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By the Third Crusade, however, the Templars had become one of the preeminent Crusading factions alongside the Knights Hospitaller and the Teutonic Knights, forming their own militaries ostensibly to protect Christian pilgrims.

Īt that time in 1096, Bernard de Clairvaux had not yet begun masquerading his secret organization as a Christian chivalric order, the Order of the Knights Templar, an event which would officially occur in 1129. The first Crusader armies were formed by Christian knights from Western Europe who offered themselves to the cause declared by Pope Urban II, and in the First Crusade, the armies consisted of a hodgepodge of soldiers from a wide range of feudal states serving under nobles appointed as commanders by the Pope. Prominent Hospitaller and Teutonic leaders sometimes held dual membership with the Templar Order, albeit the Templar affiliation would be in secret. The Crusaders and their operations were therefore closely linked with that of the Templar Order. They seeded their members into various factions the Saracens notwithstanding, this included the other two Crusader orders. By the time of the Third Crusade, the name "Templar" had been popularized for and become synonymous with this covert group among those in the know of their activities. The last was only a public front for the shadowy organization which in antiquity operated under the name the Order of the Ancients. Amongst their number were counted knightly orders such as the Knights Hospitalier, the Knights Teutonic, and the Knights Templar. These orders were largely founded in the Holy Land itself, ostensibly to protect Christian pilgrims. While a majority of Crusaders served personally in the armies of the kingdoms of Europe, the most iconic were members of a number of Christian military orders who worked in unison with these European kingdoms. The first three, and most prominent, of these conflicts involved military expeditions against the Islamic rulers of the Holy Land, aiming to forcefully claim it in the name of Christianity. The Crusaders were Europeans who undertook the call-to-arms by the Papacy to participate in the Crusades, a series of religious wars enacted against the enemies of the Latin Church.