How the Knights Templar Survived

Introduction to ETSU Online

0:00ETSU Online offers degrees in business, education, technology, nursing, health care, social services, and so much more. Whether you're continuing your education, changing careers, or finishing what you started, you can achieve your goals with one of our flexible online programs designed to fit your full or part-time schedule. Your goals, your pace, your future. Online with East Tennessee State University. Learn more and apply today at ETSU.edu slash online. That's ETSU.edu slash online. On May 12th, 1310, in a field outside Paris,

0:36fires were burning. If you got closer, you would have seen the smoke billowing into the sky and you would have heard the sound of screaming. Because tied to the stakes were 54 men who were being burned alive. All of them were Templar knights. They had been accused of unspeakable things and many of them had been tortured to provide evidence that would confirm the verdict that their investigators had

1:07already determined. They were going to be guilty. And these men had the temerity to go back on those confessions. To say, actually, we were forced to confess to these things under torture. But none of what we said was true. We are innocent of the charges. These men were being silenced. Permanently. But in a way that was designed to terrify any other Templar knight, or servant, or associate,

1:38who might dare to speak up against the verdict that was going to be pronounced.

The Villains and Virgins Podcast

1:44This was the end of the Knights Templar. Or was it? You are listening to Villains and Virgins podcast. And today, we are talking about the story of the Knights Templar, specifically in Portugal, and how the Order managed to survive what appeared to be its final end. But before we get into that, we have a couple of announcements to make. First of all, I want to thank those wonderful people who

2:15support this podcast on Patreon. I've gotten to know many of you personally, and some of you have even helped me name upcoming episodes for the podcast. So, as a member of the Villains and Virgins support community on Patreon, you get access to a number of things. One of them is a monthly live history chat, which I host, and we talk about questions and stories and anything related to history and recent episodes. You also get a monthly bonus episode that is available only on Patreon,

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Who Were the Knights Templar

3:11So, who were the Knights Templar? For those of you who've been listening to this podcast for a while, you'll know I've already done two previous episodes on the Templar, where we go into great detail about how the Order was founded and also how it ended in the early 1300s. But we're going to recap briefly how the Order begins in order to tell the story today. So, the Templars were founded in Jerusalem in the year 1119. This was in the wake of the First Crusade, which ends in 1099. And the First Crusade

3:49establishes the Crusader states. The most important of these is Jerusalem itself, but they also include Antioch, Edessa, and Tripoli. So, these little Crusader statelets are basically western outposts in the Near East. And they find themselves in a very hostile environment. Nobody there particularly likes them. The Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire is pretty sore at the fact that these states have been established in land that used to be his. And then there are various Muslim powers in

4:23the region, none of whom are particularly happy about seeing the establishment of these little western states either. So, the problem for the Crusader states, sometimes called Outremer, is that they're perpetually outnumbered. They have neighbors that don't particularly like them, and so they're going to be waging an ongoing battle for their survival. If you want the highly detailed story of how these

The Templars in Portugal

4:49states were founded, go into the catalog for Villains and Virgins and look up the First Crusade, because there's a multi-part series on the subject. But by 1119, the problem is that while the city of Jerusalem is relatively secure, the area around it remains highly hazardous. And there are Christian pilgrims that are continuing to make the journey from western Europe to Jerusalem, and they are vulnerable to things like theft or kidnapping on a regular basis, sometimes even large-scale slaughter.

5:21The Knights Templar are founded in 1119 in part to address this problem. They're founded as a group of Knights who are going to provide support and security to Christian pilgrims traveling in and around Jerusalem. But what makes the Templars unique is that they're not just military muscle. In fact, the Templars represent a remarkable innovation in the Middle Ages. They fuse two of the most significant,

5:52identities or ideals that existed at the time. They were knights, which means they were supposed to be models of military prowess. But they were also monks, which meant they were supposed to exemplify models of spiritual piety and virtue. So these two images both existed, but in the Middle Ages, up until this moment, they were mostly separate. The Templars are the first institution to deliberately combine these

6:22two as part of the official identity of its members. So the Templars are essentially warrior monks. And as monks, they have to take vows of celibacy, poverty, and obedience. This means they can't have relationships with women or men of a sexual nature. In fact, they can't even have contact with women. They couldn't hug their mothers, for example. And they were also dedicated to personal poverty, which meant that while they

6:53might receive gifts and money, those things went into the wealth of the order, they were not to be accrued and to benefit individual knights themselves. And of course, the vow of obedience meant that they would submit themselves to the authority of their own Grand Master, and ultimately to the Pope. They were answerable to no one else. And the mission of the Templars was to defend Christian pilgrims and the Crusader states themselves from Muslim attack in the Near East. The Templars as an order become very popular

7:29very quickly. They begin receiving donations from kings, queens, and noble families. And these donations very frequently take the form of land. This means that the Templars start establishing chapter houses or offices in many different European countries, including France. And this is partly because of the land that's been donated to them. So they build castles or other types of buildings on these lands, and they

8:00use the revenues or the rents that come out of these lands to fund their operations back in Jerusalem and other parts of the Near East. They even begin acting as an early form of money transfer service. This is before the days of organized banking, but money transfer was a real problem for Christian pilgrims and would-be crusaders who were moving from Western Europe into the Near East and were very vulnerable to being attacked and having all the money for their journey stolen from them. And so the

8:33Templars set up a system where you could put money in trust at your local Templar office and then withdraw it once you'd gotten safely into Jerusalem. And this helped protect travelers from the theft that was so often a problem on the roads of the Near East. So the Templars as an order expand rapidly, and while individual Templars aren't becoming personally wealthy, the order as an organization most certainly is. And they accrue so much wealth that they're even able to offer loans to kings, which they do

9:11only 30 years after their founding, during the Second Crusade, which is 1147 to 1149, when King Louis of France finds that he's running short of funds to pay for his crusading army, he turns to the Templars for a cash advance. And this wealth that the order accrues is ultimately going to lead to their downfall. Ultimately, it is another French king, some 200 years later, who has an eye on the wealth of the

9:42Templar order and decides he's going to destroy them so that he can get his hands on that. The order was abolished by the Pope, and as of 1312, there were no more Templars. Officially, at least.

