If you ever come to London I would highly recommend a visit to that area[1]. take the district line to "Temple" and walk into temple court. This is a set of interconnecting pretty courtyards surrounded by buildings used as offices for lawyers working at the nearby high court. These courtyards have a feel similar to an Oxford/Cambridge college and have been used as settings for "Harry Potter" and other films (to give you a flavour). As you wander through, eventually you will come across a statue of two knights on the back of a single horse, symbol of the templars[2]. Next to this is the Temple Church[3], with its distinctive round medieval tower where the templars themselves are buried. This is a lovely place to listen to concerts etc. I used to deliberately get the tube to temple every day so I could walk through this area to work because it's really lovely.
> This is a set of interconnecting pretty courtyards surrounded by building
Yes, London is quite unique amongst global cities for having these sorts of treasures hidden right in the centre. Another good example in that area is Linconln's Inn Fields[1] which is a quiet sanctuary just off the horrors of Holborn. Venture up the road to the City of London and there are maybe dozens more.
It is, sadly, an art form that has been lost in the "relaxed planning" era of the New-Build garbage.
Fortunately the older areas are protected from the grubby hands of the greedy property developers due to various legal constraints in place ranging from Listed Building status to more obscure ones.
The practical consequences are extremely minor - but the Inner and Middle temples can give themselves planning permission, and issue themselves alcohol licenses!
Too bad so few popular and reliable records exist, as I would be really interested in what their leverage ratio was for loans to deposits, what calendar they used to synchronize everywhere in the world (presumably astronomical), whether the Templars picked it up by learning and adapting Islamic Hawala during the crusades, what the Medicis did differently (covered a bit in Fergusson's The Ascent of Money). The necessary conditions for their early portfolio risk management practices would be fascinating, and probably even available in surviving Islamic texts.
The vow of poverty seemed to be the lynchpin of templar banking, where the way to solve the basic principal/agent problem and ensure the alignment of interests to make the templars disinterested in the transactions themselves other than ensuring their integrity. Relating to money with a vow of poverty doesn't mean suffering, it's just a vow to eschew the trappings and symbols of wealth, as the whole system relied on Templars recognizing that they did not need money when instead they had power. They could afford to be humble. This problem of how to find and prove people who can be trusted to uphold higher values that create stability continues to today I'm sure.
If you are ever in Portugal, I recommend seeing the last Templar castle in Tomar. I found its scale and engineering quite spectacular, as well as how well it appears to have been preserved.
> If you are ever in Portugal, I recommend seeing the last Templar castle in Tomar. I found its scale and engineering quite spectacular, as well as how well it appears to have been preserved.
Thank you for the tip. Absolutely stunning in the pictures alone, made a note to visit this place.
> If you are ever in Portugal, I recommend seeing the last Templar castle in Tomar. I found its scale and engineering quite spectacular, as well as how well it appears to have been preserved.
The Templar castle in Tomar was probably my best sightseeing experience, maybe because I wasn't expecting anything (her: "there's a templar castle let's go", me: "ok"). It was quite large and there were surprisingly few tourists: I think there were two other pairs visiting at the same time. Yes there's the window and the architecture is quite varied, but the general atmosphere, the vastness and the quitness is something I'll never forget.
Spent many a Sunday afternoon wondering around that castle, did you find the knights mess hall, has an awesome echo, used to visit just to shout in there with the kids :)
> whether the Templars picked it up by learning and adapting Islamic Hawala during the crusades
Doubtful. Money lenders/changers existed long before Islam (something about Jesus flipping their tables over in the Temple), and Hawala from my understanding is a flat commission based service (not interest based), since usury is forbidden.
Christianity forbids usury as well, hence why hawala seemed like a plausible candidate system for how the Templar banking system may have scaled. Interest calculations are complicated, where something simple like a commission scales easily. Given what we know now about economics and how systems scale, it seems like there is a systems view of the necessary conditions that might shed some new light on some history that has a lot of woo around it.
Catholicism teaches that usury is morally evil and therefore always wrong. 'Usury' means taking any amount of interest on a full-recourse loan (ie a loan where the collateral is not limited to a particular asset or set of assets -- so yes, it includes credit cards, student loans and most mortgages).
