Hi, and welcome to Classical Stuff You Should Know, C-S-Y-S-K. It's true, that's correct, yes. I don't think we've ever introduced it that way. I always C-S-Y-S-K.
I know, we're an acronym, boys. We are an acronym, we've made it. Anyway, we are a podcast that is about the classical world, which means old books, art, architecture, and theology, and philosophy and stuff, and our goal is to make that stuff palatable to a modern audience and tell you all the things you should have been told in school but weren't. And so I'm here with two of my bros, one Graham Donaldson, and one Thomas Ledermagny, and we three all work at a classical school in Austin, Texas, named Veritas Academy, and we like it, and that's our story.
That's right. Are you out of work? Are you looking for a new job? Well then, call Templar.
We aggressively seek employment in all stretches of the world. It's a camp agency? Yeah, it's a camp agency. Templar.
Templar. And so we do require a strict dress code, but you'll be fitted with, you'll be well protected in your job. So, Templar. And dudes only, sorry.
Yeah, sorry. Disgust. Yes, today we are, yeah, no, thank you, AJ. You know what one of my favorite episodes of all time on classical stuff was?
What? Was the one you did on Michelangelo, the painting. I think we've got to do more painting episodes. Yeah, I'm super into it.
I'm going to work on it after my ten episodes of Play-Doh. Just kidding, I'll probably step away. I'm about to play it out. So, guys, we are going to be talking about the Knights Templar today, and we're going to get through their founding, their reasons for existing, and then just sort of talk a little bit about the Middle Eastern world, as it was known, the Levant region during the Crusades, and also just talk a little bit about, like, how Christians should think about, I don't know how we should think about it, but how I think about the Crusades today, or how we sort of deal with this.
It's a rough period. Are we going to talk about the Illuminati or not? Is Kanye a Templar? Kanye is not a Templar.
So, yes, the Templars are great in that they were horrendously, horrendously crushed, and everybody was murdered on the same day by the French state in 13-something. But anyway, yes, Friday the 13th is the day that all the Templars were rounded up and were put on trial and all their stuff was taken, and so that's where we get the Friday the 13th superstition. Shouldn't this be at the end of the episode? I know, I'm just telling you this.
Spoiler. But, and then, you said the Illuminati, so the reason why the Templars are now today seen as, like, this shadowy organization is because they were all, well, that, because they were all rounded up and then pretty much stamped out, and so we just assumed that something as powerful as they were couldn't be stamped out so decisively, they must still be around seeking after revenge. It's not a bad reason. It's not a bad reason.
There's, like, one guy who didn't get stamped out, and he's... Well, the head of the Templars also did, his last words were, like, God will avenge us for your murder, for our murder, or God will have, yeah, he basically said something like, we're going to get you, and then they laid him on fire. Like that guy in, was it Ghostbuster 2, Viggo Mortensen? Right, death is but a door.
I'll look up, of course. Yeah, exactly the same. But anyway, so let's talk a little bit about the world of the Levant. Our source text for today is...
Oh, yeah, I'm taking this from... Yes, the issue code is our source text. I use a bunch of different sources. The main one is the wonderful book called The Templars by Dan Jones, the same author who wrote on the Plantagenets and also the War of the Roses, where I've gotten a lot of...
Just a basic historical story of a lot of the Plantagenets series. They're really good books, but I've also sort of compiled this with other stuff together. Cool. But so, okay, in the Middle East or the Levant region during the 11th century, so the year 1000 and whatnot, it was ruled by a kind of like a confederation of Islamic states.
And they were sometimes at war with each other, sometimes peaceful. But around the year 1100, the Muslim world was pretty fractured. And it kind of split into two camps. And actually, it's the two camps that we still have today.
We've got Sunnis and Shiites. I can never keep them straight. I'm not a scholar of Islamic history. I don't know enough about it.
It's an area that I find very interesting, but I don't know enough to speak intelligently about it. But we've got sort of two main dynasties or regions. And they were kind of at war with each other, which meant that they were both pretty weak in the 1100s. So we have the Seljuks.
They were in Turkey. They were Turks and Persians, mainly. But they were ultimately loyal to the Abbasid Caliph in Baghdad. And the Abbasid Caliph in Baghdad, they were Sunni, I think.
I'm pretty sure. So they were the Sunni branch of Islam. And then you have the Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt. And they were called the Fatimid Caliphate because they claimed to be descended from Fatima, which was the daughter of Muhammad.
And they were Shiites in Egypt. Anyway, so you've got the Fatima Caliphate and you've got the Seljuks. And the Seljuks were the ones who attacked the Eastern Orthodox Church and sort of the Byzantine Kingdom and took over a bunch of cities in the Middle East that spawned and started the First Crusade. So they...
