The 2025 Jonathan Riley-Smith Memorial Lecture, an in-person evening talk in partnership with the St John Historical Society.
The Knights Templar and Knights Hospitaller played a key role in the crusades and the politics of the Crusade States, one that often saw them on opposite sides in each conflict and civil war dividing the Latin East. The two competed for land and donations and even came to blows on rare occasions. Yet, when war came, they could put aside these differences in the joint defence of the East.
This link became stronger after the suppression of the Templars in 1312, which saw the Hospitallers inherit most of their lands. The Templar conspiracy theories which have proliferated since the late twentieth century have drawn upon this link, twisting the historical evidence to claim that the Templars survived as a shadow organisation within the Hospitallers. In this talk, Dr Rory MacLellan will discuss the intertwined stories of these two orders and the pseudohistories that still tie them together today.
Rory MacLellan is a Cataloguer and Manuscript Researcher at the British Library. He holds a PhD in Medieval History from the University of St Andrews for a thesis on the Knights Hospitaller and has published on the crusades, the Templars, and Hospitallers. He is the author of Warrior Monks: Politics and Power in Medieval Britain.
Image credit: The satirical character Renart the Fox wearing the habits of the Templars and Hospitallers, with a member of each order beside him. Detail from BnF, Français 372, f. 59r courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
