Medieval Secret Societies: Templars, Assassins and Hidden Brotherhoods

The European and Middle Eastern Middle Ages, conventionally dated from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries CE, were a period in which the late Roman tradition of esoteric religious organization was transformed by the rise of Christianity, Islam, and the various national monarchies of post-Roman Europe. Secret societies in this period took forms very different from those of the ancient world: military religious orders like the Knights Templar, Sufi tariqas in the Islamic world, the Vehmic courts of Westphalia, the troubadour tradition of the Fedele d’Amore, and the heretical movements persecuted by the medieval Inquisition. The medieval period also saw the formation of the craft guilds of stonemasons and other trades, which would later give rise to the speculative tradition of Freemasonry. The history of medieval secret societies is thus the bridge between the ancient mystery cults and the Renaissance revival of esoteric philosophy, and it is one of the most politically and religiously complex chapters in the broader history of secret societies.

The Knights Templar

The Knights Templar, formally the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, were founded in 1119 CE by the French knight Hugues de Payens and a small group of companions in the years following the First Crusade. The order’s mission was to protect Christian pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land, and its members took the standard monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, combined with the military duty of defending the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Within a few decades, the Templars had become enormously wealthy, partly through donations from European Christians, partly through a sophisticated early form of international banking, and partly through the booty of military campaigns.

The Templars were not a “secret society” in the modern sense: they were a recognized military order under papal authority, and their existence was public knowledge. Yet the order developed a number of features that gave them an air of secrecy: an elaborate initiation ritual, an internal hierarchy, a private rule of life, and a set of esoteric doctrines about the nature of Christ, the Holy Grail, and the sacred geometry of the Temple of Jerusalem. The most controversial claims about the Templars — that they worshipped a head called Baphomet, that they practiced sodomy, that they denied Christ, and that they engaged in secret magical rituals — were made during their suppression by the French king Philip IV and the papacy of Clement V between 1307 and 1314. Many of these claims were extracted under torture, and most modern historians regard them as fabrications designed to justify the seizure of the order’s wealth. The order was dissolved by Pope Clement V at the Council of Vienne in 1312, and the last grand master, Jacques de Molay, was burned at the stake in Paris in 1314. For a careful examination of the popular legends surrounding the order, see Knights Templar myths debunked.

The Order of Assassins

The Order of Assassins, known in European sources as the Assassins and in Arabic as the Hashashin (a term whose etymology is disputed but which may refer to hashish use or to a corruption of the Arabic word for “follower”), was a Nizari Ismaili sect active in Persia, Syria, and parts of the Levant from the late eleventh to the mid-thirteenth centuries. The order was founded by Hassan-i Sabbah, who seized the fortress of Alamut in the Elburz Mountains of Persia in 1090 and used it as the base for a network of mountain fortresses throughout the region.

The Assassins became famous in the European imagination for their use of targeted political murder: the order’s fida’i (devotees) carried out the assassination of selected political and military figures, including the Fatimid vizier al-Afdal, the Seljuk sultan Berkyaruq’s chancellor Nizam al-Mulk, and — in European legend, though the historical evidence is weaker — Conrad of Montferrat, the de facto ruler of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. The order was hierarchical, with the Grand Master at the top and a graded system of initiates below. Members took oaths of obedience to the Grand Master, and the order’s internal structure, ritual, and political doctrine were concealed from outsiders.

The order was eventually destroyed by the Mongol invasions of the mid-thirteenth century: the Syrian branch fell to the Mongols in 1273, and the Persian branch fell in 1256 when the Grand Master Rukn al-Din Khurshah surrendered the fortress of Maymun-Diz to the Mongols. The Nizari Ismaili tradition that survived continued into the modern era as the Ismaili branch of Shia Islam, now led by the Aga Khan. The Assassins thus represent one of the most politically effective medieval secret societies, and the legends surrounding them — including the so-called “Old Man of the Mountain” stories that circulated in European chronicles — contributed to the European image of the secret society as a sinister political force. The Assassins are an important example of the broader pattern examined in Why Were Secret Societies Formed? — political resistance conducted by a small, oath-bound, hierarchical group.

