17Ibid., p. 232.
18Ibid., p. 240.
19Ibn Wasil, p. 298.
20Joinville, p. 254.
21Ibid., p. 258.
22Ibid., p. 259.
23Marguerite gave birth three days after she learned of Louis’ capture. She named the boy Jean Tristan, “triste” meaning sadness. By the time she returned to France, she had had another child and was pregnant again. I think her story is fascinating but, since no Templars were involved, it will have to wait for another time.
24Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987) p. 208.
25Labarge, pp. 227-44.
26Riley-Smith, p. 210.
27Labarge, pp. 239-40.
28Hans Mayer, The Crusades tr. John Gillingham (Oxford University Press, 1988) p. 282.
29Labarge, p. 243.
30Ibid.
31Nangis, p. 187.
32Ibid.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Templars and Money
“The whole country of the East would have been conquered long ago had it not been for the Templars and the Hospitallers and others who call themselves religious.... But the Templars and the Hospitallers and their associates, who are fattened by ample revenues, are afraid that if the country [Egypt] is subjected to Christian laws, their supremacy will come to an end.”1
These words were put in the mouth of Robert of Artois, brother of Louis IX, by the English chronicler Matthew Paris. Matthew was writing shortly after the end of Louis’ useless and very expensive crusade in 1250. Robert is supposed to have said this in response to the advice of the master of the Templars, William of Sonnac, that they should put off attacking the Saracens at the town of Mansourah in Egypt.2
It’s highly unlikely that Robert actually said these words. Jean de Joinville, who was there, doesn’t mention anything of the kind. But Matthew may have been reflecting popular home front opinions on the wealth of both the Templars and the Hospitallers. Matthew was a monk at the English abbey of St. Albans and his only contact with Templars would have been in their role as competitors for lay donations and tithes.
“Everybody knows” that the Templars were rich.3 They had piles of treasure hidden everywhere. When the order was dissolved, no treasure was found. Therefore, it’s still hidden.
There are a lot of assumptions in the above statements. The Templars did have a reputation for being both greedy and miserly, but was it true? Were they rich? What form did their wealth take? What was their financial situation when the order was dissolved in 1312? What’s the real story of the Templars and money?
Let’s start at the end. On October 13, 1307, the Templars of Baugy, in Calvados, Normandy, were arrested along with the rest of the Templars in France. That same day an inventory was made of their goods. It was done in the presence of the three Templars assigned to Baugy and five officers of the king.4
The commandery owned fourteen milk cows, five heifers, one ox, seven calves more than a year old, two bulls, one calf still nursing, one hundred sheep, ninety-nine pigs, and eight piglets. There was a good horse for the commander and four nags to pull carts. There was also a good supply of grain, the harvest just having been finished and tithes paid two weeks before, half a tun of wine, and a supply of beer “for the boys and the workers.”5
The chapel had the bare minimum of equipment for services: vestments, one chalice, books, and altar linen. The chamber of the commander had some plain silver cups and some wooden ones. He had bed linen and clothes, including a rain cloak. He also had a blue overdress “belonging to the wife of M. Roger de Planes, which was being held for a debt, so said the commander and Bertin du Goisel.”6 The king’s men seemed to think that women’s clothing in the commander’s chamber was suspicious, but there was other clothing belonging to men of the neighborhood so they decided to believe the Templars.
While the Templars in Paris and London may have made major loans to kings, the Templars in the provinces seemed to have functioned as local pawnbrokers.
There was nothing else at the commandery that wouldn’t have been found on any well-run farm in Normandy. The three Templars were the only members of the order living there. There were twenty-six servants, including a chaplain, Guillaume Durendent, who doesn’t seem to have been a Templar priest since he and the other servants reminded the officials that they still expected to be paid.7
All the other inventories of Templar property gave the same results. The prestigious Temple in London had little more than the provincial commandery had. The cellar contained some maple cups, twenty-two silver spoons, some canvas cloths, and four tankards. There were seven horses in the stable, three for farm work. The master had some clothes and bed linen, one gold buckle, and a crossbow without bolts.8
The Templars seem to have lived simply. They had plenty to eat and drink but most of their cash went to pay bills or to the headquarters of the order in Cyprus. Even in Paris there were no great caches of jewels or coins. Most of the valuable property was either held as security for loans the Templars had made or was on deposit as in modern banks.
If the Templars really were terribly rich, then where was all the money?
Before speculating on missing pots of gold and midnight runs through the streets, it would be a good idea to try to find out just how much the Templars had.
WHERE DID THE TEMPLARS’ MONEY COME FROM?
The first gift to the Templars, according to tradition, was the “Temple of Solomon” itself. “As they had neither a church nor a regular place to live, the king allowed them to live temporarily in a part of his palace, which was on the south side of the Temple of the Lord. The canons of the Temple of the Lord gave them the courtyard that they had that was near the palace, under certain conditions, for the saying of the Office.”9
The king was Baldwin II. He was living at the time (around 1120) in the al-Aqsa mosque and may have planned to have the Templars stay only until they could afford a place of their own. It turned out that the king moved first and let the knights have the whole building. 10Of course, the building was falling down and needed the roof repaired among other things, so it wasn’t quite such a generous donation as it might have seemed at first.11
The king and the patriarch of Jerusalem also gave the Templars funds to support themselves, in return for the knights’ promise to protect pilgrims on the road against thieves and highwaymen.12 We don’t know what these funds consisted of since the records have been lost but the most likely gifts would have been something that renewed itself, like rents or tithes.
