The Tour de Nesle scandal brought Philip nothing but misery. It was nearly identical in its methods to the persecution of Pope Boniface, the French Jews and the Templars, all of which bound together the crown’s need for new sources of revenue with the king’s desire to stamp the authority of the crown over new parts of his kingdom and his extraordinary ability to convince himself of the foulest moral deviance in anyone who crossed his path. Even by the standards of his day he was a violent prig, and the best that can be said of his conduct was that the Templars were only one group of victims
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