[1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/51.51245/-0.11150
[2] This is the scene in the main photo in TFA
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.
https://www.middletemple.org.uk/about-us/freedom-information...
The practical consequences are extremely minor - but the Inner and Middle temples can give themselves planning permission, and issue themselves alcohol licenses!
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.
Thank you for the tip. Absolutely stunning in the pictures alone, made a note to visit this place.
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.
> whether the Templars picked it up by learning and adapting Islamic Hawala during the crusades
It's funny how sometimes these things are hidden in plain sight. I bet the average person would expect a more complex etymology for that phrase.
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.
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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.
We should learn from these stories of the past.
I assumed it's the other way around. Economic growth comes from technical and cultural advancements. Banks are a symptom of that growth.
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.
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).
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_IV_of_France#Finance_...
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.
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!
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.
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.
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."
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.
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_finance
In particular, the Sulpicii of Puteoli left some records of what look like modern banking practices:
https://www.world-archaeology.com/books/bankers-of-puteoli-t...
> "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."
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.
Meanwhile, many of Ficino’s own philosophical books remain untranslated today…
(Btw, if this is anyone else’s interest, I’ve helped to translate Ficino’s philosophy of pleasure: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RZYHWmptuPbpZcUbDdqNvBJD...)
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.
Perhaps, but we still got the art.
How about productizing electric cars and satellite internet to fund space exploration?
When it comes to culture, do we still need funding? The internet offers connection and replication.
What is preventing the people with the right skills from coming together and creating the next level of civilization?
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."
PDS: Fascinating!
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.
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
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.
> Our financial system today has a lot in common with this model.
This bit might be true, but what was the real story?
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".
For fraud prevention this system might allow for a “personal identification number” for the cheque to be memorised.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_Sword:_The_Shadow_of_th...
scroll down a little