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Ah, the Templars, here to pick up the slack for every conspiracy theory that hasn't already been abducted by aliens. Be they portrayed as the last bastions of chivalry in a godless world, or obsessive fanatics bent on world domination, the Knights Templar loom quite large in Western imagination. I find this kinda funny, because like most conspiracy theories, what we actually know about the historical Knights Templar is… pretty boring. Of course, maybe that's just Abstergo propaganda, but when you peel back all the rose-tinted romanticism heaped upon the Templars for the past thousand years, all you're really left with is… a bunch of generic knights. A powerful group of knights, sure, but really they weren't all that outstanding from any of the many other chivalric orders running across Europe and the Middle East causing all manner of havoc. I honestly believe it's just the whole "Deus vult" aesthetic that's carried their image so far into popular culture.

But okay, I'm getting ahead of myself. How did we end up with this dusty old man's club in the first place? Well, the first of those dusty old men was a Frenchman named Hugues de Payens, a knight in the service of Hugh, Count of Champagne. Accounts of his biography are sparse and contradictory, but Hugues would've been in the Holy Land by 1114 at the very least, when Hugh's second crusading expedition arrived in the Levant. At some point between 1118 and 1120 (sources differ), Hugues approached Baldwin II, King of Jerusalem, proposing the creation of a monastic order dedicated to protecting Christian pilgrims from the "infidel invasion". Which is hilarious, because they were the invading army, and Christians had been completely welcome in Muslim lands as fellow People of the Book for four centuries by that point, but hey let's not dwell too long on that. Clearly the Crusaders didn't either. Hugues thus founded the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ, originally consisting of just him and seven other old men whom history has little to say about. Often you'll hear that there were originally nine founding members, but it seems that this is a later tradition which confused Hugh of Champagne as being a founding member, when in actuality he didn't join the organization until 1125. Baldwin granted the Poor Fellow Soldiers a base of operations on the Temple Mount itself, allowing the knights to rebrand to the much snappier "Knights Templar", with Hugues as their first Grand Master. I'm sure his mother was very proud.

For about a decade, this small band of Templars had devoted themselves to living humble, godly lives, free from material wants bla bla bla. The problem with being the "Poor" Fellow Soldiers of Christ, of course, is that it makes it kind of difficult to actually fund the order's expansion beyond just nine old dudes who probably couldn't protect a cookie jar, let alone the entire population of Christian pilgrims. The poor wittle Templars were thus left with no other choice but to sulk back to France and ask Hugues's rich ass buddy, Bernard of Clairvaux, for a shit load of money. This request was granted, and the Templars were reorganized at the Council of Troyes in 1129. Here, they established the Latin Rule, a list of 75 clauses by which the organization could be governed. Most of these are just extremely boring churchy shit, but I do find it funny how clause 70 goes out of its way to insist that women are the work of the Devil and are full of cooties, so no girls allowed whatsoever under any circumstances. This is an organization for men to sit around with other men, goddammit. It's not gay… it's chastity!

Hugues eventually returned to the Holy Land and governed the Templars until his death in 1136. The Templars would go on to serve under a line of 22 other Grand Masters, each richer and more powerful than the last. See, it wasn't so much the pilgrims themselves the Templars wanted to protect, but rather the fat stacks of cash they brought with them in order to even afford traveling all the way to the Levant in medieval times. They couldn't just carry all this wealth around on the street, then those dirty less-fortunates might want to rob them! That money is for God, not poor people, silly peasants! So instead of carrying all that gold around with them, pilgrims would deposit it in a sanctioned location closer to home, and they'd be issued an official document which they could carry to Jerusalem. Once turned in to the Templar office, the Templars would withdraw the recorded sum from their coffers so that the pilgrims could go on their merry way cramming their camels through the eye of a needle. This proto-banking system, combined with a Papal Bull issued in 1139 which made it so that the Templars were exempt from tithes, made the Knights Templar fantastically rich. As that same Papal Bull made it so that the Templars were exempt from all local laws and authorities, answering only to the Pope himself, it also made the Templars dangerously powerful. Thank God nothing has ever gone wrong when a religious organization is allowed to sucker people into trusting them with all their money without any checks and balances, right guys?

The Templars sure did put that money to work, though. They became some of the most renowned fighters by the time of the Third Crusade, though let's be honest, they were kinda carried by Richard the Lionheart most of the way. When Richard took the island of Cyprus on his way to the Holy Land in 1191, he actually sold it to the Templars just so he could get on to crusading with a full chest. This lasted less than a year before they sold it back to Richard, as the small band of 14 Templars put in charge of the place were unable to resist a rebellion which had risen up among the island's dissatisfied Orthodox Greek population. Fast forward a few decades, the Templars attempted to reclaim the fortress of Khawami from the Nizari Assassins following their assassination of Raymond of Antioch in 1213. They were unable to do so, however, forced to retreat to scuffle with Saladin's nephew in Tripoli. It was a minor incident, but I like collecting all the little historical rivalries the Assassins and Templars actually had in real life. They're actually quite few and far between.

