Do the Knights Templar Still Exist? The Order of Christ and the Templar Legacy

Few questions about medieval history are asked more often than this one: do the Knights Templar still exist? The short answer is that the medieval Order of the Temple of Solomon was suppressed by the Catholic Church in 1312, and no organisation today can claim unbroken legal continuity with it. The longer, more interesting answer is that in one country — Portugal — the Templars were never really dissolved. They were renamed. And their successor still exists, in a transformed shape, as part of the cultural and ceremonial life of the modern Portuguese state.

If you came to the northern Alentejo because of the Templars, this is the story that ties the frontier you are walking to the question almost every visitor eventually asks: what are the Knights Templar called today?

1307–1312: how the Order was suppressed

On Friday 13 October 1307, King Philip IV of France ordered the simultaneous arrest of every Templar in his kingdom. The charges — heresy, idolatry, blasphemy, sodomy — were almost certainly invented to justify seizing the Order's wealth and cancelling royal debts. Under torture, many French Templars confessed; some, including the last Grand Master Jacques de Molay, later retracted those confessions and were burned at the stake in 1314.

Pope Clement V, working under intense pressure from the French crown, formally dissolved the Order at the Council of Vienne in March 1312 through the bull Vox in Excelso. A second bull, Ad Providam, transferred most of the Templars' surviving European property to the Knights Hospitaller — the rival military order that still exists today as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.

That was the end of the medieval Knights Templar as a recognised institution of the Catholic Church. Everywhere — except in two corners of the Iberian peninsula.

Why Portugal was different

King Dinis of Portugal refused to cooperate. The Portuguese Templars had been formally tried and found innocent of the French charges. They had also played a decisive role in defending the southern frontier of the young Portuguese kingdom for more than a century, including the founding of Tomar and the holding of castles along the Tagus. To Dinis, the suppression looked like exactly what it was: a French political operation dressed up as a matter of faith.

Rather than hand the Templars' Portuguese estates to the Hospitallers, Dinis spent seven years negotiating with Rome. In 1319, Pope John XXII issued the bull Ad Ea ex Quibus, authorising the creation of a new military order in Portugal — the Ordem de Cristo, the Order of Christ — and granting it the entirety of the former Templar holdings in Portuguese territory. The new Order's first headquarters was at Castro Marim, in the Algarve; in 1356 it moved to the existing Templar mother-house at Tomar.

The personnel were, for the most part, the same men. Many Portuguese Templars simply changed the name of the organisation they belonged to, kept their habits, kept their commanderies, and continued their work. In the strictest institutional sense, the Templars in Portugal were not destroyed in 1312. They were re-licensed.

What the Templars are called today: the Order of Christ

The Order of Christ is the direct, documented institutional successor to the Knights Templar in Portugal. Its red cross-on-white — a stylisation of the original Templar cross — became one of the most recognisable symbols of the Portuguese Age of Discovery. The caravels of Vasco da Gama, Pedro Álvares Cabral and Bartolomeu Dias sailed with the cross of the Order of Christ painted on their sails. The cross was both a symbol of a military religious order and, by then, a national emblem.

In 1789, the Order was secularised by Queen Maria I, ceasing to be a religious institution and becoming a Portuguese honorific order — a state decoration awarded for distinguished service. It exists today in that form. The Order of Christ (Ordem Militar de Cristo) is one of the Ordens Honoríficas Portuguesas, conferred by the President of the Republic on Portuguese citizens and foreign dignitaries for outstanding contributions. Past recipients include heads of state, scientists, and cultural figures from across the world.

When people ask what the Knights Templar are called today, this is the most accurate single answer: in Portugal, they are called the Order of Christ, and the institution has never legally lapsed since 1319.

The Vatican's quiet acknowledgement: the Chinon Parchment

In 2001, a researcher at the Vatican Secret Archive rediscovered a document that had been catalogued in the wrong place for centuries: the Chinon Parchment of 1308. The parchment records that Pope Clement V, after secretly examining the Templar leadership at Chinon Castle in August 1308, absolved Jacques de Molay and his senior brothers of the charge of heresy. The dissolution four years later was, in other words, a political decision rather than a judgement on the Order's faith.