[O]ur Lord, according to Luke the evangelist, has bound us by a clear command that we ought not to expect any addition to the capital sum when we grant a loan. For, that is the real meaning of usury: when, from its use, a thing which produces nothing is applied to the acquiring of gain and profit without any work, any expense or any risk.
– Lateran V
[The following proposition is condemned as erroneous:] Since ready cash is more valuable than that to be paid, and since there is no one who does not consider ready cash of greater worth than future cash, a creditor can demand something beyond the principal from the borrower, and for this reason be excused from usury. – Various Errors on Moral Subjects (II), Pope Innocent XI by decree of the Holy Office, March 4, 1679 (Denzinger)
One cannot condone the sin of usury by arguing that the gain is not great or excessive, but rather moderate or small; neither can it be condoned by arguing that the borrower is rich; nor even by arguing that the money borrowed is not left idle, but is spent usefully, either to increase one’s fortune, to purchase new estates, or to engage in business transactions. – Vix Pervenit, encyclical of Benedict XIV
Christianity inherited its ban on usury from Judaism, just like Islam. The Jews took it to mean they were only forbidden from charging interest to other members of their faith, but the Catholic Church outright forbade interest taking for a long time, well into the Renaissance.
The turning point was probably around the same time the Church came around on Liberal republics replacing kings and queens.
It sure looks like direct words from Jesus to me, not to expect anything in return for a loan. It’s just that Christian culture chose to ignore this rule in exchange for capitalism and colonialism.
This doesn’t seem to ban interest instead denouncing expectation of any payments including principal repayments. Though the nuance is clearly lost when converting from the original text to English. It’s interesting framing because the question becomes if X is a good thing is not X automatically a bad thing or could it be neutral?
“And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them, expecting nothing in return. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for He is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” - Luke 6:34-36 NIV
The Old Testament’s anti interest framing is quoted as “making a profit off a loan from a poor person is exploiting that person (Exodus 22:25–27)” alternative translations: https://www.biblehub.com/exodus/22-25.htm but poor person is an interesting exception. Loaning money to a rich person is hardly exploiting them so a Bentley dealership offering car loans on 250,000 car seems perfectly acceptable.
The temptation to make a theological argument is a distraction here. The fact is that Catholicism thought that interest was a sin for a very long time, so Christians weren't allowed to do it. It's the only reason that Jews are slandered with accusations of usury, because they were the only Europeans allowed to openly make a living lending money.
The theological argument is simply context to understand why the Church changed it’s mind between 325 and 1311. It then changed again between 1311 and now. And of course why the Eastern Christian perspective on usury is yet again different.
This stuff is really caught up on more fundamental philosophical changes over huge stretches of time. Someone outside of western culture reading the text as written would presumably miss the argument around interest and instead view it as a setup for the final line Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. While someone within the culture sees echoes of arguments going back thousands of years.
PS: No offense meant if your belief system is based on the assumption that this stuff is unchanged through time.
That doesn't at all read as being forbidden. It reads like Jesus giving advice to people to give freely and not expect anything return. Not seeing any Thou Shalt Not's or other sternly worded proclamations. Which is probably why all of their early church councils were split on the subject. As opposed to stealing, killing, adultery etc. which everyone was in agreement on based on the scripture.
Contrast that with the usury wordings in Islamic scripture where it is treated essentially the same as stealing, and it's not worded as a friendly suggestion but rather a strict proclamation. Those differences in scripture make it clear why the different religions see it so differently.
> it's not worded as a friendly suggestion but rather a strict proclamation
Jesus's positive commands ("do this") are consistently aimed at the heart rather than specific outward behaviors. What matters is not the specifics of the good things you do, but the degree to which you're loving God and loving your neighbor from your heart in those actions.
Hence when he saw a poor widow giving only 2 copper coins to the temple treasury (about 1/64 of a day's wages), he said she had given more than all the others, because she had given all she had to live on. My interpretation is that he said this because she was showing a heart that was fully given to God and trusting him completely to provide.
