The Order had first been assembled in 1119 at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem by a French knight from the Champagne region In France, called Hugues de Payens, he had travelled to the East around the time that Jerusalem fell to the Christian armies of the First Crusade. With a small number of like-minded men – later accounts said there were nine – Hugues established a brotherhood of religious warriors: skilled fighters who took oaths of chastity and poverty. They dedicated themselves to protecting Christian pilgrims on roads around the holy city, which were menaced by brigands preying on vulnerable travellers touring unfamiliar countryside.

In 1148 the Templars had saved the French armies of the Second Crusade from annihilation. Tens of thousands of ill-disciplined troops led by King Louis VII had tried to cross hostile territory in Asia Minor on foot and horseback, on their way to Syria, where they planned to liberate the city of Edessa. Bedraggled and badly led, they were prey to repeated attacks from Turkish horsemen, who inflicted a particularly terrible defeat on the crusaders at Mount Cadmus, near modern-day Denizli in Turkey. Hundreds were killed and Louis only escaped capture by hiding on a boulder.

In desperation, the French king handed over military command of the entire expedition to a Templar named Gilbert. He was one of only 50 or so brothers among the vast procession, but Gilbert’s leadership was inspired. He divided the pilgrims into battalions, each with a single brother in charge. All the able-bodied were given a crash-course in military conduct, and shown how to hold their shape and discipline under attack. As a result, the French survived the hard trek east, and on arrival in the Holy Land the Templars even raised an emergency loan to keep Louis’s troubled campaign afloat.

In the years that followed, the Templars were trusted to defend castles around Gaza in the South, where Christian territory gave way to Egyptian lands. Further North they guarded the passes through the Amanus Mountains, which controlled the routes from Asia Minor into the Christian principality of Antioch. They advised secular leaders on military strategy, but were also pointedly independent, carrying out kidnapping missions and raids of their own as they pleased. Even the Assassins – the shadowy Shia terrorist sect who lived in the Syrian mountains and specialised in spectacular public assassinations of leaders of all faiths – would not touch the Templars, and paid them a fat fee to be left alone.

The Templar Rule, which originally resembled a Cistercian monk’s order of daily routine, was heavily revised around 1165 to become more of a military handbook: setting the Templars’ battlefield protocols, and emphasising the importance of discipline and obedience. The order’s famous black-and-white flag was only to be lowered when the last man defending it was dead. “No brother should leave the field while there is a piebald banner raised aloft; for if he leaves he will be expelled from the house forever,” it read.

When they rode into battle, the Templars sang a psalm: ‘‘Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name we give glory, for your steadfast love and faithfulness.” The sight and sound of these men charging in their red-crossed white and black cloaks was rightly feared throughout the Holy Land.

When Saladin’s men had finished rounding up Templars and Hospitallers after the battle of Hattin in 1187, around 200 prisoners had been delivered. These included the Templar grand master, Gerard of Ridefort, an impulsive and suicidally proud leader who repeatedly led his men into fights against impossible odds, yet somehow always emerged with his own life. He would do so again now, as Saladin ordered him to be imprisoned and exchanged for the Templars’ castle at Gaza.

In 1187 the Order of the Poor Knights and of the Temple of Solomon was about 68 years old.

This fraternity of holy hard-men soon gained official recognition. The then-ruler of Jerusalem, Baldwin II, put them up in the al-Aqsa Mosque, which they identified with the biblical temple built by Solomon. This was how the Templars gained their name.

It took several years for the Templars to rebuild their numbers and their military reputation, but they managed it. When Richard the Lionheart arrived in the Holy Land to lead the Third Crusade in 1191 he revived the order’s fortunes, installing new leaders from his own entourage and ensuring that the Templars rode either at the vanguard or rearguard of his army as it marched down the coast from Acre to Jaffa, reclaiming cities Saladin had conquered. He briefly handed the Templars a military dictatorship on Cyprus, although they found the island ungovernable and sold it on. And when Richard left the Holy Land for Europe in 1192, he was said to have travelled incognito, wearing Templar uniform.

The order remained at the military heart of the crusades for another century. In 1218–19 they starred in the Fifth Crusade to Damietta in Egypt, deploying armoured galleys in the water of the Nile Delta, as the Christian armies attempted an amphibious siege of the city. Two generations later they were back again, having helped fund and provision another crusader army with designs on Damietta, this time led by Louis IX of France. Throughout the 13th century, the Templars continued to be involved in the Reconquista, helping King James I of Aragón to conquer Ibiza and Mallorca between 1229 and 1235, and the kingdom of Valencia by 1244.

