The Knights Templar provide great material for medieval video games. In Assassins Creed – they are totally the bad guys. But in other video games they get a better rap.
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The First Templar came out in 2011. The protagonists are a French Templar called Celian d’Arestide and a female French heretic Marie d’Ibelin being hunted by the Dominican Inquisition. The player must uncover the secrets of the Holy Grail through this duo.
Knights of the Temple: Infernal Crusade features a Templar knight called Paul. In this medieval video game he’s got to frustrate the plan of a devilish Bishop called Adelle who is trying to unleash untold evil in the world. Interesting that it pits a Knight Templar as the good guy against a very bad Catholic church.
One of the odder Knight Templar influenced video games is Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars. An American in Paris – a guy called George Stobbart – witnesses an assassination. He tracks the murderer, dressed as a clown, and through him – comes across a medieval manuscript. This embroils him and a female companion in a plot involving some very sinister Knights Templar.
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I’m interested in knowing the amounts they charged for the service of the letters of credit.
Ah, this clears up some misapprehensions I had about the nature of the Templars’ banking activities. There’s another article here from some time back about how the Templars engaged in usury but the Pope turned a blind eye to this – but this isn’t quite true, as shown here. Usury isn’t simply the act of charging more than the principal for a loan. This is a common misunderstanding, both then and today. The typical definition is that it is the act of selling for something that does not exist. The canonical example is charging you for a bottle of wine, and then charging you for drinking it. Your right to drink it does not exist separately from the possession of the wine. But if I were to, say, loan you a donkey so you could haul your goods to the next village to sell, but charge you some extra gold for your use of the donkey, there would be nothing wrong with that. The difference is that the wine is consumable – using it consumes it – but the donkey is not. If you use the donkey this week, I can still use it the next week. But if you drink the wine this week, it’s gone forever. So loaning money, which is consumable, would be like “loaning” wine – the borrower “buys” the money, but pays for it later, and the lender cannot charge him for the use of the money, since the only thing you can do with money is spend it, and “selling” the lender the money without allowing him to spend it is meaningless. In this case, however, the administrative fee reflected a real cost incurred by the lenders – it’s not exactly cheap to move loads of bullion up and down the Mediterranean. There’s plenty more to usury than that and I can’t go into it all, but here’s a good resource on it: https://zippycatholic.wordpress.com/2014/11/10/usury-faq-or-money-on-the-pill/
Reblogged this on The 9th Templar Story and commented:
I liked this overview about the Knights Templar lending practices.
An interesting post – thanks.