I did a walking tour of Bruges the other week and heard an interesting story about salt. Salt was a valuable commodity and could function as currency, carrying it around was risky and impractical. So there was a guild house that became a place where you could store your salt and get given a little note about how much salt they owed you. Later on if you wanted to exchange the value of your salt with someone else it became more practical to swap the little notes directly rather than trek down to the salt house and swap physical salt so people started doing that. Boom, paper money. I find all these kind of stories fascinating.
You're correct. Funny enough, this is also obscure knowledge even in e.g Spanish. We use the word salario (from latin salarium) which has the same meaning as in latin: words ending in -ario (lat: -arium) is used to denote association, like in templario (templar) or revolucionario (revolutionary). For some reason, however, nobody thinks of "salario" as something associated with salt (sal). I guess it's so strange in today's world that money would be used for the specific purpose of buying salt, that it simply doesn't click.
This blog by a classicist claims that the word salary is indeed coming from the latin words salarium and sal, but that it is not clear what the connection is, that there is neither evidence for the explanation that Roman soldiers were paid in salt nor that it was an allowance for the specific purpose of buying salt:
"As I said above, ‘salt allowance’ isn’t a terrible guess. But I strongly suspect it’s much more metaphorical than that. Compare how the Greek word for a salary was opsōnion, literally ‘(money) for buying opson’, where opson means ‘fish, relish, sauce’. That doesn’t mean Greek workers were given a ‘fish allowance’: it means that there was a generalised idea that wages went on traded goods like fish, and not on things like barley which land-owners would grow for themselves. Similarly, in Rome, grain allowances were a common thing; it could easily make sense to interpret salarium as ‘everything-else-money’."
In the book on the history of Rome, Livy states : “Again, the monopoly of salt, the price of which was very high, was taken out of the hands of individuals and wholly assumed by the government. Imposts and taxes were removed from the plebs that they might be borne by the well-to-do, who were equal to the burden: the poor paid dues enough if they reared children.”
Looking at the wikipedia page for bank notes[0] there is no mention of salt or Bruges on the page. It suggests that bank notes first originated in China during the 7th century the knowledge of which European explorers introduced to Europe in the 13th Century. There is mention of cloth being used in Prague in 960 and the Knights Templar, as in the original article here, in 1150.
It goes on to add more details about the introduction of banknotes to solve practical problems that would be hard to summarise, but I found an interesting read.
Excerpted from Wikipedia:
The Templars were closely tied to the Crusades; as they became unable to secure their holdings in the Holy Land, support for the order faded. Rumors about the Templars' secret initiation ceremony created distrust, and King Philip IV of France, while being deeply in debt to the order, used this distrust to take advantage of the situation. In 1307, he pressured Pope Clement to have many of the order's members in France arrested, tortured into giving false confessions, and then burned at the stake. Under further pressure, Pope Clement V disbanded the order in 1312.
--------------------
Perhaps if they were not so scrooge-like, their order would still be around today.
The financial stress of our debt-laden culture has led to deep mistrust, cospiracism, disfunction, environmental harm, and the stunting of growth for developing nations around the world.
International banks have spearheaded an absolute explosion in global economic growth. Looking at your story above, Philip was the bad actor and the Templars should've played politics better (maybe lending money to the pope as well?)
Banks are a massively significant cultural innovation. I can pay someone in a different country by pressing a button and it's a reliable, robust system.
In those days, it was a huge deal to be able to pay a merchant in France by giving gold, or even a paper representing ownership of gold, to a bank in England. Before, you had to send the money on a ship and hope for the best.
International banks led to a massive explosion in trade and global prosperity.
Not really. An international bank is one legal entity in two places. If you deposit 1 kg of gold in place A, your business partner can withdraw it in place B, minus fees of course. The bank still has to transfer the gold to make up the difference at a later date. The benefit is the merchants don’t have to do this themselves anymore.
The pope and the Catholic church lost its power a few centuries later.
Eventually in Europe everything was subsumed by the government creating all powerful nation states.
The Pope was the owner of everything. It was, after all, a catholic order. The game here was very much the King of France attacking the money power of the Church, instead of an isolated problem with the Templars.
>They can use their international reach to try to sidestep taxes and regulations.
