We’re used to the idea of the Knights Templar being either vilified or heroised since their destruction in 1307 – but what’s more intriguing is the way that people wrote about the Templars while they were still up and running….and crusading.
Because the views of the Templars from contemporary sources are often pretty damning. William of Tyre, for example, seems to have dipped his pen in bile and poison before scribbling anything down about the Templars.
His account has often been taken as gospel and quoted by Muslim authors writing about the wicked knights. But these days, historians realise that some of these chroniclers had wider and deeper agendas. They were serving those who had an interest in undermining the Templars for a variety of reasons.
So what accusations and insults were hurled by the Templars’ critics? It tended to go along these lines:
- They are in league with the Muslim enemy and not serving Christ at all
- The Templars are only interested in money and are greedy and self-serving
- They are not brave in battle but reckless and put other lives in danger
- The Templar rituals include abominable acts such as spitting on crucifixes
These chroniclers undoubtedly made it much easier for King Philip of France and Pope Clement to destroy the Templars in 1307. A long legacy of brickbats being thrown at the warrior knights fostered the impression that there had always been something rotten about the order from the outset.
As early as 1170, the aforementioned William of Tyre, after describing how the Templars came into being, asserted that they had abandoned their early humility and gorged themselves with riches. Why, they had even ditched their commitment to obey the Patriarch of Jerusalem, who had helped them in the early days, swearing loyalty to the Pope in Rome alone. Such ingratitude!
They have also taken away tithes and first fruits from God’s churches, have disturbed their possessions, and have made themselves exceedingly troublesome.
Another chronicler, Matthew Paris, expressed a common gripe among the mainstream clergy: as the Templars were getting so many donations, where was it all going? He wrote that the order “swallow down such great revenues as if they sink them into the gulf of the abyss”.
Knightfall
Pope Boniface had a miserable relationship with King Philip of France – the monarch who crushed the Knights Templar. Basically, the French king wanted to tax the Catholic church while the pope believed he needed to be asked first. It was his clergy and the king could lay off until he gave his permission. Also, the pope argued that he had no objection to funding religious wars, crusades in other words, but was less amenable to bankrolling bust ups between the kings of France and England.
Relations between King Philip of France and pope Boniface just went from bad to worse. Boniface saw everything Philip did as an attack on the church. Philip reacted with measures designed to provoke Rome like banning the export of gold, silver and precious stones – a law that would starve the pope of revenue from France. There was even a suggestion that Philip wanted to establish a new Christian realm under French control incorporating the Byzantine and Holy Roman empires. In this new empire, the pope would be reduced to a patriarch on a salary.
There was now a showdown between king and pope. Philip called for Boniface’s removal. Boniface demanded the French people overthrow an excommunicated monarch. That was too much for the king. His adviser William De Nogaret and a leading member of the Colonna family went with 2,000 mercenaries down to the city of Anagni where Boniface was holding court and kidnapped him.
Clearly, De Nogaret wanted to overcompensate for this family’s past treacherous leanings. He determined to prove to the king that he was the most loyal of French subjects. This craven courtier became a pliant tool of the king’s will and an instrument for his crushing of the Templars.
De Nogaret came up with a novel idea for convincing Pope Boniface of the king’s view. He kidnapped him in Italy. And then mistreated him. But was then forced to release the pope when local townspeople besieged De Nogaret and forced him to flee back to France. When he got back there, King Philip rewarded him handsomely and both men were delighted when news broke that Pope Boniface had died.
Nobody doubts that the Templars accumulated an awful lot of money. At key points in the crusades, they were asked to pay off ransoms for aristocratic warriors captured by the Saracens. More generally, they lent money to kings, princes and even popes becoming Christian moneylenders, an occupation in the medieval period normally associated with the Jews.
In the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a number of children were alleged to have been murdered by the Jewish community in various towns in Europe. These accusations were certainly false and designed primarily to enable the seizure of the assets of prominent, wealthy Jews. Due to various prohibitions put on 
The Templars seem to have had a complex relationship with the Jews. They certainly were not anti-semitic – or no more than most people at the time. If we look at the case of the murder of 
The Jews lived in houses in the centre of Lincoln many of which they rented from the Knights Templar. Basically, the Templars were their landlords. It’s hard to say that the Templars would have been more sympathetic to the Jews than their very hostile neighbours though one could speculate that the intensified persecution of the Jews was commercially disruptive to the Temple.
The Knights Templar weren’t just warriors, monks, farmers and politicians but also international bankers. Not to anything like the sophisticated standards of today’s bankers but by the standard of the time, the Templars were at the apex of medieval high finance.
The hapless king of England Henry III (1216-1272), who succeeded King John, went one further and lodged his own crown jewels in the Paris Temple for safe keeping. He was facing a major uprising by England’s barons for whom Magna Carta had not proven to be enough. The barons had even supported an invasion by the French king Louis at the end of John’s reign but when that king obligingly died, they threw their weight behind the boy king Henry – however, they eventually reverted to their more rebellious ways.
He also picked on merchants from Lombardy thereby assuring that they preferred to transact business in London where there is still a ‘Lombard Street’. He may even have contributed to London’s eventual rise to be the world’s global financial centre (sorry New York).
There is an awful lot of confusion about the Knights Templar and the way they operated as bankers and money lenders. How could they have been involved in banking when usury was a divine sin? What was their relationship with the Jewish lenders?