Historic date

[Ron Losey]

We are coming up on a major anniversary of an extremely historic event.



The original unlucky Friday the 13th.



The Templars (Knights of the Order of the Temple in Jerusalem) were the finest the Western world ever produced - warriors and monks, first-rate scholars, theologians, and academics.  Although they themselves lived under vows of poverty and communal ownership of property, their organization had extensive land holdings and most governments in Europe owed them money.  They and the Hospitallers (Order of St. Jude - a similar group) were the driving force behind scholarship and church and governmental reform, banking and humanitarian aid.  Not much that was stable, workable, or worthwhile went on without them.



It was a Friday, 13 October 1307 A.D.  The Roman Catholic Church, conspiring with the king of France (Phillip II), betrayed the Templar order - accused them of absurd crimes and murdered them, in order to take their land holdings and banking assets.



Never again would Europe be ruled by a social or moral elite.  Governments from then on were always regarded as never better than a necessary evil.  It was the beginning of the end for the Catholic Church as well - as they both lost their best and brightest reformers, and their leadership proved they were not above simple armed robbery.  This would eventually cost them ... it would drag them finally into the Protestant Reformation, and more than a century of war.  Governments would never again trust the Church, nor would people trust governments.



This was one of the events that reshaped the Western world.  It was the day "honor" died in Europe.  Quite possibly no other event in the last thousand years has impacted so many people so profoundly.



This week marks 700 years.



People should know their history.

[emperor77]

Templars forever! Curse king Philip II!

[Hellbound]

People should know their history.
Are you accusing us for not knowing our history?

[nonrumpali]

Wow, that's cool information. I'll have to light a candle that day for that memory. I'm not religious nor am I a part of any church but it seems to be a really significant event for anyone with or without church.

I don't know my history that much. To be honest, I can't remember even that there was any mention of this in school.

[Ron Losey]

People should know their history.
Are you accusing us for not knowing our history?

Damn straight.  I am accusing people of not knowing their history.

Maybe not you personally, if you happen to be one of those who know your history, but most people have no clue.  Realistically, even those who do study history usually learn details of such trivial insignificance that only a historian would care, while completely overlooking events that changed their world.  They neither understand the cause or the significance of what they learn.

I'll have to light a candle that day for that memory.

If you want to remember the Knights of the Temple, set fire to a politician instead.

They were warriors ... people of action. 

Lighting candles is something the Catholic Church would do - and those are the people who betrayed and murdered the Templars to steal their land, and then for a pretense made long prayers.

If you want to remember the Templars, die with honor.  That was their oath: "My honor is my life."

[nonrumpali]

If you want to remember the Knights of the Temple, set fire to a politician instead.

They were warriors ... people of action. 

Lighting candles is something the Catholic Church would do - and those are the people who betrayed and murdered the Templars to steal their land, and then for a pretense made long prayers.

If you want to remember the Templars, die with honor.  That was their oath: "My honor is my life."

Right.

[War_B*stard]

Interesting ideas.

I would agree with you in saying that the dissolution of the Templars was a significant moment (and a loss) for Europe, but equally I would not say that it is quite the cataclysmic event that you describe. I think that you may risk being accused of historical hyperbole when you describe them as "the finest the Western world ever produced".

As to the motivation behind Philip the IVs persecution of the Templars, I think I can empathise. He had a powerful, land owning  unaffiliated military group residing in his Kingdom to whom he owed alot of money (I'm guessing he wasn't the only European leader who felt  resentment at the Templars prominent position in European society). The Catholic Church at the time was rapidly being turned into a device to legitimise the will of the French Royal Court (hence the move to Avignon in 1308/9?), so it acted according to circumstance. From what I understand the Papacy was more of a convenient tool than a willing conspirator in the fall of the Templars (I don't think the Church had much to gain from the Templar's demise).

It was the day "honor" died in Europe.

I think that's going a bit far.

@Ron. Having seen many of your posts on this forum (all of which have been consistently informative) I'm sure you're not the type of person to needlessly throw around bold statements, so I would love to hear a more detailed account of your opinions.

[nonrumpali]

@Ron. Having seen many of your posts on this forum (all of which have been consistently informative) I'm sure you're not the type of person to needlessly throw around bold statements...

My thoughts exactly. I have my own beefs with what Catholicism stands for in the history of Europe but I don't want to make such spiteful comments against modern day Catholics or modern day politicians because of what happened 700 years ago. Judging from your other posts, I wouldn't see you as that kind of person either.

