Centuries later it is clear that, however powerful and perhaps even out of control the Templars were, they never engaged in heresy nor posed a threat to the existing order. Rulers everywhere in Europe but Iberia followed Philip's example and succeeded in completely suppressing the order. In a great show of power, Philip had their grand master, Jacques de Molay, burned at the stake. After a seven-year legal process in which the prosecutors relied heavily on torture, humiliation, and other psychological inducements to get the answers they sought, the Templars were finally found guilty of apostasy. King Philip IV of France struck against the order, seizing its members and confiscating their wealth. In 1307, as the Templars were planning yet another Crusade to return to Palestine, this resentment boiled over. The failure of these fighting monks to hold the Holy Land from the Muslims, when combined with their secrecy, great wealth, and arrogance, fueled resentment of their power as well as rumors about their having hidden goals. The Templars had so active and prominent a role in the Crusaders' wars that their prestige, more than that of any other order, depended on the situation in the East, and the fall of Acre caused their reputation to suffer. But banking practices also made them morally suspect, for such financial activities transgressed deeply held feudal norms and were seen as contradicting their professed piety.Īnother problem arose when Acre, the last Crusader stronghold, fell in 1291. Combined with their noble patronage, this occupation made the Templars very wealthy. Before long, they held vast sums in deposit for example, they became bankers to most of the French royal family. Combined with their far-flung military power and their reputation for probity, this spurred the Templars to offer proto-banking practices at a time when deposit banking did not yet exist. John and the Teutonic Knights.Īs men engaged in fighting, always an expensive activity, the Templars had a constant need of funds that made them different from other monastic orders. Their model inspired the founding of other Christian military orders, including the Knights Hospitallers of St. The Templars also won the fervent backing of Bernard of Clairvaux, an immensely influential cleric, and through him, the sponsorship of popes and noblemen as well as nearly universal acclaim in Catholic Europe. The group came to be known as the Military Order of Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon, or Templars for short. The king of Jerusalem welcomed the help provided by Payns and his companions symbolic of this esteem, he installed them on the holiest spot in Jerusalem, the Temple Mount, where they lived in Al-Aqsa Mosque. In effecting this combination, they "invented an absolutely novel figure, that of the monk-knight." This radical notion turned out to be both powerful and threatening. A group of soldiers, renowned for their anarchism and their devotion to plunder and women, had become soldiers for Christ. ![]() Theirs was a new, remarkable, and confusing development that merged two utterly different callings: the clergy (absolutely forbidden to engage in conflict) and the soldiery (which did so incessantly). The group adhered to a rule not much different from that of other monastic orders, with the exception of provisions that permitted them to make war. ![]() ![]() 57-59, to explain why this piece of medieval news still matters intensely to some people today:Įarly in 1119, a French nobleman named Hugues de Payns and nine of his companions dedicated themselves to protect Christian pilgrims on their way to and from Jerusalem, solemnizing this oath by adopting the monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Here is some background on of this longest lived of all "secret societies" from my book, Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes, and Where It Comes From (Free Press, 1997), pp. In a sensational bit of sleuthing, Barbara Frale, a medievalist at the Vatican's Secret Archives, stumbled in 2001 on Processus Contra Templarios, a compilation of original documents dating from 1307-12 on the French trial of the Knights Templar and the Vatican's response.
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