Founder of Templars Hugues de Payens is an enigma

The indisputable fact is: the (alleged) co-founder and first Grand Master of Knights Templar is a total, complete enigma. Nothing, absolutely nothing is known about him prior to 1119 when he appeared out of nowhere…, approached King Baldwin II of Jerusalem and Warmund, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, and proposed creating a monastic Catholic religious order for the protection of these pilgrims.

And – unbelievably – he got everything what he asked for… and more. King and Patriarch convened council of local ecclesiastical and secular lords in Nablus; this Council officially recognized the order of Templars and king… granted the Templars a headquarters in a wing of the royal palace on the Temple Mount in the captured Al-Aqsa Mosque. The most coveted piece of real estate in the city.

There is no known early biography of Hugues de Payens in existence, nor do later writers cite such a biography. None of the sources on his later career give details of his early life… even the Templar archives. The latter is astounding – to put it mildly – as Hugues de Payens was the official co-founder and the first Grand Master of the order who ruled for seventeen years.

Information is therefore scanty and uncertain; theories about his early life depend on documents that may or may not refer to the same individual, and partly on histories written decades or even centuries after his death.

The earliest source that details a geographical origin for the later Grand Master is the Old French translation of William of Tyre’s History of Events Beyond the Sea, dated to around 1200 (over six decades after his death).

This document calls him “Hugh of Payens near Troyes“, a reference to the village of Payns, about 10 km from Troyes, in Champagne. However, many historians do not find this document convincing and looked for Hugh’s origins in other places.

Even his real name is not known for sure: Latin sources call him Hugo de Paganis. Some of his earliest purported appearances in documents are under the name Hugo de Peans, or in Italian as Ugo de’ Pagani or Ugo dei Pagani. In later French works his name usually appears as Hugues de Payens or Payns, often translated into English as Hugh of Payens or Hugh de Payns.

Remarkably, Ugo de’ Pagani and Hugues de Payens are literal translations of each other, both literally meaning ‘Hugh of the Pagans‘. Now it gets very interesting: pagan founder and Grand Master of Christian monastic military order???