The most famous of the medieval military-monastic orders, founded around 1119 to protect Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem. Its members were warrior-monks: knights who took monastic vows yet fought as shock troops in the Crusades. The order grew into an international financial network that held deposits and transferred funds, and became immensely wealthy. King Philip IV of France, deeply indebted to the order and eager to break an independent power within his realm, used heresy charges and confessions extracted under torture to force its destruction in 1307, and the Pope dissolved it in 1312.
On Friday, the thirteenth of October 1307, royal officers across France opened sealed orders at dawn and arrested every Templar they could find. The king's men charged these warrior-monks with denying Christ and worshipping idols. Confessions soon followed, drawn out by torture. Seven years later the order's last leader was burned alive on an island in the Seine. The order had begun two centuries earlier as a tiny band sworn to guard pilgrims on the roads to Jerusalem. How it became one of the richest religious orders in Europe, and then was crushed in a single night, is one of the strangest reversals of the Middle Ages.