rade bustled in the cities of the Loire: Orleans, Blois, Tours, Chinon, Saumur, etc. More and more bridges were built across the river. In 1150, the Loire was bridged at Gien, Sully, Orleans, Beaugency, Blois, Amboise, Tours, the bridge at Cé, and Chalonnes. Owners of suburban vineyards, the "bourgeois" of the Loire cities, made fortunes in wine.
Angers sent its wine from Anjou to the court of Henri II Plantagenets, king of England. It was not even export, because he owned the land! Anjou dominated the Loire valley: Anjou, Maine and Touraine were integrated into the vast empire of the crown of England, which already included Aquitaine. It would take almost half a century to put an end to it.

In 1189, the new king of France, Philippe-Auguste invaded the country of Anjou, which was a possession of Henry II Plantagenet, duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, count of Anjou and king of England. Defeated at Azay-le-Rideau and tired of incessant warfare, Henry came to die at Chinon. His sons Richard and John escaped.
Richard-the Lionhearted, count of Anjou and Touraine and, therefore, king of England, made a treaty with France and received almost all of the Angevine empire.

Richard went on the Third Crusade, which took Acre and made peace with Saladin.. He also conquered Cyprus and Malta, which thereafter remained Latin countries.

Back in England, his brother John had coveted the throne in Richard's ab-sence. As soon as the situation was in hand, Richard succeeded in remov-ing Louis, the new count of Blois, from the French alliance. He soundly defeated Philippe-Auguste at Freteval Fréteval, near Vendome. But a few years later he was fatally injured in Limousin.

The "Lionhearted" was buried next to his father in the abbey of Fontevrault, in Touraine, in 1199. A few years later, his brother, Jean-sans-Terre, gave up his claim to greater Anjou in the treaty of Chinon in 1205. .

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Once peace had been restored, prosperity returned, and it brought about social change. In the countryside, peace made it possible for communities to buy freedoms, thus almost completely doing away with serfdom. The last serfs were freed in about 1240.
The large mass of the peasantry was soon made up only of free "vilains." They still lived under the rule of lords, but their rights and duties were set by custom and the agreements they made with the feudal rulers. Wage earners became more numerous in the countryside.

En In the Loire valley, managers set up "booths" in the vineyards and hired workers according to the conditions and guarantees set down by the various establishments. In all forms of work, guilds flourished. Along the Loire, there was a " Guild of boatmen and merchants frequenting the Loire river and the tributaries thereof".

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The bishop of Orleans and the lord of Meung, Manassès de Seignelay, built a the fortified castle in order to have a more spacious residence than the old tower attached to the church bell tower. The church had been built by his unfortunate predecessor, Manasses de Garlande. Manasses de Seignelay was a bishop and therefore not a Templar himself, but his fortress was very much in the spirit of the time. He also built the first stone bridge at Meung, thus making it easier and safer for traders to cross the river.

At the same time, the school at Meung was acquiring an international reputation for Bernard de Meung 's method called the "dictamen."

Guillaume de Lorris composed the initial 4,150 verses of the « Romance of the Rose » which was completed some years later by Jean de Meung, also known as Chopinel, who added 18,000 verses. It is fair to say that the spirit of civilization had come to the people of the Loire.

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Things were happening in other places, too. Saint-Francis of Assisi, accepted followers to his order in 1209, as did Saint-Dominic, in1206. The two mendicant orders would gradually take their place in history.

Cathedrals, all dedicated to Notre Dame, Our Lady, could be found in many regions of France: the one at Chartres was already nearly a hundred years old. The cathedrals of Laon, Paris, and Rheims were almost a half-century old. Others were sending their towers heavenward almost every-where. But the sky was not blue all over. In the south of France the dark smoke of the stake was rising for the Albigensian Catharists ...

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Louis IX, dubbed Saint-Louis, was an excellent sovereign. He won the love of his people, and his reign was marked by a great sense of justice, which his subjects did not hesitate to call upon. He presided at court under an oak tree in the manner of the Druid judges.

His lifestyle was very close to that of the Templars; he practiced quite an austere personal discipline. It was the prototype of French chivalry. He granted royal licenses to several confraternities, such as the "Children of Solomon ".

