My notes on the Knights Templar

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Video script I was writing before I canned it, notes in first reply below:

So, the narrative concerning the Order of the Knights Templar is that it was begun by a poor, simple man who with eight other knights formed an order to help protect pilgrims travelling the holy land, and that this order was so poor in its beginnings that they had to share horses and could not even afford clothing. The truth is that the founder, Hugues de Payens, was part of the court of Count Hugh of Champagne. Together they visited Jerusalem in 1116, and Hugues de Payens stayed to form the Order, at the minimum with Count Hugh’s permission, likely upon his command. All the other eight founding knights were related to Hugues de Payens through blood or marriage, and under Count Hugh’s command as well. It was a family affair. Count Hugh himself would join the Order in a few years. None of them were poor. The Order presented itself as poor through propaganda: they chose for their emblem two men seated on a single horse to demonstrate their need for funds, yet the Order’s rules from the beginning state that no knight should have more than three horses, demonstrating a need to limit the amount of horses to care for, not a need for more, and it even states that horses should not be shared.



The reason for this is that the Crusades had created a new barely yet tapped source of revenue: conning rich kings and lords into donating money to the cause as their contribution to avoid the shame of not joining it. Count Hugh of Champagne immediately employed his connections, sending Hugues de Payens on a tour of western Europe to plead his cause at dozens of courts and cozen huge donations from figures as large as the King of England. Likewise, any new knight who could be convinced to join the order would have to give over all of his wealth and properties to it, repeating the tactic Christianity had used in the beginning to pool wealth and use it to take power.



Nephew to one of the founding members of the Order was Bernard of Clairvaux, a high noble of Burgundy who appropriated the Order of Cistercians, a small schism movement of the Benedictine Order. Using their wealth, they would quickly build up the Cistercians as one of the leading monastic orders, which would subsequently attract donations from nobles, concluding it to be a wise long term investment financially, but far more so in terms of power. Bernard would quickly gain great influence with the Church of Rome, and would become the link between Rome and the Knights Templar, securing them many privileges and benefits. Quote: “the ability of the papacy to provide the Order with positive help had been severely hampered by the schism between Anti pope Anacletus the Second and Innocent the Second, making the 1130s an acutely difficult period for the papacy. The support given by Saint Bernard and the French clergy to Innocent the Second inevitably connected the Temple to his cause, an allegiance repaid at the Council of Pisa when Innocent granted the Order a mark of gold each year, his chancellor, Aimeric, contributed two ounces of gold, and each of the archbishops, bishops, and abbots, and ‘other good men’ a mark of silver. Others made similar donations.’ Since 113 bishops attended, this made a substantial contribution to the Order’s resources, as well as setting an example for other clerics not present.” End quote. A Cistercian would soon become Pope, Pope Eugenius the Third, who would become known as a puppet of Bernard.



By seizing the opportunity of a new financial market, a small interconnected family of Frenchmen had suddenly gained great power. Modern researchers and producers of course know the family connections, they are even readable on Wikipedia, but you will be hard pressed to find a book or documentary that even mentions it, let alone scrutinizes it. It must be assumed that any book or film which does does not get published or released. There is an obvious modern conspiracy to portray the Templars only in a good light, that every accusation against them was a baseless lie and that they were merely an order who got into banking for the sake of jesus.



The first western land grant the Templars received was of course from Count Hugh of Champagne’s successor, Count Theobald, in 1127. This was then encouraged as a trend, by the reasoning that the Templars needed ever more money and simple one-time donations weren’t enough. They needed stability, a steady supply of income to protect Christendom and fight the holy war. Nobles were cajoled into handing over parts of their land, many pressured by the Church, and soon Rome would grant the Templars legal privileges to the extent that they were only answerable to the Pope of Rome, enabling them to do whatever they pleased, creating states within states.



Despite their rapid gains in donations, property and wealth in the west, they appeared to put little of it towards fulfilling the stated cause of the Order. In the period before the arrival of the Second Crusade in 1148, William of Tyre mentions the Templars in connection with only two military actions: the siege of Damascus in 1129 and a minor skirmish near Hebron ten years later. Both ended in failure: in 1129 many men from the considerable force Hugues de Payens appears to have recruited were killed while foraging in territory unfamiliar to them, while the 1139 engagement cost the life of a well-known Templar, Odo of Montfaucon.' The author of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle complained that when the men who had been recruited by Hugues de Payens in 1128 actually arrived in the east they found that he had been lying in telling them that a great war was raging between the Christians and the pagans.”