Then, at the end of the century, when the Christians were being swept from the Holy Land by an Egyptian slave-soldier regime called the Mamluks, the Templars provided the very last line of defence. Their huge fortress in Acre was the last bastion to hold out against Mamluk forces storming through the breached walls in 1291, in what turned out to be the crusaders’ final stand.

In 1307, however, the order was destroyed by a cruel and conniving king of France, Philip IV. Philip used a popular wish for the Templars and Hospitallers to be merged into one military super-order as a pretext for investigating their practices and then confiscating their wealth. Their collapse was swift and dramatic, as the king’s lawyers and papal inquisitors accused the brothers of corruption, blasphemy, and sexual crimes.

While some Templars certainly found safe haven in Scotland and Switzerland, which were outside the sphere of papal influence at this time since both territories had been previously excommunicated, many knights simply joined other orders, particularly the equally powerful Order of St. John. The Templar Order in Portugal continued to survive with the assistance of King Denis by simply changing its name and re-instituting as the Military Order of Christ. Some Templars in other countries were arrested and tried, but never convicted. Some knights were even pensioned off and left to retire peacefully. Remarkably, a misplaced document was found in the Vatican Secret Archives in 2002 that records the trial of the Templars and the fact that before dissolving the order in 1312, Pope Clement in 1308 actually absolved the accused Templars of all heresies against them.

Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Order of the Templars, was burned’. It is said that as he died, de Molay cursed Pope Clement V and King Philip the Fair and all his descendants. He proclaimed that within a year both Philip and Clement would die, and that the king’s bloodline would no longer rule in France.
The two men did, in fact, die that year, and in the 14 years that followed, all King Philip’s heirs perished, effectively destroying the bloodline that had ruled France for three centuries.

The rise and fall of the Templars

1119: Hugh of Payns and eight other knights banded together in Jerusalem, agreeing to protect Christian pilgrims outside the city. They are officially recognised in 1120. Their base is the al-Aqsa mosque, which they call the Temple of Solomon.

1129: The first Templar Rule is written at a church council in Troyes. Templars are committed to a life of celibacy, poverty and military exercise, and banned from knightly frivolities such as hunting with birds or wearing pointed shoes.

1134: Alfonso I, King of Aragon, dies and leaves one third of his kingdom to the Templars, drawing the order into the Reconquista.

1139: Pope Innocent II decrees that the Templars are only answerable to papal authority, and grants them the right to wear the sign of the cross on their chests.

1148: During the Second Crusade to liberate the city of Edessa, the Templars repel Turkish attacks and shepherd a French army all the way to the Holy Land.

1187: On 4 July, Saladin defeats a huge Christian army at the battle of Hattin. He then orders the summary beheading of all Templars captured by his forces.

1191: Richard the Lionheart conquers Cyprus and sells it to the Templars. But the order cannot hold it peacefully and quickly sell it on to Guy of Lusignan, the former king of Jerusalem.

1200: German author Wolfram von Eschenbach casts Templar-like figures as the defenders of a mysterious item known as the Holy Grail.

1218: Templars join the Fifth Crusade in the Nile Delta, fighting on board armoured galleys.

1291: Mamluk armies attack the last crusader outpost in the city of Acre. The Templar master William of Beaujeu is killed leading the defence.

1307: On Friday 13 October, King Philip IV ordered the arrest of every Templar in France.

1312, the order is disbanded and its properties confiscated.

On the 19th day of March, 1314, Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Knights Templars, was burned on a pyre erected upon that point of the islet of the Seine, at Paris, where afterwards was erected the statue of King Henry IV. “It is mentioned as a tradition in some of the accounts of the burning, that Molay, ere he expired, summoned Clement, the Pope who had pronounced the bull of abolition against the Order and had condemned the Grand Master to the flames, to appear, within forty days, before the Supreme Eternal judge, and Philip [the king] to the same awful tribunal within the space of a year. Both predictions were fulfilled.” The close relationship between Freemasonry and the original Knights Templars has caused the story of CHiram to be linked with the martyrdom of Jacques de Molay. According to this interpretation, the three ruffians who cruelly slew their Master at the gates of the temple because he refused to reveal the secrets of his Order represent the Pope, the king, and the executioners. De Molay died maintaining his innocence and refusing to disclose the philosophical and magical arcana of the Templars.