Wait, so who attacked them? The Seljuks attacked the Eastern Orthodox. And sort of... But not the folks in Egypt?
No, no, no. But they had been started at war. They had been sort of going back and forth and having wars in Syria and having wars in what we now call Jordan and having wars in what we now call... So these are the Seljuks in the...
What was that one? The Fatimid Caliphate. The Fatimid Caliphate. They've been having wars back and forth.
And then eventually the Seljuks attacked the Eastern Orthodox. Yeah, so they would have wars. They would have peace. They would say, all right, we're going to stop for 10 years.
And every now and then in these stories of these caliphates, you've got Elir who comes up and he can kind of like bridge the gaps between all these fractured groups. And then he'll die. He'll split the empire into his four sons. And then his four sons are just terrible and it doesn't really work.
But anyway, so the Seljuks had attacked... We're in Turkey and we're sort of moving into Greece. And then Constantinople was the head of the Byzantine Church. And so there was some wars there.
And so then the First Crusade was called. And the First Crusade was pretty wildly successful in terms of... Now, the reason why it was wildly successful was because the whole region was weakened by the attacks, by these two caliphates being against each other, the Sudis and the Shiites, the Seljuks and the Fatimid Caliphate. Again, I'm pretty sure I'm pronouncing Selju wrong.
So to say that it's successful means... Okay, so to say it was successful means that they got Jerusalem. Yeah, true. They got Jerusalem on July 15th, 1099.
So July 15th, 1099, the First Crusade conquered Jerusalem and conquered a bunch of other cities like Jerusalem, Antioch, Tripoli, Acre, Beirut, Sidon, all these sort of famous port cities. In the First Crusade, they were now in Christian hands. Actually, before we kind of go into this, I just want to give one little caveat about talking about this period of history. I never really learned any of the Middle Ages growing up.
When I did history in Canadian public school, it was Rome ended, and then it was the dark time, and then the Enlightenment came, and now we've got democracy. That was kind of how history was presented to me. So I never really learned anything about the Middle Ages. And as a Protestant, I sort of had probably internalized things like...
Dark Ages were a period of superstition where Christian faith kind of went underground and... Well, Christian faith sort of ruled everything, but not in a healthy way. Not in a healthy way. And it was all allied with power, and nobody learned anything, and all the real knowledge was stuck behind Latin.
Yeah, yeah. And the thing that I was always nervous was that if I started studying the Crusades, I was going to find an ugliness that was disturbing. And in studying, I found an ugliness that was disturbing, but not the one that I was expecting. What I was expecting when I was starting to look into the Crusades was...
I knew it was going to be bloody, because it was. But I had always assumed that it was a really... That it was more religiously charged than I think it actually ended up, and it actually was in history. I'm thinking that, like, maybe it was just the way that it had been built up to me or had been talked about, was that these were battles of competing religious ideologies, and it's a black eye for the church.
I think it is a black eye for the church. But reading it, I realized it was far more about the same things that every other war is about, money and power, than a battle of sort of religious ideology. There's definitely men on both sides who fought with this sort of religious ideology. But the Crusades are more of a just litany of absolute incompetence on mainly the Christian side.
Like, the Christian leaders in the Middle East during this time had a very tenuous grasp on any position of power. The only reason they could remain in power was because the vastly superior Muslim force would fight each other, and leave sort of Christendom alone, and Christianity could kind of carve out a niche. But then any time the Islamic world got its act together, and we're like, ah, let's get rid of the church or the Christians in the Middle East, they threw down. Is that the story of the Second Crusade?
Yeah, and then it's the story of Saladin, which we'll get to not today. So I guess I was expecting more of this clash of equals. But in reality, it's kind of, um, the Christians in the Middle East, in the Crusader states were totally outnumbered, incredibly incompetent, a lot of it was pretty corrupt, and they didn't hold on because of their, like, adherence to their faith, but they held on basically because of, um, they weren't important enough to be attacked until they got important enough to be attacked, right? So that wasn't what I was expecting going to, and then realizing that it was like, oh, not that the Crusades aren't a big deal, but they aren't, they weren't sort of the big bad black guy that I thought it was.
It's, um, it's more of like, just sort of, um... Well, they're bad because of the death, right? They're bad because of the death, and bad because I think taking up the sword in the name of Christ is a pretty troublesome and problematic thing, and there was lots of people who were against the Templars for that very reason. Oh, yeah.