Sufi Tariqas and the Islamic Brotherhoods

In the medieval Islamic world, the Sufi tariqas (brotherhoods) performed many of the same functions as the Christian monastic orders: contemplative practice, mutual aid, hospitality to travelers, and the preservation of esoteric teachings. Sufi orders often operated as semi-secret organizations, with graded initiations, oaths of obedience to a master (sheikh or murshid), and doctrines about the inner meanings of the Quran and the path of spiritual realization. Major medieval Sufi orders included the Qadiriyya (founded by Abdul Qadir Gilani in the twelfth century), the Suhrawardiyya, the Mawlawiyya (the Whirling Dervishes, founded by Jalal al-Din Rumi in the thirteenth century), and the Naqshbandiyya.

Some Sufi orders developed political dimensions that brought them into conflict with the orthodox religious establishment and with secular authorities. The Bektashi order, founded in the thirteenth century by Haji Bektash Veli, became closely associated with the Janissaries, the elite infantry corps of the Ottoman Empire. The Janissaries were originally recruited from Christian boys taken from their families, converted to Islam, and raised in barracks under Bektashi spiritual guidance. The Janissary corps, with its Bektashi affiliation, functioned for centuries as a kind of secret military brotherhood within the Ottoman state, and its abolition in 1826 by Sultan Mahmud II was one of the most consequential reforms of the early modern Middle East.

The Sufi brotherhoods are an important reminder that the medieval history of secret societies was not exclusively European. The same period that produced the Knights Templar, the Vehmic courts, and the troubadour tradition also produced the Assassins, the Bektashi, and the various Shia and Ismaili esoteric orders of Persia and Syria. The full account of medieval secret society formation must include both Christian and Islamic contexts, and the history of secret societies treats them as parallel developments within a single broad tradition.

The Vehmic Courts of Westphalia

The Vehmic courts (Vehmgerichte or Feme) were a system of secret tribunals that operated in Westphalia and other parts of northwestern Germany from at least the twelfth century until the sixteenth. The Vehmic courts were formally part of the imperial judicial system, but in practice they functioned as secret societies: members were bound by oath, the proceedings were held in private, the names of members were kept secret from non-members, and the sentences of the courts — which could include outlawry and, in principle, death — were carried out by the members themselves.

The Vehmic system reached its peak in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the Holy Roman Emperor formally recognized the courts and granted them jurisdiction over serious crimes in regions where the regular courts were weak. The courts’ procedure was elaborate and ritualized: trials were held at night, in secret locations, before a presiding Freigraf (free count), and the members wore ceremonial robes and used symbolic gestures and passwords. By the sixteenth century, however, the Vehmic system had declined as the regular German judicial system became more effective, and the courts were finally suppressed in the early modern period. The Vehmic tradition is an important early example of a Germanic secret society, and it has been claimed (though not historically established) as one of the ancestral traditions of later Germanic and Rosicrucian esotericism.

The Fedele d’Amore and the Troubadour Tradition

Among the more unusual medieval secret societies is the Fedele d’Amore (the “Faithful of Love”), a circle of Italian poets and intellectuals active in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The members of the Fedele d’Amore — including Dante Alighieri, Guido Cavalcanti, Cino da Pistoia, and others — communicated through a coded poetic language in which the language of romantic love was used to disguise a deeper esoteric doctrine. The historical existence of the Fedele d’Amore as a formal organization is debated, and some scholars (notably the Italian philologist Luigi Valli) have argued that the group constituted a heretical Christian sect whose doctrine of “love” was actually a doctrine of esoteric spiritual realization. Other scholars regard the Fedele d’Amore as a literary and social phenomenon rather than a formal organization. The debate is not fully resolved, but the Fedele d’Amore tradition is important for the later development of Italian esoteric thought, and it is one of the forerunners of the Renaissance revival of esoteric philosophy.

