While the specifics of their origins, their shady remit or indeed any real rock-solid details may well elude your average Joe or Joanne, the image of the Templars is still quite a powerful one. For a relatively small band of 12th Century religious crusaders, their impact on popular culture is as significant as it is enduring.

You may not appreciate it immediately, but it doesn’t take too much head scratching before you’ll soon start to recall just some of the many times the Knight Templars have featured in a television programme, movie, video game, novel or even comic book that you’ve enjoyed. Not only that, but their legacy continues in a more oblique way as well, with a lot of ‘orders’ and military factions appearing across all pop culture mediums that are clearly influenced by or based directly on the Templars.

We’ve seen the distinctive chainmail and white surcoat adorned with its red cross in all sorts of places down the years, perhaps most notably in films such as Ironclad, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Kingdom of Heaven and National Treasure. And in certain TV series’ like Carnivàle. There are plenty of major works of literature featuring the ancient order too, of course. Novels to make the Knights Templar pivotal to their plots include Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and Umberto Eco's Foucault’s Pendulum. To name but a few.