Basically in the beginning they were a load of knights sick of the slaughter in the holy wars, but they were very good at doing the slaughter so thought, i know lets protect pilgrims as they travel to the holy land, which they did very well, and so people paid them to protect them, then they paid them to protect their goods as well, then the knights templer went, we could do a little importing and exporting ourselves, we know the dealers and buyers so why not act as the middle men, and as this was the biggest trade route in the world they soon became very rich!, so the order grew and diversified, you could send a note via Templer post to the middle of africa asking for a load of safron, and in 1 year it would arrive with only a bill form the templers as they bought the stuff on your behalf, and insured it arrived safely.
To help them do this they recuited loads of staff, built castles to keep the pilgrim (and trade) routes open and did this all with the aim of helping God.
Now the problems came during the early middle ages when lots of countrys were going to war against each other, the templers went, no we are gods bodyguards you can not use our men or castles but we will give you a loan so you can buy soliders, now a french king, i have forgotten his name took out a huge loan to fight the english, but he was a bit weak and was controlled by the pope, who really thought the catholic church should be the most powerfull and richest of Gods wordly organisations, so they demanded that the templers pay a kind of divy to the church as they were gods representatives on earth, the templers went, "Swords, big fuck of shiney ones, and we have loads of them, bugger off"
So the pope went to the french king and said, we need to bring down the templers, then we can steal all their money and land and castles, i hear they have been doing naughty things with Virgins, goats and the devil, that sort of thing. so on a meeting with his bankers, the ruling group of the templers held at french kings castle in gay paris loads of his guards storm in and go, Heritics! we arrest you in the name of the king, and then went, "tell us where all your money is and admit your sins, have you met our big hot pokers!"
The head of the templers was tourtured for 2 years to ensure all the information was out of him, the Templers not caught in the inital trap fled taking as much as they could back to the holy lands via their own shipping fleet, some ships and caravens were caught exscaping loaded with gold and such.
apon reaching the holy land they found that the arabs were also launching a new campaign to get back the holy lands and that they had nowwhere to flee to, what happened to the remaining order members and the huge wealth has never been proved!
Now we just have a dumbass born again christian waging his own personal war on our Arab cousins for the sake of wealth and oil to fuel the inefficient cars of fat ass yanks...
I do like the Ladybird book of events but there are a few errors contained within. I'll not type everything here but below are some links about the Templars, their rise and fall and what they stood for etc.
its pretty close, just got the king and pope thing wrong way round!
some people are so picky when you are writing things off the top of your head.
I got the two years of toture right! and i believe before they were killed they had red hot coals placed in their mouths to ensure they did not revoke their confessions or shout secret messages to other templers in the crowd
The museum in Cornwall had some very interesting 'artifacts' and accounts of how the knights were silenced after their confessions. I seem to recall something about the hot coals in the mouth.
It's funny how religion can be used as justification for so much pain and suffering, isn't it?
