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
However, the Templars also carried with them a dark reputation and a history filled with conspiracies.
An article in The American Catholic quarterly review 1891 stated: "these abominable beasts, endowed with human forms, these brothers—or rather enemies—armed with the sign of the cross, long ago devoted their souls to Satan in their reception into the Order, by a denial of Christ, by spitting on the cross, and by other things not to be mentioned for the sake of human shame."
"Amongst the crimes that the Templars were accused of, some were more outrageous than others. Accusations of the usual heresy, homosexual activity and spitting and/or urinating on the cross were all quite typical, but the latter of these crimes—the spitting and urinating on the cross—were thought by some historians to have been conducted by the Templars to mentally prepare them for violations they might have been forced to commit should they have been captured. But interestingly, there exist accounts that spitting on the cross was also a ritual commanded by the cult of Baphomet and that this was seen as an initiation process within the Knights Templar. With this idea, the Templars, or at least a sect of them, were not Christians and were using the image of Christ as a disguise for much more sinister antics." Source
Because they occupied the Temple Mount in Jerusalem there has been speculation about what relics the Templars may have found there, such as the quest for the Holy Grail or the Ark of the Covenant.
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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