The Knights Templar are the more famous of the two major Christian military orders that were founded during the Crusades. We talked about the other, the Knights Hospitaller, when we looked at the failed Ottoman siege of Malta in 1565. Ironically, while the Templars get more press it’s the Hospitallers who have survived to the present day, although now you may see them called the “Order of St. John” or the “Order of Malta.” The Templars, meanwhile, barely survived into the 14th century before the entire order was wiped out in a collaborative effort by Pope Clement V (d. 1314) and French King Philip IV (d. 1314), which mostly had to do with the fact that Philip owed the Templars a lot of money and didn’t want to pay them back.
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The Foreign Exchanges Companion 