hospital. The order began in a leper hospital founded in the twelfth century by the crusaders of the Latin Kingdom, as the Catholic Encyclopedia puts it. At first it was purely an order of hospitallers.

An older origin story that does not hold up. The knights later claimed to descend from earlier leper hospitals in the East, to pass as the oldest of all orders. The same encyclopedia calls that claim “apocryphal”.

What became of it. Once the Jerusalem hospital was lost, the order’s European houses stopped caring for the sick. Pope Innocent VIII suppressed it in 1490 and gave its property to the Hospitallers. In practice, the transfer took effect only in Germany.

Order of Calatrava

Founded in Castile in 1158. The charter of King Sancho III is dated 1158; the Catholic Encyclopedia gives 1157. King Sancho III gave the frontier castle of Calatrava, which the Templars had given up, to Raymond, abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Fitero. His lay brothers became its garrison, and the order took the castle’s name.

Monks under arms. The Cistercians and Pope Alexander III approved the arrangement in 1164. The knights slept in their armour and wore the Cistercian white mantle with a scarlet cross fleurdelisée, a red cross whose arms end in lilies.

Lost and won back. After the defeat at Alarcos in 1195 the knights lost Calatrava. It was retaken in 1212, the same year as the Christian victory at Las Navas de Tolosa.

04What did knights do on crusade?

Between the famous battles, the daily work looks different from the legend.

• They took the cross. Urban II’s appeal survives in several versions. In Robert the Monk’s, each man who made the vow was to “wear the sign of the cross of the Lord on his forehead or on his breast”. Those who joined were said to have taken the cross.
• It counted as a pilgrimage. In Fulcher of Chartres’s version of the speech, the Pope promises that all who die on the way will have immediate remission of sins. Robert the Monk’s version calls the journey a holy pilgrimage.
• They largely paid their own way. The historian Andrew Holt, summarising Jonathan Riley-Smith’s study of the First Crusaders’ charters, writes that the crusader and his family usually met the costs. “Often, as the charters show, they had to sell property or take out mortgages to do so.”
• They held castles for years. The Hospitallers built Krak des Chevaliers, in what is now Syria, from 1142 to 1271. UNESCO, noting further building by the Mamluks in the late thirteenth century, ranks it among the best-preserved crusader castles.

The code of chivalry in practice

Chivalry was a real ideal and an unevenly kept one.

When Jerusalem fell in 1099, the anonymous Gesta Francorum describes the crusaders killing all the way to the Temple of Solomon. There, it says, “the slaughter was so great that our men waded in blood up to their ankles”.

The Fourth Crusade, aimed at Egypt, was diverted against the Christian city of Zara and then Constantinople, which it sacked in 1204. The Byzantine historian Nicetas Choniates describes the altar of Hagia Sophia “broken into bits and distributed among the soldiers”.

Both events are part of the record, and an account of the knights includes them.

05What knights did in peacetime

What a knight was

Knight was a rank, and a costly one. In England, the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica notes, landowners had to be compelled to take up knighthood in the early thirteenth century. More generally, it adds, knighthood was avoided by poor nobles.

So a knight in peacetime was above all a landholder who owed personal service in war. From the twelfth century that duty could be commuted for a payment known as scutage.

Land, rents and courts

A knight’s estate brought him rents and services from his tenants, and a manor court. In the thirteenth century that court dealt with criminal, civil and manorial cases as one court.

In England, men of his class also served the crown in the counties. The first Statute of Westminster ordered that “none but lawful and discreet knights should be chosen as coroners”.

Simon de Montfort’s parliament of 1265 included two knights elected in every county, as the History of Parliament Trust describes it. Knights had come to parliament before; 1265 was the first time such men were summoned with no tax to consent to.

Tournaments

Tournaments were dangerous. In 1139 the Second Lateran Council banned “those abominable jousts and tournaments”, which often caused deaths and endangered souls. It denied church burial to a knight who died in one.

The ban did not stop them. The 1911 Britannica notes that the chronicles record many a tournament with its killed and wounded.

Castles, courts and poetry

Some great castles had professional designers. Edward I’s castles in North Wales were designed and directed by James of St George, whom UNESCO calls the king’s chief architect.

Troubadour poetry grew up at noble courts, and some troubadours were knights or lords themselves:

• Arnaut Daniel was a knight of Riberac.
• Bertran de Born was besieged in his own castle of Hautefort by Richard the Lionheart.
• The earliest poet of the school, Guilhem, Count of Poitiers, reigned from 1087 to 1127.

Who chivalry protected

The chivalric code bound together what the 1911 Britannica calls “the whole warrior caste of Christendom”. It did much less for the people who worked the land.

The same encyclopedia notes that in thirteenth-century England more than half the population were serfs. A dispute between a serf and his lord went to the lord’s own court. The king’s courts, though, tried to protect the serf’s life and limb and the tools he worked with.

In our reading, chivalry is real, and it is narrower than the word now suggests.

06Quick answers

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How we checked this · Last checked October 2026

• The founding stories rest on William of Tyre (in the Internet Medieval Sourcebook translation), the Catholic Encyclopedia (1907–1913), the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, UNESCO and the orders' own histories.
• Where sources differ, each version is given: the Templars' founding year, the Hospitallers' origins and the Holy Sepulchre order's origins.
• The Templars' founding year was compared across the Fordham translation, the 1911 Britannica and two modern reference works.
• The Teutonic Order's founding and the Calatrava charter come from German and Spanish sources; the English renderings are ours.
• The Catholic Encyclopedia and the 1911 Britannica are old reference works, so their judgements are given as theirs.

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09Sources