Word: templars
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Antony gave the island to Cleopatra as a gift, and other conquerors would gladly have given a Cleopatra to get Cyprus. For the last 2,000 years, tidal waves of conquest have continued to sweep over the island's pebbled shores. Cyprus has been ruled by medieval Knights Templar, Venetians, Turks and British. By 1953, when Author Lawrence (Justine) Durrell (TIME, Aug. 26) arrived in Cyprus in search of a writer's low-cost retreat, the Greek Cypriots (four-fifths of the population) were scrawling their own historic handwriting on the village walls: "Enosis and only enosis" (union...
...founded as a convent by Erkenwald, Bishop of London, about 675. Richard the Lionhearted built a chapel in its churchyard; Edward the Confessor gave it a statue of the Virgin. The Great Seal of England was once guarded from William the Conqueror on All Hallows' altar; erring Knights Templar were tried there for heresy in the 14th century, and the headless body of many a wrong-guessing notable was brought there from the nearby Tower of London for burial. In the Great Fire of 1666, Samuel Pepys saw All Hallows saved by Admiral Penn (father of Pennsylvania...
Tied to a stake, wearing the paper miter of heresy, Jacques de Molay, Grand Master of the Knights Templar, was burned to death in the year 1314. But before he died, his stentorian voice cried out a terrible curse against his enemies: Pope Clement V. his prosecutor, Guillaume de Nogaret, and the coldly handsome King Philip IV of France. Historians still argue over the guilt or innocence of the Templars,*but most agree that they had to be swept away before Philip's kingdom could become a nation of Frenchmen instead of warring congeries of Burgundians, Gascons, Provengals, Normans...
...seemed more plausible than sainthood, and not even King Philip was surprised to find that a dying man's curse was as deadly as a knife: within a year of De Molay's howled imprecation from the fire, Pope, prosecutor and the King himself had followed the Templar to the grave...
...Knights Templar were organized in 1128 to protect pilgrims going to the Holy Land. With the end of the Crusades, the Templars became less a fighting order of knights than a collection of enormously wealthy bankers. By the use of informers, partisan judges and torture, King Philip and the Inquisition liquidated the order, took over its possessions. Under torture, many Templars admitted to the crimes of spitting on the Cross, denying Christ, sodomy, embezzlement, worshiping the Devil...