The first donation recorded in Europe is from a certain William of Marseille. This was made before 1124, when the Grand Master, Hugh de Payns, arrived from Jerusalem to drum up support for the order. William divided the gift of a church in Marseille and all its property between the Knights of the Temple of Solomon, the Church of St. Marie, and the monks of St. Victor.13
A third of a church isn’t a bad start. However, the Templars soon sold their share to the bishop of Fréjus in return for eight sestiers of wheat, to be paid annually.14 That is about as much as a donkey could comfortably carry. It wouldn’t have been enough to make bread for a man to last a week.
It wasn’t until 1127, when Hugh de Payns and his comrades came back to Europe, that the order began to get some serious support.
Hugh went first to Fulk, count of Anjou, who had lived with the Templars for a time when he was on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and gave them thirty livres a year.15It is said that King Henry I of England met with Hugh and his comrades in Normandy and gave them gold and silver and sent them on with letters of introduction.16 There are no records of Henry’s exact donations, but it is certain that his successor, Stephen, or to be more accurate, Stephen’s wife, Matilda of Boulogne, made one of the first donations of land in England. She gave the Templars a manor and church in the town of Cressyng with all that pertained to it, including woods and fields, ponds and rivers, as well as the toll from mills and also local taxes.17
Lords i
n Flanders, Champagne, Poitou, and Aragon gave similar donations.
After Hugh de Payns went back to Jerusalem, several Templars, perhaps newly recruited, stayed on to spread the word.18By 1150, the order had lands in France, Aragon, Castille, Flanders, England, Portugal, the various counties of Provence, and Germany.19
An example of typical property is the Templar house in the Rouergue, a fairly remote area near the Pyrenees, which was established in 1140. However the Cistercians and the Hospitallers had arrived there first. Though the Templars established a network of houses, cleared land, and received many gifts, the other orders still had a larger share in most places and there wasn’t always enough to go around. The Cistercians of Sylvane and the Templars and Hospitallers fought over the rights to tithes from local churches for over a hundred years. It came to the point that Templars began to be asked to witness donations made to the monks of Sylvane in the hope that the monks wouldn’t later contest the gifts.20 Perhaps this tendency to dispute the rights of others to receive donations was another case that gave the order a reputation for greed.
Southern France was one of the areas in which the Templars became well established. The land had sent many of its noblemen on the First Crusade and the counts of Toulouse and St. Gilles had relatives among the counts of Tripoli. Actually, most of the important centers of Templar commanderies—Flanders, France, Champagne, Aquitaine, and Provence—were the same areas that produced many of the settlers in the Latin kingdoms.
In most of western Europe, the land the Templars owned was used for farming and livestock. The Templar lay brothers, men who donated their services without becoming monks, did much of the farm work. There were also paid servants and, in Spain, even Moslem slaves to do the work.21 A few of the Templar knights lived at the commanderies, which were usually buildings that had been donated, but many of the houses were run by sergeants. Men of fighting age and ability were immediately sent overseas.
In the British Isles the Templars had farms that produced wheat, oats, rye, and barley. Some of this was for their own use, but some was sold. They also raised sheep and exported wool.22 They had an edge over lay wool sellers in that they were excused from having to pay customs duty. Of course, the Cistercians had the same exceptions and much larger holdings so the Templars could only capture a small share of the market.23
They did make some money by renting out the land they were given to small farmers. In some cases this was in return for a portion of the harvest, but the Templars preferred cash and, especially in good years, it was to the advantage of the farmer to pay a set amount annually.
We have a window into the Temple lands in England from a survey of their property made in 1185. It shows that the Templars owned and rented out many small plots of land. The renters paid in shillings and also in kind. Examples of this are not only ale and “2 capons at Christmas” or “15 eggs at Easter,” but also promises to serve on a local jury, reap half an acre of Templar fields, shoe six Templar horses, or plow either in spring or autumn.24
Some of the commanderies must have raised horses for the knights overseas. Jean de Joinville comments on the horses loaded in the hold of the ship at Marseille for Louis IX’s first crusade.25 There are other accounts of ships bringing horses for the use of the Templars. The warhorses used by European knights were specially bred to handle the weight of men and armor.26However, since most of the horses would have been used by the Templars themselves, breeding them probably didn’t produce much income.
The best income-producers of the time were mills and ovens. Many people gave Templars the rights to water mills, and one of the worst battles between the Hospitallers and Templars in the Latin kingdoms was over water and mill rights.27
Another source of income was the right to hold fairs. These were markets at which everything from local produce to imported luxury goods were sold. Merchants coming to the fairs had to pay for a spot to set up shop as well as a tax on the goods they brought to sell. The Templars could collect these fees as well as selling their own goods at the fairs without having to pay the same fees.