Oh, for sure. They were not completely welcomed by all aspects of Christianity. And there was theologians and scholars and monks and monastics and priests all throughout the sort of 200 years that Templars existed saying, like, why do we have these guys? Why do we have, why does the church, why does, um, the God who dies for the sins of the world need dudes with swords?
You know, like, they sort of, there was that dissension. But anyway, I just wanted to sort of put that caveat out there that, um, and maybe it's just a testament to, like, not believing, or just needing to go study things for yourself. Um, because the Crusades, to me, is still troubling, and a black eye for the church, but it wasn't nearly as this, um, big as I guess I thought it was. I'll be curious to, I mean, I'm interested in this episode now.
It's more just like, um, a documentary of terrible military decisions based on bravado. It's kind of like you gave, uh, you gave a state to, um, a bunch of, like, really spirited people that had no other grounding and, like, destroyed everything. I don't know. I think if you were looking for better examples of, of, of leadership and also, you know, more interesting stories in the Middle Ages, like the English kings and the French kings are just sort of more interesting.
Anyway, whatever. Um, so Jerusalem was, was, uh, taken over in 1099, um, and, um, uh, the, uh, it was a very terrible and bloody affair, um, the Crusaders, um, ransacked the city, as often happens when cities get taken over. There are horrible stories of people who lived in the city swallowing their gold coins because they didn't want to be, um, they didn't want the Crusaders to get their gold, and when the Crusaders realized this, we're cutting open the bodies and disemboweling people for their gold coins, and just horrible, terrible things. Um, but Jerusalem was taken in 1099, and then we had an increase in pilgrimage, because people want to come, and they're like, oh, you know, Jerusalem is now a safer space for Western Christendom.
Uh, everyone's going to come. Let's see where Jesus died. Let's see the tomb. So the First Crusade, did we talk about why that was motivated, or was it just a...
It was motivated because the Seljuks had attacked, um, and taken over some other churches in the Christian East, and everyone was just sort of like, whoa, this is happening now? And so, it kind of was this, um... A bit reactionary? A bit reactionary.
Um, the Christian West had sort of coalesced into a pretty peaceful time. Uh, you know, Chartless was 200 years after Charlemagne or so, so you had this, um, you had this Christian West that didn't have these big, um, um, wars against each other, so I guess they were looking for something to do, and I think you had a very pious, you had a very pious and you had a very, um, um, motivated Pope, Pope Urban II, the third, who called the First Crusade? Anyway, Pope Urban. Was he the one who didn't believe in fashion sense?
He shot the, uh, Urban Outfitters, yeah, he outfitted his house, but he had a little Yeah, exactly, he was Pope Urban Outfitters, oh my word. Um, so, anyway, wanted to go, so a bunch of people wanted to go on the crusade, or on pilgrimage, and, um, so after the First Crusade, just for some terms, four new states were created. You had the Kingdom of Jerusalem, you had, uh, the County of Odessa, you had, uh, the County of Tripoli, and then you had the Principality of Antioch. So you basically have these four states, and they are what are known as the Crusader states.
Um, big cities in these states are Jerusalem, um, Acre, Beirut, Tripoli, Sidon, these are some of the big cities that, um, uh, where the big, a lot of the castles, these are where a lot of these wars happen, and, um, so a bunch of pilgrims are going to them, are going to Levant, they're going to Jerusalem, they want to see all the sites, but it's still really dangerous. On the roads, it's really dangerous to get there, um, and, um, just because these cities were taken, uh, they are surrounded by caliphates, surrounded by, uh, the Muslim world, um, and so, uh, um, there was, you know, pilgrims would be, uh, accosted and robbed and slaughtered and all sorts of things. Anyway, there was two big, um, terrible things that happened on, on, on Easter, and, um, there was, uh, a big slaughter of about 700 pilgrims after the miracle of the oil lamp. Do you guys, are you aware of the oil lamp in Christ's tomb?
No. On, on Easter Saturday, when Christ was supposed to have risen, or when Christ, sorry, when Christ did rise, what is supposed to happen is that there's this oil lamp that sits next to the tomb that is off, or that isn't burning, and then it turned, and then it lights itself, uh, on the, the hour that Christ was raised from the dead, as a remembrance, the little pious oil lamp. Apparently this still happens today, I don't know. Yeah, for real reason.
That's awesome. I wonder, so I, I know God has a sense of humor, or else we wouldn't have sense of humor. Sometimes I wonder if any of these are just God drolling us and thinking it's hilarious. Just having a little, just having a little fun, like, whoop, oil lamp, that's hilarious.
Um, yeah, maybe. Um, I don't know, does it make us feel more pious? It just seems kind of fun. A little miracle, a little oil lamp's like, just a reminder that Christ was raised, was risen here, maybe.