[Ron Losey]

As for modern Catholics, or organized religion in general ... I have nothing against them as individuals, but it is a great tragedy that the lessons of the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation are again being lost today.  When things got REALLY bad, people tried again to clean it up for a while, but that didn't last either.  Regardless of what you believe, there is no denying that organizations are easily corrupted.  But that is another subject, and I have no desire to teach a complete class in Church history, contemporary theology, or church management... at least not here.

-----------------------------------------------------
Back to the question:

It was the day honor died, because that was really the final effect.  The Knights of the Temple were a monastic movement - they were warriors in the classic sense, the guardians of their civilization.  They were academics, theologians, church reformers ... they were an "elite" in the sense that they gave everybody someone to look up to.  Like the samurai of Japan, they were the image of "honor".

After they were betrayed, that image died.  No more orders of knighthood stepped up to take their place.  The term "knight" after that came to mean any soldier of noble birth, but still a soldier who follows orders ... not a warrior who lives to preserve his people.  The new orders that would form were purely military organizations ... officers' clubs for the new army.  There was no honor there - they fought for whoever paid them, no matter what kind of a scumbag he was or what kind of atrocity he asked of them.  The Templar's brother organization, the Hospitallers (order of St. Jude), dropped out of the political scene and retreated back to being only a monastic organization, and even as such, dropped out of their role as church reformers (so they would not be murdered too).

People learned that governments and Church leadership could not be trusted.  They saw it with their own eyes ... the Church, and the King of France (who claimed to be a good Catholic, and the Church did not dispute it) showed everyone that they were nothing more than armed robbers.  It was a lesson people learned well in the West, and still today, people very much expect their leaders to be scum.  "Honor" died.  The idea of being a "civil servant" or even a "servant of God" became a joke - everyone could now see that these people served only themselves, and those who took vows of poverty to do such work with honesty and integrity (i.e. the Templars) were summarily murdered for the crime of making the scumbags look bad.

And the Papacy at the time was in fact a tool of the French Crown, or at least a co-conspirator with French kings ... but they were not kidnap victims.  This relationship was profitable to the churchmen - they were being paid well to keep the king of France looking legit.  Since the Church was very much no longer enforcing the vows of poverty of the monastic orders, groups like the Templars made this look especially bad.  I mean, you have French kings giving the Pope and his Cardinals just wagon loads of money to spread the story that all good Catholics should support the king of France.  Then you have the Templars, who were not afraid to say that both the French crown and the churchmen who took the money were scum. 

A couple hundred years earlier, it was the monastic orders and orders of knighthood who kept the church in line - they were the head of Church reform, and then the Church was in charge of international government and business ethics.  Turning that on its head was the first step in making the church easily corruptible ... and so they did.

Still today, most governments are seen as a necessary evil - bad people who take power so they can do bad things.  Nobody respects organized religion - they expect scandals out of the biggest names in the field.  Soldiers and police are, often as not, viewed as puppets of an oppressive and unjust system, if not the oppressors themselves.  This is not without reason - these things are usually true, at least often enough that most people expect it.

But it was not always so.  Once warriors stood to protect their people.  Once men swore to protect the helpless, to uphold justice and mercy, and to defend these things with their life - no matter what men or governments said.  They took vows of poverty, so they could not be bought, and swore allegiance only to God.  Once the blades of warriors were considered to be a light in the darkness - hope to the hopeless, justice to the oppressor, mercy to the oppressed.  Once the Western world understood honor.

That was 700 years ago.  A long time to live in darkness.

[Hellbound]

People should know their history.
Are you accusing us for not knowing our history?

Damn straight.  I am accusing people of not knowing their history.

Maybe not you personally, if you happen to be one of those who know your history, but most people have no clue.  Realistically, even those who do study history usually learn details of such trivial insignificance that only a historian would care, while completely overlooking events that changed their world.  They neither understand the cause or the significance of what they learn.

I'll have to light a candle that day for that memory.

If you want to remember the Knights of the Temple, set fire to a politician instead.

They were warriors ... people of action. 

Lighting candles is something the Catholic Church would do - and those are the people who betrayed and murdered the Templars to steal their land, and then for a pretense made long prayers.

If you want to remember the Templars, die with honor.  That was their oath: "My honor is my life."

Well i know my history. Right know I'm in what would be called the upper secondary school or highschool according to my dictionary. And at my school, i will be having history lessons all 3 years I'm there, on the highest level possible.

[Ron Losey]

Well i know my history. Right know I'm in what would be called the upper secondary school or highschool according to my dictionary. And at my school, i will be having history lessons all 3 years I'm there, on the highest level possible.

