The Order of Christ was founded in 1319 as the direct heir of the Templars in Portugal, inheriting all their property — including Tomar — so that the suppressed Temple lived on under a new name. A century later, under Prince Henry the Navigator, it became the engine and emblem of the Portuguese age of discovery.
The Order of Christ is the clearest case of the Templars surviving their own destruction. When the Temple was suppressed in 1312, King Dinis of Portugal refused to let its wealth pass to the Hospitallers and instead had a new Portuguese order created to inherit it whole — men, castles, and Tomar alike.
For a century it was a frontier order like any other; then, under Prince Henry the Navigator, it became the spiritual and financial sponsor of the voyages that opened the age of discovery, its red cross flying on the sails of the caravels.
King Dinis argued to the papacy that the Templars’ Portuguese property had been given for the war against the Muslims and should stay in Portugal for that purpose. In 1319 Pope John XXII agreed, and by the bull Ad ea ex quibus created the Order of Christ, endowed with the entire Templar inheritance.
Many former Templars simply joined the new order, and its first seat was the frontier castle of Castro Marim before it moved to Tomar, the Templars’ own great convent — the continuity could hardly have been plainer.
In 1420 Prince Henry, called the Navigator, became governor of the Order of Christ, and he turned its vast revenues to a new kind of crusade — the exploration of the Atlantic islands and the west coast of Africa.
The order’s ships carried its cross south year after year; Madeira, the Azores, and the African coast were opened under its banner. The red Cross of Christ became the badge of Portuguese expansion, painted on the sails that later reached India and Brazil.
The governorship of the order was held by royal princes and then by the kings themselves. In 1551 the mastership was formally united with the Portuguese crown, and the order became an instrument of royal patronage.
By then its cross was known across the oceans as the mark of Portugal, from the forts of Africa to the coasts of Asia and the Americas.
The Order of Christ preserved the Templar inheritance in Portugal and then transformed it, becoming the institution that underwrote the discoveries. Its headquarters at Tomar, layering Templar rotunda and Renaissance cloister, is one of the great monuments of both stories.
It survives today as a Portuguese honorific order, but its true legacy is written on the map of the world the Portuguese sailed to under its cross.