The Order of Christ: How the Templars Survived in Portugal

When Pope Clement V dissolved the Knights Templar in 1312, King Dinis of Portugal preserved the order under a new name: the Order of Christ.

24 August 2026 · Part of Knights Templar and Church, Papacy & Monasteries →

When Pope Clement V dissolved the Knights Templar in 1312, the order did not vanish everywhere at once. In most of Christian Europe, the bull Vox in Excelso and the companion decree that followed it delivered Templar estates into the hands of the rival Knights Hospitaller. But in the kingdom of Portugal, King Dinis I refused to let the order's assets, its castles, and many of its former brothers simply disappear into another institution's coffers. Within seven years of the suppression, he had engineered something almost unique in the aftermath of the Templar trials: a new military order, built on the old one's foundations, that answered to the Portuguese crown rather than to Rome or to the Hospitallers. It was called the Militia of Our Lord Jesus Christ — the Order of Christ — and it would go on to outlive the Templars by more than two centuries, eventually bankrolling the voyages that opened the Atlantic to Europe.

A Kingdom That Did Not Burn Its Templars

Portugal's experience of the Templar affair looked nothing like France's. King Philip IV had launched the persecution in October 1307 with coordinated dawn arrests, and the confessions that followed, extracted under torture, gave the French crown the material it needed to press for the order's destruction across Christendom. Dinis I took a very different path. Rather than hunting Portuguese Templars as heretics, he moved in the years before the order's formal suppression to bring its properties and personnel in his kingdom under direct royal oversight, treating them as an asset to be preserved rather than a scandal to be purged. The Templar order that had built castles and financial networks across Europe had never been accused in Portugal of the crimes that damned it in France, and Dinis had no obvious motive to destroy men who had spent generations defending his kingdom's frontier with Muslim al-Andalus.

The Iberian Exception

Clement V's dissolution bull did not, by itself, decide where Templar wealth would go. That question was settled six weeks later, on 2 May 1312, by a second bull, Ad Providam, which assigned former Templar property across most of Europe to the Hospitallers. It carved out a conspicuous exception, however, for the kingdoms of Castile, Aragon, Portugal, and Majorca, where the pope left the final disposition of Templar assets to further negotiation rather than handing them automatically to a rival order already resented by local rulers for its own wealth and privileges. Aragon's King James II used that opening to found an entirely new order, the Order of Montesa, formally established in 1317 with papal approval to absorb Templar and some Hospitaller property in his territories. Dinis pursued the same strategy for Portugal, and with less friction than James had faced, since the Portuguese Templars carried no taint of confession or trial.

Ad Ea Ex Quibus: A New Order, an Old Inheritance

In 1318, Dinis petitioned Pope John XXII to sanction a new military order built from what remained of the Portuguese Temple. The pope, resident at Avignon like his predecessor, agreed on terms that suited a crown eager to keep its frontier defenders intact: on 14 March 1319, John XXII issued the bull Ad ea ex quibus, formally establishing the Order of Christ and transferring to it the people, castles, and revenues of the former Portuguese Templars. Unlike the Hospitaller transfer elsewhere, this was not a rival order absorbing a defeated one; in practice, it allowed many of the same men, the same fortresses, and much the same administrative structure to continue under a new banner and a new master answerable to the Portuguese king. The order's first headquarters was modest by comparison with what it would become: the church of Santa Maria do Castelo at Castro Marim, a frontier town in the Algarve, under its first Grand Master, Dom Gil Martins, a knight who had previously served the Portuguese Order of Aviz.

Chronology

From Castro Marim to Tomar

The order did not stay in the Algarve for long. Later in the fourteenth century — chroniclers and historians differ on the precise year — the Order of Christ transferred its seat north to Tomar, the fortress-town that had served as the principal stronghold of the Templars in Portugal since Grand Master Gualdim Pais founded its castle around 1160. The move put the Order of Christ in physical possession of the most important surviving monument of the old Templar presence in the kingdom: a hilltop castle built around a round church, the Charola, modeled loosely on the rotunda of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. What had been built as the Temple's Portuguese headquarters became, and remains, the Convent of Christ, a complex that UNESCO now protects as a World Heritage Site for the layered building campaigns — Romanesque, Gothic, Manueline, Renaissance — that successive masters of the order added to it over the following centuries.

