Knights Templar (The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon)

Kingdom of Jerusalem / Latin Christendom

By the 13th century, roughly 15,000-20,000 members and a network of preceptories, farms, castles, and banking houses across Latin Christendom; a standing corps of heavily armored warrior-monks and the wealthiest, most trusted financial institution in Europe.

Territory in the record

Founded on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem (from which the Order took its name), then headquartered at Acre, then Cyprus after the Crusader states fell. Estates and banking houses stretched from the Holy Land across France, England, Iberia, and Italy.

Suppressed by King Philip IV of France, who was deep in debt to the Order. On Friday 13 October 1307 he had the Templars of France arrested en masse on charges of heresy, blasphemy, and sodomy; confessions were extracted under torture. Pressured by Philip, Pope Clement V dissolved the Order in 1312. The last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, was burned at the stake in Paris in 1314 after publicly recanting his forced confession.

Warrior-monks who also pioneered international banking: a traveler could deposit funds at one preceptory and draw on them at another, an early letter-of-credit system that made the Order Europe's first multinational bank. Their brutal, public destruction fed centuries of legend and conspiracy. The Chinon Parchment, rediscovered in the Vatican Secret Archives in 2001, records that Clement V had secretly absolved the Templar leaders of heresy in 1308 - evidence that the suppression was driven far more by royal debt and politics than by genuine belief in their guilt.