I've been teaching Western Culture Studies and Comparative Civilizations in universities across the People's Republic of China for the last ten years, plus studying human violence (modern and historical) as a personal interest all my life.  Most of my co-workers (university profs) consider me to be one of the best historians they know, and I admit that I don't know history a fraction as well as I probably should. 

The only thing I learned in high school is that high schools don't teach you a damn thing that's useful.  All the history I got in high school was either total propaganda and nationalistic drivel, trivia that had no impact on reality, or so watered down that puppy dogs would not be terribly mentally challenged to learn it.  Having been all over the world, it is my general observation that my experience was typical.

People don't know their history.  If you want to know your history, you're going to have to get out of the classroom and hit some museums and dig sites, and read some primary source material ... there's no substitute for seeing the real thing.  Check things out for yourself.

[Hellbound]

HEY! i didn't blame you for not knowing your history!

It seems as there is a big difference in the American and the Danish school system. The teachers at high schools in Denmark have the best education possible, it is called "a long education". For example are the history teachers eductaed historians from the university.

I don't know if the American high school is the same as the danish gymnasium, so we might not be talking about the same thing.

By the way, the teachers at gymnasiums (or people with the same education) are the people who writes history books, encyclopedias etc etc.. One of my teachers (teaching danish) have written some 6 books about famous danish poets.  Damn, he's one clever man i tell you!

the past months I've been going at the gymnasium/highschool I've learned twice as much as i have learned the past 3 years or so.. and it is usefull.. really usefull..

[Ron Losey]

I have nothing against my various teachers ... most, if not all, were well educated and did their best to teach the material to the classes they had.

My point is that, to really understand how people lived for the last thousand years or so, you're going to have to do more than take a few classes.  Classes, for all their value in introducing a subject, seldom constitute the final word on the matter.  That is where the weakness lies - people think that, because they heard an hour or so of lecture on a subject, they assume they know it.  Realistically, no matter how good the lecture was, it's probably not a very complete understanding of the material.  Worse, the lectures probably only hit a few points that the lecturer considered significant, without really explaining why those points were chosen - which creates a very broken picture.

In the same way, here, I described an event from 700 years ago and how it influenced an entire culture.  No matter how cool my description was, it doesn't compare to the way I learned this - which was hundreds of hours looking over original documents from the history of the Templars, other monastic orders, and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church at the time.  Most people never get beyond the level of reading my cool description ... very few take the time to read the actual by-laws of the Templars, to find out what they were about.  (Not like the documents are a secret ... they were recorded in several languages, even in the originals.)  Fewer still take time to put this against a little sociology, to plot the change in opinion about leaders, governments, and the Church that corresponded to this event.  (That requires reading a little bit of literature.)  None of it is hard, but it does take time to form a somewhat complete understanding of what happened.

Most people don't know their history.  What they think they know is what they have been spoon-fed in some classroom, and it's a fragment of the whole picture at best... or at worst, a fragment from a different but nearby picture.

[Hellbound]

well, i see your point Ron.

but, our history lessons aren't as you described it. from now on, until this school year finish we will have 2 major subjects: Renaissance and ancient Greece. we have about 4 months on each subject. 4½ hours a week... i think this will give more than "a table spoon" of knowledge on these subjects. Now I'm only in the grade called 1.g next year 2.g and so on, i will be on the school for 3 years all in all, that be quite alot of history lessons!

To learn how different cultures lived we have this thing called ancient knowledge (directly translated from Oldtids kundskab). In ancient knowledge we study things like old texts, from ancient Greece or Hellas what ever you want to call it, ancient Egypt up to the late medieval ages.

We are also having Latin at the moment (1,5 hours per week), i think i will choose to continue having this in 2.g too. In Latin we study ancient texts too.. like from roman times plus we learn, mostly write, Latin and its grammar.

[Ron Losey]

Again, I never said classes were a poor way to introduce a subject.  They do work.  That's still just not quite the same thing as knowing your history.  A step in the right direction, maybe, but a step, not the entire journey.  The entire journey lasts a lifetime - not a few hours.

I've been teaching Western Culture in universities for the last 10 years, and I haven't even scratched the surface of the knowledge that is there waiting for anybody who wants it.

People don't know their history because they get a couple of decent classes on the subject, and they assume that this constitutes understanding.  Same with other subjects.  Being introduced to a subject is not the same thing as understanding it.

The lessons of the Templars are forgotten because people don't dig deep enough.