I don't know. I also do think it's kind of an adorable miracle. That's what I'm saying. It's not, you know, it's not, like, it's not helping large groups of people.
It's just a little thing. It's just kind of, like, kind of cute. But anyway, so when this happened, um, the pilgrims that were there sort of left, left the scene in, in sort of, you know, exaltation. They spent all this time fasting for Easter, and as they were on the road, 700 of them were rounded up by, uh, brigands on horseback and were slaughtered, um, uh, by a dude named Il Ghazi, uh, he was sort of this, like, drunken warlord kind of guy, um, anyway, um, so, um, so there was that thing that happened, uh, and then also there was Il Ghazi besieged a town, and the town didn't have, um, uh, any sort of defenders in there, and there was a priest, I think he was even a bishop, and he was like, you know what, guys, we're gonna to defend this town and he put on armor and he got a sword and he led his troops to defend the town which doesn't seem like that big of a deal except this was something bishops weren't supposed to do bishops weren't supposed to throw down bishops weren't supposed to be men of peace they were not supposed to be men of war they definitely were not supposed to be leading men in killing other men but he did it anyway and was very successful and saved the town and people started saying like hey we've got all these problems of violence in our newly conquered region maybe hear me out maybe we should allow holy men to take up arms and kill people that's crazy but this bishop kind of like by protecting by saving this town kind of set a precedent and then if you wanted to divide the Christian world into hawks and doves maybe we could right now so the hawks were like hey we've got a new paradigm developing here shouldn't we have men of violence who are also holy men in order to defend the faith and the doves would be like no we should not because we've been called to love out your enemies and these Christian virtues we should trust in God we shouldn't trust in the arms of men and then the hawks would say yes but did not God create these arms of men and would he not so we had this sort of internal disagreement over sanctioned violence in Christendom so that does make me feel better again it wasn't just approved of immediately that this is a great idea there's no criticism of this idea so that's good that there's controversy around the idea oh definitely I guess it's a bummer that eventually it still happens but it's also encouraging that it spawned from a guy wanting to protect his town from being slaughtered that's encouraging although granted he probably shouldn't have but yeah it was probably one of those little flashpoint moments that gave color to a debate that had been going on because we are like politically the church is now in a realm where violence is going to be a more common occurrence and how do we deal with that in our sort of religious paradigm that has a lot more calls to non-violence than perhaps other paradigms or religious paradigms does that make sense?
so anyway so with all these pilgrims that are being killed a lot of knights sort of noblemen who lived in the region decided to create a bodyguard agency and so they decided that they were going to be the bodyguards for these pilgrims so when pilgrims went to these sites they would go armed with the pilgrims to make sure that the pilgrims were not molested in any way and so they sort of would wander around and they were giving donations and I don't think they were paid because they did this out of their own volition but they started receiving donations and these guys decided hey you know what this is a really great thing that we're doing and they began to think we should have a religious order around protecting pilgrims now there had been a religious order that had started in the Middle East in the Levant in Jerusalem a number of years before and they were a religious order that created what were called that created hospitals so they created hospitals to care for the sick to care for lepers and to care for those who in the crusades were wounded and these men were known as the hospitalers or the order of St what was it the hospital of St. John of Jerusalem or the order of anyway they were in Jerusalem they were the hospitalers the order of St. John so their job was basically like military field wounds essentially triage yeah and this is saying that St. John of Jerusalem the most venerable order of the hospital of St.
John of Jerusalem and so they were established as an order so what an order means is that the Pope gave you the thumbs up you're allowed to do this people took vows you took holy vows just like if you were Benedictine or Franciscan you were a member of the order of the hospitalers and you took vows and so this is there was a charter that you had to follow there was rules that you had to follow and actually the St. John's hospitalers still exist today I think they started in 1080 and they have an unbroken line of membership to this day they are now known as St. John's Ambulance so they're all over the world they're all over the world they are volunteer basically volunteer ambulance volunteer paramedics they're still headquartered in Jerusalem which is fascinating what's the training look like because if I had two ambulances that showed up and one was from the hospital and one was from the hospitalers they're like hi we're volunteers I actually realized that St. John's Ambulance is not a very big thing in the US there was St.
