For more than a hun dred years the Templars had been one of the wealthiest and most influential factors in European politics. If we confine our at tention to the East, we realize but a small part of their enormous power. Two
were appointed guardians of the dis puted castles on the betrothal of Prince Henry of England and the French princess in 1161. Other Templars were almoners of Henry III. of England and of Philip IV. of France. One grand master was godfather to a daughter of Louis IX.; another, despite the prohibition of the order, is said to have been godfather to a child of Philip IV. They were summoned to the great councils of the Church, such as the Lateran of 1215 and the Lyons council of 1274. Frederick II.'s persecution of their order was one of the main causes of his excommunication in 1239; and his last will enjoined the restoration of their estates. Their property was scattered over every country of Christendom, from Denmark to Spain, from Ireland to Cyprus. But the wealth of the Templars was due not so much to their territorial possessions as to the fact that they were the great international financiers and bankers of the age. The Paris Temple was the centre of the world's money market. In it popes and kings deposited their revenues, and these vast sums were not hoarded but issued as loans on adequate security. Above all, it was the Templars who made the exchange of money with the East possible. It is easy, indeed, to see how they were the ideal bankers of the age; their strong holds were scattered from Armenia to Ireland, their military power and strict discipline ensured the safe transmission of treasure, while their reputation as monks guaranteed their integrity. Thus they became the predecessors, and later the rivals, of the great Italian banking companies. To take interest (usury) was of course unlawful. The method of circumventing this seems to have been that the mortgagees paid to the mortgagors a nominal rent which was used towards the reduction of the debt. The difference be tween this and the real rent represented the interest. A docu ment throwing a vivid light on the banking methods of the Tem plars and Hospitallers is a charter of Margaret, queen of the English, A.D. 1186, from the abbey of Fontevrault, printed in Calendar of Documents, France (1899), vol. i., ed. J. H. Round, No. 1084.
Never had • the order of the Temple been to all appearance more powerful than immediately before its ruin. Sovereign power, in the sense of that of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia or the Knights of St. John in Rhodes and later in Malta, it had never possessed ; but its privileges and immunities constituted it a church within the church and—in France at least—a state within the state. Philip IV., indeed, in pursuance of his policy of centralizing power in the crown, had from 1287 onwards made tentative efforts to curtail the power and wealth of the order; but soon his necessities forced him to a temporary change of policy. In January 1293 the privileges of the order in and about Paris were confirmed and extended, and in 1297 Philip borrowed 5,200 livres tournoises from the Paris Temple. Then came the great quarrel with Pope Boniface VIII., and on the loth of August 1303 the king signed with Hugues de Peraud, the general visitor of the French Templars, a formal treaty of alliance against the pope. On the 6th of February 1304 Boniface's successor, Benedict XI., once more confirmed all the Templars' privileges ; while Philip, for his part, appointed Hugues de Peraud receiver of the royal revenues and, under pressure of the disastrous campaign in Flanders, in June granted a charter exempting the order from all hindrances to the acquisition of property. Two years later the king took refuge in the Temple
from the violence of the Paris mob, and so late as the spring of 1307 was present at the reception of a new Templar.
Yet for some two years past the king had been plotting a treacherous attack on the order. His motives are clear : he had used every expedient to raise money, had robbed and expelled the Jews and the Lombard bankers, had debased the coinage; the suppression of the Templars would at once rescue him from their unwelcome tutelage and replenish his coffers. He cherished also another ambition. The question of an amalgamation of the great military orders had often been mooted; the project had been approved by successive popes in the interests of the Holy Land; it had been formally proposed at the Lyons council of 1274, only to be rejected by the opposition of the Templars and Hospitallers themselves. To Philip this scheme commended itself as an opportunity for bringing the orders under the control of the French crown ; there was to be but one order, that of the "Knights of Jerusalem," of which the grand master was always to be a prince of the royal house of France. Clearly, it only needed an excuse and a favourable opportunity to make him attack the Templars ; and, once having attacked them, nothing short of their entire destruction would have been consistent with his safety. The excuse was found in the denunciation of the order for heresy and unspeakable immoralities by a venal informer; the opportunity was the election of a pope, Clement V., wholly devoted to the interests of the king of France.
For perhaps half a century there had been strange stories circulating as to the secret rites practised by the order at its midnight meetings, stories which probably had their origin in the extreme precautions taken by the Templars, originally per haps for military reasons, to secure the secrecy of their proceed ings, which excited popular curiosity and suspicion.
In the spring of 1304 or 1305 a certain Esquiu de Floyran of Beziers pretended to betray the "secret of the Templars" to James II. of Aragon. The pious king, who had every reason to think well of the order, did not affect to be convinced; but the prospect of spoils was alluring, and he seems to have promised the informer a share of the booty if he could make good his charges. Esquiu now turned to Philip of France, with more im mediate success. For the purpose of collecting additional evidence the king caused twelve spies to find admission to the order, and in the meantime sought to win over the pope to his views. Clement V. owed the tiara to the diplomacy of Philip's agents, perhaps to their gold; but though a weak man, and moreover a martyr to ill health, he was not so immediately accommodating as the king might have wished, expressing his disbelief in the charges against the order, and, though promising an inquiry, doing his best to procrastinate. Philip determined to force his hand. All France was at this time under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition, and the Inquisition could act without consulting the pope. The grand inquisitor of France, William of Paris, was Philip's confessor and creature. The way was thus open for the king to carry out his plan by a perfectly legal method. His informers denounced the Templars to the Inquisition, and the grand inquisitor—as was the customary procedure in the case of persons accused of heresy—demanded their arrest by the civil power. On the 14th of September 1307, accordingly, Philip issued writs to his baillis and seneschals throughout the kingdom, directing them to make preparations to arrest the members of the order.