mers, nine noble knights
formed a holy brotherhood-in-arms, and entered into a solemn compact to
aid one another in clearing the highways of infidels and robbers, and in
protecting the pilgrims through the passes and defiles of the mountains
to the Holy City. Warmed with the religious and military fervor of the
day, and animated by the sacredness of the cause to which they had
devoted their swords, they called themselves the "Poor Fellow-soldiers
of Jesus Christ."

They renounced the world and its pleasures, and in the Holy Church of
the Resurrection, in the presence of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, they
embraced vows of perpetual chastity, obedience, and poverty, after the
manner of monks. Uniting in themselves the two most popular qualities of
the age, devotion and valor, and exercising them in the most popular of
all enterprises, the protection of the pilgrims and of the road to the
Holy Sepulchre, they speedily acquired a vast reputation and a splendid
renown.

At first, we are told, they had no church and no particular place of
abode, but in the year of our Lord 1118--nineteen years after the
conquest of Jerusalem by the crusaders--they had rendered such good and
acceptable service to the Christians that Baldwin II, King of Jerusalem,
granted them a place of habitation within the sacred enclosure of the
Temple on Mount Moriah, amid those holy and magnificent structures,
partly erected by the Christian emperor Justinian and partly built by
the caliph Omar, which were then exhibited by the monks and priests of
Jerusalem, whose restless zeal led them to practise on the credulity of
the pilgrims, and to multiply relics and all objects likely to be sacred
in their eyes, as the Temple of Solomon, whence the "Poor
Fellow-soldiers of Jesus Christ" came thenceforth to be known by the
name of "the Knighthood of the Temple of Solomon."

A few remarks in elucidation of the name "Templars," or "Knights of the
Temple," may not be unacceptable.

By the Mussulmans the site of the great Jewish Temple on Mount Moriah
has always been regarded with peculiar veneration. Mahomet, in the first
year of the publication of the _Koran_, directed his followers, when at
prayer, to turn their faces toward it, and pilgrimages have constantly
been made to the holy spot by devout Moslems. On the conquest of
Jerusalem by the Arabians, it was the first care of the caliph Omar to
rebuild "the Temple of the Lord." Assisted by the principal chieftain