From the Knights Templar to the Knights of Christ

Other undercurrents had been bubbling beneath the surface European culture in the late middle ages that originated from slightly different sources. The Royal Order of the Knights of Our Lord Jesus Christ (Real Ordem dos Cavaleiros de Nosso Senhor Jesus Cristo), popularly known as the Knights of Christ, was a Portuguese and largely maritime chivalric order . It was to play a pivotal role in the exploration of the New World. The Knights of Christ originally were Knights Templar who had fled to Portugal after the Order had been suppressed in 1307 by Pope Clement V in collusion with the French King Philippe IV.

When the south-bound flotilla of the Templar fleet left La Rochelle in France in 1307 and arrived at Nazaré in Portugal, it was given refuge by King Denis I. Denis had reluctantly obeyed the Papal decree to confiscate all Templar properties in his realm. However, he negotiated with Clement’s successor to found a new chivalric order, the members of which were all former Templars. These Knights of Christ became the recipients of all of the Templars’ former properties in Portugal. It was hardly surprising that Denis should support this group of refugee Templars. He needed their expertise in rebuilding his country after the Muslim occupation and he may have wished to have a counterbalance to the increasing power and influence wielded by the Knights Hospitaller in his realm.

There were other deeper reasons as well. The Portuguese monarchy at this time was a cadet branch of the House of Burgundy. The same Royal House, in the person of André de Montbard, had been one of the founders of the Knights Templar, nearly two hundred years previously. Whatever the dynastic allegiances between the Templars and the House of Burgundy, it is certainly true that the Burgundian Kings of Portugal were enthusiastic in their support of the Knights of Christ.

It was during the reign of Denis’ son, King Alfonso IV (the Brave), that the Portuguese Age of Discovery really began. This was an age that included the exploration of the Atlantic even from the onset. Indeed, Alfonso was said to have been a Grand Master of the Order of the Knights of Christ. Alfonso set in train expeditions to the Canary Islands during the first quarter of the 14th century. Later on, the famous seafarer Vasco de Gama was a Knight of Christ and the renowned Prince Henry the Navigator was a Grand Master of the Order.

Another significant fact is that Christopher Columbus, although sponsored by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, was married to the daughter of a Knight of Christ. It is said that Columbus gained access to his father-in-law’s sea charts. Some writers even claim that Columbus was himself a Knight of Christ and that he had studied cartography and navigation at the school founded by Henry the Navigator. Whatever the truth of this claim, on Columbus’ first expedition, the Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria all crossed the Atlantic under sails emblazoned with the cross pattée of the Knights of Christ. That same emblem once had symbolised the power and enterprise of the Knights Templar throughout Europe for two hundred years.

But as always, there is more to the story of the Templars then what’s written down in the history books.

The Esoteric Side of the Knights Templars

The Knights Templars studied various occult works of Ancient Egypt and the (Gentile) Kabbalah during their extended time in the Holy Land. Discoveries were made possibly related to ancient material and information. These are either facts regarding the Ancient Hebrew Mysticism and the true purpose of ancient religions predating Christianity. Regardless, Hidden knowledge of some sort was likely exposed which most obviously consisted of mysticism and the occult. The Templars returned to Europe with a vast amount of wealth and riches, which became a threat to King Phillip and the Church. Not surprising since any wealth that lies in the hands of Gentiles has always remained a threat to the elite. It’s assumed that the Templars became suddenly rich and rose in power due their occult works and rituals.

“A major Templar foundation, the famed Rosslyn Chapel near Edinburgh, has a large number of Green Man carvings, which may further suggest that the Templars recognized the Green Man as an ancient source of their idiosyncratic beliefs.”

“Commonly portrayed as a head with profuse foliage growing from his mouth, the Green Man (and Lady) represent fertility, growth, and fecundity of nature. The many faces of the Green Man range from joyful to downright impish. Although many assume that the Green Man is mainly a “Celtic” motif, this is not the case. Green Man carvings are also found in ancient eastern temples, in the Apo Kayan area of Borneo, the chapels of Dhankar Gompa in the Himalayas, in the temples of Kathmandu and in the Jain temples of Ranakpur, and in Roman buildings. In short, the Green Man is a
universal theme with very early roots.”

