First let me say, if I have any historical inaccuracy in my question please let me know because I hope to someday be a professor (still have quite a way to go though) and want to take every opportunity to learn.
I know that the Knights of the Temple of Solomon were disbanded by the “officially” disbanded by Pope Clement V in 1312 after a significant amount of controversy. I was talking with a friend about the crusades the other day and we started theorizing about what if the Knights Templar still existed underground. That got me wondering, is there was any historical evidence supporting the idea that they carried on after their official disbanding?
There is no evidence of the Templars continuing to exist as an organisation after 1312. Most of the Templars who survived the trials were shipped off to other monasteries where they lived out the rest of their lives.
There was a successor to the order that emerged in Portugal though. The brethren there were not put on trial but they were still arrested and their lands seized by the crown, a process that was already in motion before the first arrests of the order in 1307. In 1319, King Dinis I of Portugal used the former Templar lands in his kingdom to found a new military order, the Order of Christ. There was some transfer of personnel, with the onetime master of the Portuguese Templars ending his days as the commander of the order’s preceptory of Montalvão on the eastern border of Portugal. The Order of Christ’s associations with the Templars has led many pseudo-histories to claim that this was a vehicle for the Templar order to survive, but beyond inheriting the Temple’s lands and some of its members, this was fundamentally a different organisation to that of the Templars, being largely under the control of the Portuguese crown, rather than an exempt order of the church subject only to the pope himself.
Some pseudo-histories also claim that the Templars escaped to Scotland, where they were welcomed by Robert the Bruce, eventually unifying with the Scottish branch of the Hospitallers. Again, there is no historical evidence whatsoever to back this up. In fact, Robert was unlikely to have welcomed any Templars to his kingdom as the Templars had sided with Edward I in the Wars of Independence. The king would also have been wary of angering his French allies by harbouring members of an order they had destroyed or of further angering the pope, who had already excommunicated Robert and whose legitimation the king desperately needed, by supporting the former members of an order suppressed following a heresy trial.
If the Templar order had survived the trials, it would likely have either demilitarised, like the Order of St Lazarus and the Hospital of St Thomas of Acre did in the decades following the loss of the Latin East in 1291, or become secularised, like the Iberian orders of Santiago and Calatrava.
Sources:
Clive Porro, ‘Reassessing the Dissolution of the Templars: King Dinis and Their Suppression in Portugal’, in Jochen Burgtorf, Paul F. Crawford, Helen Nicholson (eds), The Debate on the Trial of the Templars (1307-1314) (Abingdon, 2010), pp. 171-82.
José Valente, ‘The New Frontier: The Role of the Knights Templar in the Establishment of Portugal as an Independent Kingdom’, Mediterranean Studies, 7 (1998), pp. 49-65.