John's Ambulance when I was a kid growing up I think it's something if you're in a small town you don't have a big hospital you don't have a professional class of paramedics you have these people it's like volunteer firefighters in small towns you have volunteer ambulance so the order still exists today I don't know much about it but it's kind of fun to think about and so these temples were like okay if we have this service order of hospital we should have a service order of protection for pilgrims and they were living in Jerusalem and their headquarters was in the Al-Aska Mosque on the Temple Mount the Al-Aska Mosque still exists today it's now a mosque again and it is right across the square from the Dome of the Rock it's that big gold dome so they lived so the Templars got their name because they were the brothers of the Temple they lived in the Al-Aska Mosque on the Temple Mount this was their HQ and so there was they elected a leader and he was a Frenchman and his name was Hugh of Payne P-A-Y-N-S you can call him Hugh of Payne if you want which is kind of cool I was just going to say Hugh of Payne yeah but Hugh of Payne he came to the Middle East as many knights did as many noblemen did for pilgrimage and also because swords were needed and there were skirmishes and battles all the time and his knights stayed and they elected him as the head of this new order but they didn't have a charter they didn't have a rule of life and they wanted one and so Hugh of Payne's job was to kind of find somebody in the Christian world who could write a order for them for them to be able to have some sort of rule that the men could follow and so King Baldwin II he was the king of Jerusalem and it's kind of funny to me that the kings of Jerusalem are known as King Baldwin King Baldwin IV was the famous leper king but anyway King Baldwin II was like alright we got these knights and they live in the Temple Mount and they're being bodyguards and they're wanting to be a holy order and they were unlike the Hospitallers the Hospitallers ended up becoming a military order as well but more than the Hospitallers the Templars had this idea this new idea of Christian warrior knight up till then knights were seen as very secular things warriors who were either hired or by vows to their lords took care of very worldly matters such as bloodshed and policing and that kind of thing but there was a one man who was thinking of recasting knighthood to also emulate Christian virtues and his name was Bernard of Clairvaux and so Bernard of Clairvaux was a Cistercian Cistercian Cistercian well I think so or Cistercian yes and so the Cistercian order was of order of poverty an order of work similar to the Benedictines but I think a little more intense than the Benedictines and he was well respected the popes liked him he had a golden tongue like his rebuke was scathing of wealth and excess he was a Twitter star Twitter star Bernard of Clairvaux for sure he was a true believer in poverty and service he was and Hugh of Payneau went to him and Baldwin wrote to him and said hey we've got these new guys they want to create a holy order a holy order of Christian warrior who was going to fight the enemies of Christendom and Bernard of Clairvaux was like I can write that charter for you I can write that rule of life for you and he does and so he he writes the rule of life and it was centered around chastity so you couldn't get married couldn't have kids it was centered around obedience you were obedient to the internal life of the order and poverty that you were not to make any that you were not to have much money this is ironic based on what happened to the Templars their symbol was as we sort of we know the Templars as wearing the Red Cross but their actual symbol was just a simple black and white flag and their crest was to showcase the poverty was two dudes sharing a horse that's their symbol two dudes sharing a horse because they couldn't afford two horses what was on the black and white flag? the left side was white the right side was black oh so half I'm pretty sure or up and down I can't remember up and down it's up and down so that is the and then the Red Cross becomes part of their symbol a little bit later on and then you've got the Blue and White Cross of the Hospitallers the Red and White Cross of the Templars and then later on a rival military order called the Teutonics get started and they're Germans and they're black and white do they sing? it sounds like yeah anyway by the way I've been waiting for a good opportunity to make the was Bernard of was he clairvoyant? I've been waiting for the joy he couldn't have because he wanted the Templars to have lives in poverty but a Spanish king named Alfonso was going to wreck that but we'll get there you're telling me the guy named Alfonso does not want to live in poverty that's correct so the internal life of the order was one of yeah it was a military order it was a religious order you took vows you were there for life you didn't get married you didn't have sex you didn't have children and anybody could join nobleman or commoner and so this was a very wildly successful thing commoners all joined people that didn't have any other recourse in life could join and you went and you fought and you lived in various places we'll talk about how it grew in a second but we're still at the rule and so the rule was one that was supposed to tame and temper the more showy and bro-y aspects of knighthood into what?