The Templar Legacy in Portugal

9:57But I was recently in the Templar complex in a place called Tomar in Portugal. And there I was standing on Templar history, which is rooted in centuries of Portuguese history, before 1312 and well afterwards. In fact, the Templar legacy continues in Portugal right through the Age of Exploration and beyond. And this is the story of how that happened. So how did the Templars come to be

The Arrival of Templars in Portugal

10:30in Portugal anyway? Well, the answer is it happens almost immediately after their founding. So if the Templar order begins in 1119, the first Templars arrive in Portugal in 1128, less than a decade later. But Portugal, as you and I know it, doesn't even exist. It would be better perhaps to speak of the Iberian Peninsula at this point in history. This is the chunk of land that contains the modern nations of Spain and Portugal. But at the time, neither of those nations existed. The Iberian Peninsula was

11:07a collection of small, little kingdoms that were vying for land and competing against each other. One of these kingdoms was the Kingdom of Leon. And Portugal was merely a county, or a section, of the Kingdom of Leon. And there were other kingdoms as well. Aragon and Castile, for example, which will eventually become the foundation of modern Spain. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. And there were also Muslim kingdoms on the Iberian Peninsula. We'll talk about them more in a second.

11:42But what will become Portugal is, at this point, just a little county in the Kingdom of Leon. But its prince, a guy named Alfonso Henriquez, has other ideas. He wants to make this county an independent kingdom. And in part, this is the story of how that happens, because the Templars are very much involved. So on March 19th, 1128, the Templars are given the Castle of Sur in the County of Portugal.

12:16So this is a land donation. And it's very similar to the kinds of land donations that the Templars are going around Europe collecting at this point. The order is very young. It's about nine years into existing. And they need these donations in order to fund their operations back in the Near East, in the Crusader states. So initially, when they get this castle in Portugal, it gives them a local headquarters base. But the revenues from that castle and its environs were intended to go and fund

12:49Templar operations overseas. So the Templars are dedicated to fighting the Muslims in the Near East. But the Christian kings of the kingdoms in the Iberian Peninsula are busy fighting Muslims right there, on the Iberian Peninsula. And they called them Moors in this part of the world. And Moor is kind of a, it's kind of a blanket term. I mean, it was used very liberally to sort of mean anybody who happened to be a Muslim, even though over time, the people who were labeled with this could have been quite

13:23different from each other. But the Christian kings on the Iberian Peninsula are saying, we have our own anti-Muslim war going on here. So we could use some help with that. In fact, Muslim conquerors had arrived on the Iberian Peninsula, coming up from North Africa, in 711. So we're looking at four centuries into the past already. And when they did arrive, they rushed up through the Iberian Peninsula and took over almost all of it, leaving only a few

13:57northern kingdoms at the top. The story of the centuries since the 700s is called the Reconquista. And this is the struggle of the Christian kingdoms on the Iberian Peninsula to take back land that was now ruled by these Muslim forces. So by the time we get to 1128, when the first Templars arrive, these Christian kingdoms have managed to push back quite a ways. They've taken over about half of the

14:27Iberian Peninsula. But the Muslim presence in what is now Portugal lasts for some five centuries and even longer in the places that will eventually become the country of Spain. So it's not an insignificant or passing presence. When the Muslims come in in 711, they conquer the Visigoths and they establish this very long-standing presence on the peninsula that is still reflected in architecture and food and musical styles to this day. So while this Reconquista, very long, multiple

15:05centuries-long story is going on, we're going to focus in on the area that is about to become Portugal, because that is the limits of our story for today. But I want to put it in this larger context that is peninsula-wide. By the 1100s, when the Templars arrive, the original Muslim group that had overrun the Iberian Peninsula in the 700s—they were called the Umayyads—has long since fragmented and been overrun by different Muslim dynasties and groups. This is a whole other story, and I want to

15:40make a note here before I continue, because many of the accounts of the Reconquista simply talk about the Muslims as though all of these people who are fighting are primarily identifiable just by their religion. But that's like saying that every ruler of Leon, Castile, Aragon was just motivated by Christianity, and that's ludicrous. We recognize that there are political differences between these kingdoms. They have different geopolitical interests. Yes, they happen to be Christians, but sometimes

16:14they fight each other. They're rivals. All of that is true on the Muslim side as well. And so while I'll be saying the Muslims or the Moors a lot here, it's important to recognize that these aren't all the same groups of people. There is as much complexity and even internal rivalry on the Moorish or Muslim side of this story as there is on the Christian side as well. If you want more detail on the Muslim or Moorish side

16:45of this, I'm going to be doing a bonus episode just on that on the other communities of the Iberian Peninsula on Patreon only next month. So there's more information on that if you are interested. Check it out. It's not up right now, but by March it should be out. By 1128, the year the Templars arrive in the Iberian Peninsula. The Muslim group that is then in power, they're called the Almoravid dynasty and they're essentially Berbers from North Africa. They hold the cities of Lisbon, Seville, Toledo and Cordoba and

17:20everything south of that. But they don't just have this territory in what is now Spain and Portugal, they also have a vast amount of territory under their control in North Africa itself. And they're beginning to realize that they're stretched a bit thin because they have to defend all of this very large amount of territory from various rivals they have on their borders, not just in the Iberian Peninsula, but back in North Africa as well. Nevertheless, in 1137, about nine years later, these Muslim forces mount a major northern offensive. So they're pushing up from the territory they already

17:56control in the Iberian Peninsula against the borders of these Christian kingdoms, who are constantly making incursions on their territory. And this is the kind of back and forth that characterizes the entire Reconquista. It's been going on for centuries. But this is a really important moment for the history of Portugal in particular, because in 1139, Prince Afonso Henriquez fights a very important battle against these Muslim forces. It's called the Battle of Orique. And he wins. He actually succeeds in exacting

18:31tribute payments from this particular Muslim group on his border. And at this time, he begins calling himself King of Portugal. It's part of a bid that he's making to give the county of Portugal independent

The Life of Gualdim Paix

18:47kingdom status. And the status that he accrues from winning this battle is a major part of his success in making Portugal an independent kingdom. So in 1139, he wins this battle. He begins calling himself King Afonso Henriquez. And by the way, Afonso Henriquez isn't just fighting Muslims. In the years immediately prior to 1139, he's been busy fighting battles with his Christian neighbors on the borders, as he's trying to expand the amount of territory under his direct control and build himself his own

19:23little kingdom, which will eventually become known as Portugal. Now, Afonso Henriquez succeeds in his objective. Portugal is formally recognized as independent from the Kingdom of Lyon in the Treaty of Zamora only a few years later in 1143. So four years after that critical battle of Ulrike. Not coincidentally, this was the same year that the Muslim leader of the Almoravid forces dies. And this leads to confusion and disorganization amongst those different military leaders and forces. And so the Christian

19:59kingdoms on the Iberian Peninsula use this opportunity to mount a major offensive of their own. This campaign lasts from 1143 to 1151. And the Templars are recruited to fight alongside Afonso Henriquez in these battles. Basically, Afonso Henriquez says to the Templars, your mission is fighting against Muslims or enemies of the faith. So help me fight these Muslims right here in Portugal who are enemies of our faith. So the Templars fight alongside King Afonso Henriquez and

