"Templar assets, including liturgical books, instruments and garments, but also all other writings which the Templars had possessed or produced, dispersed widely and were absorbed into the treasuries and sacristies of laymen and ecclesiastics after the disintegration of the Order around 1312. Only few religious books once pertaining to the Order have as yet been discovered. They shed light on the question whether or not the Templars used a uniform liturgy and what they used it for. (...)
Every year the Templars of each Western province met in chapter, le chapitre provincial, to pay their dues, report on their houses and judge faults. Alan Forey has reconstructed how these assemblies worked around 1300. Where did they meet, who came, and what did they decide?
In
about 1120 King Baldwin II decided to lend his palace at what now is called the Al-Acsa Mosque, temporarily to the juvenil Templar Order. Its Primitive Rule
(after 1129, TN) implies that their compound at the palace, after having come into
Templar hands, would have comprised a refectory, a chapel or church, a chapter house, and an
infirmary. Where was in the early days that church?
One of the myths that the Templars told about their own beginning was that for the first nine years there were only nine knights. This is first mentioned in William of Tyre but was often repeated by later chroniclers who learned it from the Templars of their own time. Fiction or fact?
