Why the Templars Were Named for Solomon’s Temple
The Order’s full name was Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Salomonici — the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon. It is the reason we call them Templars at all. But the building they were given in Jerusalem was not Solomon’s Temple, and it could not have been: Solomon’s Temple had been rubble for roughly 1,700 years by the time the first nine knights moved in. What they actually occupied was the al-Aqsa Mosque, which the crusaders had decided to call Solomon’s palace. The whole identity of the Order rests on that misidentification.
What Baldwin II Actually Gave Them
Around 1119, a small band of knights under Hugues de Payens approached King Baldwin II of Jerusalem with a proposal to protect pilgrims on the roads from the coast to the holy places. Baldwin housed them in the royal palace on the Temple Mount — the Haram al-Sharif — and within a few years the king moved out and left the complex to them entirely.
Crusader Jerusalem had its own names for the two great buildings on the platform. The Dome of the Rock, finished in 691, became the Templum Domini, the Temple of the Lord. The al-Aqsa Mosque, begun in the early eighth century, became the Templum Salomonis, Solomon’s Temple. Neither name was historically correct. Both stuck, and the knights quartered in the second one took their name from it.
What Happened to the Real Temple of Solomon?
Short answer: It was destroyed twice. The First Temple, built in the tenth century BC, fell to the Babylonians in 586 BC. The Second Temple, rebuilt on a monumental scale by Herod the Great, was destroyed by Rome in AD 70. Only the retaining wall of Herod’s platform survives today.
The historical Temple of Solomon — the First Temple — was built in the tenth century BC and destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC. A Second Temple was raised after the exile and rebuilt on a monumental scale by Herod the Great from about 20 BC. Roman forces destroyed it in AD 70, during the First Jewish-Roman War. What survives today is the retaining wall of Herod’s platform, not the Temple itself.
So when a twelfth-century charter describes land granted to “the knights of the Temple of Solomon,” it is using a crusader place-name, not making an archaeological claim. The medieval world was comfortable with that kind of naming in a way the modern one is not, and a great deal of later Templar mythology comes from reading those documents too literally.
The Rise of the Knight Templar Tee
Nine knights, a borrowed hall on the Temple Mount, and two centuries of consequence. Aged print on heavyweight cotton.
🇺🇸 Fast US shipping · 🇪🇺 Ships across the EU · 🔒 Secure checkout
Did They Excavate Under the Temple Mount?
Short answer: There is no twelfth-century evidence that they did. The Templars certainly used the vaults beneath al-Aqsa as stables, and later surveys found tunnels under the platform, but the claim that the founding knights were secretly searching for relics first appears in print in the twentieth century.
This is where the legend industry begins. The claim is that the first knights were not protecting pilgrims at all but tunnelling beneath the platform in search of the Ark of the Covenant, the Temple treasure, or documents that would have overturned the Church.
The evidence is thin and mostly circumstantial. Nineteenth-century surveys by Charles Warren did find tunnels and cisterns under the Haram, some of which may have been cleared or used in the crusader period; the Templars certainly used the vaults beneath al-Aqsa as stables, and contemporary visitors describe them. That the Order had access to underground spaces is not in question. That it was conducting a secret archaeological search is pure inference, unsupported by any twelfth-century source, and it first appears in print in the twentieth century.
The simpler reading is that nine knights with no money were given a cavernous building and used it as any garrison would: horses below, men above.
How the Name Shaped the Seal and the Architecture
The Temple association runs through the Order’s visual identity. The famous seal legend reads Sigillum Militum Xpisti — the seal of the soldiers of Christ — and variants add Templi, of the Temple. Our breakdown of what the Sigillum Militum Xpisti actually says covers the readings and the common mistranslations.
The architecture is more interesting still. Templar churches across Europe — Temple Church in London, consecrated in 1185, the round church at Tomar, several in France and Spain — were built with circular naves. The model was not Solomon’s Temple but the Dome of the Rock and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the two round buildings the knights knew from Jerusalem. The Order carried home the shape of the place it was named after, even though the name was wrong. We look at the pattern in Templar architecture, round churches and fortresses.
Solomon’s Temple After the Order
The Temple survived the Templars as a symbol. From the eighteenth century, Freemasonry built an entire ritual vocabulary around the building of Solomon’s Temple and the figure of its master craftsman — a tradition with its own history and no documented connection to the medieval knights. The overlap in imagery is one reason the two are so persistently confused, and it is worth keeping the threads separate when you read older books about either.
For the medieval Order, the Temple meant something narrower and more practical: an address, then a name, then an identity. By the time of the Council of Troyes in 1129, when the Order received its Rule, “the Temple” was simply what people called them. The full title appears in charters; the short one is what everybody used.
The Stables, the Horses and the Vaults
The most concrete thing the sources tell us about the Templars on the Temple Mount is agricultural rather than mystical. The vaults beneath the al-Aqsa platform — the spaces later travellers called Solomon’s Stables — were used by the Order to keep horses, and a pilgrim account from the 1160s by John of Würzburg describes the scale of them. Theoderich, writing around 1172, reckoned the undercroft could hold well over a thousand animals, which is the kind of round number medieval visitors liked but still indicates something very large.
For a military order this was the single most valuable feature of the site. A heavy cavalry force needs stabling, fodder storage, water and farriers inside the walls, and Jerusalem had almost nowhere else that could provide it. The Temple Mount was not chosen for its symbolism; it was chosen because it was the only place in the city with room for the horses. The symbolism arrived afterwards and has been doing the heavy lifting in popular accounts ever since.
Why the Name Still Matters
Getting this right changes how you read everything else. The Order was not founded to guard a relic or recover a treasure. It was founded to escort pilgrims, it was housed in a mosque the crusaders had renamed, and it took its identity from the address. Everything genuinely remarkable about the Templars — the banking network, the fortress-building, the two-century military record — grew out of that mundane beginning. Our guide to the Order’s symbols and what each one means follows the same principle: start with what the sources say, then decide what the imagery is worth.
When the Order’s symbolism appears on a modern shirt, the honest version is the one the knights would recognise — the red cross pattée, the seal, the Beauséant — rather than Ark-and-tunnel iconography invented eight centuries later. Keep the design to what they actually carried and it reads as history rather than costume.
The Templars were named for a building that no longer existed, after being housed in one that had been renamed by mistake. That is not a scandal; it is how medieval Jerusalem worked. But it is the single most useful fact to hold on to, because almost every conspiracy theory about the Order begins by assuming the name was literal.