On this day in history…
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Shit went down.
The 2005 film Kingdom of Heaven makes the Knights Templar appear the personification of evil Christian soldiers bathing in the blood of infidel Muslims, but they were no worse than anyone else of that era. Their true crime was being too good at capitalism.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: March 18, 1314--
The First Crusade captured Jerusalem in 1099 and Christians from o’er Europe were all fuck yeah let’s pilgrimage so we can pray at the place where Jesus died a slow and agonizing death. Problem was that while Christians secured the city, the rest of the Catholic-controlled Holy Land wasn’t that controlled. Lotta bandits operated between Jerusalem and the coast where pilgrims landed. And these were not “stand and deliver” polite highwaymen sorts. They were “slaughter people by the hundreds and pick their corpses clean” type thieves. The Knights Templar were created to protect pilgrims from such a fate.
In 1119 a French knight went to both the king and patriarch of Jerusalem and said this shit is fucked we need a militant monastic order to protect pilgrims and they said okay set up shop in this mosque we stole up on the Temple Mount. Temple = Templar. Except the full name was Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon. The “Poor” part didn’t last. Neither did the Temple part.
The typical knight of the age was little more than a mounted and armored thug. But the Templars were a devout and disciplined fighting force who kicked a lot of ass. High-ranking churchmen and nobility alike thought the Knights Templar were awesome and gave them buckets of money. So what did they do? They went into business as financiers. Before long, 90% of the order was non-combatant, involved in managing an early form of international banking. The Orlando Bloom movie makes them seem like criminals for the commission of atrocities against Muslims, and yeah there was some of that, but it pales in comparison to the heinous crime of helping create a foundation for capitalism run amok.
It was their success at capitalism that led to the Order’s downfall. Late in the 12th century the Muslims reclaimed Jerusalem and the Knights Templar set up a new home base in Paris. By the end of the 13th century Europe was sick of Crusading because the Muslims were more unified and Christians were just throwing bodies, including children, at a lost cause. The order was seen as no longer necessary, and also envied for its massive wealth. What’s more, the French king was deeply in debt to the Templars, so in 1307 he said I know I’ll arrest a bunch of them and torture them into confessing a bunch of unchristian shit. In 1310 there was a mass burning at the stake of Templars. The pope dissolved the order two years later. The final fuck you involved taking the former Knights Templar Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, and setting him on fire in front of the Notre-Dame de Paris on March 18, 1314.
NOTE: This piece was researched and written by a human, not some bullshit "ai" plagiarism software.
Those who cannot remember the past need a history teacher who says “fuck” a lot. Get both volumes of ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY SH!T WENT DOWN at JamesFell.com/books.
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