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You could name them, because I have no idea if you're referring to modern-day bankers, the lawyers who took over their premises, or some other organisation.
But perhaps they are referencing Huguenots: https://www.huguenotsociety.org.uk/blog/huguenots-and-the-wo...
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_...
Not so much the first bank, but the first PayPal.
The term "bank" comes from literal banks that served as a bank to sit on and a box to keep money in. PayPal is just a glorified cheque processor.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's where the term "salary" came from, if I'm not mistaken. Roman thing?
You're correct. Funny enough, this is also obscure knowledge even in e.g Spanish. We use the word salario (from latin salarium) which has the same meaning as in latin: words ending in -ario (lat: -arium) is used to denote association, like in templario (templar) or revolucionario (revolutionary). For some reason, however, nobody thinks of "salario" as something associated with salt (sal). I guess it's so strange in t…
http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2017/01/salt-and-salary.ht...
Regarding the latter he writes:
"As I said above, ‘salt allowance’ isn’t a terrible guess. But I strongly suspect it’s much more metaphorical than that. Compare how the Greek word for a salary was opsōnion, literally ‘(money) for buying opson’, where opson means ‘fish, relish, sauce’. That doesn’t mean Greek workers were given a ‘fish allowance’: it means that there was a generalised idea that wages went on traded goods like fish, and not on things like barley which land-owners would grow for themselves. Similarly, in Rome, grain allowances were a common thing; it could easily make sense to interpret salarium as ‘everything-else-money’."
I did a walking tour of Bruges the other week and heard an interesting story about salt. Salt was a valuable commodity and could function as currency, carrying it around was risky and impractical. So there was a guild house that became a place where you could store your salt and get given a little note about how much salt they owed you. Later on if you wanted to exchange the value of your salt with someone else it be…
It's where the term "salary" came from, if I'm not mistaken. Roman thing?
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.
Too bad so few popular and reliable records exist, as I would be really interested in what their leverage ratio was for loans to deposits, what calendar they used to synchronize everywhere in the world (presumably astronomical), whether the Templars picked it up by learning and adapting Islamic Hawala during the crusades, what the Medicis did differently (covered a bit in Fergusson's The Ascent of Money). The necessa…
Thank you for the tip. Absolutely stunning in the pictures alone, made a note to visit this place.
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.
The tragic end to the Knights Templar brings to mind David Graeber's idea of bringing back the jubilee: https://davidgraeber.org/articles/after-the-jubilee/ 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 F…