20:37the rest of his army in 1147 at the Battle of Santorum, where they're taking over a city state, which is then under Muslim control. And Afonso Henriquez wasn't just asking the Templars for help either. In the same year, 1147, he actually recruits some guys that are on their way past Portugal to the Near East for the Second Crusade, because the Second Crusade begins in 1147. So there's this massive military mobilization that's coming from across Western Europe through various routes over

21:11land and across the sea to get to Constantinople and then head over to Jerusalem. So there are a number of ships that are coming from Western Europe past Portugal, and Afonso Henriquez has some of his messengers talk to these guys and say, hey, why don't you dock here, get out, and help us take Lisbon from the Muslims. And here's the deal. If you guys succeed in taking the city, then you can sack it and pillage and take any movable valuables that you find, also any of the ransoms that you can

21:48get from captives that you obtain in this battle are yours. And once you've extracted all of the immediate revenue from the city, you can carry on to the Near East and just leave Lisbon under my control. This is what Afonso Henriquez says. And he succeeds in persuading these would-be crusaders to make this stop. They do participate in the siege of Lisbon, they do take the city, and that is how Lisbon comes to be under Portuguese control. This offer of being able to plunder an entire city

22:25was an extremely lucrative one. In fact, it was one of the major reasons that some people even went on crusade to begin with. And there are many historical sources that describe some elements of the crusading armies as very rough guys. Criminals, adventurers, pirates, people who were just out to make a quick buck and to do so at sword point. Now, not everyone who went on crusade fit that description, but there were significant elements that did. And so offering these guys a chance to stop over in

22:59Portugal and fill their bags with loot, as long as they could manage to take the city, was a viable offer, and it worked. So all of this is part of the larger context of what's going on at the time. Portugal is emerging as an independent kingdom under its first king, Afonso Henriquez. But now let's look at the life of one Templar in particular who saw many of these events firsthand. His name was Gualim Paix, and he was born in 1118, which is one year before the Templar order was

23:35even founded. By the time he was ready to begin his career as a knight at about the age of 20, it was 1138. And he was in fact knighted officially in 1139, so he would have been 21 years old. He was knighted at the Battle of Orique, which we already talked about, by none other than Alfonso Henriquez himself. So he's right there alongside this man who is becoming the king of a newly forged kingdom,

24:06which will be known as Portugal. So Gualim Paix is beside King Alfonso Henriquez in many of the significant battles that he's fighting during these formative years. And at some point, Gualim becomes a Templar. I wasn't able to find exact details on when exactly he takes this decision, but becoming a member of the Templar order was a very serious undertaking. So he would have had to take these very solemn vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. It's possible that he did that with members of the

24:41Templar order in Portugal, because by 1139, when Gualim Paix becomes a knight, the Templars have already been in Portugal, and they're quite active in this campaign as well. So while I'm not entirely certain when he becomes a member of the order, I can tell you that he then goes to the Near East, and he spends five years with the Templars in Jerusalem itself. Now these are extremely formative years for our young Portuguese knight. He gets front row access to watching the Templars undertake

25:16their main mission, which is the defense of the Crusader states in the Near East. But these five years are also going to be incredibly important for his own sense of identity, as well as for his knowledge of battle tactics, which he will eventually bring back to Portugal with very important consequences. Reportedly, Gualdim Paix served at the siege of Ascalon in 1153. So at this point, he's been a knight for some 15 years or so, and he's serving with the Templars on this campaign. Now the Templars

25:52weren't doing this battle by themselves. The city of Ascalon was then in the hands of the Fatimids, who are a Shia Muslim dynasty that was very active in the region. They were based in Egypt, but they controlled territory that extended for quite a distance outside of what is now Egypt. And Ascalon was a city that was very close to Jerusalem itself. So it provided an important staging ground for raids and military missions that could threaten Jerusalem and the environs. For this reason,

26:25the king of Jerusalem, who was an ex-Crusader by the name of Baldwin II, got together an army of his allies from the other Crusader states and the Templars, and he mounts this siege of Ascalon. He wants to take this city out of Fatimid control and have it under his own control so it can no longer be used as a staging base by his enemies. The siege of Ascalon lasts for nearly seven months, from late January, early February, all the way into August of 1153. And if Gwaldim Pais was there, then he would

27:00have seen a very significant episode in Templar history. Now generally, sieges were fairly drawn out and boring affairs for most of the people involved. We have this sort of Hollywood-inspired idea that a siege was just a continuous battle until the gate was broken down by the battering ram and the orcs, I mean the enemies, roll in, right? But in reality, medieval sieges just meant an army encamped in the area surrounding a city, often for months at a time, and they were there to ensure that no food

27:36went in and no people came out, and the idea was to starve the inhabitants of the city into surrendering, because that's much less costly than storming the gates, if you don't have to do that. But eventually, things come to a head, and there is an all-out assault in August of 1153. At this point, there's a section of the wall that crumbles, and this doesn't happen by accident. The attacking army has been very busy trying to weaken that wall for weeks or months at this point. They probably had

28:10sappers tunnel under that wall to weaken the foundations underneath, so that part of the wall would just collapse. So this is what happens, and when it does, a group of Templars who are stationed along that section of the wall, because the army is spread out as a perimeter all around the city, so the guys who are stationed right at that part of the wall rush in. Now this is a group of 40 Templar knights led by their grand master, a guy named Bernard Tremelet. So they bravely rush through the

28:43wall first into an enemy-dominated city. The problem was that these 40 Templars were very quickly surrounded and outnumbered by the defenders of that city, and they were beheaded. Their heads were piled up in a pyramid of victory that was displayed to the governor of the city, and their decapitated bodies were soon after displayed over the walls as a warning to the rest of the attackers of what awaited them if they entered the city. So Gualdim Pais was not with that group of Templars, because

29:19none of them survived. But there were other Templars present at that battle. Gualdim himself must have been on another section of the wall, but news of what had happened would certainly have reached him. The siege ended seven days later, and the army, under the command of King Baldwin II of Jerusalem, succeeded in taking Ascalon. Eventually, in 1157, Gualdim Pais returns to Portugal. He brings with him many significant memories of these battles, and also of the defensive fortifications and tactics

29:55that he'd witnessed in use in these battles in the Near East. And he will use this knowledge to influence the construction of Templar fortifications in Portugal himself. He's going to be in a unique position to do this because he becomes the master of the Templars in Portugal. It basically means that he's the regional boss. So all the rest of the Templars in Portugal answer to him. He's the master of Portugal. He himself would have been answerable to the Grand Master of all the Templar chapters

