It’s time for the big show. French failed aristocracy pumped up on faith and the desire to kill heathens (or poor people).
Templar Knights
By now there’s not much more I can say, there aren’t any original colours on here. The miniatures are again Legio Heroica, but they’re not the Templars from that range. Instead they’re from a few years later and they’re a few sets from the Teutonic range. In here we’ve got some FEU20 (Mounted Teutonic Knights), FEU21 (Mounted Teutonic sergeants) and FEU19 (Teutonic Knights Command). These miniatures, particularly the bucket helmet equipped, are the modern image of the Templar Knight. The options in Legio’s Crusader range are from a few decades earlier.
I think these lads look their best from the flanks where you can see the crosses on the flank of the caparisons. If you look really carefully you will also see red crosses on the chests of the Knights, the right corner of their capes. When you add this up it’s 7 crosses per miniature (4 on the horse, 2 on the rider, 1 on the shield), across 18 miniatues that’s a lot of crosses and redrawn lines. I’m in no rush to start another Templar project (nor Hospitaller). In fact if it has shields with straight lines I’m going to need some time to rebuild before then.
I haven’t talk much about these guys, but they’ve been chugging along with similar units as they’ve been painted. You need miniatures to represent commanders in ADLG, and Legio make a couple of nice command sets. I’ve included the generic sets in other units as they’re mixed in. But Legio also have some character miniatures, here we have CRU01 (King Baldwin, Raymond of Tripoli, Knight with true cross).
Raymond has actually appeared a bit earlier. History wasn’t particularly kind to Raymond, but then Raymond was one of the few not captured during the disastrous (for the Crusaders) Battle of Hattin. He charged with his Knights at the Muslims to reach water and broke through. Rather than turn around and help out the rest of the army. They decided to piss of and head back to Crusader controlled territory. They got away OK, but the rest of the army was annihilated. A few of the wealthy Barons and what not were ransomed, but most were either executed or sent into slavery. Notably the Templars, Hospitallers and Turcopoles were all executed, as was Raynald de Chatillon who had been one of the reasons this whole mess started as he wouldn’t leave the Muslim pilgrims alone.
In this army Raymond is demoted to a flag bearer with the plain knights, I drilled out his hand (which was empty) and stuck a pike through it. If you go back to this post you’ll see him riding off into the sunset with his buds. The other two are present below. The sculpt of Baldwin wasn’t great as his face didn’t line up. Unlike most minis in this scale it’s actually quite visible (it’s exaggerated, I guess so it can be highlighted as a leper mask). So it needed a bit of surgery to smooth it out and make it look a bit more facelike. I’m not a sculptor, though, so it’s still not great. But as this scale it’s serviceable.
