Templar Cross vs. Iron Cross: 700 Years Apart

• knighttemplar
• September 12, 2026
• Categories: History & Lore
• Tags: Crusader Cross, Knights Templar, Templar Symbols

They are not the same cross, they were never worn by the same people, and roughly seven centuries separate them. The Templar cross is a red cross pattée, granted to the Order of the Temple in 1147 and worn on a white wool mantle in the crusader states. The Iron Cross is a black-and-silver Prussian military decoration instituted in 1813 to reward bravery against Napoleon. The confusion is understandable, because both use the same underlying shape — arms that are narrow at the centre and flare outward at the tips. But that shared silhouette is the only thing they have in common, and once you know what to look for the two are impossible to mix up.

Why they look so similar: both are a cross pattée

The word you need is pattée (from French patte, a paw or foot). It describes a cross whose four arms taper toward the centre and splay out at the ends, so the outline reads almost like four wedges meeting at a point. It is one of the oldest decorative cross forms in European heraldry, and it belonged to no single group — medieval masons, moneyers, bishops and half a dozen military orders all used versions of it.

That is the heart of the problem. A cross pattée is a shape, not a badge of allegiance. Asking whether a cross pattée is “Templar” is a bit like asking whether a red circle is a Japanese flag: sometimes yes, but the form on its own tells you almost nothing. What identifies the wearer is the combination of shape, colour, background and context — and on all three of those the Templar cross and the Iron Cross diverge completely.

The Templar cross: red on white, granted in 1147

The Order of the Temple was founded around 1119 by Hugues de Payens and a small band of knights sworn to protect pilgrims on the roads to Jerusalem. At the Council of Troyes in 1129 the brotherhood received a formal Rule, shaped with the support of Bernard of Clairvaux, and with it the plain white mantle that marked a knight-brother’s vow of purity.

The cross came later. In 1147, at a chapter held in Paris in the presence of Pope Eugene III and King Louis VII of France, the Templars were granted the right to wear a red cross on that white mantle — the blood-coloured sign of martyrdom, worn over the heart or on the shoulder. Red on white, from that point on, meant the Temple. Contemporaries could read it across a battlefield, which was precisely the point.

So the authentic Templar cross has three fixed properties: it is red, it sits on white (the knight’s mantle; sergeants wore brown or black robes with the same red cross), and it belongs to a religious order of warrior-monks that was dissolved by Pope Clement V in 1312, with the last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, burned in Paris in 1314. Nothing about it is German, and nothing about it is a medal for valour. For a fuller account of what the red cross actually signified, see our guide to what the Templar red cross really stood for.

The Iron Cross: a Prussian medal from 1813

The Iron Cross (Eisernes Kreuz) begins five hundred years after the Templars were suppressed. On 10 March 1813, King Frederick William III of Prussia instituted it as a decoration for bravery in the war against Napoleon — and, unusually for the period, made it available to all ranks rather than to officers and nobles alone. The design is credited to the neoclassical architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel: a cast-iron cross in a silver frame, deliberately austere, because Prussia in 1813 was broke and iron rather than gold was the honest material.

Crucially, Schinkel did not invent the shape. He took it from the black cross of the Teutonic Knights, the German military order founded at Acre around 1190 that wore a black cross on a white mantle. That is the real historical thread people are half-remembering when they sense a medieval connection to the Iron Cross — and it runs to the Teutonic Order, not to the Temple. We unpack that lineage in detail in our piece on the meaning of the black cross across history.

The Iron Cross was then re-instituted for each major German war rather than awarded continuously: 1870 for the Franco-Prussian War, 1914 for the First World War, and 1939 for the Second. Each version carried the dates and the royal cypher of its era on the obverse — “FW” for Frederick William, “W” for Wilhelm, oak leaves at the centre.

Five ways to tell them apart at a glance

• Colour. Templar: red. Iron Cross: black with a silver or white rim. Colour alone settles most cases.
• Ground. The Templar cross is shown on something — a white mantle, a shield, a banner. The Iron Cross is a physical object, a medal hung from a ribbon.
• Edging. The Iron Cross almost always has a raised metallic border framing the black field. The Templar cross is flat colour with no frame.
• Centre detail. Iron Crosses carry dates, cyphers or oak leaves at the centre. A Templar cross is plain.
• Proportion. The Iron Cross has slightly concave arm ends and a compact, square-ish footprint. The classic Templar pattée flares wider and reads rounder at the tips.

The question behind the question: the Nazi association

Most people searching “Templar cross vs Iron Cross” are quietly checking one thing — whether wearing a cross pattée will be read the wrong way. It is a fair question and it deserves a straight answer.

The Iron Cross itself is a Prussian and later German military award that long predates the Third Reich, and it was won by soldiers across three wars before 1933. The 1939 version is the problem: that one was restruck with a swastika at its centre, and in Germany displaying that specific design is a criminal offence under section 86a of the penal code. The plain Iron Cross without the swastika is not banned. It remains the official emblem of the modern Bundeswehr, adopted in 1956 and visible today on German tanks and aircraft.

Separately, from the 1960s onward the bare Iron Cross shape was picked up by American hot-rod and outlaw-biker subcultures, which is why it turns up on jackets and decals with no political intent at all. The practical upshot: a red cross pattée on white is Templar iconography and carries none of this baggage. A black cross pattern with a silver frame is the one that invites a second look, and a swastika-centred version is indefensible in any context.

Wearing the cross with its history intact

If what draws you to the shape is the crusader lineage — the vow, the mantle, the discipline of a fighting brotherhood — then the version you want is the red pattée, and it is worth wearing it in a form that is unambiguous. Red on white or red on a clean dark ground reads instantly as the Temple. Keep the arms properly flared, keep the centre plain, and skip the silver frame that pulls the design toward the Prussian medal.

That is the reasoning behind our own crusader graphics: the cross is drawn from the medieval pattern rather than the military decoration, so the reference stays exactly where you intend it. If you are still sorting out which cross is which, our comparison of the Templar cross and the Maltese cross covers the other pair people routinely confuse.

The short version

The Templar cross is a red cross pattée granted in 1147 to a Catholic military order that no longer exists. The Iron Cross is a black Prussian gallantry medal designed in 1813, borrowing its outline from the Teutonic Knights rather than the Templars. Same family of shapes, entirely different lineages, five centuries and two very different institutions apart. Once you check the colour and look for a frame, you will never mistake one for the other again.