30:31in Jerusalem itself. So you can think of him as the regional boss. Shortly after Gualdim Pais arrives back in Portugal and assumes this office, the Templars in Portugal receive a significant donation of land in the town of Tomar. And they receive this from the Portuguese king in gratitude for their ongoing service in his battles and campaigns against Moorish forces in the Iberian Peninsula. And by the way, the Templars in Portugal weren't the only ones receiving these kinds of donations. Other Templars in the

31:05kingdoms that would eventually become Spain were also getting similar donations for the same reasons. So the town of Tomar was an area that was on the border with Muslim forces in Iberia at the time, and therefore it was a vulnerable area. It was a place that you would expect would be attacked. And so it needed to be fortified and defended. And therefore, in giving Tomar to the Templars, the king isn't just saying, hey, here's some free land. He's saying, I want you to hold this land

31:38against the certainty of attack which is going to happen. So the Templars get this land and they get the money from it, but they also receive this military duty that comes along with it. Gualdim Paes, who is now the master of the Templars in Portugal, supervises the building that the Templars are going to do on this land in Tomar that they've been given. And building commences in 1160 and goes on for about a decade. Now the Templars build an entire complex. They need a castle and they need defensive

32:12fortifications. But they also need a place where they're going to live. Remember, these guys aren't just warriors. They're also monks. And that means they need to have their cloisters where they have individual rooms to be inhabited by brothers of the order. And they also need a place to pray. Because when the Templars aren't fighting, they live like monks. And that means they're involved in prayers multiple times a day. This complex includes the Templar Rotunda, which is part of this church that

32:45they build inside Tomar. And it's deliberately built to resemble the Templar headquarters back in Jerusalem on Temple Mount. So it has a very distinctive shape. It's almost circular. And this is a very deliberate gesture back to the original Templar headquarters in Jerusalem itself. I visited this Templar complex in Tomar. And the chapel in particular is absolutely magnificent. The decoration inside

33:16covers every visible surface. Except for the parts where the French army under Napoleon, some centuries later, decided to take down some of the paintings and burn them for firewood to keep warm in winter. So you can thank the French for missing pieces of art that originally used to decorate this space. But it's nonetheless a spectacular chapel to look at. And it would have functioned as the nerve center of the entire complex. But as you wander the halls of the rest of the Templar complex, it's amazing the austerity

33:50in which these men lived. Most of the brothers, or the knights, or the monks, depending on how you want to think of them, because they were all of these things, lived in very sparse rooms. There's basically nothing in there except a window and a sort of a shelf, which they would have made their beds on. These rooms were sometimes shared by two or three individuals. There was very small space for personal effects or items because you weren't supposed to own much. And the only heating that existed

34:22in these stone-walled rooms and corridors came from one heating room. So in the winter you can imagine these men walking out of their cells, freezing against the cold, and heading into the one room where they would build sort of a central fire. And hopefully the heat from that would spread a little ways, but you can imagine that the temperatures in their individual cells would have been much colder. So as much as possible in the winter months, you can imagine these men sitting around inside the

34:54central heating room to stay warm, when they weren't of course going to the chapel for regular services and prayers, or out in the courtyard tending their horses. Additionally, the rooms in this complex are connected, so someone could walk in to your individual cell at any given time, which meant the idea of privacy or the fact that you could expect to have some time to yourself really didn't exist. Now, if the Templar chapel itself in Tomar was designed to resemble the original Templar headquarters

35:28in Jerusalem, it wasn't the only feature that incorporated elements that Gualdin Paish remembered from his five years in the Near East. He very carefully designed the castle walls to incorporate defensive elements that he remembered from his time overseas. In particular, they were designed with what is called an Alambor. So you might imagine that a castle wall would essentially emerge vertically from the ground and possibly be surrounded by a moat. That was the usual defensive mechanism that you could see

36:02in many, many castles. But in the East, they had a steeply sloping section that came off the edge of the wall, this Alambor feature. And the purpose of that was to make it extremely difficult to scale the wall. You essentially had to fight your way up this steep slope, even to get to the base of the wall, and that made you very vulnerable. It also made more distance that any sapper would have to tunnel through in order to weaken the actual foundations of the wall itself. So Gualdin Paish had seen this Alambor

36:36feature as part of the defensive fortifications of castles in the Near East. And when he supervised the building of the Templar complex in Tomar, he incorporated this element. And as it turned out, it was going to come in very handy indeed. Now once the Templars had finished building this complex, which took them about a decade, the town of Tomar very quickly grew up around the complex walls, where individual families and artisans are settling there because they recognize that the

37:09Templar castle provides a sort of protection. So in the event that there is an attack from the south, they can go and take refuge inside the walls of that complex. And therefore it encourages settlement in this tenuous border region that Portugal is trying to retain a firm grip on. And that was, of course, the whole point. Now all of these defenses and preparations will be tested. And the major test came in 1190. What had happened was politics had shifted for what the Portuguese would have called

37:46the Moors. And the Almoravids, who had previously been the dominant Muslim power in the Iberian Peninsula, had been overtaken by a new group known as the Almohads. And the Almohads also originated in North Africa. They'd initially burst out and begun swallowing up Almoravid territory in North Africa. And then they turned their eyes to other Almoravid territory in the Iberian Peninsula. So it was that in 1190, this enormous Almohad Muslim army surges up from North Africa into the Iberian Peninsula from the south,

38:25and then disperses into smaller groups to attack various cities and fortresses. A group of 900 of these soldiers surround the Templar complex in Tomar. They arrive on July 13, 1190. So as this army begins to arrive and the town outside is surrounded by enemy forces, you can imagine all of the families, the farmers, the artisans, rushing into the Templar complex to take shelter behind the heavily fortified

38:57walls. And that's, of course, what those walls were designed to do, was to provide a defensive shelter against an incursion just like this. Gualdin Paix was 72 at the time, so he's still the master of the Templar order, but he's no longer a young man. At the center of the Templar complex was the Castle Keep. And this is a stronghold from which you could continue fighting even if all of the other exterior fortifications had been overrun. The Castle Keep was then surrounded by the courtyard, and this was the

39:33area that normally provided stables for the Templar horses. It's also an area that you can now imagine is filled with the inhabitants of the town itself, who fled in here for shelter. And take a moment to imagine what it must have been like for these people living in Tomar, who've suddenly seen the vanguard of this enemy army arrive, and they rush into this complex, and now they're wondering what happens next. They know that any farm animals they have, any money or valuables that they might have

40:05had in their houses, any tools that are useful, will certainly be seized and taken by this enemy army if they're found. But they have a much more serious concern. If the Templars cannot repel this enemy force from the gates, if they manage to overrun the Templar complex, there's a very real possibility that everyone inside that courtyard is going to die or be taken prisoner. So it must have been a very grim moment for many of these families, and you can imagine the anxiety, and the children crying,

