This Day in History: Hundreds of Knights Templars in France are arrested at dawn on Friday the 13th by King Phillip the Fair on this day in 1307. It’s sometimes said the Templars were the world’s first bankers, though they were more accurately the world’s first financial-services company. People who made pilgrimages to Jerusalem would deposit cash at the Temple Church in London, and withdraw it in Jerusalem. Instead of carrying money, he would carry a letter of credit. The Knights Templar were the Western Union of the crusades. This then made them wealthy, which then made them a target of King Phillip the Fair, a man desperate for money.
"The High Middle Ages in France were brought to a dismal close by King Philip IV. 'Philip the Fair' centralized power by seizing control of the papacy, dramatically increased taxes, debased the French currency, expelled France’s Jewish population, massacred the international bankers known as the Knights Templar, destroyed the country’s independent trade fairs, and plunged France into a crisis with England that shortly after evolved into the disastrous Hundred Years War. The poverty engendered by this royal rampage contributed to the unsanitary urban conditions that were so hospitable to the Black Death that killed over a third of Europe. The towns that had been oases of prosperity had become death traps."~Dan Sanchez
It is believed that the Friday the 13 superstition started on that October dawn in 1307 when the Knights Templars were arrested, tortured and then put to death.
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