The Vatican published a facsimile edition of the parchment in 2007. It does not constitute a posthumous reinstatement of the medieval Order, and the Church has not reversed the 1312 suppression. But it is, on the historical record, the closest thing to an official admission that the suppression was unjust.

Neo-Templar orders: the OSMTH and the Grand Priory of Portugal

Alongside the documented Order of Christ, a number of modern neo-Templar organisations also describe themselves as continuators of the Templar tradition. The most internationally established is the Ordo Supremus Militaris Templi Hierosolymitani — the OSMTH — an ecumenical Christian order recognised as a non-governmental organisation by the United Nations Economic and Social Council. The OSMTH does not claim unbroken descent from the medieval Templars and is candid about its own founding in the modern period; what it claims is the inheritance of the Templar spirit and mission.

Its Portuguese branch, the Grande Priorado de Portugal, has its operational centre in Tomar — the medieval Templar headquarters — and is one of the most active national priories of the order. In recent years it has admitted new members in Chapter ceremonies at the Comenda de Tomar, organised travelling exhibitions on Templar history across Portuguese municipalities, expanded English-speaking branches in London, and run humanitarian convoys to the Ukrainian border. The medieval motto — protect pilgrims, defend the defenceless — is being applied, in contemporary form, to contemporary situations.

Other organisations — Masonic Templar rites, esoteric orders, the various groups that have proliferated since the eighteenth century — sit further from the documented historical thread. They are part of the broader cultural afterlife of the Templars rather than its institutional continuation.

The Templar legacy you can actually walk to

The reason this matters for a visitor to the northern Alentejo is that the institutional story above is not abstract here. It is written into the landscape. The territory of the Açafa, granted to the Templars in 1199, became Order of Christ territory after 1319. Castles at Nisa and Alpalhão, the commandery network across the frontier, the cross carved into the vault of the Ermida de São Silvestre near Castelo de Vide — all of these were administered first by the Templars, then, without interruption, by their successors under a different name.

When you stand in the Convento de Cristo in Tomar, you are standing in the only place on earth where the Knights Templar transitioned smoothly into their modern successor and the architecture of that transition survives intact. The original Templar charola — the round church of the twelfth century — is still there. So are the cloisters added by the Order of Christ in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. So is the famous Manueline window of the Chapter House, carved at the height of Portuguese Discoveries, when the Templar cross was sailing to India and Brazil.

The frontier corridor between Nisa, Castelo de Vide and Crato is the other half of that story — the working territory rather than the ceremonial heart. The Templars administered it. The Order of Christ inherited it. The Portuguese state still owns most of the castles.

So, do the Knights Templar still exist?

The honest summary is this. The medieval Order of the Temple of Solomon was suppressed in 1312 and has never been reinstated. In Portugal, its institutional successor — the Order of Christ — was created in 1319, absorbed the Templar properties, personnel and mission, and survives today as a Portuguese state honour. A number of modern neo-Templar organisations, most notably the OSMTH and its Grande Priorado de Portugal, work in the spirit of the medieval Order without claiming legal continuity from it.

If you came looking for the Knights Templar today, the most honest place to find them is in the territory they actually worked: the Iberian frontier between Tomar and Crato, between Nisa and Castelo de Vide. The institutions that inherited their work are documented. The walls they helped raise are still standing. The cross they carried is still visible — on hermitage keystones, on castle gateways, and, in transformed shape, on the chest of every recipient of the Order of Christ.

That is more than most extinct medieval institutions can claim.

Continue exploring

For the architectural side of this story, see our piece on Castelo de Vide and the brief decade in the 1370s when the Order of Christ administered the town. For the cross of the Order carved into the vault of a nearly forgotten hermitage, see The Hidden Templar Cross of Castelo de Vide. For the contemporary Grand Priory's work in Tomar and beyond, see How the Templars Never Quite Disappeared.