Templars Were First Recognized by Council of Nablu

To achieve its objectives, the order of Knights Templar had to recruit sufficient number of military personnel (knights, sergeants and foot soldiers) and to raise sufficient amount of financing (money and other liquid assets) and money-generating land (for agricultural and other commercial enterprises).

And it had to be not a one-time recruiting/financing drive; Knights Templar needed to create a powerful recruiting/financing machine which will operate at the highest possible efficiency both in the Outremer and in Europe.

To make it happen, Knights Templar had to be recognized: first locally (in Crusader States – by local secular and ecclesiastical lords) and then globally (by the Church, given their nature as the military-religious monastic Christian order).

Given the highly ambitious objectives of Knights Templar, they had to be recognized first by a local Council of local secular and ecclesiastical lords and then by a Council of high-ranking clerics somewhere in France (as all Knights Templars during the first years of its existence were Frenchmen).

The first objective was accomplished at the Council of Nablus (now a Palestinian city in the West Bank, located approximately 50 km north of Jerusalem). It was convened (no surprise here) by Warmund, Patriarch of Jerusalem (brought ecclesiastical lords), and King Baldwin II of Jerusalem (secular lords).

Contrary to a popular misconception, the Council of Nablus was convened to deal with more fundamental secular and religious issues than just the recognition (formally permission to officially found/register) of Knights Templar (it established the first written laws for the Kingdom of Jerusalem).

Council of Nablus established twenty-five canons dealing with both religious and secular affairs. It was not quite a church council, but not quite a meeting of the royal court either.

Due to the religious nature of many of the canons, it can be considered both a parliament (of sorts) and an ecclesiastical synod. The resulting agreement between the patriarch and the king was a concordat, similar to the Concordat of Worms two years later.

Interestingly, Council of Nablus was not mentioned in the chronicle of Fulcher of Chartres, who served in the entourage of Baldwin II and must have been present.

This is probably because the nature of the canons, dealing as they do with the crimes and sins of the Latin population, contradicted Fulcher’s portrayal of the Kingdom as a Christian utopia.