> on friday, 13 october 1307, hundreds of the knights templar were arrested in france, an action apparently motivated financially and undertaken by the efficient royal bureaucracy to increase the prestige of the crown. > the king charged the templars with usury, credit inflation, fraud, heresy, sodomy, immorality, and abuses, and the scruples of the pope were heightened by a growing sense that the burgeoning french state might not wait for the church but would proceed independently.
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