Knights Templar Coat of Arms: The Real Heraldry

The Knights Templar never had a coat of arms. Not in the strict sense the word carries in heraldry: a unique, hereditary design granted to a person or a corporate body and defensible as their property. The Order bore a badge — the red cross on white — together with a seal and a banner, and those three things did the work that arms do for a noble family. The shield-shaped “Templar coat of arms” you find on search results, patches and print-on-demand mugs is what heralds call attributed arms: a design assigned backwards in time, centuries after 1312, to an order that never carried it.

That distinction is not pedantry. It explains why no two versions of the “Templar arms” online agree with each other, and it tells you which images are actually documented.

Why an order of monks sits outside heraldry

Heraldry as a system is personal and hereditary. Arms identify an individual and pass down a bloodline; they are granted, recorded and inherited. A Templar brother, on joining, gave up precisely the things arms exist to advertise — his lineage, his property and his personal display. The Rule, shaped at the Council of Troyes in 1129 under the influence of St Bernard of Clairvaux, stripped out decoration as a matter of discipline: no gold or silver on bridles, lances or spurs, no ornamental fittings, nothing that marked one brother out from another.

What the Order needed instead was corporate identification — a way to say Templar rather than this particular knight. That is a badge, not arms. The red cross on the mantle told you the man’s order; the colour of the cloth beneath told you his rank; neither told you his name.

The timing matters too. Corporate and ecclesiastical arms — arms belonging to an institution rather than a person — only became properly regulated over the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Templars were suppressed in 1312, before that system matured. Their contemporaries the Hospitallers survived into it and did end up with a settled coat, a plain white cross on red, which is exactly why the Hospitaller arms look “official” and the Templar ones never quite do.

The red cross: the badge people mean

When someone searches for the Templar coat of arms, this is almost always the thing they are picturing — and it is genuinely documented.

The white mantle came first; the Rule of 1129 gave the knights plain white habits and said nothing about a cross. The cross was granted eighteen years later, in 1147, when Pope Eugenius III gave the brothers the right to wear a red cross on their mantles. Three details get lost in modern reproductions:

• It was worn over the heart — left breast or left shoulder, not centred on the chest like a sports crest.
• Red meant martyrdom. A brother wearing it was stating that he expected to die in the habit.
• White was rank, not Order. Only knights wore white mantles; sergeants — the larger part of the Order — wore black or brown with the same red cross.

The shape drifted. Surviving Templar crosses include plain Greek crosses, crosses with flared arms, and a range of intermediate forms, because each house had its cloth cut locally rather than to a central pattern. The flared cross pattée became the standard image only in hindsight — which is why a modern “authentic” reproduction is really a choice among several authentic options.

The Beauséant: the one Templar device that blazons cleanly

The Order’s war banner is the closest thing the Templars had to something a herald could describe in proper terms. It was a plain two-part field, black and white, and in the language of blazon that is per fess argent and sable — a shield divided horizontally, white and black. Medieval sources differ on which half sat uppermost, and some descriptions give the black as a chief rather than an even division, so any reconstruction involves a choice.

Its meaning was read straightforwardly by contemporaries: black for the world the brothers had renounced, white for the purity they had entered; or, more bluntly, dark to their enemies and fair to their friends. Its function was tactical. The banner marked where the line stood, and the Rule treated it with corresponding seriousness — a brother was not to leave the field while the Beauséant was still flying, and the standard-bearer’s duty was to keep it up.

If you want the single device that behaves most like Templar “arms,” this is it. It is a field, not a picture; it is the Order’s own; and it is described the same way in multiple independent sources. See what each crusader banner stood for for how it sat among the other flags of the Latin East.

The seal: Sigillum Militum Xpisti

If the Order had anything answering to an official mark, it was the seal — the thing pressed into wax that made a charter legally the Templars’. The legend reads SIGILLVM MILITVM XPISTI, “Seal of the Soldiers of Christ,” with Xpisti spelling Christ through the Greek chi-rho.

The image is the famous one: two armed knights sharing a single horse. The popular reading is poverty, an order too poor to mount its brothers separately. That reading sits badly with the chronology, since the Templars were by then among the wealthiest institutions in Christendom. The stronger readings are the vow of poverty as a permanent claim rather than a balance sheet, or the double nature of the Templar himself — monk and soldier, two men in one saddle. The reverse carried the domed Templum Domini, the Dome of the Rock, which stood beside the Order’s headquarters and gave the Templars their name.

A seal is not a coat of arms. It authenticates a document; it does not identify a bearer in battle or pass to an heir. But it is the Order’s own device, used by the Order, in its own lifetime — which is more than the shields online can claim.

Individual Templars did have arms

Here is the nuance that the flat answer misses. The Order had no arms; many of its brothers did, because they came from armigerous families and those arms existed before they took vows.

Grand Masters are the clearest case. Their family arms were real, recorded in the usual way, and sometimes combined with the Order’s cross in later rolls — but that combination is generally a post-medieval herald’s reconstruction, not something a Grand Master displayed on campaign. The arms commonly shown for Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master, burned in 1314, fall into this category: attributed later, reproduced ever since, and not evidence of what he bore while leading the Order.

So when a genealogy site offers you “the Knights Templar coat of arms” for a surname, it is answering a different question than the one asked: it is showing a family’s arms, not the Order’s.

What the shields you see online actually are

Most circulating “Templar arms” are composites assembled from the real pieces above, usually some mix of:

• A heater shield, argent, charged with a red cross pattée — essentially the mantle badge moved onto a shield shape.
• The two-knights seal dropped into the centre, which no medieval source puts on a shield.
• A motto scroll, nearly always Non nobis Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam — “Not unto us, Lord, not unto us, but unto thy name give glory,” from the Psalms. The line is genuinely associated with the Order, but its fixed place on a ribbon beneath a shield is a modern convention.
• Supporters, crowns or helms borrowed from later civic and Masonic Knights Templar heraldry, which is an eighteenth-century and later tradition with its own perfectly real arms — just not the medieval Order’s.

None of that makes the images worthless. It makes them modern, and worth knowing as modern, so you can tell a historical reconstruction from a design decision.

Wearing it honestly

If you want to wear the Order’s identity rather than a later invention, the documented marks are the short list: the red cross pattée as the brothers wore it, the Beauséant, and the seal. Each one is attested, each one meant something specific, and each one survives better on cloth than a crowded composite shield does — a crest with supporters and a scroll turns to mud at chest size, while a cross or a two-part field reads across a room.

The seal is the quiet choice of the three. It carries the Order’s own words, it is instantly legible to anyone who knows the history, and it does not pretend to be a grant of arms that never existed. For the wider family of Templar marks and how they differ, see the guide to the Templar emblem, seal and crest.

The short answer

There is no authentic Knights Templar coat of arms, because the Order never received or used one. What it did have — a red cross granted in 1147, a black-and-white war banner, and a seal of two knights on one horse — is better documented and more interesting than the shields that replaced them. The crest is the invention; the cross, the banner and the seal are the record.