The bro-y aspects? They were kind of bros to show and bro not to be bros so knighthood in the middle ages was flashy clothes I'm so cool I can throw down I've got a fancy horse and people the hawks of the Christian world were worried that their warrior class was a little too licentious and so they were going to create a warrior class that was focused on the life of asceticism and poverty and obedience and throwing down I just think back to two podcasts ago we were talking about the guardians and all this kind of stuff It sounds like that's what Plato wanted anyway they both still want the same thing I'm wondering if there is actually anything distinctly Christian about this I don't think it's a good thing No I don't think it's a good thing but it's interesting what you just said is that basically as soon as people were kind of okay with it five of these orders popped up immediately Yeah Oh not even way more than five but that doesn't mean it's a good thing One thing is something bubbled up that desire was there and then once the theology got around it There are appealing aspects to a structured life But the thing is I was going to bring this up at the end of the podcast also just talking about we need to have or the idea of sanctioning violence is going to be at some level necessary for a state or for a group of people Coupling that sanctioned violence with a religious life is weird really troublesome for us in the church but then it does raise the question should it never happen or can it happen well but we'll get there later Anyway so Bernard Flairville writes the order and Hugh of Payon goes to the west to recruit people to come help on this big campaign to take the town of Damascus to besiege Damascus and when he does it is insanely wildly successful he recruits 10,000 knights they want to join they go and I believe they successfully take the town of Damascus and it's the first big victory for the Crusaders or for the Templars We won't even get to the second crusade and why it starts but that's sort of the crusade that makes the Templars famous but there's another part to the story that is really important to tell about the founding of the Templars so we have the order anybody can join and that is there was this dude named King Alfonso King Alfonso is in Spain King Alfonso lived a warrior's life so Spain in the Middle Ages was basically divided into north and south the north being Christendom the south being Islam I believe King Alfonso was the king of Leon and Castile although he may have been the king of Aragon I can't remember let's just say he was the king of Castile which is right in the middle of Spain anyway so he had spent his life fighting Muslims in the south and trying to sort of push the Muslims off of the Iberian Peninsula into North Africa and he lobbied for years to the Pope saying like hey man this is a crusade too like it can't just be the Middle East we're also fighting enemies of Christendom or whatever and then eventually you're like you're right this is that and so then this whole big campaign called the Reconquista happened in Spain and Reconquista was the reconquering of the Iberian Peninsula pushing the Muslims into Africa and this was something that went on from 1100 all the way to like oh man almost the Reformation like it went on forever you go to Portugal the south of Portugal you go to the south of Spain and you go to those cities in the south and they have Muslim influence in their architecture all over and anyway so King Alfonso is fighting the Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula and he was a warrior king he loved the Templars he tried to start his own orders he started two of them they didn't really take but he started his own Knights Templars it didn't really happen but he slept on a shield and he decided that it's got to be a big shield because it's small but as a king he was dedicated so much to the warrior cause that he thought that the company of women would make him soft which presents the problem for the kingdom he didn't have any kids so no kids and he was a bit of a bombastic dude and when he died much to the chagrin of his advisors he left the entire kingdom of Castile to the Templars oh wow yeah this is a problem and all the bros and the Templars were like yeah I don't think the Templars were yet bros they were true believers in life of poverty at this point so this is a problem for them this is a problem for them because A. they inherited a giant pool of wealth but B. they are also not they're not rulers it's supposed to be the defined right of kings it's supposed to be that the kingdoms were to be chosen by God through the lineage of the kids and so this was a huge problem and also just a logistical problem because how do you manage this huge kingdom with family dudes and so all the advisors in Castile when King Alfonso was dead were like we don't want these foreign guys running our country or running our kingdom so the Pope and the order had to make a kind of a decision and so they made a decision to tie a bow in the story of King Alfonso so what happened was they got King Alfonso's brother and they're like alright King Alfonso's brother you're going to be king King Alfonso's brother did not want to be king he was a monk who had taken a vow of poverty and chastity they made him recant his vows of poverty and chastity they forced him to marry this girl and as soon as they had a kid Alfonso's brother abdicated made that kid king and went back to the monastery the kid was a daughter so the daughter became queen of Castile and she ended up marrying somebody and then emerged to the kingdom so that's how that story ended the Templars did not end up ruling the kingdom although they kind of kept the paper that said they did which was going to be a problem later but what they did was they negotiated all the sweetest castles so they said yes they said look at him take all the sweetest castles we'll set up our uh an order we'll set up a wing of our troops or our knights there and we will fight the muslims in the south of which is a horrible deal and then they said because everyone was like oh man we can't really force them to give up the crown so we'll like you know we'll kind of ask them to give up the crown and then the knights templar um had one more ask for this to happen and the pope granted it and it was that they never had to pay tithes in the entirety of their whole order they didn't have to give any money to the catholic church and they had the same uh rights to collect tithes tithes from the people in where they existed from the local populace themselves oh no that's crazy and it was accepted