330 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



The Order spread with remarkable rapidity, and gifts of land, 

 money, and privileges flowed in upon the Templars. Pope Euge- 

 nius III (1146) gave the Order the right to wear a red cross on 

 their white mantle, as a symbol of their readiness to shed their blood 

 for the Cross. He also remitted one-seventh part of the Church fines 

 to those who gave money to or entered the brotherhood. Hadrian IV 

 gave them further exemptions from tenths, &c., but it was left to 

 Pope Alexander III to confer on them the most convincing proof of the 

 esteem in which they were held. In 1173 he gave formal permission 

 to the Order to enroll priests as chaplains, and exempted them from 

 episcopal authority. The brethren were exhorted to confess to their 

 chaplains exclusively, " car ils ont greignor pooer de I'apostoile, d'eaus 

 assoudre, que un arceiiesque." In the general enthusiasm, even 

 princes hastened to enter their ranks, and bequeathed their domains 

 to the Master and brethren of the Temple. Even as late as 1243, the 

 Dominicans, by a statute of the General Chapter of the Order, 

 engaged to solicit from each dying person whom they confessed a 

 legacy for the Templars.^ 



Meanwhile, the Templars were constantly recruiting their forces 

 in the East from their preceptories in the West, and carrying on a stub- 

 born and deadly contest against the Mohammedans. Unfortunately 

 for the cause, they were continually at strife with the Order of the 

 Hospitallers. This body had originated in the efforts of some 

 Italian merchants to care for the sick at Jerusalem, but they gradually 

 extended their sphere of action to protecting the pilgrims on their 

 way to the Holy Sepulchre. They styled themselves Knights of the 

 Hospital of S. John of Jerusalem, from S. John the Eleemosynary, a 

 canonised patriarch of Alexandria, to whom the chapel of one of their 

 hospitals had been dedicated; and finally became a military and 

 monastic Order of Knights, like the Templars, for the protection of 

 Christendom. These two Orders were continually at variance, and one 

 of the charges afterwards brought against the Templars was that by 

 their frequent quarrels they had injured the cause of Christ in the 

 wars against the infidels. 



There does not appear to have been any settlement of the Templars 

 in Ireland before Henry II landed on these shores, as far as can be 

 gathered from the Irish Annals. But the King of England, soon after 

 his conquest of this country, granted by charter certain lands to the 

 Order. We must remember that Henry II, to appease the indignation 



1 Michelet, " Histoire de France," vol. iii., p. 120. 