“As the primal King of the World, the Green Man is known by many legendary faces and names world wide, including Murrugan, Dionysus, Osiris, Al-Khadir, Melchizedek, and Lucifer. He is the life force, so he can manifest at any time and in any form that is appropriate for that part of the world.

Templar sites were found on the same site where the Druids constructed their temples. One example is the popular cathedral as mentioned above, Notre Dame de Chartres of the Knights that was built on a sacred pagan ground.

“So venerated is the location of Chartres that it is the only cathedral not to have a single king, bishop, cardinal, canon, or anyone interred in the soil of its mound. It was a pagan site, dedicated to the traditional Mother Goddess – a site to which pilgrims traveled long before the time of Jesus. The original altar was built above the Grotte des Druides, which housed a sacred dolmen, and was identified with the ‘Womb of the Earth.

Many of the architectural drawings for the finer points of the Gothic cathedrals (including the pattern for the famous labyrinth at Chartres) were obtained from a 2nd century Greek alchemical manuscript and were dedicated to the patron goddess of France, Notre Dame de Lumière (“Our Lady of Light”). This pattern is “reckoned to be one of the most sacred designs on Earth.

Other than the Green man, Gothic style Cathedrals were built with esoteric imagery and other similar Pagan structures. Inside the Cathedral also contained astronomical symbolism of Gods and the fable of cosmic creations. The Gods were deemed as representations of the planets and stars; hence the heavenly bodies of the universe.

“Other symbols found in the Gothic Cathedrals convey strong subliminal messages about the power of Feminine. Carved spiders’ webs—an image repeated in the domed skylight of the church Notre Dame de France in London—represent Arachne, the spider goddess who rules Man’s fate, or Isis, in her role as weaver of destiny. Similarly, the great maze or labyrinth drawn on the floor of Chartres Cathedral refers to the female mysteries, through which the initiate can find his way only by following the thread for him by the goddess. Clearly this place is not intended for the praise of the Virgin Mary, particularly because it was also home to a Black Madonna—Notre Dame de Souterrain (our Lady of the underworld).”

Chartres and Amiens cathedrals are said to be located on particular points on the ground, along with other like the Notre Dame cathedral of Reims, Evreux and Bayeux, in a formation that reflects the arrangement of the stars in the constellation of Virgo. If this is so, it is curiously similar to the writings of Cornelius Agrippa, some three hundred years or so later, on geomancy. It may also be an example of the Hermetic dictum, As above, so below.

What becomes clear is that the heresy the Templars were accused of was Johannite Gnosticism; in other words, a reverence of John the Baptist as the true Messiah.

Remember that contrary to the popular myth of fanatical holy warriors, the Knights Templar often made peace with the “Saracens” a blanket term not only for Muslims but for other non-Christian sects in Asia.

To the true Gnostic, death was a liberation from the false prison planet of the Demiurge and his Archons. It’s no surprise then how Gnostic sects like the Druze became such fearsome warriors.

But there’s an even older Gnostic sect in the Middle East than the Druze or the Alawi, one that the Templars almost certainly came into contact with and one that would explain the reverence for John the Baptist in esoteric orders.

No less an authority than Josephus recorded that the Jews believed it was the execution of John and not Jesus that was believed to have brought the wrath of God down upon them in the civil wars that led to the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in the First Century: The Mandaeans (literally, “the knowers”) are the only surviving Gnostics from the time of late Antiquity. They have dwelled for the past eighteen hundred years in southern Iraq and southwest Iran, and increasingly, as a result of recent wars, in other parts of the world. They adhere to the typical Gnostic doctrines and mythologies regarding the soul’s entrapment in earthly life and the existence of a heavenly Lightworld, the soul’s true home.
Being baptists, the Mandaeans consider John the Baptist their main prophet and renewer of the religion, which, they say, ultimately stems from Adam himself. The Mandaeans live next to but remain apart from their (mostly Moslem) neighbors, and throughout the centuries they have preserved their traditions to a remarkable degree.
Conversion to Mandaean beliefs would explain the charges most consistently aimed at the Templars by defectors in the ranks, namely that “they spit on the Holy Cross, these Knights Templar. Not only do they deny the divinity of Christ during their reception, they do not even worship God Almighty, but a graven idol instead. “

From Pope Pius IX’s landmark Allocution:

“The secret thought of Hugues de Payens, in founding his Order, was not exactly to serve the ambition of the Patriarchs of Constantinople. There existed at that period in the East a Sect of Johannite Christians, who claimed to be the only true Initiates into the real mysteries of the religion of the Saviour.

