o protect the arrival and sojourning of pilgrims in
Palestine; and Baldwin II., the third Christian King of Jerusalem, had
given them a lodging in his own palace, to the east of Solomon's temple,
whence they had assumed the name of "Poor United Champions of Christ and
the Temple." Their valor and pious devotion had soon rendered them
famous in the West as well as the East; and St. Bernard had commended
them to the Christian world. At the council of Troyes, in 1123, Pope
Honorius II. had recognized their order, and regulated their dress, a
white mantle, on which Pope Eugenius III. placed a red cross. In 1172
the rules of the order were drawn up in seventy-two articles, and the
Templars began to exempt themselves from the jurisdiction of the
patriarch of Jerusalem, recognizing that of the pope only. Their number
and their importance rapidly increased. In 1130 the Emperor Lothaire II.
gave them lands in the Duchy of Brunswick. They received other gifts in
the Low Countries, in Spain, and in Portugal. After a voyage to the
West, Hugh des Payens, the chief of the nine Templars, returned to the
East with three hundred knights enlisted in his order; and a hundred and
fifty years after its foundation the order of the Temple, divided into
fourteen or fifteen provinces,--four in the East and ten or eleven in the
West,--numbered, it is said, eighteen or twenty thousand knights, mostly
French, and nine thousand commanderies or territorial benefices, the
revenue of which is calculated at fifty-four millions of francs (about
ten and a half million dollars). It was an army of monks, once poor men
and hard-working soldiers, but now rich and idle, and abandoned to all
the temptations of riches and idleness. There was still some fine talk
about Jerusalem, pilgrims, and crusades. The popes still kept these
words prominent, either to distract the Western Christians from intestine
quarrels, or to really promote some new Christian effort in the East.
The Isle of Cyprus was still a small Christian kingdom, and the warrior-
monks, who were vowed to the defence of Christendom in the East, the
Templars and the Hospitallers, had still in Palestine, Syria, Armenia,
and the adjacent lands, certain battles to fight and certain services to
render to the Christian cause. But these were events too petty and too
transitory to give serious employment to the two great religious and
military orders, whose riches and fame were far beyond the proport