and they said yes this is a great idea so that was the one thing they wanted they didn't pay tithes to the church and they wanted to keep the tithes for themselves this is unfortunately this is going to be the death blow for the templars in 200 years i get not paying taxes but then wanting to pull taxes from everybody around using like a step but the reason why they they said to you know everyone sort of agreed was like hey these are the guys that we are sanctioning to fight in the levant we're going to be sending the money we're going to be sending them money anyway right through the church we might as well just cut out the middle man let them do it themselves yeah makes sense yeah and then uh and the second thing that they wanted to do was they wanted to have the men who had taken vows in the order so all the brothers of the order they wanted to be able to offer confession and absolution within the order as opposed to in the church instead of going to a priest to confess their sins they wanted to be able to confess their sins to their superiors in the order exactly and so and then the pope agreed to that and they did and this is going to be a problem oh yeah they're basically doing their own church they essentially were carving out a mini version of the catholic church within the catholic church that was bent on warfare this isn't going to be important yes so this is um but at the time everyone thought this was a great idea later on no one thought it was a great idea but at the time everyone thought it was like yeah this makes sense um let's do this and so um you didn't so they didn't have to be ordained so you could basically confess to somebody who wasn't ordained in the church they were just they had taken vows to be a templar as long as you're superior um and so by so they were founded in 1119 this is one of the bunch of the bros like hey we should protect the pilgrims by 1140 they were the most famous order in all of christendom and people who were dying and giving them lands and castles and estates by like the bowl full they had huge tracts of land in france enormous enormous tract of land in spain huge tracts of land and castles in england in germany yeah not so much in italy um they had the whole island of cyprus they had huge parts of sicily and then they controlled um the castles in those major cities in in the least um you know acre being the sort of the um the big one um beirut tripoli sidon somehow they lose acre eventually because richard first takes back over how's that property working out yeah now poverty is not well i mean they sort of say like we're not buying fancy things we're still wearing our like they they eschewed having fancy fancy armor and they just wore like basic armor and a white um a white smock and eventually someone drew a big red cross on it and that's where they got that but they just wore this white smock and not very flashy armor like see we're poor um but they had enormous enormous enormous tracts of land and they ended up becoming um a uh decentralized uh ledger of finance in the middle of the middle east which is really interesting we'll talk about the next podcast they're like the first bitcoin i was drinking to their bank but no they don't have their own currency do they no but what they could do was um any letter that was signed off by a templar in one city was going to be honored by a templar in another city so you could give a templar a pound of gold in tripoli and then sail all the way to toulouse with a letter and then you could go and get that pound of gold back that's crazy yeah so that's basically became and then they would give you know they take a little bit off the top for their services uh i think they didn't even but um um but so the first robin hood if they didn't yeah yeah we'll talk more about that so yeah return the gold and keep proceeds so yeah already you can see seeds of trouble in the future you've got you know all this money you've got a something within the christian world that is wholly dedicated to violence and warfare um and you had them completely cordoned and sectioned off from any kind of outside regulatory bodies in the church um so the templars only lasted for like 250 years that's short yeah i was out there much longer yeah i mean while the hospitalars are still going they're not a military order anymore as far as i know the hospitalars bank can i go do the banking they never really banked the templars did the banking um but anyway um so yeah i just this happens a lot and some of the sort of the things that i find interesting about the early story of the templars is there's something about an organization saying we are going to eschew poverty we're going to eschew riches and take a vow of poverty and we have this mission now in this case the mission is the conquering of the holy land which i don't think is christians have any business before that it was just protecting the pilgrims right yeah which i think was a good mission but then it evolved into we the best way to protect the pilgrims is to kill all the pilgrims enemies right that's not um but there's something about like orders that take vows of poverty that for whatever reason attract donations why is that why do people say like oh man those guys are doing good work i want to give my money to them it still costs money to uh so uh the gosemite abbey and travis kentucky still has costs they have to the people that work land not only the monks but also people that they hire the things that they need that they can't grow themselves like there's a monetary need i don't know how the state needs to tap into that uh we're not we're not reconquering the holy land that's that's not all go funding man anytime you want anyway um but anyway i just i've always sort of found it ironic that throughout in the history of the western church you have these movements of organized orders around poverty and good works and those orders are almost always swamped by money and then undone by money and that just to me is like incredibly sad um i mean you see in protest churches now too right like you of course you see it yeah these make churches that you know are you know we're doing god's work preaching gospel and then are just swamped with cash and don't know what to do with it and build like you know like a facility for sunday school yacht church yeah yacht church anyway just i've always just found that kind of the troubling aspect of these stories it always kind of goes that way um and also um there's just also something about the something attractive about that ordered life like there are secular versions of that ordered life now um of just sort of having