The Cathars and Medieval Heretical Movements

The Cathars (also known as Albigensians, after the city of Albi in southern France) were a Christian dualist movement that flourished in southern France and northern Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The Cathars taught a doctrine of two principles — a good god of spirit and an evil god of matter — and they rejected the sacraments, the priesthood, and the authority of the established church. The Cathar movement was the target of the Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229), one of the most violent episodes of medieval religious persecution, and of the medieval Inquisition, which was established in the early thirteenth century partly to suppress the Cathars and related movements.

The Cathars were not, in most modern historical assessments, a secret society: they were a public heretical movement with their own bishops, priests, and places of worship. Yet the structure of the Cathar church — with its graded system of initiates (the perfecti, who had received the consolamentum) and ordinary believers (the credentes) — shared many features with the mystery-cult tradition, and the consolamentum itself, a laying on of hands that conferred the Holy Spirit, was a ritual reserved for the initiated. The Cathar tradition contributed to the later development of esoteric and mystical thought, and the persecution of the Cathars established a precedent for the treatment of esoteric religious minorities in Christian Europe.

The Medieval Craft Guilds and the Origins of Freemasonry

The medieval craft guilds, particularly those of the stonemasons who built the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe, are the immediate ancestors of the modern fraternal tradition of Freemasonry. The stonemasons’ guilds were organizations of skilled craftsmen who regulated the practice of their trade, trained apprentices, and supported members in distress. The guilds developed elaborate initiation rituals, secret signs and passwords (so that traveling masons could identify each other), and a graded hierarchy of apprentice, fellow, and master. The Regius Poem of 1390 and the Halliwell Manuscript of the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century are the earliest surviving documents of the English Masonic tradition, and they record both the trade regulations of the guilds and the legendary history of the craft.

By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the operative stonemasons’ guilds had begun to admit “accepted” or “speculative” members — gentlemen, scholars, and intellectuals who were not professional stonemasons but who were interested in the guild’s symbolism and ritual. The transformation of the operative guilds into the speculative fraternity of Freemasonry occurred gradually, and the first Grand Lodge was established in London in 1717. The medieval guild tradition is therefore the direct ancestor of the modern Masonic fraternity, and the history of secret societies treats it as one of the major continuities between the medieval and modern periods.

Conclusion

The medieval period produced a remarkable variety of secret societies, ranging from the politically effective to the religiously persecuted, from the military-religious to the contemplative. The Knights Templar, the Assassins, the Sufi orders, the Vehmic courts, the troubadour tradition, the Cathars, and the craft guilds all contributed elements to the later development of European and Middle Eastern esoteric thought. The medieval period is also the period in which the ancient mystery cult tradition was most thoroughly suppressed by the Christian church, and in which its surviving elements were transmitted through esoteric and heretical channels into the Renaissance revival of Hermeticism. The story of how this transmission occurred is one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of secret societies, and it is continued in the Renaissance secret societies of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Sources and Further Reading

The standard scholarly references are Malcolm Barber, The New Knighthood (1994) and The Trial of the Templars (1978) for the Templars; R.I. Moore, The War on Heresy (2012) and The Birth of Popular Heresy (1975) for the Cathars; Farhad Daftary, The Assassin Legends: Myths of the Ismailis (1994) and The Ismailis: Their History and Doctrines (1990, 2nd ed. 2007) for the Assassins; Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (1975) for the Sufi orders; and the relevant chapters in Jonathan Riley-Smith, ed., The Oxford History of the Crusades (1995). For the Vehmic courts, the best single account remains Barbara Green, “Vehmic Courts” in Dictionary of the Middle Ages (1989), and for the Fedele d’Amore, the critical treatment is Mark Musa, Advent at the Gates (1974).

The Knights Templar, ancient mystery cults, Renaissance secret societies, Freemasonry explained, and Knights Templar myths debunked treat the surrounding context. The history of secret societies treats the larger arc.