This was the high water mark of Christian France. The faith was alive and well in the Loire countries, and although the inquisition was already rav-aging the south, the Orleanais and Touraine seemed to be safe at the dawn of the 14th century.

Proof, if any is needed, is the discovery of a statue of the Virgin at Clery in 1280. Miracles followed, inevitably, and encouraged the local lord, Simon de Meulun, to found immediately five canonical prebends in order to provide an income for the chapel where the statue was located. Philip the Fair added five more 25 years later, and the chapel became a basilica.

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The Templars played a great part in the economic development. The Order of theTemple got richer by the day from its colossal commercial en-terprises and from the bequests it continually received. It used these be-quests to build hospices for travelers or leprosariums where the Order of St. John Hospitalerwas not yet at work. In addition, the Templars proba-bly participated as well in financing cathedrals and in maintaining militia to insure the safety of travel by road.

At the same time, the religious orders that had taken part in founding the Templars, the Benedictine and Cistercian abbeys, went into decline. The great days of the Benedictine monasteries were over, and some priories had only a single monk. Their work was done.
At the end of the 13th century, there were no more pupils at Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire except those in the school of music.

These old orders grew poor. Many of them had made sizable donations to the Order of the Temple. It is interesting to ask why they had sponsored a new order that was likely to rival their own. Did they see in it a much more effective instrument for promoting civilization? They no longer had any income, and the traditional abbots or bishops of the secular and regular clergy were more stubborn in defending their material interests, which they saw were constantly diminishing. This attitude would soon give rise to anticlericalism among the faithful. Meanwhile, the mendicant orders were getting rich, and Franciscan or Dominican confessors would soon be seen in the corridors of power. Behind them loomed the specter of the inquisition...

Thousands of "heretics" had already been burned at the stake all across Eu-rope and especially in France. The special prosecutors of the Church rav-aged the provinces of the kingdom. In the south, the Jura, the Causses, and also along the Loire and especially at La Charité sur Loire, which hardly seems to have deserved its name in that dark time because of Robert-le-Bougre, ("Robert the Son of a Bitch"), who was a corrupt inquisitor even though he had been a Catharist himself. His excesses caused him to be de-nounced by the bishops of the dioceses because they were horrified at so much violence. This did not keep him from being named inquisitor of France three years later or from burning hundreds more victims.
Unfortunately, he was not the only fanatic of his ilk, and many abuses were committed in the name of God. Among these were deliberate criminality, because fanaticism was not the only source of terror. The "purifying" flames had the advantage, so it was said, of allowing their victims to see their souls "redeemed" by God. But in many cases the devil redeemed oth-ers things than souls. The inquisitors had all the tools of power: persecu-tion, torture, condemnation and, especially, the confiscation of the property of the "heretics" including confiscation by posthumous trial ! It is quite understandable that some did not pass up the opportunity, because as much as one-third of the proceeds from confiscated property went to the inquisi-tors. Under such conditions, it is easy to see why some inquisitorial "brothers" were so heavy-handed in embezzling their unfortunate victims.

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The Templar order never agreed to participate in any of these "crusades" against the Catharists, Albigensians or other Waldensians. It did not live on plunder and had no need of the lands that the Inquisition promised to the "crusaders" of the time. However, it had become a power to be reckoned with. Its fleets controlled the Mediterranean, money was circulating in abundance, and its "commanderies" were numerous in all the provinces. There were commanderies at Gien, Orleans, Azay-le-Rideau, Villandry and Le Mans, but there were many others that served as way stations.

The number of commanderies in France can be estimated at about 2,000 . Every commanderie owned, operated or contracted for the operation of several "granges".

Some quick calculation shows that if every commanderie managed 2,000 "acres" of arable land, meadows, woods, and ponds, the Temple lands in France alone may have amounted to about two million hectares. The re-cently introduced modern plow, which had also been brought back from the Crusades, turned over the ground in furrows rather than simply scratch the surface like the old wooden rake. All these lands were well cultivated and well managed. It is no wonder, then, that for two centuries there were very few famines in France...

Besides the commanderies, farms, granges, warehouses and hotels, the Templars owned many houses in all the large towns. In Paris alone, it owned the entire Marais quarter as well as the hill of Belleville, the vine-yards of Montmartre and most of the suburb of Saint-Jacques. It may have owned property in the same proportion in all the large towns of France..