In 1244, the city of Jerusalem was lost to the Muslim Khwarazmians, and this was kind of the beginning of the end for the whole "Crusade" thing. Acre, the last Crusader state, fell in 1291, and this was a big yikes for the Templars. After all, the whole reason they were allowed to get away with having all this money and power was so that they could protect pilgrims in the Holy Land. Since that clearly wasn't happening anymore, it started to make all these powerful noblemen who had entrusted all their money to the Templar bank consider getting a major withdrawal. This is where Philip IV of France enters the scene, takes a look at all that shiny Templar gold, and says "hmm, you know, I think that gold would look a lot nicer in my treasure room". When Pope Boniface VIII tried to weasel his way into making the church exempt from taxes, shrewd old Philip was like oh no no no, you're in my house bitch, and had him tried and imprisoned in 1303. His successor Pope Benedict enjoyed a brief tenure before being replaced by Philip's buddy Pope Clement V, who moved the papacy to Avignon in 1309, because I guess that's something you can just do when you're Pope. The Templars, who were still fond of having all this money instead of Philip, became the king's next target. He rounded all the Templars up in 1307, including their last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, and had them tried for all manner of accusations from corruption, financial fraud, and heresy, even accusing them of worshiping some sort of demon called "Baphomet". There's a whole discussion to be had about how true these accusations were which is beyond the scope of this summary. Many of the Templar confessions were extracted under torture, which certainly hurts the credibility of Philip's propaganda, but whatever the case, all the Templars, de Molay included, were sentenced to be burnt at the stake in 1314. One famous legend has it that de Molay used his dying breath to curse King Philip's entire bloodline, a legend which would come to fruition when King Louis XVI was beheaded in 1793, and an anonymous Freemason boldly proclaimed "Jacques de Molay, thou art avenged."

Which segues us nicely into the fun part: the survival conspiracies. We know for a fact that a lot of the resources once owned by the Templars were redistributed mostly to other chivalric orders across Europe who weren't persecuted by the French, such as the Knights Hospitaller and the Military Order of Christ, but that's boring! Disregarding annoying obstacles like "evidence" and "documentation", some theorize that a small band of Templars managed to escape persecution in Scotland, where they supposedly assisted Robert the Bruce at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. Allegedly, this aid earned them enough favor to survive in vague circumstances until 1689, when masonic legend starts to fill in the juicier details. According to the way the Freemasons tell the story, when the body of the Viscount Dundee was pulled from the battlefield of Killiecrankie, the underside of his breastplate bore the mark of a Templar Grand Master. This title then supposedly passed to the Earls of Mar, then the Dukes of Atholl, and eventually Charles Edward Stuart, leader of the infamous Jacobite Uprising of 1745. Apparently, there was a German Freemason named Karl Gotthelf von Hund who was introduced to these Templars in 1743, and they assigned him the task of uniting the two organizations into one. Huld would insist that the Freemasons had actually always been the direct descendants of the Templars all along, but his claims were contested by Jean-Baptiste Willermoz in 1782. As there's not really any documentary evidence to prove that these Scottish Templars were even direct descendants of the real Templars at all, it really just comes down to which tradition you believe. For the sake of worldbuilding the Drake Hero Universe, I've decided to treat them as separate orders which were fused together in 1743, but that's just my storytelling preference. If the Freemasons really do represent some Templar hold out, then the Templars have at last settled into their original goal of being a boring club of dusty self-important old men sitting around with no women allowed whatsoever. You know, cause girls have cooties. It's totally not gay you guys.

Design notes, this one was pretty straightforward. In fact… I'd argue it was too straightforward. I think the internet has supplied us with a pretty standard mental image of what your typical deus-vult-ing crusader looks like by now. The downside to that is that no one seems to deviate beyond your generic Halloween costume Templar knight at all. I get that this gear was pretty standard for the time period, but I gotta pull 4 unique designs out of my ass for these. It doesn't help that there's surprisingly few scholarly/historical depictions of Templar armor out there, at least none that distinguish them from any other knights of the period. They've all been drowned out by modern renditions of the romanticized knight, which often combine anachronistic elements from later in history into their armor. Maybe I'm overthinking it, and that may have held me back a little. I've also had a ripping migraine, because some snot-nosed kid coughed in my direction like two feet away from me while I was at work, so I've been left with this piece sitting on my desk unfinished and mocking me for days now. Maybe that's the real Templar conspiracy. Curse you Abstergo and your tiny human-shaped germ incubators. In the end, I think I buffed out something satisfactory. Certainly room for improvement, but for now I'm gonna use that room to go cry in the corner.

