Knights Templar Emblem: The Real Logo, Seal & Crest

• Templar Uniform Editorial
• September 29, 2026
• Categories: History & Lore
• Tags: Knights Templar, Templar History, Templar Symbols

The Knights Templar had no logo. A modern order would have one mark and use it everywhere; the Templars had three separate emblems doing three separate jobs — the red cross pattée sewn onto the mantle, which identified a brother on sight; the seal of two knights on one horse, which authenticated the Order’s documents; and the Beauséant, the black-and-white banner that marked where the line stood in battle. What people search for as the Templar logo or crest is usually the first of those. What they find in a heraldry book is usually the last thing the Order itself would have recognised.

The red cross pattée: the emblem everyone means

The white mantle came first. The Order’s Rule, drawn up at the Council of Troyes in 1129, gave the knights plain white habits and said nothing about a cross at all. The cross arrived eighteen years later: in April 1147, at the assembly in Paris that launched the Second Crusade, Pope Eugenius III granted the brothers the right to wear a red cross on their mantles.

Three details of that badge matter, and all three get lost in modern reproductions.

• It was worn over the heart — on the left breast or left shoulder, not centred on the chest like a football crest.
• The colour was the point. Red was the colour of martyrdom. A brother who wore it was declaring, in the plainest visual language available, that he expected to die in the habit.
• Only knights wore white. Sergeants — the larger part of the Order — wore black or brown mantles with the same red cross. The cross marked the Order; the colour of the cloth marked your rank in it.

The shape drifted. Templar crosses survive as plain Greek crosses, as crosses pattée with flared arms, and in a dozen intermediate forms, because each house had its cloth cut locally rather than to a central specification. The flared cross pattée became the standard image only in hindsight.

The seal: Sigillum Militum Xpisti

If the Order had anything answering to a corporate logo, this was it — the mark pressed into wax on charters, grants and letters, the thing that made a document legally the Order’s. The legend around it reads SIGILLVM MILITVM XPISTI, “Seal of the Soldiers of Christ,” with Xpisti spelling Christ in the Greek letters chi-rho.

The image inside is the famous one: two armed knights riding a single horse. The usual reading is poverty — an order so poor its brothers doubled up in the saddle. That reading is almost certainly wrong by the time the seal was cut, because the Templars were by then among the wealthiest institutions in Christendom. The stronger readings are the ones the brothers would have recognised: the vow of poverty as a permanent claim rather than a current balance sheet, or the double nature of the Templar himself — monk and soldier, two men in one saddle.

The reverse carried a different image again: the domed building the crusaders called the Templum Domini, the Dome of the Rock, which stood beside the Order’s headquarters on the Temple Mount and gave the Templars their name. Read across both faces, the legend completes itself — Sigillum militum Xpisti de Templo Cristi, the seal of the soldiers of Christ of the Temple of Christ.

The seal has had the longest afterlife of the three emblems, partly because it is the strangest image and partly because it is the one that reproduces well on a small surface. If you want the detail — the variants, the inscriptions, the arguments over the two riders — we have a full piece on the Sigillum Militum Xpisti, and the design itself is available as a Templar Sigilvm tee.

The Beauséant: the emblem that gave orders

The third mark was not worn and not stamped — it was carried. The Beauséant was the Order’s war banner, divided black above, white below (the sources disagree on which half sat where, and both arrangements are attested). The medieval gloss is blunt: black towards the enemy, white towards the friends of Christ.

It functioned as a command instrument rather than decoration. The Rule was severe about it: while the banner stood, no brother could leave the field, and a brother who charged before it did was punished. When the Beauséant fell, the brothers were to rally to any other Christian banner still flying — and if none was, only then could they withdraw. Above the banner in some depictions runs the Order’s motto, Non nobis Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam — “Not to us, Lord, not to us, but to Your name give the glory” (Psalm 115:1).

Our separate guide covers the Beauséant banner and the war cry that took its name.

Was there a Knights Templar coat of arms?

Not in the sense the question usually means. Heraldry as a formal system of inherited arms was still hardening during the Order’s lifetime, and corporate arms for institutions came later still. Individual Grand Masters had personal arms, which belonged to their families rather than to the Templars.

The blazon you will find in reference works — argent, a cross gules, a red cross on silver — is what heralds call attributed arms: a coat assigned retrospectively to a body that never granted itself one, so that later writers and artists had something to draw. It is a fair summary of what the brothers wore. It is not a medieval Templar coat of arms, and anyone selling you a detailed Templar “family crest” is selling you a nineteenth-century invention.

The same caution applies to the Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God carrying a banner, which appears on a number of genuine Templar seals — especially in England and southern France. It was a real Templar device, but a house device, not the emblem of the whole Order. The detail is in our piece on the Agnus Dei seal.

Three emblems wrongly called Templar

• The Maltese cross. Eight sharp points, four arrowhead arms. It belongs to the Knights Hospitaller — the Order of St John — and became firmly associated with them only after they settled on Malta in 1530, more than two centuries after the Templars were suppressed. It is the single most common misidentification.
• The skull and crossbones. Tied to the Templars by the legend of the Skull of Sidon and by later Masonic imagery, not by any surviving Templar seal or banner. The story is worth reading; the attribution is not history.
• Masonic Templar regalia. The crowned cross, the In Hoc Signo Vinces badges and the rest come from eighteenth-century Templar degrees within Freemasonry. They are a genuine tradition with its own history — just not a medieval one, and not evidence of an unbroken line.

Wearing the emblem now

Whichever of the three you choose, choose it deliberately, because they say different things. The red cross is the uniform badge — the most legible, the most immediately understood, and the one that reads as the Order itself. The seal is the quieter choice: half the people who see it will not know what it is, and the half who do will know exactly. The Beauséant is the hardest and the most specific — a command flag, not a symbol of faith, and it carries the meaning of holding a line.

What none of them is, is a logo. The Templars never designed a mark to be recognised by strangers; every one of these emblems was made to do a job — to identify, to authenticate, to command — and the recognition came afterwards, as a side effect of nine centuries. That is precisely why they still hold up on cloth today, and why a modern brand mark drawn to be liked does not.

For the full inventory — crosses, seals, banners, mottos and the rest — start with our guide to Knights Templar symbols and what each one means, or widen the frame with crusader symbols and meanings.

For the heraldry question specifically — shields, blazons, and which parts are modern invention — see why the Order never had a granted coat of arms.