Warlord(72)
After hearing my story, the gatehouse guard indicated that we should take our business to the largest stone building to the front of the Temple Church, the Counting House, where all the Order’s money matters with outsiders were transacted.
I had the utmost respect for the fighting abilities of the Templar knights, and I had never met one who was not an extraordinary man, in one way or another – but the Order was cunning, too, and full of guile. And they were wealthy. Despite the vow of poverty that each knight took upon entering, the Order itself had amassed an abundance of treasure in the seventy years of its existence, and wide lands and estates, too, across the breadth of Europe. It was said that many a king or duke envied the coffers of the black-and-white knights – and part of the reason for their wealth lay in the nature of the exchange that I was about to make with them.
The Templars had preceptories all over Christendom and each was staffed by the Order’s knights and their sergeants, clerks, chaplains and servants. For decades, the Templars had been conveying goods – food, wine, clothing, building materials, weapons and so on – to their bases in remote parts of the world, from Syria to Scotland, from Denmark to the Douro, and in doing so they had also, naturally, begun to take part in commerce. Moving goods over the face of the earth, and selling them here and there had meant that sometimes the members of the Order needed to carry large sums of silver coin; and they thus laid themselves open to attack by bandits and thieves in the wilder regions. So the knights had devised a simple method of money exchange: a traveller would not carry money in the form of specie or coin, he would carry a letter, written in code, which commanded a Templar clerk when he arrived at his destination to hand over a particular sum of money on receipt of the parchment. This proved to be a great success – as a piece of parchment could have no value for a back-country thief – and soon the idea spread to other knights, who were not members of the Order, and then to townsfolk and traders who were travelling to far-flung markets and wished to safeguard their own silver.
On that fine morning in August, when Hanno, Thomas and I rode into the Paris Temple, there was nothing at all unusual in a knight with a large sum of money in heavy silver coin wishing it to be converted into a simple letter, to be redeemed in another preceptory, in another town, in another land, or indeed, almost anywhere in Christendom.
The scouting plan, as such, was that while I conducted my business with the Templar treasurers, and perhaps reassured anyone who cared to listen that I believed that I had recently been attacked by mere footpads, Hanno would reconnoitre the interior of the fortress, wandering off in a casual manner like a bored man-at-arms stretching his legs, while Thomas looked to the horses. Hanno was my eyes and ears, he would explore the compound on foot, perhaps chatting to some of the Templar sergeants or some of the lay brothers and servants, and seeing if he could discover any evidence of the knights of the blue cross.
When I had explained the plan to Thomas and Hanno, my squire had voiced the sensible worry that, if the knights of the blue cross were indeed Templars, and we were within their precincts, they might decide simply to kill us, and I had to agree that there was a risk attached to our stratagem. But not, I judged, a large one. At Fréteval, in a dense patch of wild woodland, secluded, miles from the main armies, the knights of the blue cross had felt confident enough to show their identity and display their animosity towards me. But when they had attacked me in the streets of Paris – in public – they had made an attempt to hide their status as knights and had pretended to be beggars. It had not been a very impressive masquerade – I have found that soldiers often stand out from the common run of men – but it demonstrated that they did not wish us to know, or anyone who saw us fighting to know, that they were knights. We would be safe in the Paris Temple, I argued, because they wanted to hide their identities. The knights of the blue cross could not openly attack us in this big, open semi-public place without being observed by many eyes, and this was something they were most unwilling to allow. We were as safe here, I told my friends, as we would be anywhere in Paris. This was my logic, anyway, and I prayed that it might be true.
I left Hanno and Thomas with the horses outside the Counting House and walked inside. It was cool and airy – I came through a great wooden double door into a tall stone hall with a double row of columns supporting the huge roof, and a series of doors at the back leading, I assumed, to private chambers, perhaps treasure vaults or rooms where parchment rolls and accounts might be stored. Two Templar sergeants wearing black surcoats over mail and with long swords belted at their waists stood guard on either side of the main door. In the centre of the room were four long tables covered in green cloth, and at each table sat a pair of clerks. At two of these tables, the clerks were in the process of transacting business with clients: at one, a French knight was passing over two small linen sacks of coins to the clerks; at the other a wealthy merchant was carefully reading a parchment document, holding it close to his face and frowning at the words written upon it.