40:41and the mothers trying to comfort their children, while they themselves feel something very similar to terror. Now outside this courtyard, which is filled with anxious townspeople, there is a much larger fortification called the Al-Medina. This is a wall system. It is the outer fortification that encloses the entire complex, and it follows the contours of the hills themselves. There was a gate, of course, that allowed access through this wall. But the construction of that gate had also been influenced

41:15by what Gweldim Paish learned in his time in the Near East. The gate was defended by two towers. So you can envision an entry door with a tower on each side of it, quite close. And this wasn't ornamental or accidental. The purpose of these towers was to defend that gate. It meant that anybody trying to go through that gate was vulnerable to having pitch or boiling oil or arrows fired down upon them

41:46by the defenders stationed in those towers. Also, the gate itself was designed almost like a funnel. So initially, a good number of men could storm through the entrance, but then there was this narrowing passageway that they had to go through in order to get through the wall and into the courtyard on the other side. And this funnel system was deliberately part of the architecture. It was something that Gweldim Paish had learned in the Near East, and he built this gate for the same characteristics.

42:18The purpose of that was, you might start with a lot of guys entering that gate, but only a few of them could go through it at a time. And that meant that the ones who came through first could easily be picked off or overpowered by the defenders. And once they were killed and their bodies lying on the ground, they begin to form obstacles so that succeeding attackers who are trying to come through this entrance have to fumble over a larger number of fallen bodies still coming through a narrow opening.

42:50And basically what this allows is for a far smaller number of defenders to wipe out a much larger number of attackers by funneling them through this kind of an opening. So this gate worked extremely well, and during the Siege of 1190 it became known as the Gate of Blood because of the enormous number of men who died there and the amount of blood that was spilled all over the ground as the attacking army fought to try and get through this gate. But this gate wasn't the only defensive measure that Gweldim Paish took.

43:23Incredibly, he also leads a charge. He leads about 300 Templars out to attack this much larger 900 men, strong force of enemies. Now picture this in your mind for a moment. How many 72-year-olds do you know who would be fit to ride on a horse in heavy armor and storm an enemy army slashing down their foes with heavy blows from above? Now this takes an enormous amount of physical strength,

43:58not to mention courage. Gweldim Paish was clearly a man who had all of these elements in abundance. The Siege of 1190 around the Templar complex lasted for six days. Gweldim Paish and his defenders were able to repel the attacking Muslim army which scattered and turned aside. And this victory actually cut the momentum of this Almohad incursion into the Iberian Peninsula. So it wasn't just a victory

44:31for the Templars of Tomar, it was a significant turning point in this entire campaign. Gweldim Paish died five years later and was buried with honors in Tomar. Now this significant Templar victory at Tomar vindicated the existing policy of handing over many border castles to the Templars as part of this defensive strategy. And this had been going on for a number of decades prior to 1190, but this battle

45:02just proved that it was an effective strategy. For example, a few decades later, after breaking his leg at the Battle of Badajoz, King Alfonso Henriquez turns over one-third of his newly conquered border territory to the Templars. Now an interesting note about the Battle of Badajoz. King Alfonso Henriquez is fighting this battle. He's fighting this battle against a Muslim city-state, a neighboring Muslim

45:34city-state, and he loses. He loses because his own son-in-law from the nearby Christian kingdom of Lyon fights with the Muslims against Alfonso Henriquez. Now I bring this note in because it reminds us that the Reconquista was not some simple conflict where all the Christian kingdoms allied together to fight against all the Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula. That's just simplistic, and frankly it's

46:07inaccurate. The Reconquista is really a competition for land. It is the formation of kingdoms which eventually will become the modern states of Spain and Portugal. But along these centuries of competition, these kingdoms, the Christian kingdoms are sometimes fighting each other and disputing who's going to have control of which region or what fortress, and they're sometimes fighting Muslims on their borders,

46:37and sometimes, as we've just seen in this particular battle, we have Christians allying with Muslims against other Christians. And unfortunately, King Alfonso Henriquez of Portugal lost this battle, and that ended his career leading armies into the field. But reinforcing this point about the complexity of these territory competitions, when King Alfonso Henriquez hands over a third of his border territory to the Templars, those include his borders with the Christian kingdoms of Lyon and Castile,

47:14as well as his borders with Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula. So that is significant. And furthermore, he also requests at this point that any revenues from land that are given to the Templars in Portugal be used only for battles inside Portugal. So this is a significant moment for the Templars because it's basically nationalization. Instead of the Templars taking land donations in Portugal and then sending

47:44money into the Near East to fund Templar operations over there, the revenues that they're going to be receiving from these new land donations will only be used inside Portugal. So the king is giving land to the Templars land to the Templars, yes, but he's also ensuring that the benefits of that land and the service of the Templars be dedicated to purposes within Portugal itself. This explains why Templars and other military orders in Portugal and the other kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula

48:19were so often given land in these border regions, because they could be called for military service any time. They were full-time soldiers, and that's why these were the guys you wanted on your borders. So the Templars have proven themselves incredibly valuable to the King of Portugal and the other kings of the Iberian Peninsula. And across Europe, they've become at this point a very wealthy, very powerful order. They're well-connected and they're answerable only to their Grand Master

48:50or to the Pope himself. But now the story takes a very dark turn.

The Downfall of the Templars

48:57We're now in the 1300s, and in France, the most Christian king, Philip IV, sometimes called Philip the Fair, is a man whose ambitions chronically exceed the sum of his bank account. As I mentioned previously, the Templars had become very wealthy. Wealthy enough to make loans to kings, which they had been doing for quite some time. And they'd made a number of very significant loans to Philip the Fair, the King of France as well. And it's a very sort of mafia strategy, isn't it? If you owe

49:35somebody a debt that you don't have the means to pay back, what's your strategy? Well, it's to whack the guy that you owe the money to. And that's essentially what Philip the Fair comes up with. He decides that he's going to get his hands on the Templar assets in France. He has no intention of paying back the loan that he owes these guys. And in addition, he wants to take everything else that they have for himself, at least in France, which is as far as his arms can reach. So in 1307,

50:08he arranges to arrest the Templar Grand Master, who happens to be visiting France at that time to attend a wedding that King Philip invited him to. And he coordinates not just the arrest of the Grand Master, but of all the other Templars in France, basically on the same day. So he's been plotting this for months ahead of time. And once he has the Templars in custody, he accuses them of these horrific things. He says that they've been involved in devil worship, and in homosexual acts, and in

50:43heresy, denying that Christ is the Son of God, and all of these other doctrinal points, which are core to Orthodox Christian belief. And these are very deliberate accusations. They're intended to be damning. They're intended to be so black that you can justify destroying the entire order, which is, of course, why he's doing this. And again, this entire sordid tale is covered in some detail in a

