What Did the Knights Templar Eat? The Rule’s Menu

The Knights Templar ate better than most people in medieval Europe, and the Rule told them exactly how. Meat three times a week. Two brothers sharing every dish. Wine with meals. Silence while eating, broken only by scripture read aloud. Leftovers to the poor at the gate.

Food in the Order was never a private matter — it was regulated, portioned and watched, because a fighting man had to be fed properly and a monk was not supposed to enjoy it too much. The Rule’s solution to that contradiction is one of the most revealing documents the Order produced.

Meat three times a week — and why

The Latin Rule, drawn up after the Council of Troyes in 1129, is explicit: the brothers were to eat meat three times a week, normally on Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. On Sunday the knights received a double portion.

That provision is unusual, and the Rule knows it. Contemporary monastic rules restricted meat severely, often banning four-footed animals outright for the healthy. The Templar Rule justifies the difference directly: meat is granted “because it is understood to be a great weakening of the body,” that is, abstaining from it weakens men who must fight. The Order was staffed by armoured cavalry, and armoured cavalry needs protein.

On the remaining days the brothers ate:

• Two or three dishes of vegetables or pulses — beans, lentils, chickpeas, whatever the house grew. This was the everyday base of the diet.
• Fish, cheese and eggs on the meatless days, with the Rule noting these should be prepared simply.
• Bread, constantly, as the staple that filled out every meal.
• Wine, in moderation — the Order’s Atlantic shipping out of La Rochelle existed substantially to move it.

Friday was abstinence, and Lent was observed strictly. The sick were exempt from all of it and were fed what the infirmarer thought would restore them.

Two brothers to a dish

The most characteristic Templar table rule is also the most quietly clever: brothers ate in pairs, sharing a single bowl.

The stated reason was practical charity — so that each could watch the other and make sure neither went short, and so that a brother practising extra austerity would be noticed rather than allowed to starve himself quietly. Self-imposed fasting beyond the Rule was discouraged; obedience outranked private piety.

The effect was also social. You cannot share a bowl with a man for years and remain a stranger to him. The pairing institutionalised the brotherhood at the most ordinary moment of the day, which is roughly the same logic as the two knights on one horse of the Order’s seal — the image says the same thing the dinner table did.

Silence, scripture, and the shape of a meal

Meals were taken in common and in silence, with a clerk or chaplain reading aloud from scripture while the brothers ate. The Rule acknowledges the obvious practical problem and solves it without comment: because speaking was forbidden, a brother who needed bread or water was to ask by sign.

The Order ate twice a day in the normal run of things — a main meal and a lighter evening one, with the schedule shifting by season and by the liturgical calendar. Everything was structured around the hours of prayer; eating fitted between offices rather than the other way round.

When the meal ended, the leftovers did not go back to the kitchen. The Rule directs that a tenth of the Order’s bread be given to the poor, and the broken food from the brothers’ table distributed at the gate. This was not incidental almsgiving but a standing obligation written into the same document that governed the knights’ armour and horses.

What they ate in the East

The Rule was written in Champagne for an order whose work was in Syria and Palestine, and the Templar houses in the castles of the Latin East ate what the Levant produced.

That meant olive oil rather than northern animal fats, mutton and goat more than beef, local fish, and the fruits and pulses of the region. Sugar was produced in the crusader states and the military orders were involved in the industry. Spices moved through the ports the Order shipped from. Archaeological and documentary work on crusader-period sites shows settlers adapting to local foodways reasonably quickly, and there is no reason to think the Templars were exceptions — they were often better placed than anyone to obtain what the region offered.

Castle stores were a serious military matter. A fortress expecting siege held grain, oil, salted meat and water against a long investment, and the brothers responsible for provisioning were doing defensive work as surely as the ones on the walls.

What the food says about the Order

Read the dietary clauses together and a consistent picture emerges. The Templars were not ascetics competing at self-denial; they were professionals being maintained. Meat was issued because fighting men need it. Wine was allowed because it was normal. Fasting was limited because an exhausted knight is useless. And every one of those concessions was hedged with a rule that kept the concession from becoming an appetite — shared bowls, silence, fixed days, surplus to the poor.

That is the Order’s whole character at table: generous enough to function, controlled enough to stay monastic. The brotherhood it produced was built in the most unremarkable way imaginable — two men, one bowl, every day for the rest of their lives. For how that brotherhood was formed in the first place, see the three vows every brother swore.

The food rules that got brothers punished

Because the Rule regulated meals, breaking the meal rules was a disciplinary matter, and the Order’s recorded judgments include a surprising amount of food.

A brother who ate somewhere he should not, or took food without leave, could be penanced. Eating alone was itself suspect — it broke the shared-bowl principle and suggested a brother was holding something back from the house. Keeping private stores was worse, because the vow of poverty meant a Templar owned nothing: a brother found with his own supply of food had, technically, property.

The penalties followed the Order’s standard ladder. Minor lapses drew a penance and extra labour. More serious ones cost a brother his place at table — which, given that the disgraced ate on the floor, made the punishment itself a meal.

There is a thread running from the dining rule to the discipline here, and it is the same one that runs through the whole Rule: the Order was not interested in heroic self-denial, which it actively discouraged, but it was intensely interested in brothers behaving identically. Food was where that principle got tested three times a day.

The short answer

Meat three times a week (Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday) with a double portion for knights on Sunday; vegetables, pulses, fish, cheese, eggs and bread otherwise; wine in moderation; two meals a day; Friday abstinence and a strict Lent. Brothers ate in pairs from one dish, in silence, while scripture was read — and a tenth of the bread went to the poor at the gate.