And, since their debts to each other are a very real kind of private money, when the banks are fragile, the entire monetary system of the world also becomes vulnerable.
We are still trying to figure out what to do with these banks.
We cannot live without them, it seems, and yet we are not sure we want to live with them.
Governments have long sought ways to hold them in check.
Sometimes the approach has been laissez-faire, sometimes not.
Few regulators have been quite as ardent as King Philip IV of France.
Very interesting leaps taken to come to the conclusion that Philip IV ("government") was trying to "regulate" the private money sector, back then.
First of all he waged very costly wars (against Aragon, England and Flanders) and found himself - no surprise - with unmanageable debt i.e. not enough silver (also a very important difference between today's "banking") in 1295. By that time even the Templars hadn't enough money to help him out so he began to loan from the much richer Florentine bankers and to devalue his own royal currency (tied to silver) with the high price of social unrest/domestic instability.
The crackdown on Templars preceded a power struggle with the clergy (a common theme in the centuries before and afterwards) represented by the pope Boniface VIII. Long story short: Philip IV won and consequently established the nearly 70 years long so called "Avignon Papacy". The next pope Clement V was basically under his thumb. Only in this greater context could he go on and "restructure" the "Templar Banks", technically the property of the Church.
Of course in this cascade of perpetual debt and wars he utilized all his domestic "regulatory" powers[0]: constantly raising taxes (1289), seizing assets of Lombard merchants (1292), heavily debasing currency (1295), unheard/provocative taxation (50%) of the French clergy (1296), expelling Jews and seizing all their assets (1306).
Kings of the time didn't think of the modern trick: (1) making gold useless to make tax payments and (2) creating your own fiat money, with no backing on anything but the power to make more wars.
I'm pretty sure they got this 'original' idea from the practice of their Muslim contemporaries. This is a very similar concept to the origin of cheque where it's too dangerous to carry gold and cash along the silk road from Middle East countries to China and beyond.
The word "original" does not appear so I don't know why you've put it in quotes. Indeed you don't have to read very far down the article to find acknowledgement that something similar had been done centuries earlier in China.
Edit: I see the headline (probably written by someone other than the author) says they "invented banking". There are of course many claims to that dubious honour!
Stupid question, but wouldn't stealing a cheque work back then? I mean I can imagine only known people would be allowed to cash it. Plus there's more benefits to carrying a cheque, large quantities get difficult to move around (same with cash money, which is one reason that higher denominations are discouraged)
I'm not sure if the rules were the same as far back as then, but the modern rule (or rules, plural, as they're a consequence of several rules) that a bank (either the drawee bank or an intermediate paying/depository bank, depending on the circumstances) is liable for a fraudulently cashed check has existed for centuries, IIRC. And just like today, it doesn't much matter if an impersonator forged a payee's or endorsee's signature, amount, etc; a bank is still on the hook. (And IIRC a bank is liable only upon a prima facie showing of forgery, as opposed to whatever stronger burden of proof would normally adhere.) Of course, the defrauding party is liable to which ever bank was on the hook, but the rules operate to rather clearly make a bank strictly liable in the first instance so there's minimal confusion in the banking system regarding settlements or settlement disputes, and the drawer (person who wrote the check) is the most protected of all.
This incentivizes banks to "know your customer" (long before modern regulatory regimes), as well as for banks to only deal with other reputable banks. In legal jurisdictions that do a lot of international commercial transactions, rules such as these are typically held paramount unless specifically and clearly overridden by local law. Relatedly, jurisdictions that don't abide the so-called Lex mercatoria tend not to become centers of international commerce.
If the drawer weren't strongly protected, the utility of checks would severely diminished.
It sure worked. One of the reasons the value of those cheques dropped with distance to the issuer. Basically, it was a trust based system. And one that worked extremely well. With added benefits for those that figured out proper accounting around assets, liabilities and so on. The Italian bankers did, the Hanse (North German economic and trade super power made of individual merchants) did not, for example.
A cheque would be both easier to travel with (thus exposing yourself to less harm) but also comparatively illquid (can perhaps only be redeemed in a few locations which may not be realistically accessible to highwaymen).
