The Claim
The Order of the Knights Templar hid a huge amount of gold that has never been found.
The knights Templar had various different names, such as the Poor Fellow soldiers of Christ and the order of the temple of Solomon, but most people know them by their most famous name, the Templar’s.
They were a Catholic military order that are best recognised by the red cross they wore on their armour and shields. The order was made up of the most fearsome knights and provided the bulk of the elite troops during the crusades, but one thing many people don’t know about the Templar’s is that about 90% of the order was made up of non-combatants.
The members of the order that weren’t knights were mostly in support roles and finance, controlling the flow of wealth that the knights provided and making sure it got back to the church.
The order was active between 1119 and 1312 AD and during this time gathered a huge amount of wealth from all of the foreign temples and cities they “liberated” in the name of Christ. Since they were so good at their job and had the full backing of the Catholic church and various kings around Europe at the time, they could do and get away with pretty much anything.
This freedom to act how they like led to over 1000 Templar owned and operated fortifications, trading posts, religious sites and various other buildings and settlements. These were all used to funnel money back to the church and to support themselves.
Everything went smoothly for the Order of the Templar’s until one day on Friday the 13th, 1307 King Philip IV of France issued an order to have hundreds of French Templar’s arrested at the same time, an action supported by the pope.
It seems the Templar’s were accused of various acts against the church and King Philip IV, something that later revealed itself to be somewhat of a scam. It turns out that King Philip IV was quite poor at the time, and feared the level of wealth and power the Templar’s had over the country, so in a deal with the pope he tried to dissolve the order and claim all their wealth as his own.
The Templar’s were accused of some ridiculous things, such as getting new recruits to spit on the cross during initiation ceremonies and encouraging indecent kissing and homosexual practises, as well as some more serious things like corruption and fraud.
After the initial wave of arrests, many of the Templar members confessed to the charges under torture, and King Philip IV then claimed he had “proof” and so requested that all Templar’s across the whole order be arrested and charged.
Since the Catholic church and the pope supported the order, the Templar’s had no way of existing as they had and were forced to dissolve, which is were the treasure comes in.
There’s 2 types of treasure when it comes to the Templar’s, which are minor stashes and the treasure from the temple of Jerusalem. The minor stashed are believed to be all the wealth located in a Templar building being hidden near by to hide it from being seized.
When the rest of the Templar’s heard of the arrest order, they had literally no choice but to the either hide the gold they had on them or in whichever building they controlled, or let it fall into the hands of the soldiers coming to arrest them.
There have been several small treasure finds of what is believed to be Templar gold, most of which were found by accident using metal detectors. Its not known which Templar buildings contained stashes of wealth at the time the order was dissolved, so there’s no way of knowing where treasure “might” be.
As for the treasure of the temple of Jerusalem, this was supposed to have been stolen during the conquest of the city. As soon as the Templar’s entered the cities main temple, they saw tons of gold and silver and countless other gems and ornaments, which of course they looted as fast as possible.
This looting led to the knights involved becoming insanely rich, but since the treasure was supposed to belong to the church they kept most of it secret.
Since no one has found it yet no one knows of a possible location, but the Oak island money pit is one place that pops up quite often. Another theory is that the treasure was spent over time and slowly dripped back into local economies, though it would have been difficult and less profitable to destroy the gold statues and gems recorded as being in the temple and sell them as regular gold bars or smaller broken down gems to disguise them.
As of now many theories exist about where it is, and if it even existed in the first place, but since there’s not really much evidence and records from hundreds of years ago are sketchy at best, until someone finds it we’ll never know.
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