Not everybody would be fooled by their propaganda of false poverty: John of Salisbury would write, quote: “Still it is entirely wicked that, enticed by the love of money, they open churches which were closed by bishops. Those suspended from office celebrate the sacraments, they bury the dead whom the Church refuses, and they act once a year so that during the rest of the year the erring people are deaf to the voice of the Church; and he who cannot be coerced seems to be corrected. Therefore, they travel around to the churches, they praise the merits of their own Orders, they bring absolution for crimes and sometimes they preach a new gospel, falsifying the word of God because they preach living not by grace but by a price, by pleasure and not by truth. And in the end, when they convene in their lairs late at night, ‘after speaking of virtue by day they shake their hips in nocturnal folly and exertion’. If one moves in this fashion towards Christ, then the doctrine of the Fathers which teaches that the narrow and steep path heads towards the true life of man is false and vain.” End quote.



Desire for money over mission aims can perhaps be witnessed in further actions. When the Second Crusade failed, the Templars were blamed. Quote: “In particular they blamed the resident Franks who were known to have been in alliance with Unur, ruler of Damascus, before the crusade, and to have received payments from him in the past. Some German writers, prompted by the desire.to explain Conrad’s failure, claimed that the Templars had deliberately engineered the retreat. According to the anonymous Wurzburg annalist, the attack would have succeeded had it not been for the ‘greed, deceit, and envy’ of the Templars, who had accepted a massive bribe to give secret aid to the besieged.’ End quote.

 

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After the failure of the crusade at the Siege of Damascus in 1148, Louis returned to France, followed by Everard, who was in charge of the king's treasury.

As early as October 1127, at Provins, Theobald, Count of Blois, the
nephew and successor of Count Hugh in Champagne, granted the
Templars a house, grange, and meadow, together with a tenement
of one carucate, at Barbonne, near Sézanne to the north-east of
Provins, as well as conceding to his own vassals the right to make
gifts from their own lands, provided this involved no loss of service.”

y the claim that the Master threatened that ‘the Templars would put
aside their white mantles, and sell and pawn [what they have], if the
shame of what the Saracens had done to him and his Order were not
avenged. The king dared not contradict him, ‘for he loved and feared
him because he had made him king, and had handed over to him the
treasure of the king of England’.'?

atthew Paris’ main reason for copying the letter seems to have
been to discredit it, for it is followed by a diatribe in which he says
that the letter was scarcely to be believed, for the Temple and the
Hospital had such bad reputations, ‘because, it is said, they always
provoke discord between Christians and Saracens, so that during the
war they might collect money from pilgrims arriving from all parts;
both because of their mutual discord and because of this they were
plotting the capture of the emperor’.'” But Frederick II was well
aware that his policy had indeed been overthrown, since both the
return of the Temple area to the Christians and the proposed fortress
near T’oron were quite contrary to the treaty which he had negotiated
in 1229. He wrote angrily to tell the Master and brothers that this
was contrary to his honour and that if they did not desist he would
confiscate all Templar property in Germany and Sicily.

templars accused of not allowing victory in egypt so that they would not lose need for their control over the levant.

matthew paris: On
hearing this, the count became very angry, claiming that this proved
the truth of a past prophecy, which said that the whole region would
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THE NEW KNIGHTHOOD
long ago have fallen to the Christians had not their efforts been
impeded by the military orders, who hindered the crusade for their
own profit. If the crusaders overcame Egypt, he said, the military
orders would no longer be able to dominate the land from which
they drew such large revenues. ‘Is not Frederick, who has experienced their deceit, a most proven witness upon these things?’ T

Major decisions over whether to make war or
agree to a truce, whether to alienate land or acquire a castle, who
should be appointed to positions of command, who should be sent
to the west either because of illness or for administrative reasons, or
who could be received into the Order, could only be taken in
consultation with the Chapter. Similarly, although he was entitled to
withdraw up to 3,000 besants from the treasury if he was intending to
go to Tripoli or Antioch, he could do so only with the permission of
the Commander of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, ‘who is Treasurer of
the convent and who should keep and guard the keys of the treasury’.

The trial depositions demonstrate
that, in the west, there was an extensive class of artisan Templars,
identified by the trial notaries as serviens or serving brothers, often of
an age and physical condition which would have precluded serious
military activity.*° The term serviens is not used in the Rule, but
references to ‘the craftsmen brothers of the stables’ and ‘mason
brothers’, as well as to blacksmiths and cooks, (pg 218)