51:13previous episode we've done on this podcast, The Templars, The Fiery End. It's episode two on that series. So you can go and do a deep dive over there if you want more on this part of the story. But for various reasons, King Philip of France also has the Pope at the time, Clement V, under his thumb. And so he's able to exert an enormous amount of influence on the Pope personally to get him to go along with the plan here. So King Philip has his investigation team torture the Templars who are in

51:47custody in France to force them to provide evidence that they are, in fact, guilty of all these horrific things that Philip has drawn up. And then he puts pressure on the Pope himself to disband the order because, look, they're all guilty of these terrible things. I mean, how could you possibly allow them to continue under these circumstances? Now, there were a good number of Templars who retracted the confessions they'd been forced into under torture. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this episode,

52:18they were burned alive as an example to anybody else who might want to push back against this unjust and bizarre series of accusations. And once this happens, the Pope himself is compelled to disband the order, which he does by a papal decree in 1312. So in France, we've had this politically motivated show trial. We've had confessions extracted under torture. We've had executions. And finally, we have the Pope saying, that's it. It's the end of the order. No one can be a Templar.

52:53So while King Philip of France has been incredibly effective in enforcing his dishonest designs, even on the Pope, within France itself, it's not going down so well in other parts of Europe. Remember, the Templars are an international organization at this point. In the 1300s, they've been around for two centuries. And they have offices in England and Scotland and what is now Spain and Portugal and all over the place. And many of these other monarchs, when they hear what's

53:26happened and they see that the Pope has issued this decree, are pretty dubious. King Edward II of England, for example, says, really? The Templars have played a really important role in my kingdom for generations. These are men that I trust. They're men who've been exemplary models of virtue and bravery and honesty. And now you want me to just arrest all these guys and put them in jail? So not everyone is convinced, even though Philip the Fair has been able to force people in France to sing his tune.

53:59And the result of that is that what happens to Templars in other countries is a little bit different. So the Pope gives instructions that Templars in these other countries should be arrested and they should be kept in custody until the Pope's investigators can get over there and see if they were also involved in the sins of the order that have been exposed in this French show trial. But in many of these other places, the local Templars aren't found guilty. They end up being quietly released. Nobody else is serving significant sentences because nobody else

54:34believes what went down in France. However, in many cases, the land and assets that had belonged to the Templar order were taken over by the kings of those countries because the Templar order didn't exist. The Pope had dissolved it. That means the Templars can't own property. So what happens to the property the Templars owned? In many cases, it reverted to the control of the crown. So a similar thing goes on in Portugal. When word arrives in Portugal of this trial and the Templars

55:07have been found guilty and the King of Portugal being told to arrest the Templars in his area, he doesn't. He does, however, absorb Templar property under his own control and then he enters into some negotiations with the Pope. So we're now in the 1300s. King Afonso Henriquez has been gone for a couple of centuries. The current King of Portugal at this point is a guy called King Diniz. So what the King of Portugal is now communicating to the Pope about is he wants permission to found a new

55:42military order. Now, if you wanted to found a new order like the Templars, an order that had a religious component, then you had to talk to the Pope and get permission because he was in charge of matters religious. And it's exactly this kind of an order, a kind of a military, kind of a religious order that King Diniz of Portugal is interested in founding. And he succeeds in getting what he wants. So on March 14th, 1319, the new Pope, a guy called Pope John the 22nd, issues a papal bull that founds

56:21a new order, the Order of Christ in Portugal. So this is exactly seven years after the Templars have been disbanded by the previous Pope and the King of Portugal has been negotiating to get this to happen in the interim. And now it finally has. And what this new Pope says is he's granting permission for this because the King of Portugal has requested help fighting the Moors or the Muslims in his neighborhood. And so this order is being founded to help him with that objective. This new order,

56:54the Order of Christ, receives all of the properties that were formerly held by the Templar Knights in Portugal. These include fortresses like the Templar Complex at Tomar and all other fortresses the Templars had held, as well as buildings like churches, chapels, and oratories. So it's a wholesale property transfer. There were no Templar arrests in Portugal. So the Templars who had been operating as Templars in Portugal, after 1319, they're in the same rooms, the same guys in the same cells in the

57:33Templar Complex of Tomar are still there. And they're still doing the same things, which is defending the border. But they now have a new name. It's just the Order of Christ. So same people, same mission, same buildings, new name. Even the insignia doesn't change that much. The original Templar insignia is a red cross on a white background, or sometimes a white and black background. But it's a very square cross. Both lines are equal in length. Now the insignia for the New Order of Christ is also a red cross on a

58:11white background. The major difference is that the vertical line of the cross is now longer than the horizontal one. So it looks more like the symbol of the cross that you see on many churches today. And they put a little flare on the ends of all of the beams of the cross, so that the edges are wider than the center. But otherwise, it looks remarkably similar. Furthermore, the Pope, who authorizes the creation of this new order, references the Order of Calatrava as sort of the model for what this new order

58:47is going to look like. The Order of Calatrava had been founded in 1164 in the neighboring kingdom of Castile, right next to Portugal. And it had been founded in imitation of the Templars, who emerge in 1119, right? So 50 years later, this new Order of Calatrava emerges on the Iberian Peninsula, and it repeats this model of warrior-monk, of fusing these two together. So now, two centuries later, now that the original

59:20Templars have been dissolved, the New Order of Christ is modeled after an Order of Calatrava, which was modeled on the Templars. So even in terms of the reference points they're using, there's really no significant difference. It's just the name that needs to change. And by the way, the King of Portugal wasn't the only one who did this. The King of the nearby kingdom of Aragon, part of what will eventually become Spain, does a very similar maneuver. And he gets permission to begin the Order of Montesa,

59:56where he basically takes all the Templars in his kingdom, and he renames them the Order of Montesa, and they otherwise continue doing the same things in the same castles as they were doing before. King Denis of Portugal actually says, in a formal letter of the same year, that the Order of Christ is basically part of reforms of the Order of the Temple, or the Templars. So he's very explicit about this, and he says that he had acquired all of the Templar properties during that interim period between

1:00:29the Pope's dissolving of the Templars in 1312, and the beginning of the Order of Christ in 1319. All of their properties had basically reverted to the crown, and King Denis says, you know, I'm handing them all back. They weren't ever really mine, and I'm now just formally putting the New Order of Christ as the owner of all these things that used to belong to the Templars. So if anything, the Templars in Portugal, or as we will now call them, the Order of Christ, is closer to the Portuguese

1:01:01king than ever before. After all, they owe him their very survival, and their mission is now exclusively based in Portugal. This close relationship between the Templars, under their new name, and the kings of Portugal is going to be critical to understanding what happens next. So we're going to fast forward

The Order of Christ and Prince Henry

1:01:23a few decades. It's 1385, so it's been approximately 60 years since the Order of Christ has come to exist. And the king of Portugal is now a guy called João I. And for those of you who listened to our last episode on this podcast about Portugal in the Hundred Years' War, you'll know all about João I and how he had to fight a certain evil queen and the Battle of Aljubarada and all of that. So if you want that story, it's in the previous episode. But this is now the king of Portugal in 1385. He marries an English

1:01:59princess. I've called her Philippa of Gaunt because she's the daughter of John of Gaunt, who's a prince in England, the son of the king. But more properly, we could call her Philippa of Lancaster because that was the official name of the family. But she's the daughter of a prince in England. She marries King João of Portugal. And she's a very important queen because she and João go on to have eight children. And one of these has become famous in history internationally. His name was Henry.

