Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

For nearly two centuries, Templar brothers had played a distinguished part in some of the most dramatic battles and sieges in the near east. They had taken on Saladin at Hattin in 1187, slogged through the flooded Nile delta during the disastrous Egyptian crusades of 1217–21 and 1249–50, and been the last men standing when the Mamluks overran Acre in 1291. The Templars had also developed an institutional expertise in financial services—as moneylenders, accountants, and civil servants, they were employed by the French crown to handle important aspects of public finance. Their non-fighting brothers had houses all over the west—in virtually every kingdom from England and France to the German states, Sicily, and Hungary, where their patrons included kings, queens, and the highest nobility. So for the French to set their sights on taking down this institution was no small task. But that, with the connivance of Paris’s scholars, is what they did.