a life that's built on principles having a rule that one follows and um you can go find whole reddit reddit threads of people um i even found one that was called monk life now it had nothing to do with with um religious order but he was like uh you know it was like uh meditation kettlebells and keto hashtag monk life right like but there's just something about um about having that sort of structure that lots of people find appealing and there's also something about it appealing for um for men as well i'm not saying that that doesn't happen with with women but there is something about this this ordered life done together that you see throughout history being very appealing to groups of two groups of dudes i don't really i don't have an account i don't have an account for that i don't know why it is um no yeah i can't think of a reason for it i agree with you that's the story of the monasteries also it does make me happy that um in the history of the church um the order that was centered around warfare and violence doesn't survive beyond its it's um doesn't you know doesn't survive 200 years whereas you have monasteries that are still going that are focused on poverty and prayer so i think that's something to be said as well um but wrestling with the the crusades um uh yeah i don't think any i don't think any modern believer can look at that with any amount of like saying that was a great idea right so what happened on friday the 13th oh man that's next podcast oh we're doing 200 yeah we're doing 200 oh gosh we haven't even talked about first we haven't got to saracens oh my goodness okay yeah i hope that changes everything oh yeah i'm sorry um you referenced this on your last episode which i forget how many others ago i just wonder is this actually a gendered thing to say that it's only men who like that ordered life weren't you saying there's some rapid rise in yeah no you're right there is there is yeah no you're true there is a rapid like yeah apparently millennial nuns is a huge uh growing um section right now i call like 12 millennial nuns on twitter oh they are like the holiest yeah you go on twitter and it's just garbage and then there's just none and she like takes a selfie of her and she's like i've been here praying for two hours and praying for the life of christians and she's like oh my word this is this is anyway so okay is it no i don't know if i don't know if i don't know if i don't know if you don't know if i don't know if i don't know if i don't know if i don't know if it's actually um a male problem specifically yeah i don't know if it's a man i feel like anything i say can skew i think the way to view the templars is they took the forms and patterns and structures of the religious life and turned its focus to the secular here and now to the political problems of the day and tried to shoehorn the religious life into the political secular problems of the day and they and people were really jazzed about it i thought we're like oh this is a brand new thing this is a new expression of christianity that's going to that's going to sort of move the ball forward not only are we going to have a soul taken care of we're gonna have the world taken care of too right and it burns out in 200 years um uh and it collapses in the way of its own excess and violence this is what ends up happening it feels kind of funny to say that 200 years is a short period of time yeah but for but for uh but for an idea i think it is i guess in the context of a church that's 2 000 years old yeah um but then uh i don't know see i just i get sensitive to to um people it's people saying like oh we can take the form of the religious and put it into the secular and we're going to get um really motivated people and it's true but but i think you know um i can't have an analogy there's one there's an idea for me but i don't have enough to bring out but it did work for the templars right like it for a bit yeah i guess you consider it anyway it worked in recruiting people there's something deeper that was its eventual undoing i don't know it worked for four generations right essentially five generations still the approach to an ordered life is the monastic life and that's outlived that templar order for sure i don't know maybe there's something appealing in that probably to a certain type of person but um like you'd be bored out of your mind if you did the same thing every day right yeah uh to what extent i i don't know i crave novelty right yeah but novelty can be found it doesn't necessarily mean variance from routine actually that's exactly what it means uh what i mean is that you can find novelty even within routine like every morning i could read a different book does that make sense i can find that novelty even within the routine of monastic order yeah anyway that's all i'm gonna say about the first this first one the templars just their establishment who they are the world that they're entering into and also that this is a wing of christendom that is i think one that we shouldn't lionize and one that we shouldn't um um sort of hold up as uh as something to revel in i think there's also a um uh a dark section of the internet nowadays uh that is anti-islam that that longs for some sort of of return to a militarized christianity that will have some sort of war and that is i think uh you know um on that is outside the bounds of orthodoxy it doesn't sound like a good idea no and it wasn't a good idea when it happened even though it you know took root and captured hearts and minds for like i said five generations um at some point it was still it was still kicked out whereas the hospitalers had their founding principle on helping as opposed to conquering anyway even though they did fight so that's templars that's uh we'll we'll get to their sort of their glories and their agonies in the next podcast for sure great sounds good to me all right thank you gentlemen thank you specifically gram and this is in classical stuff you know you can check out our website classical stuff.net and we have all of our back episodes there if you're craving episodes one through i think probably nine ish now sure all of our episodes are on the website you can find them there along with pictures of our ugly mugs and i do mean ugly mugs we're selling drinkware i'm just kidding it's our faces and you can tweet at us at clsscal stuff at the twitter and you can email us classical stuff at veritasacademy.net those are the places you can find us we would love to hear from you and if you want to send us memes or more additions to classical stuff bingo we would love 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