Across the medieval Netherlands, several tiny estates held powers very disproportionate to their size: the right to hang criminals, to levy no taxes, and to answer to no one but the pope or the count. These estates reveal a pattern that points insistently in one direction: the medieval knightly orders such as the Knights Templar. Evidence, or coincidence?
A medieval estate near Rotterdam, the Netherlands, called De Tempel has disappeared entirely. But its name, its extraordinary legal privileges, and its possible links to the Knights Templar continue to provoke questions that eight centuries of scholarship have not definitively answered. Was this tiny domain merely a drainage station, or something far more remarkable: a house of the Templar Order? And what about the present estate De Tempel?
