No order of knights rose higher or fell harder than the Templars. Founded in 1119 to guard pilgrims on the roads to Jerusalem, they took their name from their headquarters on the Temple Mount, and their look — a white mantle with a blood-red cross — from the Pope. They became the shock troops of the crusades and, stranger still, its bankers: a Templar house would take a pilgrim's gold in Paris and honour a letter of credit for it in Acre, and kings borrowed from their vaults. That wealth helped kill them. On Friday 13 October 1307, Philip IV of France had every Templar he could seize arrested for heresy; the order was dissolved in 1312, and the last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, was burned in Paris in 1314.

King & Country give us one of those knights at a hard moment — a commander mid-order, helmet off and tucked under his arm, blood on his forehead, one hand raised to steady his men in the chaos. His mail gleams beneath a crossed surcoat, a sword at his hip and a white shield slung at his back: leadership and its cost in one figure. Set him with the Templar and the Lazarene and the Lazarist Commander to gather the orders' officers, or turn him toward Saladin, who broke the Frankish army at Hattin. In a diorama he anchors a command stand, holding the line where the fighting is worst.

Model: MK194 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 1 piece set