Henry the Navigator and the Cross on the Sails

The Order of Christ might have remained a minor regional curiosity had it not acquired, in the fifteenth century, a Grand Master whose ambitions reached far beyond Portugal's borders. Prince Henry, later remembered as Henry the Navigator, held the position from 1420 until his death in 1460, and he used the order's revenues and its exemption from certain crown obligations to underwrite the maritime expeditions that pushed steadily down the West African coast during his lifetime. The order's distinctive emblem, a red cross pattée with a white field at its center, descended visually from the Templar cross that had marked the order's founders two centuries earlier, and it was painted onto the sails of the caravels that carried Portuguese crews into increasingly unfamiliar waters. That visual inheritance tied the voyages of the fifteenth century back to an order whose institutional memory, if not its formal mission, still stretched to the Crusader states that had given the original Templars their purpose before the fall of Acre in 1291 ended the Latin presence in the Holy Land.

A Symbol That Outlasted the Order

The Order of Christ's cross did not stay confined to a religious-military brotherhood. After Manuel, who had served as the order's governor before becoming King Manuel I of Portugal in 1495, the emblem was increasingly treated as a symbol of the crown and the kingdom's overseas ventures rather than of the order alone, paired in Portuguese iconography with the armillary sphere that also became a mark of the Age of Discoveries. Centuries later, long after Portugal's fortunes had been reshaped by episodes like the union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns between 1580 and 1640, the cross of the Order of Christ remained visible on Portuguese military insignia, a fragment of Templar visual identity that had migrated, through the accident of Dinis's fourteenth-century diplomacy, into the symbolic vocabulary of a modern nation-state. It is a strikingly different afterlife from the one imagined by the medieval cross the Templars themselves wore as marks of penitential warfare in the Holy Land.

Conclusion

What happened in Portugal after 1312 was not really a survival story in the sense of secret continuity or hidden brotherhoods; it was a straightforward act of royal statecraft. Dinis I recognized that the Templars' Portuguese estates, fortresses, and experienced fighting men were too valuable to hand to a rival order or scatter through confiscation, and Pope John XXII, negotiating from Avignon with a monarch who controlled the property in question, had little practical reason to refuse. The result was an order that carried forward the Temple's castles, its cross, and much of its personnel under a new charter — one that, a century later, would help finance Portugal's opening of the Atlantic world.

Frequently asked questions

Was the Order of Christ secretly the same organization as the Knights Templar? Not secretly, but substantially in practice. King Dinis I arranged for many of the same fortresses, revenues, and former Templar brothers in Portugal to pass into the new order chartered by Pope John XXII in 1319, so the institutional and personal continuity was real, even though the Order of Christ was a legally distinct body created by papal bull rather than a Templar order operating under an assumed name.

Why did Portugal keep its Templar properties instead of handing them to the Hospitallers? The bull Ad Providam of May 1312, which assigned most former Templar assets to the Knights Hospitaller, explicitly excepted Castile, Aragon, Portugal, and Majorca, leaving their disposition open to further negotiation. King Dinis used that opening to petition for a new Portuguese order rather than let the property pass to a rival institution.

What was Henry the Navigator's connection to the Order of Christ? Henry served as the order's Grand Master from 1420 until his death in 1460, and he drew on its wealth and privileges to help finance the Portuguese voyages down the African coast associated with the early Age of Discoveries, which is why the order's cross appeared on the sails of Portuguese ships during this period.

Where was the Order of Christ headquartered? It was founded at the church of Santa Maria do Castelo in Castro Marim in the Algarve in 1319, then later moved its seat to the fortress-town of Tomar, the former principal stronghold of the Knights Templar in Portugal, where the Convent of Christ still stands today.

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