Different Crusader Knights and Crusader Military Orders
A Comprehensive Overview

Different Crusader Knights and Crusader Military Orders

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, which 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: the Templars, the Hospitallers and the Teutonic Knights, then the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre, the Order of Saint Lazarus and the Order of Calatrava. After that, what knights did on crusade, and what they did at home when there was no war. The sources are listed at the end.

The Crusader Knights: Noble Warriors of the Holy Land

Pope Urban II’s appeal, in the version recorded by Robert the Monk, asked each man who made the vow 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”. The three main military orders of the Holy Land each 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 in the hands of the Lord Patriarch”, and that their first duty was “protecting the roads and routes against the attacks of robbers and brigands”, “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; the Fordham translation dates his “same year” to 1118. 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. Because it stood “next to the Temple of the Lord”, William explains, “they are 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. The red cross came later: William says the knights began to add “crosses made of red cloth 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 “numerous princes and private individuals had 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, and 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 and 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, and 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, “which in time became a veritable army, comprising knights”.
• White cross on black. The Hospitallers “had the 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, and 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, which 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 “a large tent, constructed 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, and 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, which listed it as a World Heritage Site in 1997, calls it “the most complete and elaborate example of a Gothic brick-built castle complex in the characteristic and unique style of the Teutonic Order”.

Crusader Military Orders: Guardians of the Holy Land

Other orders grew up beside the big three, in the Holy Land and in Spain. Three are covered here, and 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”, says the link to the First Crusade rests on “an undocumented tradition”, and 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 and issued apostolic letters restoring the order in 1868.
• Today. It is the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, and the Patriarchate describes its members’ contributions as its institutions’ “main source of funding”.

Order of Saint Lazarus

• A leper hospital. The order “originated in a leper hospital founded in the twelfth century by the crusaders of the Latin Kingdom”, in the words of the Catholic Encyclopedia, and it began purely as 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, a transfer that in practice took effect only in Germany.

Order of Calatrava

• Founded in Castile in 1158. 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 the 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.

What did knights do on crusade?

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

• They took a vow, and it counted as a pilgrimage. In Fulcher of Chartres’s version of Urban II’s speech, the Pope promises that “all who die by 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, and “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, and UNESCO, noting further building by the Mamluks in the late thirteenth century, ranks it “among the best-preserved examples of the 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 and slaying even to the Temple of Solomon, where the slaughter was so great that our men waded in blood up to their ankles”. And 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.

What knights did in peacetime

What a knight was

“Knight” was a rank, and a costly one. In England, the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica notes, it became necessary in the early thirteenth century “to compel landowners to take up the knighthood”; more generally, it adds that “knighthood was avoided by poor nobles”. So a knight in peacetime was, above all, a landholder, and one who owed what the 1911 Britannica calls “personal service in war”, though from the twelfth century that duty could be commuted for a payment known as scutage.

The everyday work: land, rents and courts

A knight’s estate brought him rents and services from his tenants, and a manor court, which in the thirteenth century 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”, and Simon de Montfort’s parliament of 1265, as the History of Parliament Trust describes it, included “two knights elected in every county”. 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 result in human deaths and danger to souls”, and denied church burial to a knight who died in one. The ban did not stop them: the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica notes that “many a tournament had its tale of killed and wounded in the chronicle books”.

Castles and fortifications

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

Courts, poetry and patronage

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, and 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 Encyclopaedia 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”, and that “disputes between a serf and his lord were decided in the latter’s court”, although “the king’s courts attempted to protect the serf’s life and limb and necessary implements of work”. Chivalry is real, and it is narrower than the word now suggests.

Reading about the orders: a short checklist

Popular accounts of the military orders mix record, legend and later reinvention. A few questions help sort them out:

• Whose date is it? A founding date can come from a chronicler writing decades later, a modern encyclopedia or the order’s own history, and they do not always agree: the Templars’ start is 1118 in the Fordham translation of William of Tyre, 1119 in the 1911 Britannica, and about 1120 in some modern reference works.
• Is it the order’s own story? Orders that still exist tell their history in their own way. The Holy Sepulchre’s own history is more cautious about its origins than some other accounts.
• Which cross? A red cross on white is the Templars, a white cross on black the Hospitallers, a black cross on white the Teutonic Knights.
• Which century? The Hospitallers of 1113, of Rhodes and of today are one order with very different jobs.

Sources

• William of Tyre, “The Foundation of the Order of Knights Templar”, trans. in the Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University.
• Urban II, speech at the Council of Clermont, 1095: five versions (Fulcher of Chartres, Robert the Monk and others), Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University.
• “The Siege and Capture of Jerusalem: Collected Accounts” (Gesta Francorum and others), Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University.
• Nicetas Choniates, “The Sack of Constantinople (1204)”, Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University.
• Second Lateran Council (1139), canons, Papal Encyclicals Online.
• Catholic Encyclopedia (1907–1913): “Knights Templars”, “Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem”, “Teutonic Order”, “Order of St. Lazarus of Jerusalem”, “Military Order of Calatrava” (New Advent).
• Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911): “Templars”, “Teutonic Order”, “Crusades”, “Knighthood and Chivalry”, “Coroner”, “Manor”, “Tournament”, “Troubadour” (Wikisource).
• Historisches Lexikon Bayerns, “Deutscher Orden: Politische Geschichte (Mittelalter)”, Dieter J. Weiß.
• Sovereign Order of Malta, “History” and home page.
• Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, “History”; Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, “Order of the Holy Sepulchre”.
• UNESCO World Heritage Centre: “Castle of the Teutonic Order in Malbork”; “Crac des Chevaliers and Qal’at Salah El-Din”; “Castles and Town Walls of King Edward in Gwynedd”.
• Andrew Holt, “Jonathan Riley-Smith on the Motivations of the First Crusaders” (2016).
• Mark Cartwright, “Knights Templar”, World History Encyclopedia (2018); EBSCO Research Starters, “Order of the Knights Templar”.
• Sovereign Order of Malta, “1113 – The bull ‘Pie postulatio voluntatis’”.
• History of Parliament Trust, “Simon de Montfort’s 1265 Parliament and Magna Carta” (2015).
• Almagro Noticias, on the 1158 charter of Sancho III held in Spain’s Archivo Histórico Nacional (September 2026).

Checked September 2026. Dates and descriptions come from the sources above; where they differ (the Templars’ founding year, the origins of the Hospitallers and of the Holy Sepulchre order), each version is given.