1:02:32Henry. So Henry isn't their first son. In fact, he's actually child number five. So he's not going to be the crown prince. He's not going to inherit the throne or anything like that. And the Portuguese, of course, would have called him Enrique. But I'm using the term Henry because he's now known well outside of Portugal as Henry the Navigator. Henry grows up into a young man. And in 1420, a papal bull makes him an administrator of the order of Christ in Portugal. Now, why is the pope

1:03:08involved? Why is it an administrator? It goes like this. The king of Portugal wanted his own sons in charge of the military orders that were operating in Portugal. So this meant the order of Christ, but it also meant other military orders as well. For example, he asked the pope to make another one of his sons administrator of the sons administrator of the order of Santiago. So it's part of this move that King João of Portugal has to have full control of these military orders by putting his own sons in

1:03:42charge of them. Now, you'll recall that the Templars used to answer to the master of their order. That office is now no longer being used. So the guy in charge of the order of Christ is an administrator. But what's different is that up to this point, the administrator of the order of Christ had been a frere, a brother, someone who had taken all the vows and was a member of the order and had lived as any other one of them for his entire career. What happens in 1420 with Prince Henry assuming this post is that you have an

1:04:18external, someone who's never taken these vows, he's never lived in this ascetic, celibate way, and yet he's going to be in charge of basically giving orders about what everyone else is going to do. And critically, he has control of the properties and the funding that belong to the order of Christ as well. But why was it so important for King João to have this kind of family control over the military orders like the order of Christ? Well, by this time, by the early 1400s,

1:04:52because 1420 is when this happens, the situation in Portugal has changed. They no longer have a border with potential Muslim enemies on the other side of it. Portugal doesn't have a Muslim border at all. And so what this means is that the mission of these warrior monks, whether they were called Templars or the order of Christ, has always been to fight Muslims. There are no Muslims in Portugal to fight. So what's happening now is that when the kings of Portugal have other military adventures in

1:05:27mind, such as expeditions to Morocco, hey, let's go fight some Muslims where they live in North Africa. A lot of these warrior monks, the order of Christ were saying, well, thank you very much, but our mission involves fighting Muslims here. And we're not just signing up to fight anybody anywhere. We're not just regular army that you can use for whatever you want. And so to overcome this obstacle, King João wants to increase his control, direct control over these orders. And that's why

1:06:00he's putting his sons in charge of them. Now, Prince Henry, as it turns out, has two burning passions. One of them is to take the battle against Muslims to North Africa. He's very interested in fighting against Muslims where they live. So now that there aren't any to fight where he lives, he wants to go across the water and fight them in Morocco. His other main passion is voyages of exploration. And that's why he's become so significant in world history. But in many ways, there is a lot of

1:06:36synchronicity between Prince Henry and the members of the order of Christ. Prince Henry sees himself very much in a medieval mold. He sees himself as a crusading prince, as a knight who's taking up this mission that's been passed down through generations of knights. He sort of idealizes the crusades, which have been going on since 1095. And he wants to have his own piece of this glory. And in many ways, his own personal tastes kind of aligned with what members of the order of Christ were doing. I mean, he's

1:07:11supposed to have worn a hair shirt, which was a thing that had been going on since the Middle Ages to make yourself really uncomfortable all the time. Hair shirts would cause irritation on the skin, they weren't comfortable. That was the whole point, is to wear this underneath your clothes. Other people couldn't see it, but it made you uncomfortable. It caused you a certain degree of suffering, if you like, all the time. So Prince Henry, as a man, is already inclined this way. We also don't have any records of Prince Henry having a romantic relationship with anybody. So effectively, he was celibate. He

1:07:49hadn't taken a vow of celibacy, which he would have had to if he became part of the order, but he was effectively living that way anyway. So while he wasn't officially a member of the order, he has this dominant role in terms of running it, and he sees himself very much as one of them. In fact, there's some evidence that he actually considered taking the vows to become an official member, and even communicated with the Pope to allow him to sort of keep the property that he had as a prince if he was going to join the order, because normally a vow would involve a vow of poverty, which would

1:08:23mean giving up your properties. So there is some indication that Prince Henry was eager enough to become a full member that he actually negotiated for this, but in the end, he doesn't end up going through with taking the actual vows. He just remains an administrator or an overseer of the members of the order of Christ. But what that means is that he has access to the Templar complex in Tomar, the very same place where the siege of 1190 with the Gate of Blood and Gweldimpayish and all that

1:08:55occurs. And so he walks the same halls, and many of the members of that order are still occupying the same stonewalled cells and shivering around the central heating room. But Prince Henry is using that space to plan his maritime expeditions, because he's fascinated with maps, and with finding out what actually the coastline looks like in places where there's no clear or reliable information. And so one of the things that he becomes obsessed with is commissioning ships to go and sail along the

1:09:32coast of Africa. So they initially go to Morocco because he wants to make war on Muslims in Morocco, but eventually he begins to send his ships farther and farther down the western coast of Africa. And eventually they'll reach as far as Mali and Sierra Leone, looking for gold. But along the way, these captains will come back from their latest voyage, and they'll show him the notes they've taken on the coastline, and what's there, and what people they encountered, and where the natural harbors might be. And Henry is adding these obsessively to a better and better map system

1:10:07that he's trying to develop. Now, although he's called Prince Henry the Navigator, he never actually got on one of these boats and went on a voyage himself, which is kind of remarkable, because you'd sort of assume that someone who was so obsessed with exploration and maps and going to new places would have taken the opportunity himself. The reason why probably has a lot to do with his status as a prince. When you take a look at a caravel, one of the sailing ships that men of the time were using to

1:10:39make these voyages, or even if you've watched films like Master and Commander, where you're looking at what life was like aboard ships even centuries later, there's very little privacy. I mean, everyone is using the same facilities to go to the bathroom. You can't maintain a lot of distance between the captain and the men. There's a little bit of distance, but not much. And so for a prince who's expected to retain an aura of majesty and a status sort of above regular humans, it's really difficult to do that

