Templar Knights

Private Military Companies are not new.

For instance, The Knights Templar (1119 – c. 22 March 1312) were some guys who got their start in what we’d today call ‘executive protection’ almost 1000 years ago. Over a short couple hundred years, they’d explode to become one of the most powerful organizations in Europe. That is, before they were systematically hunted down and dismantled by a King who owed the Knights money- more on that in a later post.

How do such humble roots lead to such high stakes? I believe it was two things

1. a strong culture - laid down from the earliest stages and embodied by the founders - was one of the core driving forces behind their ascent.

2. The long term implications of the service they initially offered.

For some more context - around the time they formed, Christians would make regular pilgrimages to the Holy Land in Jerusalem. Depending on where you came from, your route could be full of bandits and treachery, and so you’d need some muscle to ensure a safe passage.

So, recognizing this demand, a French knight named Hugues de Payens and a mystic abbot and rhetorician named Bernard_of_Clairvaux created a military order along with eight relatives and acquaintances, calling it the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon—later known simply as the Knights Templar.

The co-founders created a list of 72 rules called the “Specific Behavior for the Templar Order” that every Brother in the Order had to follow. Most of these are characterized by extreme restraint - not having children, not laughing too much, fasting. It doesn’t sound pleasant. But this was their cultural foundation.

If you’ve been reading for awhile, you know that I believe that restraint has magical properties. I’ve said elsewhere that growth, somewhat counterintuitively, is often a process of subtraction rather than addition - of keeping only those things which are truly necessary, and discarding all else. The Templars embodied this ethic to an extreme degree.

It seemed to pan out for them. Fast forward, a 150 or so years, and the Order had accumulated astronomical sums of wealth. They invested in real estate all throughout the continent, forming an interlinked network of castles which would serve as multipurpose nodes for the Order’s interests. They even got started in the lending game, forming a proto-international banking system that would make make them even wealthier.

This all started from following nobility around with a weapon and making sure they didn’t die.

Today, we call this Executive Protection. Can we follow this same order of operations and get the same results today?

More next.

LH