The dome on the Templar seal
The domed building on the reverse of the Templar seal, which historians read as the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, called the Temple of the Lord by the crusaders.
Meaning
On the reverse of the order’s seal, the European Templar Route describes “a dome topped by a cross and supported by an arcaded gallery”. The Route reads it as the Dome of the Rock, a part standing for the whole: the order’s first commandery and headquarters, which it remained on the seal after Jerusalem fell in 1187 and the headquarters moved to Acre. The grand master’s half of the divided seal took its name, the tube, from kuba, “the dome”; the other half showed the two knights on one horse.
Origin and history
The order took its name from the Temple. The king gave the first knights a dwelling in the south wing of his palace “near the Lord’s Temple”, William of Tyre wrote around 1170, and so they were called the Brothers of the Militia of the Temple. Two buildings on the Temple Mount carried the name. The crusaders had made the Dome of the Rock a church, with a golden cross on its summit, and called it the Temple of the Lord, Charles Addison explains, while the palace, which Jacques de Vitry’s translator places in the al-Aqsa mosque, was known as the Temple of Solomon. The Masonic Knights Templar tell the same story in their own history: the knights were given “a building on Mount Moriah, the site of the former Temple of King Solomon”.
Surviving impressions
The Archives nationales in Paris hold casts of the seal: the Templar Route reproduces the grand master’s seal with the dome from 1255 (sc/D 9862).
Read next
- Next in Knights Templar symbolsAgnus Dei on Templar sealsThe Lamb of God with its banner, which the Knights Templar in England, Provence and Aragon used on their seals.
- The same shape in Christian symbolsArmenian cross (khachkar)The cross as the Armenian Apostolic Church carves it, its arms ending in curling leaves. On the khachkars, Armenia’s carved cross-stones, it stands on a rosette and sprouts leaves and tendrils: the cross as the tree of life.
See also
Two knights on one horse, Templar cross, Beauséant, Cross and crown.
Sources
- The Seals of the Order of the Temple, Arnaud Baudin, Deputy Director of Archives and Heritage of the Aube, European Templar Route
- 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 I
- 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, p. 51, note
- Origin of the Knights Templar, Grand Encampment of Knights Templar of the U.S.A.
The same shape elsewhere
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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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