Description
Ah, the Templars, here to pick up the slack for every conspiracy theory that hasn't already been abducted by aliens. Be they portrayed as the last bastions of chivalry in a godless world, or obsessive fanatics bent on world domination, the Knights Templar loom quite large in Western imagination. I find this kinda funny, because like most conspiracy theories, what we actually know about the historical Knights Templar is… pretty boring. Of course, maybe that's just Abstergo propaganda, but when you peel back all the rose-tinted romanticism heaped upon the Templars for the past thousand years, all you're really left with is… a bunch of generic knights. A powerful group of knights, sure, but really they weren't all that outstanding from any of the many other chivalric orders running across Europe and the Middle East causing all manner of havoc. I honestly believe it's just the whole "Deus vult" aesthetic that's carried their image so far into popular culture.

But okay, I'm getting ahead of myself. How did we end up with this dusty old man's club in the first place? Well, the first of those dusty old men was a Frenchman named Hugues de Payens, a knight in the service of Hugh, Count of Champagne. Accounts of his biography are sparse and contradictory, but Hugues would've been in the Holy Land by 1114 at the very least, when Hugh's second crusading expedition arrived in the Levant. At some point between 1118 and 1120 (sources differ), Hugues approached Baldwin II, King of Jerusalem, proposing the creation of a monastic order dedicated to protecting Christian pilgrims from the "infidel invasion". Which is hilarious, because they were the invading army, and Christians had been completely welcome in Muslim lands as fellow People of the Book for four centuries by that point, but hey let's not dwell too long on that. Clearly the Crusaders didn't either. Hugues thus founded the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ, originally consisting of just him and seven other old men whom history has little to say about. Often you'll hear that there were originally nine founding members, but it seems that this is a later tradition which confused Hugh of Champagne as being a founding member, when in actuality he didn't join the organization until 1125. Baldwin granted the Poor Fellow Soldiers a base of operations on the Temple Mount itself, allowing the knights to rebrand to the much snappier "Knights Templar", with Hugues as their first Grand Master. I'm sure his mother was very proud.

For about a decade, this small band of Templars had devoted themselves to living humble, godly lives, free from material wants bla bla bla. The problem with being the "Poor" Fellow Soldiers of Christ, of course, is that it makes it kind of difficult to actually fund the order's expansion beyond just nine old dudes who probably couldn't protect a cookie jar, let alone the entire population of Christian pilgrims. The poor wittle Templars were thus left with no other choice but to sulk back to France and ask Hugues's rich ass buddy, Bernard of Clairvaux, for a shit load of money. This request was granted, and the Templars were reorganized at the Council of Troyes in 1129. Here, they established the Latin Rule, a list of 75 clauses by which the organization could be governed. Most of these are just extremely boring churchy shit, but I do find it funny how clause 70 goes out of its way to insist that women are the work of the Devil and are full of cooties, so no girls allowed whatsoever under any circumstances. This is an organization for men to sit around with other men, goddammit. It's not gay… it's chastity!

Hugues eventually returned to the Holy Land and governed the Templars until his death in 1136. The Templars would go on to serve under a line of 22 other Grand Masters, each richer and more powerful than the last. See, it wasn't so much the pilgrims themselves the Templars wanted to protect, but rather the fat stacks of cash they brought with them in order to even afford traveling all the way to the Levant in medieval times. They couldn't just carry all this wealth around on the street, then those dirty less-fortunates might want to rob them! That money is for God, not poor people, silly peasants! So instead of carrying all that gold around with them, pilgrims would deposit it in a sanctioned location closer to home, and they'd be issued an official document which they could carry to Jerusalem. Once turned in to the Templar office, the Templars would withdraw the recorded sum from their coffers so that the pilgrims could go on their merry way cramming their camels through the eye of a needle. This proto-banking system, combined with a Papal Bull issued in 1139 which made it so that the Templars were exempt from tithes, made the Knights Templar fantastically rich. As that same Papal Bull made it so that the Templars were exempt from all local laws and authorities, answering only to the Pope himself, it also made the Templars dangerously powerful. Thank God nothing has ever gone wrong when a religious organization is allowed to sucker people into trusting them with all their money without any checks and balances, right guys?

The Templars sure did put that money to work, though. They became some of the most renowned fighters by the time of the Third Crusade, though let's be honest, they were kinda carried by Richard the Lionheart most of the way. When Richard took the island of Cyprus on his way to the Holy Land in 1191, he actually sold it to the Templars just so he could get on to crusading with a full chest. This lasted less than a year before they sold it back to Richard, as the small band of 14 Templars put in charge of the place were unable to resist a rebellion which had risen up among the island's dissatisfied Orthodox Greek population. Fast forward a few decades, the Templars attempted to reclaim the fortress of Khawami from the Nizari Assassins following their assassination of Raymond of Antioch in 1213. They were unable to do so, however, forced to retreat to scuffle with Saladin's nephew in Tripoli. It was a minor incident, but I like collecting all the little historical rivalries the Assassins and Templars actually had in real life. They're actually quite few and far between.

