Force
Knights Templar
The military order of warrior-monks that guarded pilgrim routes to the Holy Land and became the elite shock cavalry of the Crusades.
The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon — the Templars — were founded around 1119 to protect pilgrims on the roads of the newly conquered Holy Land, and grew into medieval Europe's first standing professional army: warrior-monks under vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, answerable only to the Pope.
In the field they were the Crusader States' armored spearhead. The white mantle with the red cross marked knights sworn never to retreat unless outnumbered beyond the Rule's limits; their disciplined conrois charge — knee to knee, lances down — was the most feared shock tactic of the age, delivered at Montgisard, Arsuf, and a century of desperate defenses. The Rule governed everything from horses per brother to silence at meals: discipline as devotion.
The order's second life was financial — castles, estates, and a letter-of-credit network that made it banker to kings — and that wealth killed it. Philip IV of France, deep in Templar debt, engineered mass arrests on Friday, 13 October 1307; confessions under torture, suppression by the Pope in 1312, and the burning of Grand Master Jacques de Molay in 1314 ended the order and began seven centuries of legend, none of it richer than the history.
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Arming Sword
The arming sword was the one-handed, double-edged sword of the medieval knight, carried from the eleventh to the fifteenth century with a shield or buckler. With its straight crossguard and heavy pommel it formed the cross shape that became the symbol of knighthood and the Crusades, and it was the sword of the Knights Templar and of every man-at-arms who fought in the Holy Land. Ewart Oakeshott's types X to XIV describe its development from a broad cutting blade to a tapering one made to thrust.
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Great Helm
The great helm was the fully enclosed, flat-topped or sugarloaf helmet of the high medieval knight, worn from around 1220 until the mid fourteenth century over a mail coif and often over a smaller skullcap as well. Riveted together from several iron plates, pierced by narrow eye slits and breathing holes, it gave the mounted lancer the most complete head protection yet seen in Europe at the cost of vision, hearing and air. Topped with heraldic crests, it became the knight's badge of rank, and it survives in coats of arms to this day.
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Trebuchet
The counterweight trebuchet was the heaviest artillery of the Middle Ages: a great pivoting beam whose short arm carried a box of earth or stone weighing many tons, and whose long arm swung a sling that hurled stones of 50 to 150 kilograms against castle walls. Descended from the Chinese man-powered traction engine, it appeared around the Mediterranean in the late twelfth century, battered Acre, Stirling and Xiangyang, and dominated siege warfare for two hundred years until gunpowder bombards made stone-throwing obsolete.