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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, and to ensure the safety of the large numbers of European pilgrims that flowed towards Jerusalem after its conquest.
The Templars were organized as a monastic order, following a rule revised for them by Bernard of Clairvaux, the founder of the Cistercian Order. They were heavily-travelled, and very trusted. Brothers who carried even a coin on their person that the Order did not know about were punished. The Templars were, however, endowed with an extraordinary Papal Bull (Omni Datum Optimum) that permitted them to levy taxes and accept tithing in the areas under their direct control, and this facilitated their later rise to institutional power.
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 this extraordinary 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 allowed both royals and peasants alike to trust them so completely. However, this trust attracted the jealousy and greed of many other Orders and eventually 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 financial activities. The Templar's banking and military ventures later led to extensive holdings both in Europe and the Middle East, including, for a time, the entire island of Cyprus.
On October 13, 1307, what may have been all the Knights Templar in France were simultaneously arrested by agents of Philip the Fair (Philippe le Bel), to be later tortured into admitting heresy in the Order. A modern historical view is that Philip, 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 homosexual acts and the worship of a "bearded head" or cat idol ("Baphomet"). Some authors discount this as a common accusation (as it was in the Inquisition), and therefore a typical forced admission. Conspiracy theories related to the supression of the Knights Templar 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 -- Jacques de Molay -- Hughes de Payens