In 1244, the city of Jerusalem was lost to the Muslim Khwarazmians, and this was kind of the beginning of the end for the whole "Crusade" thing. Acre, the last Crusader state, fell in 1291, and this was a big yikes for the Templars. After all, the whole reason they were allowed to get away with having all this money and power was so that they could protect pilgrims in the Holy Land. Since that clearly wasn't happening anymore, it started to make all these powerful noblemen who had entrusted all their money to the Templar bank consider getting a major withdrawal. This is where Philip IV of France enters the scene, takes a look at all that shiny Templar gold, and says "hmm, you know, I think that gold would look a lot nicer in my treasure room". When Pope Boniface VIII tried to weasel his way into making the church exempt from taxes, shrewd old Philip was like oh no no no, you're in my house bitch, and had him tried and imprisoned in 1303. His successor Pope Benedict enjoyed a brief tenure before being replaced by Philip's buddy Pope Clement V, who moved the papacy to Avignon in 1309, because I guess that's something you can just do when you're Pope. The Templars, who were still fond of having all this money instead of Philip, became the king's next target. He rounded all the Templars up in 1307, including their last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, and had them tried for all manner of accusations from corruption, financial fraud, and heresy, even accusing them of worshiping some sort of demon called "Baphomet". There's a whole discussion to be had about how true these accusations were which is beyond the scope of this summary. Many of the Templar confessions were extracted under torture, which certainly hurts the credibility of Philip's propaganda, but whatever the case, all the Templars, de Molay included, were sentenced to be burnt at the stake in 1314. One famous legend has it that de Molay used his dying breath to curse King Philip's entire bloodline, a legend which would come to fruition when King Louis XVI was beheaded in 1793, and an anonymous Freemason boldly proclaimed "Jacques de Molay, thou art avenged."

Which segues us nicely into the fun part: the survival conspiracies. We know for a fact that a lot of the resources once owned by the Templars were redistributed mostly to other chivalric orders across Europe who weren't persecuted by the French, such as the Knights Hospitaller and the Military Order of Christ, but that's boring! Disregarding annoying obstacles like "evidence" and "documentation", some theorize that a small band of Templars managed to escape persecution in Scotland, where they supposedly assisted Robert the Bruce at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. Allegedly, this aid earned them enough favor to survive in vague circumstances until 1689, when masonic legend starts to fill in the juicier details. According to the way the Freemasons tell the story, when the body of the Viscount Dundee was pulled from the battlefield of Killiecrankie, the underside of his breastplate bore the mark of a Templar Grand Master. This title then supposedly passed to the Earls of Mar, then the Dukes of Atholl, and eventually Charles Edward Stuart, leader of the infamous Jacobite Uprising of 1745. Apparently, there was a German Freemason named Karl Gotthelf von Hund who was introduced to these Templars in 1743, and they assigned him the task of uniting the two organizations into one. Huld would insist that the Freemasons had actually always been the direct descendants of the Templars all along, but his claims were contested by Jean-Baptiste Willermoz in 1782. As there's not really any documentary evidence to prove that these Scottish Templars were even direct descendants of the real Templars at all, it really just comes down to which tradition you believe. For the sake of worldbuilding the Drake Hero Universe, I've decided to treat them as separate orders which were fused together in 1743, but that's just my storytelling preference. If the Freemasons really do represent some Templar hold out, then the Templars have at last settled into their original goal of being a boring club of dusty self-important old men sitting around with no women allowed whatsoever. You know, cause girls have cooties. It's totally not gay you guys.

Design notes, this one was pretty straightforward. In fact… I'd argue it was too straightforward. I think the internet has supplied us with a pretty standard mental image of what your typical deus-vult-ing crusader looks like by now. The downside to that is that no one seems to deviate beyond your generic Halloween costume Templar knight at all. I get that this gear was pretty standard for the time period, but I gotta pull 4 unique designs out of my ass for these. It doesn't help that there's surprisingly few scholarly/historical depictions of Templar armor out there, at least none that distinguish them from any other knights of the period. They've all been drowned out by modern renditions of the romanticized knight, which often combine anachronistic elements from later in history into their armor. Maybe I'm overthinking it, and that may have held me back a little. I've also had a ripping migraine, because some snot-nosed kid coughed in my direction like two feet away from me while I was at work, so I've been left with this piece sitting on my desk unfinished and mocking me for days now. Maybe that's the real Templar conspiracy. Curse you Abstergo and your tiny human-shaped germ incubators. In the end, I think I buffed out something satisfactory. Certainly room for improvement, but for now I'm gonna use that room to go cry in the corner.