Knights Templar symbols

The emblems of the medieval Knights Templar, from the two knights on one horse to the red cross and the black and white Beauséant, and the cross and crown of the Masonic order that took their name.

The medieval order

Templar crossThe red cross the Knights Templar wore on their white mantles, most often drawn as a cross pattée, with four arms that widen towards straight ends.
BeauséantThe war banner of the Knights Templar, half black and half white. A bishop who rode with the Templars read the colours as fair to friends and terrible to enemies.

The seals

The Masonic order

Cross and crownThe emblem of the Masonic Knights Templar, an order of Freemasonry first recorded in the 18th century: a red passion cross with a gold crown. It is not an emblem of the medieval Knights Templar.

About knights Templar symbols

The Knights Templar were a military order of the Catholic Church. In 1118 Hugues de Payens, a knight of Champagne, and eight companions vowed before the Patriarch of Jerusalem to defend the Christian kingdom there, the Catholic Encyclopedia (1912) records, and the king lodged them in his palace beside the Temple, which gave them their name, the Poor Knights of the Temple. The Council of Troyes gave them a rule and a white habit in 1128, and the order grew rich in lands across Europe until Philip IV of France had its members arrested on 13 October 1307. Pope Clement V dissolved the order in 1312, without condemning it.

The order’s own emblems

Most of what the Templars used as symbols survives on their seals. The great seal showed two knights on one horse on one face and a domed building on the other, which the European Templar Route reads as the Dome of the Rock; the provinces of England, Provence and Aragon sealed with the Lamb of God. On their habits the brothers wore the red cross, and into battle they carried the black and white Beauséant, which Jacques de Vitry, Bishop of Acre, read as fair to friends and terrible to enemies. Each page gives the sources side by side where they disagree: on when the red cross was granted, on whether the two riders mean poverty, on which half of the banner was black.

The trial

The accusations of 1307, among them spitting on the cross and worshipping an idol, are told on the Templar cross page as accusations, with what the record shows: confessions made under torture, a pope who protested, and a commission that could not prove the order guilty of heresy. The idol has its own page among the occult symbols.

The Masonic Knights Templar

A separate order took the Templars’ name within Freemasonry. Its own governing body in the United States, the Grand Encampment of Knights Templar, says there is “no proof of direct connection” between the medieval and the modern order, and that Templary emerged in the early 1700s as part of Freemasonry. Its emblem is the cross and crown, and it still carries a black and white Beauséant. Its members are Freemasons, and the lodge’s own emblems are on the Masonic symbols pages.

Sources

The Knights Templars, Charles Moeller, The Catholic Encyclopedia (1907–1912), via New Advent, Their humble beginning
The Seals of the Order of the Temple, Arnaud Baudin, Deputy Director of Archives and Heritage of the Aube, European Templar Route
The History of Jerusalem, A.D. 1180, by Jacques de Vitry, translated by Aubrey Stewart, Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society, London, 1896 (scan on the Internet Archive), Internet Archive, ch. 65, p. 52
William of Tyre: The Foundation of the Order of Knights Templar, Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum XII.7 (c. 1170–74), translated by James Brundage (1962), Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University, XII.7
Origin of the Knights Templar, Grand Encampment of Knights Templar of the U.S.A.
Constitution and Statutes of the Grand Encampment of Knights Templar of the U.S.A. (2022), Grand Encampment of Knights Templar of the U.S.A., Sections 239, 307

Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research