And all this property was tax exempt. Moreover, some bequests had been made to the Templars that consisted of various "entitlements" and taxes on markets, lands or churches, which meant that the Templar accountants had become the most skilled and honest in their profession. Even the royal government often delegated to some of them the task of collecting royal taxes. The moneys collected traveled under the supervision of the Templar militia and were deposited in the royal treasury by the Templar house in Paris. The Templars were, in effect, the king's tax collectors.

Such wealth made it possible for the Templars to be lenders on occasion. They lent to kings, bishops, great lords, businessmen and even private in-dividuals.

And the Order was not limited to France. It operated throughout western Europe. England's Richard the Lionhearted returned from the Holy Land aboard a Templar vessel in the uniform of the Templars. The Templar Order operated from England to Cyprus, from Spain to Norway. It was not present in eastern Europe, where Emperor Frederic von Hœnstoffen sponsored a dissident order, the Teutonic Knights, who left quite a dif-ferent mark on history. And Templar commerce was not only domestic but also international. It is thought that the Templars may have taken sil-ver from mines in Mexico two centuries before Christopher Columbus "discovered" America with his three caravels under sails bearing the Templar Cross!

Some facts might corroborate this daring hypothesis :
1°) The Templars made La Rochelle an enormously active seaport at the terminus of a number of important land routes. It may seem surprising that an Order oriented toward Palestine in the east should make such heavy use of an Atlantic port facing westwards. Of course, the Order also had ports on the Mediterranean, which was the gateway to the Orient, and on the North Sea, which led to England and Ireland. But why La Rochelle, on the Atlantic?
2°) Silver was worth much more than gold in the Orient at that time, quite the opposite of its valuation in the monetary exchange of the West. It is now known that the silver mines of Mexico had been in production long before the conquistadors rediscovered them. And they were not worked by Indians, who valued the metal far less than the Old World did. Who profited from these mines? If we also take into consideration the large in-crease in silver exchanged for gold in the Orient at the same time, we are justified in asking where it came from.

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The upshot is that the Order of the Temple had become rich and powerful; very rich and very powerful; richer and more powerful than the kingdom itself.

How did that happen? How could an order that ruled out private property for its members become so rich and powerful in less than two centuries?
And this brings up a question apparently unrelated except for the historical period: How does a gothic cathedral stand up, and why does it "sing" so well?

Both questions have the same answer. In gothic architecture, the building material itself, by its size and placement, transmits the vertical and lateral thrust necessary for the elevation and lightness of the work. There is no heaviness; the whole construction is dynamic; the building material is stressed like a guitar string and responds to the slightest vibration...

It is the opposite of the massive weight of Romanesque architecture. The geometry used in the gothic architecture directs stress upwards. It is a work of elevation that is both spiritual and material; the very tension of the vaults helps negate their own mass, and they respond to the slightest har-monic vibrations developed, for example, as though by chance, by Gregorian chant...

Human society is an image of the model in stone: every part can participate in the elevation of the Whole only to the extent that it is not itself weighed down. Thus the Whole grows much faster than the sum of its parts, taken individually.

Of course, this system must be free of deceit and corruption. As applied to people, it is thus unlikely to find it still standing a few centuries later. However, the cathedrals of stone are still there !...

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The incredible power of the Templar order overshadowed many people, primarily the king of France, Philippe the Fair, who was no great shakes as an economist, even debased the coinage to finance his spendthrift policies. He even borrowed money from the Templars for his daughter's dowry.

Did Pope Clément V fear that the spiritual authority of the Church would slip away from him if he no longer controlled the Templars? Or was he somehow forced to do as Philip ordered after Philip had installed him in Avignon, where he could keep an eye on him?
The bishops were mostly sons of great lords; they saw their abbeys' "entitlements" drying up and could only count on church collections any more.

A number of private interests were converging in opposition to the power-ful Templar order. Since it was beyond moral and civic reproach but knew some secrets, it had to be attacked with calumny and false evidence invented out of whole cloth on the basis of what was unknown, especially its concept of religious practice. And with all the trials of heretics, the specialists of the inquisition had had time to practice !...

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