The Templar alphabet: the story of a modern legend

The mysteries attributed to the Knights of the Temple are countless, and one concerns writing. According to a widespread story, the Templars used a secret alphabet built on the eight-pointed cross, with which they enciphered letters of credit and correspondence between their houses scattered across Europe and the East. It is an evocative tale, but the medieval documents do not confirm it. It is worth separating what we know of the Order from what legend has attributed to it.

The Order and money

The Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon was born in Jerusalem around 1120 to protect pilgrims. It obtained a rule at the Council of Troyes in 1129 and grew rapidly, accumulating lands, castles and wealth. The Templars also became skilled administrators of money: they held deposits, transferred funds and granted loans to kings and nobles. The Temple house in Paris was for a long time a kind of treasury of the kingdom of France.

It is true that the Templars allowed pilgrims to deposit money in one house and withdraw the equivalent in another, by means of written documents. This service, efficient and safe, fed the idea of a reserved writing system. However, the Templar charters that survive are written in Latin or in the vernacular languages of the time, in the ordinary documentary scripts, and show no cipher alphabet.

The cross that becomes an alphabet

The alphabet attributed to the Templars is based on an eight-pointed cross set within a circle, from which angles, triangles and arrows corresponding to the letters are derived. The design follows a logic similar to that of the Masonic grid cipher: the position of the sign within the figure indicates the letter. This similarity suggests a modern invention, born in circles already familiar with geometric substitution ciphers.

As far as studies show, there is no medieval manuscript recording this alphabet. Its first secure attestations are much later and belong to the context of the modern fortune of the Templars, when various initiatory groups proclaimed themselves their heirs and reinvented their symbols and traditions. Even the trial records, which report in detail the charges brought against the knights, make no mention of a secret script.

The end of the Order and the birth of the myth

On 13 October 1307 King Philip IV the Fair of France had the Templars of the kingdom arrested on very grave charges, including heresy and blasphemous practices. At the Council of Vienne, in 1312, Pope Clement V suppressed the Order with the bull Vox in excelso. The last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, was burned at the stake in Paris in 1314. The sudden and dramatic end fed for centuries stories of hidden treasures and lost secrets.

In the eighteenth century some branches of Freemasonry claimed Templar descent, and in the nineteenth century novels and essays spread the image of an Order guarding occult knowledge. In this climate many legends were born, including that of the cipher alphabet, which fits well with the idea of a secret society of bankers and initiates. The eight-pointed cross, moreover, is more typical of the Order of Saint John, later known as the Order of Malta, than of the Templars, and this detail too betrays a late elaboration.

The Templar alphabet is therefore a fine graphic object and an interesting chapter in the history of the imagination, but not a document of the Middle Ages. Recognising this takes nothing away from the fascination of the Knights of the Temple, whose real history, made of wars, finance and trials, is extraordinary enough. One need only read it in the sources to see this.