Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/268

 252 POLITICAL HERESY. — THE STATE. Yet the wealth of the Order was more than sufficient to excite the cupidity of royal freebooters, and its power and privileges quite enough to arouse distrust in the mind of a less suspicious despot than Philippe le Bel. Many ingenious theories have been advanced to explain his action, but they are superfluous. In his quarrel with Boniface VIIL, though the Templars were accused of secretly sending money to Eome in defiance of his prohihition, they stood by him and signed an act approving and confirming the assembly of the Louvre in June, 1303, where Boniface was for- mally accused of heresy, and an appeal was made to a future council to be assembled on the subject. So cordial, in fact, was the understanding between the king and the Templars that royal let- ters of July 10, 1303, show that the collection of all the royal rev- enues throughout France was intrusted to Hugues de Peraud, the Visitor of France, who had narrowly missed obtaining the Grand Mastership of the Order. In June, 1304, Philippe confirmed all their privileges, and in October he issued an Ordonnance granting them additional ones and speaking of their merits in terms of warm appreciation. They lent him, in 1299, the enormous sum of five hundred thousand livres for the dowry of his sister. As late as 1306, when Hugues de Peraud had suffered a loss of two thou- sand silver marks deposited with Tommaso and Yanno Mozzi, Flor entine bankers, who fraudulently disappeared, Philippe promptly intervened and ordered restitution of the sum by Aimon, Abbot of S. Antoine, who had gone security for the bankers. When in his extreme financial straits he debased the coinage until a popular insurrection was excited in Paris, it was in the Temple that he took refuge, and it was the Templars that defended him against the assaults of the mob. But these very obligations were too great to be incurred by a monarch who was striving to render himself absolute, and the recollection of them could hardly fail to suggest that the Order was a dangerous factor in a kingdom where feudal half the land, while an examination of its Cartulary shows that in reality it pos- sessed but four lordships, together with fragmentary rights over rents, tithes, or villeins in seventy other places. A single abbey, that of St. Michel de Cuxa, possessed thirty lordships and similar rights in two hundred other places, and there were two other abbeys, Aries, and Cornelia de Conflent, each richer than the Templars. — Allart, Bulletin de la Societe Agricole, Scientifique et Litteraire des Pyrenees Orientales, T. XV. pp. 107-8.