Some of the most sensible reactions to the charges against the Templars and the destruction of the order came at the time. Dante, as we have seen, who wrote his Purgatorio during the trial of the Templars, had nothing to say about the supposed avarice of the order. But he was in no doubt about the greed, power-seeking and dishonesty of King Philip IV of France and the malign influence of his entire Capetian dynasty. Dante’s Italian compatriots generally thought the same: Italian bankers in France, like the Jews, had already been made to suffer Philip’s rapaciousness, while in the following generation the writer and poet Boccaccio, author of the Decameron, supported the Templars’ innocence and ridiculed the Inquisition.
In Portugal, the French assault on the Templars was also seen for what it was, and with royal support, and the permission of the Papacy, the Templars continued to flourish in Portugal under another name. The Germans and the English, too, tended to be sceptical about Templar guilt. In fact it was really only in France and among people under French sway that the story of Templar heresy was swallowed. Ramon Lull is an example. He was a Catalan philosopher and mystic who eagerly expected that Philip IV would lead a new crusade to the East. At first he believed in the honour and good faith of the Templars, but in 1308, during the trial and the full force of the French monarchy’s propaganda campaign against the order, he fell into line with the French court and changed his mind; but if he thought that the condemnation of the Templars would purify
Christians and iead to a new crusade, he was disappointed.
Meanwhiie, as the flame of the Crusader ideai flickered and died, the Tempiars were taking on a mythic iife of their own.
World History
