1128
Council of Troyes approves Templar Rule
Bernard of Clairvaux drafted a Latin rule for the fledgling Templars and presented it at Troyes. Overnight the order of nine poor knights acquired official status, a white mantle, and the authority to recruit and accept land donations across Europe. Within a decade they were continent-wide. Bernard's treatise In Praise of the New Knighthood provided the theological justification, arguing that killing in defense of the Holy Land was not homicide but malicide.
Geoffrey of Anjou marries Empress Matilda
Henry I married his widowed daughter to a fourteen-year-old Angevin count whose yellow broom sprig gave his house the name Plantagenet. Matilda was twenty-five and furious. Their eldest son Henry would inherit an empire stretching from the Pyrenees to Scotland. The marriage was stormy from the start; the couple separated repeatedly, and Matilda regarded her young husband with the contempt of a former empress for a provincial count.
Battle of Sao Mamede
Afonso Henriques, a young Portuguese count, defeated his own mother Teresa's forces outside Guimaraes and seized independent control of the county of Portugal. Within a few years he would be styling himself king of a new Iberian state that Rome would recognize by mid-century. The battle is commemorated in Portuguese tradition as the founding moment of the nation, marking the point where Portugal's destiny diverged from the rest of the peninsula.
Matilda of Boulogne inherits the county
Matilda I inherited the County of Boulogne and, with her husband Stephen of Blois, began assembling the cross-Channel territorial base that would soon allow Stephen to seize the English throne. Her diplomatic skill would later rescue her husband more than once during the Anarchy, negotiating truces and raising armies with an effectiveness that contemporaries, uncomfortable praising a woman's political acumen, attributed to divine providence.
David I founds Holyrood
The Scottish king and former English earl founded the Augustinian abbey of Holyrood outside his palace at Edinburgh after, as legend would have it, a miraculous escape from a wild stag. The abbey became a focus of royal patronage and later the seat of Scottish parliaments. David's foundation was part of a wider program of introducing Norman institutions and religious orders into Scotland, transforming its church and governance.