Indeed, Saint Francis’s appearance at Damietta in 1219 was a reminder of just how far the brothers fighting there had come from the way of life their founders had envisaged. It was exactly a century since Hugh of Payns had established the Order of the Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. Those one hundred years had seen the Templars transformed from indigent shepherds of the pilgrim roads, dependent on the charity of fellow pilgrims for their food and clothes, into a borderless, self-sustaining paramilitary group funded by large-scale estate management.
