The riches of the Templars - the poor knights of Christ - were legendary. But when the order fell into disgrace and the French king wanted to confiscate its wealth, he did not succeed. The question is: why?
The Templar Knights had a reputation for being fabulously wealthy. Craftsmen and ordinary masons were paid generously for their work. In addition to religious buildings, they systematically built powerful castles over a vast territory - from Scotland in the north to the Holy Land in the south. They also introduced banking, and even kings saw nothing wrong with borrowing from the order's bankers.
The King's Secret Order
France at that time was not a very large and not at all rich country. The king had to come up with more and more taxes in order to somehow fill the treasury. From time to time he arranged "financial cleansing", that is, he found unfortunate people from whom all their property could be taken away. These could be foreign merchants, Lombard usurers, or, of course, Jews.
But the money quickly ran out and it was necessary to look again, where to get it. Usually the question was solved simply: the king, like his predecessors, borrowed from the richest knightly order - from the Templars. He left a handwritten receipt for the knights. By 1307, there were already a lot of such receipts in the Parisian Temple. And at any moment the knights could demand the return of the debt. There was nothing to pay. It was then that in the minds of the king and his financial advisers a good, albeit shameless, plan was born: to make the Templars into insidious apostates - and to plunder. This required only one thing - the active assistance of the church.
There were problems with that. Popes favored their knights. They allowed them, in fact, to build their own state, not controlled by either the kings or the church. The Templars were directly subordinate only to the popes themselves. But Philip the Handsome managed to solve this seemingly insoluble problem. He put his own pope, Clement V, on the Holy See, who, in gratitude for this service, helped the king to put an end to the Templars. The king, according to one of the conspiracy theories, had a secret ally in the fight against the order. His financial advisers negotiated with him, but the name of this "friend" was not disclosed. And it's clear why. The Egyptian ruler Muhammad I, who had just defeated his enemies, the Mongols, and did not want to see the Templars in Palestine, who did not give up hope for a new crusade, acted as a "friend". Allegedly, he provided Philip with gratuitous financial assistance, asking for a mere little - the defeat of the order.
In the last decade of September 1307, dispatches with a secret order sealed in double envelopes were delivered by royal couriers throughout France. Officials were allowed to open it only on Friday 13 October. According to this order, the royal troops broke into the preceptorium (administrative division) of the knights at dawn and took into custody everyone they could capture. But if everything went well with the arrest of the knights, then the property turned out to be mostly immovable - the treasures that the king had hoped for were never found. Interrogations of the arrested also yielded nothing.
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The king was not only annoyed - he was furious. Where did the precious stones, gold and silver go? The only thing he seems to have received is a few handwritten receipts. But what did they mean if the order ceased to exist? Who would dare to blackmail the king with them ?!
24 carriages with good
The Temple was searched very thoroughly, but to no avail. This did not fit at all not only in the head of the king, but also in the heads of his contemporaries. After all, they sometimes visited the residence of the order. And they saw gold utensils, crosses and reliquaries decorated with precious stones, they knew that a significant stock of gold coins was also kept in the Temple. None of the above was found there. The order, as you know, was secret, only a few people knew about it. But the secret known to the two is no longer a secret?
Almost immediately after the search in the Temple, a legend appeared that the knights, literally on the eve of the arrests, managed to save their wealth. Allegedly, several witnesses saw how several heavily laden carts followed one after another through the northern gates of the city in the middle of the night. Each was pulled with difficulty by four horses. The cargo was accompanied by a knightly convoy. The number of carts has grown century after century. At first there were 3, then 18, and then all 24.
The opinions of contemporaries about which direction the knights went with their goods also differed. According to one version - to Rouen, from where they sailed on ships to the east. On the other - to La Rochelle, from where they sailed either to Spain, or to Scotland, or even across the ocean, that is, to America, which has not yet been discovered. Most likely, the Templars really expected trouble from their monarch. The treasures were temporarily housed in the Temple in 1306 when the knights had to evacuate from Cyprus. Knowing Philip, they were not going to concentrate their wealth in one place. And long before October 13, property was taken out in different directions. In parts.
On the money trail
"If you want to know the truth," they say in crime novels, "go for money." So in search of the treasures of the knights, if they, of course, do not rest at the bottom of the ocean, you should also go for money. An unexpected financial rise or massive construction is the very trail we are looking for. And of the European countries, only two need to take a closer look: Switzerland and Latvia.
Switzerland as a unified state appeared on the historical scene in 1291, after a treaty "for eternal times" between the cantons of Schwyz, Uri and Unterwalden. The emperors of the Holy Roman Empire had views on these lands, and the Swiss had to fight for their independence. At the beginning of the 14th century, Switzerland was not yet a country of bankers, but relatively many cities and industry were already developing there. It was at this time, after 1307, that a construction boom began in Switzerland. Banks appeared. As well as knights in Templar white cloaks with a red cross. They, according to legends, led the detachments of peasants and lumberjacks in the partisan wars with the imperial troops. The knights were sober people. They did not bury the exported treasures in the ground or walled them up in walls. They built, subsidized the production of wool and flax, founded banks.
A similar picture has developed in Latvia. The state of stone construction before and after 1315 is even more clearly traced there. If “before” there were only two castles, then in 1315 construction began at once 34. And the territory under the control of the Livonian Order expanded more than 100 times - from 750 square kilometers to 67 thousand square kilometers. Riga, founded a century earlier by Bishop Albert, is completely wooden, has become stone. Three Gothic cathedrals and solid high walls appeared in it. But the order, on whose funds all this abundance was built, was practically a beggar. And suddenly - so many new castles, cathedrals. Where does the money come from? It is quite possible that from the exterminated order of the Templars. After all, in fact, the Templars, Teutons and Livonians had a charter of a single model and externally differed only in the color of cloaks and crosses. And the missionary policy of the Teutons and Livonians was not much different from the crusades to the Holy Land. They also wanted to build a knightly state, but not in Palestine, but on the eastern outskirts of what was then Europe. In pagan Latvia and southern Estonia. And for this good deed the Knights Templar would not spare any treasures.
Of course, traces of fugitive knights and Templar wealth can be found in other countries. For example, in Spain and Portugal, where part of the templars moved with their funds. There immediately appeared new knightly orders, the heirs of the Templars. Some of the knights happily crossed the English Channel. And settled in England and Scotland.
By the way, some researchers believe that the notorious English gold of the great alchemist Raymund Lull is in fact not alchemical in origin, but the most Templar. It is just that no work of medieval crucibles can explain the appearance of 25 tons of full-weight gold coins in an extremely short time. And Llull himself, according to most historians, never visited England.
Elena FILIMONOVA