I thought there was a problem with that. Like, didn’t the Templars form a chain of financial institutions that they couldn’t call banks that lasted until a later Pope went “Yeah, those are banks. Run by Templars. Fuck the Templars, tell 'em to give us all their cash”?
No. The person who got mad at them was the king of France (Phillip IV). Who basically wanted to rob them to finance his wars to centralise France, so he arrested the lot, had the new French pope declare that he was allowed to put them on trial, and then declared them heretics and stole their shit.
A technique he also used on the jews.
The issue was not that they ran a bank, it was not illegal to run a bank. The term “banking” hadn’t entered into the lexicon yet iirc. They hadn’t even run into the one issue the church was supposed to have with banking (Usury). They were just a powerful institution with a lot of money that didn’t pay taxes and was exempt from tithes and Phillip was broke
I thought there was a problem with that. Like, didn’t the Templars form a chain of financial institutions that they couldn’t call banks that lasted until a later Pope went “Yeah, those are banks. Run by Templars. Fuck the Templars, tell 'em to give us all their cash”?
No. The person who got mad at them was the king of France (Phillip IV). Who basically wanted to rob them to finance his wars to centralise France, so he arrested the lot, had the new French pope declare that he was allowed to put them on trial, and then declared them heretics and stole their shit. A technique he also used on the jews.
The issue was not that they ran a bank, it was not illegal to run a bank. The term “banking” hadn’t entered into the lexicon yet iirc. They hadn’t even run into the one issue the church was supposed to have with banking (Usury). They were just a powerful institution with a lot of money that didn’t pay taxes and was exempt from tithes and Phillip was broke