Two knights on one horse
The 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.
Meaning
The order’s seal was a double silver matrix on the model of Byzantine bullae, with the two horsemen on one face and a domed building on the other (The dome on the Templar seal), the European Templar Route explains; the Latin legend, Sigillum militum on one side and De templo Cristi on the other, “makes the two elements inseparable”. Arnaud Baudin, writing for the Route, reads the riders as a double allegory of the brothers’ humility and their solidarity, two virtues the Rule claimed from the start. Renewed several times, the seal remained the most representative image of the order until its trial.
Origin and history
The first impression that survives dates from 1167, though the order may have had a matrix from its earliest years; in 1147 the master Évrard des Barres already used a seal on a private deed. When the office of visitor was created in 1164 the seal was divided: the grand master kept the dome and the visitor took the horsemen, though grand masters still sealed with the two riders in 1221 and in 1286. The matrices were seized at the Paris Temple on 13 October 1307, and most were destroyed after the order was dissolved in 1312.
Were the Templars too poor to own a horse each?
No. The order’s Rule allowed each knight three horses, “because of the great poverty which exists at the present time”, and no more without the master’s leave. The poverty reading is old all the same. Cecil Headlam, writing on the Inns of Court in 1909, thought the horse carrying two men was probably meant to suggest the Templars’ work of helping pilgrims on the road, “but in which some saw an emblem of humiliation and of a vow to poverty so strict that they could afford but one horse for two knights”.
The horse that became Pegasus
In London the Templars’ precinct passed to the lawyers of the Inner and Middle Temple, and its emblems with it. Headlam says the two riders were turned into the wings of a Pegasus, which the Inner Temple took as its badge after Christmas revels held in 1563 in honour of Lord Robert Dudley. Addison told it differently in 1842: the Inner Temple, on the advice of the herald Gerard Leigh, gave up the Templars’ device for a winged horse in the fifth year of Elizabeth I’s reign. The Middle Temple kept the Templars’ lamb (Agnus Dei on Templar seals).
Read next
- Next in Knights Templar symbolsThe dome on the Templar sealThe 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.
- The same shape in Adinkra symbolsBese SakaBese Saka, a bunch of kola nuts, is the adinkra symbol of affluence, abundance and unity.
See also
Agnus Dei on Templar seals, 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
- The Primitive Rule of the Templars, The Latin Rule of 1129, Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University, 51. On Animals and Squires
- The Inns of Court, Cecil Headlam, A. & C. Black, London, 1909, Project Gutenberg, Chapter II, the Temple
- The History of the Knights Templars, the Temple Church, and the Temple, Charles G. Addison, Longman, London, 1842, Project Gutenberg, Chapter XIII
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from circles or curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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