The Banking Business, and a Superstition That Is Not Theirs

The Templars ran what amounted to a financial network. A pilgrim could deposit funds at a preceptory in the West and draw against them in the East, which solved the problem of carrying money across a continent of thieves. They held deposits for the French crown, managed estates across Europe, and were exempt from most local taxation. That is the context for their suppression, and it is why the charges brought against them are treated with suspicion: the crown owed them a great deal.

The proceedings themselves are unusually well documented, and the documents keep producing surprises. In 2007 the Vatican published the Chinon parchment, a record of a hearing in 1308 at which papal commissioners absolved the order's leaders of heresy after they recanted. The document had been in the archive throughout, catalogued under a wrong date. It does not show that the order was innocent of everything alleged; it shows that the pope's own investigators did not find it guilty of heresy.

One thing the record does not support is the Friday the thirteenth story. The arrests were on Friday 13 October 1307, but no source connects that date to the superstition until the twentieth century, and the unlucky Friday and the unlucky thirteen have separate and older histories. It is a modern invention that has become the single best-known fact about the order.