Background of the First Crusade

In the latter centuries of the First Millennium, Western Europe was under siege by the armies of Islam. Muslim forces had swept through the Holy Land and by the Ninth Century had conquered Italy, Spain, Portugal, and threatened to occupy France. When Pope Urban II, therefore, called for the First Crusade in 1095, it was a call to the Christian World to mobilize in its own defense, targeting first the recovery of Palestine and its Christian shrines from the Seljuk Turks. Europe’s Christian kings and noblemen responded in force. By 1099, Palestine was again under Christian control and a new Kingdom of Jerusalem was established under Baldwin II. What the king needed to enforce his control was a credible military capability.

The First Knights

A small band of French knights, led by Hugues de Payens, offered their services to King Baldwin around 1118, specifically to protect the scores of Christians attempting pilgrimages to the Holy Land through hostile territory. The knights organized themselves as a religious community, made their vows to Jerusalem’s Latin Patriarch, and pledged their allegiance to the king. They were of modest means, however, and needed housing, so the king allowed them to establish residence in the former al-Aqsa Mosque, on the site of what was believed to be Solomon’s Temple. Thus, they came to be known to some as the Poor Knights of Christ, and to others as the Knights of the Temple of Solomon.

The knights’ success in Jerusalem and de Payens’ vision of what more they could do led him to return to Europe to recruit more men, raise money, and ensure his group’s legitimacy through recognition by the Church. By 1129, he had won the support of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux and the recognition of this new Order of the Temple by Pope Honorius II, thereby establishing the first chivalric order of soldier-monks, whose mission was the protection of Christians and Christian interests.

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