Interesting question. I've read books about the Templars and it didn't come up. Some speculation:
Worth bearing in mind the type of people using this service were landed gentry. A Turkish bandit wouldn't do well turning up at a Templar fortress trying to redeem some French Lordlings's gold but you still have to expect unscrupulous Europeans would be stealing from each other.
I'd expect the KYC was pretty strong at the issuers that handled gold/property. Your family would be known, not just the individual. I think they were redeeming food/lodgings/services while on route so defrauding a remote fortresses might not be at all rewarding. To score big I think you'd need to present as landed gentry at places like London which sounds hard... your target would need to have no friends/relations... but it's the premise of 1000s of historical fiction novels so eh?!
Wax seals and such were the authentication tools at the time. It might hobble attempted fakes but I would assume thieves would steal the cygnet rings and such too. I've seen claims the Templars used cyphers but that type of history gets blurred with the romantic stories. Encoding a password onto the cheque seems painfully obvious to us today.
I imagine there was a chain of custody of the person themselves. Templars were protecting the pilgrims not just their gold so they accompanied them from location to location so the chance of someone unknown turning up at a gate with cheques to cash is less likely. I also imagine they were in groups with others of similar stature with similar arrangements so the difference between an authentic wealthy traveller and a chancer might be quite vast. I imagine there was a network of letters between Templar sites tracking the notable Lords so faking your way into someone else's identity would be quite tricky.
From what I gather, it foremost may simply have been a risk based business where the vast profit covered the losses.
> This is a very similar concept to the origin of cheque where it's too dangerous to carry gold and cash along the silk road from Middle East countries to China and beyond.
Spot on.
It's actually mentioned in the article:
"The Templars were not the first organisation in the world to provide such a service. Several centuries earlier, Tang dynasty China used "feiquan" - flying money - a two-part document allowing merchants to deposit profits in a regional office, and reclaim their cash back in the capital."
Would you know if the Templars charged interest? On the other hand, I believe I've read somewhere The Koran forbids charging interest. But perhaps I am mistaken?
Essentially, the Roman Catholic Church turned a blind eye to the Templars usury, largely because of the value provided by the Templars in enabling an endless stream of warriors for Christendom. They did set some arbitrary limits on the amounts that were permissible, but didn't have much in the way of methods of auditing or enforcement.
Note that the article does not discuss loans, per se (although, the Templars also got involved in that). It is more an international money transfer and currency exchange service. No doubt, the Templars charged hefty fees for their services, but they did not class any of it as interest as usury was definitely considered a sin for Christians at the time (as it still is in Islam).
> If you had been at the great fair of Lyon in 1555, you could have seen the answer. Lyon's fair was the greatest market for international trade in all Europe.
This is interesting to me as I live in the city and it's long been a center for trade, geographically positioned on two major rivers and with access to Paris, Switzerland, and Italy. Try as I might, though, I can't Google up anything about that fair in 1555 - does anyone have a link to a Wikipedia-style/level article about it?
The Foires de Lyon are likely being referenced, but that specific year is more than likely a reference to the Grand Parti de Lyon -- which was neither a party or a faire.
There's a fairly significant amount of information locked away in language-specific Wikipedia - many French things have a stub article in English, and an absolute essay in French
In Our Time, BBC radio show with Melvyn Bragg, has an episode on the Templars; https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001cpwt. Worth a listen if you're interested and want an inciteful overview.
The actual title of this article is "The warrior monks who invented banking", but there is a fairly extensive literature on Roman banking dating back at least 1000 years previously:
> "Much of the business of the Sulpicii consisted of short term loans, of amounts ranging from £1,000 to £20,000 and for periods of up to a month – for the sake of simplicity, I am reckoning a sesterce as being the equivalent of £1. A number of loans took place at auction sales – for these were a large part of the activity of a Roman forum – a Roman forum must have been very much like e-Bay. A banking house would manage the auction and supply immediate payment to the vendor, but would allow the purchaser several days to pay; if more time was needed, this could be provided at a cost."
Nice article. Wish they had gone on to cover Cosimo Medici! He was the best. Inventing banking and then using the profits to fund the renaissance? Need people like that today.
