Who was the last Templar? Do they still exist as a secret society? Or did they fade into the mists of history after the Pope dissolved the controversial order in 1307?
Few groups have excited as much controversy or as many theories of their activities and legacy as the medieval military/religious order known as the Knights Templar. They were a secret order and their secrets went to the graves of its leaders, or were closely kept through the intervening centuries, so that what history does not know about them is almost as much as is known.
Templars Live On
But in Portugal the knights did live on, under another name and under the protection of the King. For unlike the king of France – who had convinced the Pope to outlaw them -- and other rulers who feared the power and lusted after the tremendous wealth of the knights, King Dinis of Portugal did not seize the riches and slay the knights who only a few years earlier had helped deliver his land from centuries of Moorish occupation.
Instead, although disbanded them officially as the Pope had directed, he convinced the Pope to let him establish a new order of religious knights under his own watchful eye in Portugal. No sooner had he founded the Order of Christ than the word went out that former Templars would be welcome to join it – and safe from those who were hunting them down at the order of other kings.
New Order of Christ
It was not just gratitude for the Knights Templars’ role in expelling the Moors from Portugal that led to King Dinis’ act. For while the new Order of Christ took on a more religious and somewhat less militant form than the Templars, they none-the-less stood ready to defend Portugal from any possible return of the Moors, who had not yet been driven out of neighboring Spain.
He established them at the fortress above Castro Marim, at the eastern frontier of the Algarve, where they could also keep an eye on the Spanish border. The knights' partially restored Castelo is still there, surrounded by much larger 17th-century ramparts.
Headquarters at Tomar Castle
The Templar’s richest and most elaborate headquarters had been at Tomar, but to install the new order there would have brought too much attention to the connection. So it was a century later that Prince Henry the Navigator, son of a later King and grand Master of the Order of Christ, returned the order to its castle at Tomar, from which the last Templar had fled in 1307.
Inside the hilltop castle, the original Templar church, the octagonal Charola, is shaped like the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, with pillars separating the central chapel from an ambulatory where the warrior knights attended mass on horseback. This was only one of the many privileges of the Templars, which drew the jealousy of other religious orders, as well as with monarchs of the lands they operated in. The castle, chapel and monastery at Tomar are today a UNESCO World Heritage Site, one of 13 in Portugal.
How many of the original Templars made it to safe sanctuary in Portugal will never be known, just as it is impossible to know how many others just melted into anonymity to escape arrest and execution. But it is certain that a number of Templars survived the Pope’s decree as knights in the Order of Christ.
Several of the Templar castles still stand, and even without their mysterious history, are among Portugal’s best places to visit.
Barbara Rogers - Traveler, writer and guidebook author with a passion for those lands that border the Mediterranean Sea and the neighboring Atlantic ...
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