“The Johannites ascribed to Saint John the foundation of their Secret Church, and the Grand Pontiffs of the Sect assumed the title of Christos, Anointed, or Consecrated, and claimed to have succeeded one another from Saint John by an uninterrupted succession of pontifical powers”.

Pio’s charge of Templar Johannite subversion seems ridiculous to orthodox historians, but the mystical ferment of the 11th Century might well speak to contact between the Normans– no admirers of the soft, decadent pederasts who were taking away their ancestral gods– and Mandaean sects in the mountains of Antioch. Pio again:
“Thus the Order of Knights of the Temple was at its very origin devoted to the cause of opposition to the tiara of Rome and the crowns of Kings, and the Apostolate of Kabalistic Gnosticism was vested in its chiefs. For Saint John himself was the Father of the Gnostics, and the current translation of his polemic against the heretical of his Sect and the pagans who denied that Christ was the Word, is throughout a misrepresentation, or misunderstanding at least, of the whole Spirit of that Evangely.”

Many of their most prominent figures were members of some of the best-connected and most powerful European aristocratic families.

Those same families provided the wealth for the building of the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe. More often than not, these cathedrals venerated the Divine Feminine through their stone masonry and devotional art. This was especially the case with the Notre Dame Cathedrals. It is a tradition which ultimately stems from the worship of the Egyptian Virgin Mother, Isis.

The royal and aristocratic sponsors of these enterprises had the political will and financial power to ensure that esoteric principles and symbolism were woven into the very fabric of monumental architecture; albeit covertly. The Knights Templar were a repository for Gnostic, Hermetic and alchemical lore in mediaeval Europe and their expertise has guided the construction of the great Gothic cathedrals, especially the French Notre Dame cathedrals.

The transformation of members of the Templars into the maritime Knights of Christ in Portugal had stimulated to the exploration of the Atlantic. What was more, the stimulus to learning of the crafts of navigation and seafaring also seems to have exerted a considerable influence on Spain at the end of the Middle Ages.

Origin of Gisors fortress,

The origins of this fortress overlooking the valley of the Epte, at the eastern edge of the Duchy of Normandy, dating back to the surrender of Normandy, Brittany and the Vexin to Rollo, King of the Vikings in 911 by Charles the Simple, King of France, as the price for lifting Rollo’s siege of Paris and Chartres.

An earthenwork motte was built at Gisors from 1097 by Robert II de Bellême, by order of William Rufus, King of England (as the ruler of the Duchy of Normandy following the English conquest in 1066). This structure was supplemented a year later by a wooden tower, probably surrounded by a palisade. In 1113, this fortified site hosted a meeting between Louis VI, the King of France, and Henry I Beauclerc, the King of England, at the Elm of Gisors, in the valley below the castle. Gisors became the defensive heart of the Vexin region, the frontier zone between the English and French territories.

The castle experienced its first siege in 1120, during the rebellion against the Norman lords against the English guardianship. The fortress, defended by Governor Robert Chandos, held up well against this siege, sending a serious warning that lead the English king to judge it safer to reinforce the fortifications, beginning the work in 1123. The first reconstruction campaign saw the addition of an octagonal keep (or donjon), surrounded by a stone rampart (the lower bailey).

Henry I Beauclerc died in 1135 of a surfeit of lampreys, leaving no male heir (despite having had three legitimate and more than 20 illegitimate children). His oldest daughter, the Empress Matilda, widow of the German Emperor Henry V, married the noble Angevin Geoffrey of Anjou, who had become Duke of Normandy, while at the same time the throne of England was entrusted to Stephen of Blois.

The Plantagenets

The death of Stephen in 1154 without a male heir left Geoffrey’s son, Henry of Anjou, as the new king of England and inaugurated a new era: that of the Plantagenets. Henry had just married Eleanor of Aquitaine, immediately following her contentious divorce from Louis VII, King of the French. Henry and Eleanor thus became the rulers of a vast territory extending from England through Normandy and Anjou, South to the Pyrenees.

To seal the reconciliation between the two kingdoms, a treaty was agreed between the new King of England and Louis VII of France in 1158 at the castle of Gisors, in which Louis granted Henry II’s younger son Henry the hand of his daughter Marguerite, aged only six months, who was at that time Duchess of the Vexin, delivering the fortress of Gisors as her dowry.

