Beauséant
The 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.
Meaning
Jacques de Vitry, Bishop of Acre and a companion of the Templars on campaign, described “a black and white banner, which they called Bauceant”, carried before them, “signifying that they are fair and kindly to their friends, but black and terrible to their enemies”. Albert Mackey, writing in 1874, preferred a plainer origin for the name: in Old French bauseant meant a piebald or party-coloured horse, so the word means simply a banner of two colours. He set aside the reading from bienséant, “seemly”. The Masonic Knights Templar carry the banner today.
Origin and history
The banner was guarded closely. Its bearer took it to the field with a company of knights and squires sworn never to let it fall into the enemy’s hands, Charles Addison writes. Losing the right to carry it was a punishment: under the Rule’s later articles, the European Templar Route notes, a brother who struck another in anger could no longer carry the gonfanon baussant, nor touch the order’s silver seal. Mackey adds that the banner bore the verse Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam, “not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto thee give the glory”.
Which half is black?
The medieval writers say only black and white. Mackey describes the upper half as black and the lower as white, and the Grand Encampment of Knights Templar, the Masonic order in the United States, fixes the same arrangement in its statutes: silk in two horizontal stripes of equal width, black above and white below, swallow-tailed for a third of its length. The Masonic order is a separate body from the medieval one, as its own history says (Cross and crown).
Read next
- Next in Knights Templar symbolsTwo knights on one horseThe image on the great seal of the Knights Templar: two armed brothers riding one horse. Historians read it as humility and brotherhood; a later story made it a sign of poverty.
- The same shape in Andean and Inca symbolsGateway of the Sun (the Staff God)A doorway cut from a single block of andesite at Tiwanaku, near Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, carved above the opening with a god holding a staff in each hand. Who the figure is remains open: Britannica lists a sun god, a thunder god and Viracocha among the readings.
See also
Templar cross, The dome on the Templar seal, Agnus Dei on Templar seals, Cross and crown.
Sources
- 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
- The History of the Knights Templars, the Temple Church, and the Temple, Charles G. Addison, Longman, London, 1842, Project Gutenberg, Chapter III
- An Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry and its Kindred Sciences, Albert G. Mackey, Moss & Co., Philadelphia, 1874 (Cornell scan on the Internet Archive), Internet Archive, Beauseant; Beaucenifer; In Hoc Signo Vinces
- The Seals of the Order of the Temple, Arnaud Baudin, Deputy Director of Archives and Heritage of the Aube, European Templar Route
- 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., Section 239
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from lines or squares and rectangles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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