Schweiz grundat av tempelriddare

This is the key to understanding the Crusades: the rise in importance of
merchant-banking. We must remember that, at the time,
intelligence-gathering was an important function of the traveling
merchant class, later called the merchant adventurers, and that the
eleventh-century bankers and caravan masters formed the nexus of what
was to evolve into our modern intelligence and banking apparatus. The
two functions are inextricable from one another. By either providing or
withholding information, they could influence political affairs. And by
the setting of rates of exchange, the merchant bankers could either
drain a city of its capital, or direct wealth and commerce its way. And
thus it was that the merchant bankers -- who were primarily Jews, and
the upstart Venetians -- were rising to challenge the temporal power of
the Papacy, and usurp its role as king-maker. Thus both the aristocracy
and the Papacy were threatened.

The ensuing call for Holy War was preached across Europe by itinerant
monks -- such as the Benedictines, St. Bernard and the Cistercians --
who could whip the people of the towns they visited into a religious
frenzy. To purge Christendom of evil heresy, and to avenge the "Blood of
Christ", the mob would then be allowed into the Jewish quarter. In the
murder and rampage that ensued, the Crusader Knights would suddenly
appear on the scene as "Lords and Saviors" -- and thus whole armies
could be marshalled "on-the-fly". And the occasion also demonstrated to
the Jews how, during the Knights' absence on Crusade, there would be no
one to protect them from the next mob, which could be summoned at any
time by the Church. And so, while on their way to the Holy Land, Godfrey
and the Knights of the Prieure de Sion had quietly strong-armed their
way into the Jewish merchant-banking establishment, and taken over the
operation. This was Pope Urban II's "Rough Wooing" of the Jews. After
the first blood-letting, the surviving Jews were kept on as
tax-gatherers, banking associates, war financiers, and brokers for
converting loot into wealth. And it does make military sense, before
marching off to fight the Turks, that one first "put the Jews in their
place".

So it is fair to say that a great portion of the Templar wealth had been
stolen from the Jews, or that the Papacy had handed over the Jewish
merchant-banking "franchise" to the Knights Templar in payment for their
services; but the situation goes still deeper than that. From the
captive Jews' perspective, while the Pope had indeed put a sword to
their throats, the Templars helped to bring in of new business, in fact,
a great deal of new business -- and it turned out that St. Bernard the
antisemite was also a very talented salesman. This was the beginning of
a very strange relationship ... for the Knights Templar and the Jews
were becoming merchant-banking partners!

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