Gisors as a Templar stronghold,

In anticipation of the significance of the Capetian/ Plantagenet marriage, the stronghold was given to the Order of the Knights Templars, along with two other castles. The three Knights Templars responsible for ensuring the fortress were Robert Piron, Tostes Saint Omer and Richard Hastings. Accordingly, since 1160, when Henry ordered the celebration of the wedding, Gisors was returned to Normandy.

The strategic nature of this part of the valley of the Epte did not escape the notice of the French King, and a new campaign of reconstruction was undertaken in 1170, lasting ten years. During this prolonged period, the tower was consolidated and extended with two additional floors while at the same time the moats were enlarged. A new rampart wall, 800 meters long and flanked by eight bastion towers, was completed to protect the site.

Alice of the Vexin,

Princess Alice was used as a pawn for the acquisition of demesnes through Western Europe, particularly in relation to the disputed territory of the Vexin. She was first engaged to her own stepbrother, Eleanor’s son Richard with her second husband Henry II, since the marriage to Richard would also give the French King a claim on the territory of Aquitaine that he had lost with his divorce from Eleanor. Alice was sent to live in the English court of Henry II, which involved travelling with the court ladies among the various royal castles in Normandy, Anjou and England. Negotiations continued until The Duchy of the Vexin passed to Marguerite’s newborn sister, Alice; Henry and Marguerite were married for only nine years until Henry died after fomenting a revolt against his father.

Alice was aged 15 when Richard (who, however, showed no inclination to go ahead with the marriage because he suspected that his father had already had a relationship with her) acceded to his mother’s arrangement to marry him to a princess of Navarre named Berengaria, effectively breaking the engagement to Alice. At this point, Richard’s father Henry attempted to marry Alice himself in 1174 (after his own break-up with the combative Eleanor, who was first for and then against the intended marriage).

When that option became unfeasible, he tried to marry Alice to Richard’s brother, John, who also rejected the arrangement, so she returned to the French court. Eventually, in 1195, Alice’s half-brother King Philip Augustus of France arranged her marriage to William IV Talvas, the Count of Ponthieu (near Calais), who represented the senior line of the lords of Montgomery, trusted vassals and allies of William the Conqueror. The Duchy of the Vexin, however, apparently remained with Alice, passing to her daughter Marie of Ponthieu and claimed as part of the dowry of her granddaughter, Eleanor of Castile, who became the beloved, but acquisitive, wife of Edward I, King of England.

King Philippe Augustus

In 1188, on the eve of the Third Crusade, an encounter between the royal sovereigns Henry II and Philip Augustus, the new King of the French, took place at the Elm of Gisors, at which a truce was agreed. However, Henry died the following year and Philip was accompanied by his successor Richard the Lionheart, in the Capetian Crusade to fight in the Holy Land. When Richard was imprisoned in Dürnstein at the end of the crusade, the opportunity was too good for the French sovereign, who captured the fortress in 1193, and ordered several modifications, including the construction of the Prisoner Tower, inspired by the Chateau of the Louvre, the barbican facing the city, and the royal manse, destroyed in the early twentieth century.

When Richard the Lionheart was released in 1194, he took up arms to recover his fief. However, both parties choose appeasement and signed the peace treaties of Vaudreuil and Issoudun in 1195, complemented the following year by the Treaty of Gaillon, which placed the Vexin – and therefore Gisors – under the authority of the crown of France. To compensate for the loss of several of its strongholds and try to protect his lands, Richard then began building the formidable stronghold of the Château Gaillard, built in just two years on a promontory overlooking the Seine.

The Templar Prison

Deprived of its strategic significance, the castle of Gisors was then transformed into jail. It welcomed famous guests in the wave of arrests of the Knights Templar: the fortress became, from March 1310 to March 1314, the whereabouts of the Grand Master of the Order, Jacques de Molay, joined in dungeons of the castle by three other dignitaries of the order: Hugues de Pairaud, Geoffrey de Gonneville, preceptor of Poitou and Aquitaine, and Geoffrey de Charny, Preceptor of Normandy.

Reconquest by the English

In 1419, a three-week siege by Thomas, Duke of Clarence affected the reconquest of the castle by the English, who remained in control until 1449.

Return to the Crown of France

Gisors was returned to the crown of France at the end of Anglo-French 100-years’ war, after which the castle lost its strategic function and was gradually neglected. The fortress was subsequently decommissioned in 1591.