1:11:12when you're on a ship retching over the side as seasick as the next guy, looking very much like an ordinary miserable human and not like an elevated representative of God's glory on earth. So Prince Henry the Navigator doesn't actually go on any voyages, but he's constantly commissioning them and hiring guys to go and map the next stretch of coastline. And he uses not only physical locations like the Templar complex in Tomar, but also the funds that the Order of Christ or the Templars had

1:11:50access to. So he's able to dip his hand into those bank accounts and use that money to commission these ships and to pay the captains that he's sending out along the coast. And eventually he pays back some of this money by basically taxes on materials that they're bringing back from these new places and selling or other revenues that they're extracting from these newly discovered places. Whether or not he actually balanced the books, did he take more than he gave? We don't have very clear records on

1:12:24this, but we do know that he used the funding of the Order of Christ to make these voyages possible. Now I've mentioned that Prince Henry the Navigator sees himself very much in the tradition of medieval knights and crusaders. And this concept of crusade has basically run through our entire story today. Originally, the first Templars in 1119, founded in Jerusalem, are there to protect territory that's been established by the first crusade. And so they're fighting Muslims who might want to take

1:12:59back that territory in the Near East. We've then seen the concept of crusade expanded in Portugal by kings like Afonso Henriquez, who's enlisting guys on the Second Crusade and Templars to say, it's fine if you want to make war on Muslims in the Near East, but how about you also fight Muslims here in the Iberian Peninsula? So that's already an expansion of what a crusade is and where it's conducted and against whom. But Prince Henry the Navigator, because there are no more Muslims for

1:13:35him to fight on his own border, on the edges of Portugal, he now wants to expand the concept of crusade even further to make war on Muslims in Morocco, a place that's been Muslim for centuries, as well as to make war on Muslims and other non-Christians. They may not be Muslims, they might just be pagans, a word that they use to describe anyone who was not a religion they recognized, any non-Christians wherever they might be found. And Prince Henry the Navigator isn't the

1:14:07only one who has this idea. It very much percolates into the way that the Christian kingdoms on the Iberian Peninsula, which will become Portugal and Spain, are going to treat their exploration of lands that are new to them. So the Portuguese voyages of exploration are going to go to places like the Canary Islands and Madeira, and eventually down the western coast of Africa. But then they're also going to go much farther than that, eventually to places like India and Japan and Brazil. And other

1:14:46countries like Spain will soon after get into this game and go to many other places that they called the New World, effectively North and South America. And they're going to take with them this idea of a crusade as a lens through which they explain to themselves and others what it is they are doing. So Henry the Navigator isn't alone in using this religious language, this holy war crusade idea,

1:15:19to wrap a very economic colonial mission. So we can see Prince Henry using this kind of language in the mid-1400s when some of his ships reach Guinea on the Atlantic coast of Africa. On paper, conquering infidels and spreading the Christian faith was used as a reason to explain why there was a Portuguese presence there. In practice, it was a military reconnaissance mission used to figure out where to establish a Portuguese fort or base with a view to eventually conquering that area. So there's a tension

1:15:56between the official language that's used to justify what's going on and the actual strategic goals that are motivating the expenditure and the labor of these missions themselves. And quite the opposite of converting the natives and spreading Christianity, early Portuguese voyages to the west coast of Africa very soon began to bring back human slave cargo. And it wasn't just the Portuguese who did this, they were rapidly followed by many other Europeans who got into the exploration and colonization game.

1:16:32So the Spanish, the French, and the English all got involved in the massive transportation of human slave cargo, a process that became known as the transatlantic slave trade. And this is because individual human beings were one of the most valuable commodities that you could fill your ship with and sell. So if you're motivated by economic gain, then getting involved in the slave trade was one of the fastest ways to get really wealthy really quickly. So the establishment of European colonization

1:17:09in places like West Africa and the New World was often billed as spreading Christianity at home, but was experienced very differently by the people in the lands that had contact with these European explorers. So what happened to the order of Christ itself? Well, that order still exists in Portugal today, although it's undergone some very significant evolutions in the centuries since the 1400s. It's completely

1:17:41secularized at this point. So no one is taking any kind of monastic vows. There is no religious component. And essentially it is now an order of merit that can be handed out to Portuguese citizens and foreigners. So it's very much divorced from its roots in the practice of knighthood or monastic life. It's not that different to when the king or queen of England knights a pop star like Paul McCartney or Elton John,

1:18:11for example, and they become Sir Elton John. And that's basically just a way of giving some sort of official recognition or a distinguished status to someone who seems worthy of recognition. And in many ways, that is what the order of Christ exists to do today. The Templars themselves were unique because when they were originally founded all the way back in 1119 in Jerusalem, they did this remarkable thing. They officially fused the identity of a warrior with

1:18:46that of a monk. And it was part of a larger movement, the idea of the Crusades, the very first Crusade and the ones after it as a holy war, as a war that was somehow morally incumbent, that was part of your religious identity, a war that pleased God. And the Popes who called for Crusades very frequently promised spiritual benefits to people who agreed to fight in them. They said, if you die on a Crusade,

1:19:17you're going straight to heaven. And if you don't die, you're doing something that is morally admirable and pleases God. But the problem with fusing these two ideas, with fusing religious faith and war, is that it really reduces the capacity of the Church to take any kind of critical position about what is then being done in that war. If you're going to call something a holy war, then just the terms you're using themselves naturally exclude a whole lot of questions

1:19:52about the types of things that are being done under that banner. And they also deliberately brush over other questions of economic or strategic motivations that might also be operating on such a military campaign. So fusing religion and war, as the Templars did in their very identity, and as the Crusading movement did as a whole, is a very dangerous idea. It continues many centuries later, as I've said,

1:20:25and is repurposed for use in how European powers are encountering non-Christians in other parts of the world. But the problem with fusing the powers of religion with the powers of the state is that the state doesn't become more religious. It's simply the religion that becomes tarnished by power and its abuse, and inevitably becomes more profane. I hope you've enjoyed this episode of Villains and Virgins podcast.

1:21:03This episode connects to many other stories we've been telling on this podcast, and so you can go find out more about the Templars in the multi-episode series we've done on them. You can dive deep into the Crusades, both the first and the second one. There are multi-part series on those also available, and as I promised at the beginning of this, I'll soon be releasing a bonus episode on other people in the Iberian Peninsula. Sephardic Jewish communities, Muslim

1:21:33communities, the differences between them, and the other parts of the story that were going on at the same time. Thank you so much for being here, and I hope I'll see you in the next episode.

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