The Black Templar Cross: Meaning & Why It’s Not Red
Search for a black Templar cross and you will find pendants, patches, hoodies and wall prints everywhere — yet the medieval Knights Templar never carried an official black cross at all. The emblem the pope approved for them was a red cross pattée on a white field, granted in 1147. So what does the black version actually mean? The honest answer is layered. Black did play a genuine role in the Order’s visual world — in its battle banner and in the mantles of its lower ranks — but the sleek all-black cross you see on merchandise today is a modern recolor rather than a medieval badge. Here is what each color truly signified, and where the confusion comes from.
The cross the Templars actually wore
The Order’s official sign was the cross pattée (also spelled cross formée) in red, set against a white mantle or surcoat. The shape is distinctive and worth picturing clearly: the four arms are narrow where they meet at the center and flare outward to broad, nearly straight ends, so the whole cross looks as though it is opening up toward the viewer. That flared silhouette is one of the fastest ways to identify a genuinely Templar-style cross, and it stayed remarkably consistent across seals, buildings and cloth.
It was not, however, the only Christian cross a crusader might carry, and the Order itself used more than one form over its two centuries. Our guide to the different Templar cross types walks through those variations if you want to compare them side by side. The color scheme carried meaning of its own, too: red stood for the blood of martyrdom — the readiness to die for the faith — while the white ground represented purity and the knight’s monastic vows.
You would have met this cross almost everywhere the brothers went. It was stitched onto mantles and surcoats, pressed into wax seals, carved above the doors of their round churches, and painted on shields and banners. That repetition mattered. In an age when most people could not read, a bold, instantly recognizable emblem did the work of a signature and a flag at once, announcing to friend and foe exactly who was riding toward them.
Pope Eugene III is traditionally credited with granting the red cross around 1147, roughly three decades after the Order was founded. Before that the brothers were known chiefly by their plain white habit. If you want to see how the Templar cross compares with the layered, five-fold design that many pilgrims brought home from the Holy Land, our explanation of the Jerusalem cross and the wider crusader’s cross makes a useful companion read.
So where does the black come from?
Black was never the color of the Templar cross, but it was absolutely part of the Order’s world in two concrete and well-documented ways.
- The Beauséant banner. The Templars’ war standard was divided black over white — in heraldic language, roughly per fess sable and argent. Medieval writers read the two tones morally: the Order was said to be fair and gentle to its friends and dark and terrible to its foes. This black-and-white duality, not a black cross, is the real historical root of the Order’s association with the color.
- The mantles of the lower ranks. Only professed knights wore white. The larger body of sergeants and serving brothers — the men who fought, farmed, and managed the Order’s estates — wore black or brown mantles, still marked with the red cross. So a black garment carrying a red cross was genuinely Templar; a black cross itself was not.
The Beauséant is worth dwelling on because it is the piece of genuine Templar black most people have never heard of. Chroniclers describe it as the point around which the brothers rallied in battle; so long as the standard stood, the knights were required to keep fighting, and abandoning it was a serious offence. The banner even lent its name to the Order’s war cry. So when a modern design leans on black, the honest historical anchor is this standard, not an imagined black cross.
In short, the medieval “black” you can defend historically is the black of a banner and of a working brother’s cloak, always paired with white or with the red cross rather than replacing them. It signalled rank and role, and it framed the white mantle as something deliberately set apart.
Eagle and Symbol of Knights Templar
Carry the authentic cross pattée and eagle heraldry — the true shape behind every black-recolor knockoff.
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The Teutonic mix-up: a black cross that really existed
Much of the modern belief in a “black Templar cross” is actually a case of mistaken identity. Another great military-monastic order, the Teutonic Knights, genuinely used a black cross on a white ground as its emblem. Founded in the Holy Land and later famous for its long campaigns around the Baltic, the Teutonic Order is the one whose insignia was truly black — and that cross went on to shape centuries of German heraldry and military iconography.
Because the two orders both wore white mantles and both fought in the crusades, people frequently blur them together, then reason backward that the Templars must have had a black cross as well. They did not. Keeping the orders straight is one of the quickest ways to sound genuinely informed about the period:
- Knights Templar — red cross pattée on white.
- Teutonic Knights — black cross on white.
- Knights Hospitaller — white cross, later the eight-pointed “Maltese” form.
The modern all-black Templar cross
None of this means the black Templar cross is “wrong” to wear — only that it deserves to be understood for what it is. The blacked-out cross pattée is a contemporary aesthetic, part of a broader fashion for monochrome, tactical and heraldic recolors. Designers drop the red for a stealthier, more graphic look, and modern wearers attach their own meanings to it: solemnity, mourning, quiet discipline, or simply a taste for understated black metal and cloth over bright enamel and colour.
That is a perfectly legitimate modern symbolism, provided nobody claims a medieval pedigree for it. Black and white were part of a much larger visual language for the Order, which we unpack in our overview of Templar symbols and their enduring meanings. The rule of thumb is simple honesty: the shape (the cross pattée) is authentically Templar, while the all-black coloring is a choice of our own era rather than the thirteenth century’s.
Wearing the cross with its real story
If you are drawn to the black cross, the best approach is to wear it knowing the fuller picture: the historic Order marched under a red-and-white sign and a black-and-white banner, and the color you have chosen speaks to a modern sensibility built on a very old form. That blend of authentic shape and personal meaning is exactly what thoughtful heraldic apparel should offer — not a costume, but a symbol you can explain.
The cross pattée looks especially sharp rendered as a clean graphic beside other Templar motifs such as the eagle. Whichever version you prefer, the historic red or the modern blackout, the aim is the same. You are carrying a centuries-old emblem with respect for what it once meant to warrior-monks, and a clear sense of what it means to you today.