According to
the reports of the pilgrims John of Wurzburg and Theoderich during
the 1160s and 1170s, the Templars were laying the foundations of a
large new church at right angles to the north end of the al-Aqsa
mosque.* Although the loss of the Temple area in 1187 meant that
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THE NEW KNIGHTHOOD
this project was never completed, it seems that they intended to build
here on a lavish scale. The church would have run across the Temple
platform to the west of the al-Aqsa and, together with the vaulted
halls along the western and southern sides, would have enclosed a
large square or cloister, an arrangement which could not have failed
to impress western visitors. The discovery in this area of the remains
of limestone blocks with Templar inscriptions which were probably
part of a vertical wall face, together with the existence of a flourishing
workshop on the Templar platform capable of producing very high
quality sculpture, suggests decoration in the manner planned for the
contemporary Church of the Annunciation at Nazareth. (219)

Relics were also used to strengthen links with potential patrons in
the west and to maintain interest in the affairs of the Holy Land. In
1247 it was a Templar who brought to London a crystalline phial
containing Christ’s blood, shed on the Cross, which had been sent
by the Masters of the Temple and the Hospital and authenticated by
the seals of the Patriarch of Jerusalem and the other prelates of the
Holy Land, while in 1272 Thomas Bérard sent to London pieces of
the True Cross, together with relics of saints Philip, Helena, Stephen,
Laurence, Euphemia, and Barbara.” In Castile, the Templars had the
church of Segovia built in a striking position in open country outside
the north wall of the city specifically to house a fragment of the True
Cross (see plate 9), and in Paris on feast days the Order exhibited the
relic collection kept at the house, including remains of the famous
II,000 virgins of Cologne.”* Moreover, because of their role as
money-lenders, the Templars often held relics as pledges for loans,
and these are not infrequently found in the treasuries of local Templar
houses. The reliquary bust of St Policarp appears to have been
acquired in this way, pledged by the Abbot of the Temple of the
Lord and never reclaimed, while the commune of Zara on the
Dalmatian coast handed over a large collection of reliquary arms of
saints and crosses to the Master of Hungary and Slavonia in return
for a loan, finally redeemed as late as April 1308. (226)

By the late twelfth century, Walter Map was claiming that
both the Templars and the Hospitallers accepted advowsons of
churches from knights who entered their orders, often under the
pressure of debt. (249)

While the economic development of Cistercian houses,
for example, was a by-product of the Order’s success in attracting
recruits, it was the raison d’étre of the Templars’ western structure. (250)

Matthew Paris, echoing Walter Map’s cynical observation of half a
century before,® chose to present Templar opposition to Egypt
(which disrupted the peace made by Frederick II in 1229) as simply
one more method of perpetuating the wars between Christians and
Saracens, wars in which the military orders appeared to him to have
a vested interest. The orders, he claimed, actually had adequate
resources to achieve victory over the Saracens, for the Templars had
9,000 manors and the Hospitallers 19,000, besides their other revenues and privileges, and every manor could furnish a fully equipped
knight for the Holy Land. Yet, since victory had not been achieved,
despite the participation of ‘many vigorous western knights’ in the
crusades, Christians had come to believe that the military orders
must be perpetrating some kind of fraud.° (256)

Trencavel family were large donors to the templars early on who held cathar lands and were killed during cathar crusade. Raymond Roger Trencavel. He relied strongly on Jews to run Béziers, his second seat of power. The city of Béziers was sacked in July and its population massacred.

The master of the Templars in Ireland was one of the financial overseers of the Irish exchequer. (count of champagne married into england royal line (stephen-henry count of champagne) who then conquered ireland).

Brother Haimard, the Treasurer,
was one of a select inner circle of advisers to the king, presiding over
the Exchequer in Normandy after the conquest of 1204, and acting
as executor of the wills of both Philip and Queen Ingebourg in
1222.'57 Haimard was the first of a continuous line of Templar
treasurers to serve the Capetian kings during the thirteenth century:
there were at least eight such men between Haimard (1202-27) and
Brother John of Tour, seized with the other Templars in France in
1307.'5® Royal influence ensured that the Paris Temple was controlled
by the man chosen by the king. (300)

The Templars were bankers not only to Louis IX,
but to his mother, brothers, and sons. (300)

In August
1274, for example, Edward I of England reimbursed the Templars
the large sum of 27,974 livres tournois borrowed during his crusade of
1272, together with 5,333 livres, 6 sous, 8 deniers for ‘administration,
expenses, and interest’.'”(303)

A look at the extant Templar and Cistercian charters from Burgundy
and Champagne confirms that of the families whose personal engagement
and material support were largely responsible for the Cistercian expansion
in Champagne and Burgundy many eventually extended their patronage
to include the Templars, and vice versa. To some extent this can be
explained by the fact that the founder of the Order, Hugh of Payns, was
a Champenois nobleman with an established social network in the region,
and that Count Hugh of Champagne, who seems to have been well
acquainted with Hugh of Payns, had already joined the Templars in
1125.
91 One other reason why the Order was instantly successful in
Burgundy and Champagne was that from the outset it attracted the
attention of families with close ties to one of the most vocal proponents
of religious reform: Bernard of Clairvaux. It was by means of this personal
link with Cîteaux, created by common patronage, that the Templars, at an
early stage, became associated with a religious order whose spiritual value
at the time was undisputed.(114)

