When the Knights Templar Bought Cyprus — and Quit

• Templar Uniform Editorial
• October 25, 2026
• Categories: History & Lore
• Tags: Knights Templar, Templar History

In 1191 the Knights Templar bought a country. Richard the Lionheart had just conquered Cyprus and had no intention of governing it, so he sold the island to the Order for 100,000 besants, with around 40,000 paid immediately.

Within roughly a year the Templars gave it back. The episode is one of the few times we can watch the Order attempt something outside its competence, fail, and cut its losses — and it says more about how the Templars actually operated than most of the legends do.

How Richard came to own an island

Cyprus was not a crusader target. Richard arrived there in May 1191 by accident: storms scattered his fleet on the way to the Holy Land, and ships carrying his sister Joan and his betrothed Berengaria were driven onto the Cypriot coast.

The island’s ruler, Isaac Komnenos — a Byzantine renegade governing independently of Constantinople — treated the survivors badly and refused Richard’s demands. Richard landed, defeated him within weeks, and took the island. He married Berengaria at Limassol while he was there.

Then he had a problem familiar to any conqueror on a schedule: he was going to Palestine, and an island needs a government. Cyprus was strategically excellent — a supply base and a safe harbour behind the crusader coast — but Richard needed money and troops, not a province.

The purchase

The Templars were the obvious buyer. They had the cash, which almost no one else did; they had a standing organisation capable of garrisoning a place; and they had an interest in a secure rear base.

The terms as the sources give them: 100,000 besants total, about 40,000 down, the balance to come from the island’s own revenues. Grand Master Robert de Sablé — a Angevin lord who had been one of Richard’s own commanders before joining the Order — took it on.

That detail matters. Sablé had been elected Grand Master only months earlier, and his closeness to Richard is part of why the deal happened at all. It is also the kind of fact that sits badly with the image of the Templars as a sealed secret society: the Order’s head was a recent recruit from the King of England’s circle.

Why it collapsed

The Templars garrisoned Cyprus with a very small force — the figures in the sources are modest, on the order of a few dozen brothers and sergeants with supporting troops. That was enough to hold a castle. It was nowhere near enough to govern a populous Greek island.

To make the payments, the Order had to extract revenue quickly from a population that had just changed rulers twice and had no loyalty to either. Taxation was heavy and resented. In April 1192 the Cypriots rose at Nicosia, and the Templar garrison found itself besieged in its own quarters.

The brothers broke out by a sortie and restored control by force, and then did something genuinely interesting: they concluded that the island was not worth it and asked Richard to take it back.

This was not weakness. It was an accurate reading of their own business. The Order’s competence was fortresses, logistics, money and cavalry — holding points and moving resources. Ruling a civilian population with its own church, language and grievances was a different profession, and they recognised the mismatch faster than most medieval institutions would have.

What Richard did next

Richard took Cyprus back and resold it, this time to Guy of Lusignan — the deposed King of Jerusalem, whose defeat at Hattin had cost the kingdom and who needed somewhere to rule. Richard kept the Templar down-payment.

That sale worked. The Lusignan dynasty governed Cyprus for nearly three centuries, and the island became exactly the secure Latin base the crusader states had lacked. When Acre finally fell in 1291, Cyprus is where the surviving orders went — including the Templars, who re-established their headquarters there.

So the Order ended up based on the island it had declined to own, as tenants of a kingdom founded with money it had paid and forfeited.

What the episode shows about the Order

Three things, each cutting against a popular assumption:

• The Templars had extraordinary liquidity. Very few powers in 1191 could produce 40,000 besants quickly. This is the same financial machinery that made them Europe’s bankers, and it is better evidence of their wealth than any vanished-treasure legend.
• They made mistakes and corrected them. An order supposedly guided by secret wisdom bought an island, misjudged the garrison requirement, provoked a revolt, and reversed the decision inside a year.
• They were not a state. The Templars held castles and estates across Christendom but never governed a civilian population as a sovereign. Cyprus is the experiment that proved they should not try — unlike the Hospitallers, who later did exactly this successfully on Rhodes and then Malta.

It also quietly explains their relationship with Richard the Lionheart: allies who transacted, with the king coming out ahead on the money.

What 100,000 besants was actually worth

The figure is easy to skim past. It helps to anchor it.

The besant in crusader usage was a gold coin, and 100,000 of them was a sum on the scale of a kingdom’s annual revenue rather than a rich man’s fortune. For comparison, the ransom demanded for Richard himself after his capture in 1192 was 150,000 marks of silver — a sum that required a special tax across England and still took years to raise, and which contemporaries regarded as near-ruinous.

So the Templars producing roughly 40,000 besants on short notice, as a deposit, from the treasury of a religious order, is the detail to sit with. Very few institutions in Europe could have done it. The Order was not merely wealthy in land — it had liquidity, which in the twelfth century was far rarer and far more useful.

That capacity is what later made them banker to the kings of France and England, holding royal treasure in the Paris and London Temples. It is also, uncomfortably, what made them worth destroying: Philip IV owed the Order money, and the arrests of 1307 began with a seizure of assets. An institution that can put 40,000 gold coins on a table in 1191 is an institution a cash-starved king remembers in 1307.

Why Cyprus and not the Holy Land

One further reason the purchase made sense at the time, and then stopped making sense: Cyprus sat off the coast rather than on it. An island base could not be reached by a land army, could feed itself, and lay a short sail from Acre, Tyre and Tripoli.

The Order already understood this logic — its network ran on ports and shipping rather than on contiguous territory. What it misjudged was that a base and a country are different purchases, and that the second comes with several hundred thousand people attached.

The short answer

Richard the Lionheart conquered Cyprus in May 1191 and sold it to the Knights Templar for 100,000 besants, about 40,000 paid up front. The Order garrisoned it too thinly, taxed it too hard, faced a revolt at Nicosia in April 1192, fought its way out, and asked Richard to take the island back. He resold it to Guy of Lusignan and kept the deposit. A century later the Templars moved their headquarters to Cyprus anyway — as guests.