Templar cross
The 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.
Meaning
The Templars sewed a red cross on their habits: on the white mantle of the knights and on the black or brown of the serving brothers, the European Templar Route explains. Their Rule kept white cloaks for the knights alone, “which signifies purity and complete chastity”. The Masonic historian Albert Mackey gave the Templar cross in 1874 as a cross pattée, its arms widening outward, and the Templar Route finds it on the seals of the order’s province of Poitou. The red cross is the medieval order’s emblem; the Masonic Knights Templar, a separate order, use the name Templar cross for one of their badges of rank (Cross and crown).
Origin and history
When the cross was added is told three ways. The Catholic Encyclopedia (1912) puts it at the Council of Troyes in 1128, where the order adopted the white habit of the Cistercians, “adding to it a red cross”. William of Tyre, writing about 1170, gives Troyes only the white habit: the crosses of red cloth came later, “in Pope Eugene’s time, it is said”, to set the brothers apart from others. Charles Addison, in his history of 1842, places the grant at a chapter of the order in Paris attended by Pope Eugene III and Louis VII of France, where the Second Crusade was arranged; Eugene held a synod in Paris in 1147, as the Catholic Encyclopedia’s article on him records, and Mackey dates the grant 1146. Addison calls it “the blood-red cross, the symbol of martyrdom”, worn on the left breast over the heart, and says the Templars first carried it into battle on a white banner at the siege of Damascus.
Cross pattée or Maltese cross?
The Templar cross is not the eight-pointed Maltese cross. Mackey describes both as crosses pattée, but the cross of the Knights of Malta had its limbs “deeply notched so as to make a cross of eight points”. He blamed Walter Scott, among others, for giving the Templar cross eight points. The Hospitallers, he adds, wore a cross of the same form as the Templars, white on a black mantle.
Losing the cross
The cross could be taken away. Jacques de Vitry, Bishop of Acre, wrote that for the worst offences the brothers “took away their red cross, and cast them out for ever”.
The 1307 arrests and the charge of spitting on the cross
On 13 October 1307 Philip IV of France had every Templar in his kingdom arrested on the same day. One charge was that new brothers were made to spit on the cross and deny Christ; the others were obscene kisses, sodomy and the worship of an idol, which the Templar Route names as the Baphomet (Baphomet). Most of the accused confessed after torture so fierce that many died of it, the Catholic Encyclopedia records, and outside France, the Templar Route notes, the arrests led to confessions only where torture was used. Pope Clement V protested at the king’s proceedings, and his commission could not prove that the order as a body held any heretical doctrine. In 1312 he dissolved the order without condemning it. A parchment from hearings at Chinon in 1308, long misfiled in the Vatican archives, records Clement first absolving the order of heresy, the Associated Press reported when the Vatican published it in 2007. Jacques de Molay, the last grand master, was burned in Paris in March 1314 after withdrawing his confession.
Read next
- Next in Knights Templar symbolsBeauséantThe 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 charges of 1307: spitting on the cross and worshipping an idol called BaphometBaphometA name first recorded in the trials of the Knights Templar (1307–1314), where confessions made under torture described an idol the knights were said to worship. The winged, goat-headed figure people picture was drawn by the French occultist Éliphas Lévi in 1856.
See also
Cross and crown, Two knights on one horse, The dome on the Templar seal, Agnus Dei on Templar seals.
Sources
- The Knights Templars, Charles Moeller, The Catholic Encyclopedia (1907–1912), via New Advent, Their humble beginning; Their tragic end
- 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
- The History of the Knights Templars, the Temple Church, and the Temple, Charles G. Addison, Longman, London, 1842, Project Gutenberg, Chapter II (A.D. 1146–1147)
- Pope Blessed Eugene III, The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 5 (1909), New Advent
- An Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry and its Kindred Sciences, Albert G. Mackey, Moss & Co., Philadelphia, 1874 (Cornell scan on the Internet Archive), Internet Archive, Cross, Templar
- Templars: a two hundred years history, European Templar Route, The order; Agony and Fall; Chronology
- The Seals of the Order of the Temple, Arnaud Baudin, Deputy Director of Archives and Heritage of the Aube, European Templar Route
- The Primitive Rule of the Templars, The Latin Rule of 1129, Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University, 17. On the Brothers’ Dress
- 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
- Long-lost text lifts cloud from Knights Templar, The Associated Press, 12 October 2007, NBC News
- 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 241
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from crosses.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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