Again, there were complaints that the Templars were abusing this privilege. In around 1260, in the town of Provins, in Champagne, the local tradesmen complained to the count that the Templars were charging fees to merchants bringing wool into town for the fairs. The merchants reminded the count that for a penny a week, they had always been excused from paying what was basically sales tax. As a result of the fees imposed by the Templars, wool sellers were taking their goods elsewhere. “Sir,” they begged the count, “[w]e know truly that if you knew the great damage which you are suffering here from loss of rents, from your ovens, your mills, your fabric manufacturers and your other factories which you have here at Provins, and the great damage which your bourgeois are suffering . . . for God’s sake, help us.”28 Unfortunately, we don’t know how the count, Thibaud, responded to this poignant plea. Nor do we know how much the Templars earned from their extortion.
Another big source of income was from the privileges given to the Templars by the various popes. The first, given by Pope Innocent II, on March 29, 1139, was that the Templars could keep all the booty they captured.29 This was a privilege that the Benedictines and Cistercians hadn’t even thought of. In Spain especially, this was extremely profitable, although the order was often given land by the kings on condition that they conquer it themselves.30Booty also brought in a lot of income in the Holy Land, at least at the beginning. It was because of this that William of Tyre accused Grand Master Bernard of Tremeley of refusing to let anyone but Templars inside the walls of Ascalon when they had broken in. William insisted that Bernard was too greedy to let anyone else have a chance to loot the city.31
The pope also gave the Temple the right to build its own small churches and bury its members and “family” in them. The “family” was a very loose term, meaning the relatives of the brothers but also servants, their relatives, and anyone who had become a lay brother or lay sister of the house through a donation.
One of the worst bones of contention between the order and the local clergy grew out of the privilege given by Pope Celestine II on January 9, 1144. Celestine encouraged people to donate to the Temple by allowing them to ignore one-seventh of any penance a priest had given them. That wasn’t so bad. It didn’t cost anyone anything. The priest could adjust the penance. But then he allowed the Templars to come through villages once a year and open the churches in places that were under interdict. This meant that the Knights of the Temple got the donations that were given at marriages and burials that the local clergy couldn’t perform while the interdict lasted.32 This was literally a godsend for the order.
The biggest donation that the Templars ever received was one-third of a country. They didn’t get to keep it, but they traded it back to their advantage.
In 1134, Alfonso I of Aragon and Navarre, known as “the Battler,” died without direct heirs. Instead of finding some distant cousin to rule after him, he left the whole kingdom of Aragon to be divided between the Templars, the Hospitallers, and the canons of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.33
Before the celebrations in the commanderies were over, the beneficiaries of the will realized that the nobility of Aragon weren’t going to stand for that. They dragged Alfonso’s brother, Ramiro, out of a monastery, married him off, and crowned him king.34In Navarre, Count García Ramírez took over.
Pope Innocent II tried to get the terms of the will enforced, but it was impractical from the beginning. The Hospital and the canons of the Holy Sepulcher came to terms with the Spanish nobles by 1140. The Templars held out until 1143. Their settlement included castles, a tenth of royal revenues, one thousand solidos every year, a fifth of all lands conquered from the Moors, and exemption from some taxes.35
So the Templars (and the Hospitallers) had a wide variety of sources of income. But was it enough?
WHERE DID THE MONEY GO?
Critics such as Matthew Paris seem to have had the impression that the Templars an
d Hospitallers had more than enough money to conquer Saracen lands from Cairo to Baghdad. He and others were certain that the Templars spent all their money on a luxurious lifestyle and oriental decadence. Either that or they were misers, hoarding cash that should go to the struggle to regain the Holy Land.
Were they? What did they spend their money on?
First of all, the Knights Templar did not live like ordinary monks. Each knight brother had to have three horses and tack and one squire, a ration of barley for the horse, and armor, as well as regular clothing. He needed his own napkin and washcloth.36He also had a cook pot and bowl to measure the barley, drinking cups, two flasks, a bowl and spoon made of horn, and a tent, among other things.37
The sergeants got most of the same things as the knights, except for the tent and cook pot. They were allowed one horse each.
The average cost of a warhorse during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was thirty-six livres.38 That’s more than the value of a good-sized manor. There are many stories about poor knights who sold or mortgaged their patrimony for a good horse. Most Templar knights brought at least one horse with them when they entered, but horses were just as often casualties of war as men and both were costly to replace.
The Templars also hired Turcopoles to fight with them. These men were Christian Syrians or sons of Greeks and Turks. They were trained as mounted archers in the Eastern style. Some of them were brothers of the order but most were paid mercenaries. The Templars had a master in charge of them, called a Turcopolier, who also was commander of the sergeant brothers in times of combat.39
Added to these, there was the cost of shipping men and equipment from West to East. By the middle of the thirteenth century, the Templars had some ships of their own, but they were costly to maintain, even if they took on paying passengers.
The Real History Behind the Templars Page 21
