Bernard put his weight behind them and wrote persuasively on their behalf in the letter 'In Praise of the New Knighthood', and in 1129, at the Council of Troyes, he led a group of leading churchmen to officially approve and endorse the order on behalf of the church. They had a powerful advocate in Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, a leading Church figure, the French abbot primarily responsible for the founding of the Cistercian Order of monks and a nephew of André de Montbard, one of the founding knights. The impoverished status of the Templars did not last long. The Crusaders called it 'the Temple of Solomon' and from this location derived their name of Templar. The first headquarters of the Knights Templar, on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Their emblem was of two knights riding on a single horse, emphasizing the order's poverty.

The order, with about nine knights including Godfrey de Saint-Omer and André de Montbard, had few financial resources and relied on donations to survive. The Crusaders therefore referred to the Al-Aqsa Mosque as Solomon's Temple, and from this location the new order took the name of Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, or 'Templar' knights. The Temple Mount had a mystique because it was above what was believed to be the ruins of the Temple of Solomon. King Baldwin and Patriarch Warmund agreed to the request, probably at the Council of Nablus in January 1120, and the king granted the Templars a headquarters in a wing of the royal palace on the Temple Mount in the captured Al-Aqsa Mosque. In 1119, the French knight Hugues de Payens approached King Baldwin II of Jerusalem and Warmund, Patriarch of Jerusalem, and proposed creating a monastic order for the protection of these pilgrims. The abrupt disappearance of a major part of the European infrastructure gave rise to speculation and legends, which have kept the 'Templar' name alive into the present day. Under further pressure, Pope Clement V disbanded the order in 1312. In 1307, he pressured Pope Clement to have many of the order's members in France arrested, tortured into giving false confessions, and then burned at the stake. Rumours about the Templars' secret initiation ceremony created distrust, and King Philip IV of France, while being deeply in debt to the order, used this distrust to take advantage of the situation. The Templars were closely tied to the Crusades when the Holy Land was lost, support for the order faded. They developed innovative financial techniques that were an early form of banking, building a network of nearly 1,000 commanderies and fortifications across Europe and the Holy Land, and arguably forming the world's first multinational corporation. They were prominent in Christian finance non-combatant members of the order, who made up as much as 90% of their members, managed a large economic infrastructure throughout Christendom.

Templar knights, in their distinctive white mantles with a red cross, were amongst the most skilled fighting units of the Crusades. Officially endorsed by the Roman Catholic Church by such decrees as the papal bull Omne datum optimum of Pope Innocent II, the Templars became a favored charity throughout Christendom and grew rapidly in membership and power. They were founded in 1119, headquartered on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and existed for nearly two centuries during the Middle Ages. The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon ( Latin: Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Salomonici), also known as the Order of Solomon's Temple, the Knights Templar, or simply the Templars, was a Catholic military order, one of the most wealthy and popular of the Western Christian military orders.

Crusaders of the lost idols