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The first of the military orders, the Knights Templar were founded in 1118 in the aftermath of the First Crusade to help the new Kingdom of Jerusalem maintain itself against its defeated Muslim neighbors.
The Templars were organized as a monastic order, following a rule revised for them by Bernard of Clairvaux, the great leader of the Cistercian Order. They were heavily-travelled, and very trusted. Brothers who carried even a coin on their person that the Order did now know about were punsished.
There were four divisions of brothers in the Templars:
- the knights, equipped as heavy cavalry
- the serjeants, equipped as light cavalry and drawn from a lower social class than the knights
- farmers, who administered the property of the Order
- the chaplains, who were ordained priests and saw to the spiritual needs of the Order.
In addition, there were brothers devoted only to banking, as the heavily-travelled Order was often trusted with precious goods by participants in the Crusade - over time this grew into a new basis of money as Templars became increasingly involved in banking activities.
The strict prohibition against the Templars' carrying their own money seems to have been the catalyst that permitted others to trust them so completely. However, this trust attracted the jealousy and greed of many other Orders and the nobility, especially Kings, who were at this time seeking to monopolize control of money and banking, after a long chaotic period in which civil society, especially the Church and its lay Orders, had dominated the activity.
On October 13, 1307, what may have been all the Knights Templar in France were simultaneously arrested by agents of Phillip the Fair (Phillipe le Bel), to be later tortured into admitting heresy in the Order. A modern historical view is that Phillip, who seized the treasury and broke up the monastic banking system, simply sought to control it for himself. This, and the Templars' original banking of assets for suddenly-mobile depositors, were two of many shifts towards a system of military fiat to back European money, removing this power from Church Orders. The Hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem, seeing the fate of the Templars, were also convinced to give up banking at this time.
However, the accusation of religious heresy was not, by the standards of the time, entirely without merit. Under torture, some Templars "admitted" to worshipping a "bearded head." Some authors discount this as a common accusation (as it was in the Inquisition), and therefore a typical forced admission, while some use it as the basis of conspiracy theories. These often go far beyond the simple and obvious motive of simply seizing property, which was and remains an extremely common motivation for all forms of religious persecution.
see also: Pope Clement V -- Acre, Palestine --