Florentine maecenas were no different from billionaires today chasing each other in space races.
They didn't sponsor artists for the sake of art but rather as a display of wealth and power.
Edit: I am clarifying intention here, it does not mean that the side effects don't have a net positive, but they are unlikely to come from a purely altruistic place.
Cynicism aside, the renaissance was a real phenomenon. Among many other things, Cosimo Medici restarted the Academy, hiring the philosopher Marsilio Ficino to translate Plato (which had been lost to the west for nearly 1000 years), Plotinus, Hermes Trismegistus, etc. The reintroduction of classical ideas and modes of thought had a profound impact on the development of Europe over the next 200 years.
Meanwhile, many of Ficino’s own philosophical books remain untranslated today…
We can never know the exact intention of anyone, especially figures long in the past.
I find it hard to believe that wealthy eccentrics didn't (or don't) enjoy things for their own sake. If you have a pile of money and the chance to create something great, that'd fill you with wild excitement I can only imagine.
Although many so-called "nobles" certainly funded the arts for such vain purposes, I guarantee that many other nobles were funding art for its own noble sake.
Well those people still need to eat, have a roof over their head, etc. so that they live comfortable enough lives to be able to create whatever it is they're creating.
When somebody offers food and shelter, people will fill the space and they will create whatever that person asks them to do. They will create Netflix productions and Google chat apps and Meta VR spaces.
The internet allows people to connect without the initial need for funding. If funding is needed, the internet makes it possible for a team to discover investors and foundations that would add financial support.
We need money not for funding, but rather to organize the division of labor. The strange thing is that money does not come with obligations to those holding it, only privileges, so it can be withheld from the market, leading to the appearance that there is a lack of funding.
>"But at this particular fair, gossip was starting to spread about an Italian merchant who was there, and making a fortune.
He bought and sold nothing: all he had was a desk and an inkstand.
Day after day he sat there, receiving other merchants and signing their pieces of paper, and somehow becoming very rich.
The locals were very suspicious.
But to a new international elite of Europe's great merchant houses, his activities were perfectly legitimate.
He was buying and selling debt, and in doing so he was creating enormous economic value.
A merchant from Lyon who wanted to buy - say - Florentine wool could go to this banker and borrow something called a bill of exchange. This was a credit note, an IOU, but it was not denominated in the French livre or Florentine lira.
Its value was expressed in the ecu de marc, a private currency used by this international network of bankers.
And if the Lyonnaise merchant or his agents travelled to Florence, the bill of exchange from the banker in Lyon would be recognised by bankers in Florence, who would gladly exchange it for local currency.
Through this network of bankers, a local merchant could not only exchange currencies but also translate his creditworthiness in Lyon into creditworthiness in Florence, a city where nobody had ever heard of him - a valuable service, worth paying for."
This article was an interesting (and quick) read. Thanks for posting it.
FTA: Few regulators have been quite as ardent as King Philip IV of France.
... He owed money to the Templars, and they refused to forgive his debts.
... the last grandmaster of the Templars, Jacques de Molay, was brought to the centre of Paris and publicly burned to death.
Which is a novel way to default on your loan, close your account, and start doing business with Florentine Franzesi bankers.
The royal treasure was transferred from the Paris Temple to the Louvre around this time.
In other words -- he seized the Templars assets.
It's against this backdrop that the wikipedia page on Philip IV of France achieves renewed vitality and is worth perusing.
We're in a time when histories of money attract a bit more interest. We are exiting a period where theoretical/rhetorical histories^ are a little less dominant.
In any case, it's interesting how often religion is deeply involved in what we would now call the financial services sector. In many ancient civilisations, temples minted coins and performed other banking-esque functions. Many ancient law codes dedicate a lot of ink to debt, and debt-related things.
I wonder how much of the Templars' methods were picked up in the Mediterranean and Levant, where civilisation was deep rooted and continuous.
^I want to use the term "pseudohistory," but without the accusatory implications. What I mean is models with thought experiment at their core. EG historical materialism, Smith, etc
> We don't actually know how the Templars made this system work and protected themselves against fraud. Was there a secret code verifying the document and the traveller's identity?