What can be said is that many of the families who seem to have
founded, and populated, Cistercian nunneries as a way of expressing their
spiritual understanding of the penitential and charitable value of crusading
also, and often at the same time, founded and supported Templar communities and that therefore the motivations for supporting each Order in
the wider context of crusading must have been very similar.(122)

The fact that at the time when the Templars
in southern France were increasingly associated with Mary they were
infiltrated by a new clientele of families with close ties to Cistercian or
‘proto-Cistercian’ communities suggests that the one phenomenon was
linked to, or determined by, the other and that the spirituality of the
Cistercians may have played a dominant role in the religious development
of Templar families and thus, very likely, of Templar religious practice.(132)

But the number of knights and nobles with ties to the Temple who
fought the French crusaders and sympathised with heretical beliefs was
not small either. In the urban context at least, as Jörg Oberste has
shown, support for heretical ‘good men’ and ‘good women’ and engagement in Catholic institutions, including Templar communities, frequently
occurred within the same families.52 It is also plausible that some lay men
and women engaged with the Temple as a way of avoiding accusations of
heresy and in order to guard themselves against excommunication and the
interdict, in much the same manner as some of their contemporaries
suddenly involved themselves with Cîteaux (154)

The web of blood and marriage ties that can be spun around individual
Templar donors, brothers and associates eventually included a large proportion of the Burgundian and Champenois aristocracy and covered many
of the Order’s major commanderies in those regions. (214)

As is revealed in numerous charters from France, and as will be
discussed in greater detail below, the Templars of Champagne and
Burgundy benefited greatly from the benevolence and the financial
needs of their countrymen at the siege of Acre during the Third Crusade. (237)

Stephen Harding, Bernard’s predecessor
as head of the Cistercian movement, had used rabbis to help him with
textual problems in the Hebrew scriptures

It is a matter of particular interest that Bernard appears convinced
that Jews retain some special status even after the crucifi xion and that
some Biblical promises still apply to them. He writes that the Jew,
unlike the Christian, has the right to temporal riches, for he “received
the promise of a temporal reward.”3

What is especially surprising in this connection is Bernard’s use of
the verse, “Th e Lord is rebuilding Jerusalem, calling the banished sons
of Israel home,” as a prophecy of Jewish redemption.

Furthermore, Bernard maintained the most liberal of the views that
were possible within the accepted theology. It was, of course, universally
maintained that Jews should not be massacred; indeed, Psalm 59:12
(“Do not kill them ... “), which Bernard cites in his letter, was a classical
proof-text quoted very frequently to buttress this position.1

In addition, Bernard’s apparent view that even militant Jews
should be tolerated, as well as several opinions that we shall discuss below
(e.g., the unusual vigor of his insistence on their ultimate salvation and his
view that they retain a special favorable status), clearly serve to classify
his practical position on the Jews as extremely tolerant.

Whether or not Bernard would have maintained such a position in
the face of a proselytizing Judaism is surely open to question, but the fact
remains that his actual statements in this area are extremely tolerant,
especially when we compare them with his attitude toward pagans. He
writes in a letter, “We utterly forbid that for any reason whatsoever
a truce should be made with these peoples [Eastern European pagans]
... until such a time as, by God’s help, they shall be either converted or
wiped out.”

Bernard
implies that the Bible would prevail: “Let them [heretics], I say, either be
corrected by your zeal in this way lest they perish or be coerced lest they
destroy others.” He then goes on, apparently dealing with a situation in
which they might “destroy others,” and says: “But concerning the Jews,
time excuses you: Th ey have their own end which cannot be brought
earlier. Th e fulness of the nations must precede it.”

Finally, he says that Christians are
worse usurers than Jews, a statement we shall discuss below.42
In 1156 Alexander III forbade the taking of mortgages on the grounds that they
were usurious—which added to the difficulties crusaders experienced trying to
raise money. Such financial problems presumably encouraged them to borrow
money from Jews, particularly as, from the pontificate of Eugenius III onwards,
the papacy was stern in condemning money-lending by Christians, especially by
clerics.55

he countess of Champagne was appealing to the pope to ensure not only
that crusaders’ rights with regard to usurious contracts were maintained but also
that there was some degree of protection for Jews living in her territory and making
loans at interest.

 

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