Really? We don't know? If that's true, that surprises me.
The templars were a secret society (that is they had private initiation ceremonies just like any frat, social club, etc today - although the vows they swore were probably taken far more seriously).
They had a lot of money. That money was confiscated by force, including the torture and killing of members. This was backed up by lots of claims of devil worship and the like to get common people to be OK with it.
The money was tied to the records.
Is it that surprising that in this process all the records were destroyed? The powerful didn't want the records and the legal hassle they entail, they just wanted the gold. The common folks didn't want to be spiritually corrupted by the blasphemous works (that they likely couldn't read anyway). The records were probably burned or scraped clean and re-used (see palimpsest) since paper and parchment were expensive commodities.
There may be a document or two hiding in various corners of some old monastary library or in some book binding somewhere - as recently as 2001 some records surfaced from the vatican secret archives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinon_Parchment but like a lot of other knowledge of that era, most of it is probably lost.
It does sound odd. Having some understanding how it worked would validate the theory. Else it only sounds like a theory, albeit with perhaps a couple limited documented instances.
So I read the text until "Checks and balances" and found a mistake in the text which makes me believe now this was written by AI and maybe audited by a human.
Some of the grittier truth may be about political expediency of taming
"knights". Monty Python caricatures aside, until (and beyond) the
Templars, many were marauding bands of privateers looting their way
around Europe. Sending them off to do God's work while letting them
play at "banking" the spoils was probably a neat solution to not
having a standing army, but still keeping a cadre of loyal
battle-hardened dudes on a string.
When their use expired, as maturing nation states found them less
convenient, King Philip IV ordered them rounded up (apocryphally on
Friday 13th) in a betrayal I think George Lucas adapted as the fate of
The "Jedi".
The Templars were not set up to send off bandits and do God's work. They started as protection for pilgrimage, set up an system to move funds from Europe into the Holy Land to support their work (which included hiring quite a few mercenaries), which turned into banking, and were half-coerced into some of the Crusades (notably not the first), because they were indeed the experienced, hardened and loyal soldiers that were needed. But they did not "bank" the spoils, and regular Crusaders weren't roaming thieves either.
> regular Crusaders weren't roaming thieves either
Absolutely not. From what I've read they were extraordinarily
disciplined. My point was that "knights" more generally until then,
are mischaracterised as "good and noble" but were really freelancers
[1]. The Templars obtained a better defined security role.
[1] just occurred to me there may be some etymology there.
Fun fact, everytime to see a stone sculpture of a knight on a tomb with his feet crossed, it means he was involved in pillaging and whatnot in the holly lands. So yes, they deffinietly were pillaging thieves. Just look up hoe the Doge of Venice got them to divert to nowaday Istanbul and pillaged it to repay their debt to Venice.
Nah, that's a popular myth. I too was told it as a child but I understand the real reason is much more mundane... it's easier to sculpt. Creating realistic looking legs out straight requires under-cutting and they still look kinda "off" so crossing the legs was a bit of hack to improve realism without delicate work.
One way to do this over large distances is the bank of Alice and the bank of Bob meet and exchange papers/signatures/codes in advance, enough to do a years worth and then they can verify each other’s cheques
until the next exchange. They could settle in gold.
For fraud prevention this system might allow for a “personal identification number” for the cheque to be memorised.
The term "bank" comes from the Italian word "il banco" which is a bench or counter top. It is a reference to the original money changers who sat on benches and provided financial services to merchants. Those services, which were the origins of banking, were mostly about issuing loans and changing money.
The services rendered as described in the original article are of a payment system which allows you to deposit cash in one location and withdraw it in another. This is far more similar to the service provided by PayPal, than it is to the primary service provided by a bank which is to issue loans, and to be sanctioned by the state in order to do so.
Sorry, but you can't do this here. Since your account has posted unsubstantive and flamebait comments in quite a few other contexts too, I've banned it.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You could name them, because I have no idea if you're referring to modern-day bankers, the lawyers who took over their premises, or some other organisation.
[1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/51.51245/-0.11150
[2] This is the scene in the main photo in TFA
[3] https://www.templechurch.com/