Templars

The **Templars**, also known as the **Knights Templar**, are a secret society opposed to the use of Servants.

Part of the F/AP and Phase Erika stories, they are rivals to Chaldea. From a meta standpoint, almost everything about them was written to make them antagonists.

## Members

* Templar Prime (unknown leader)
* Anne-Lise Chevalier (leader of the French cell)
* Beregovoy Perrin (leader of the Swiss cell)
* Erika Helsman (mage and field agent)
* Ruler of Victory (Ruler-class servant)
* Abraham Van Helsing (Archer-class servant)
* Cortes Antonio (field agent)

## Lore

While kind of compatible with the original lore, this organization is different from the Templars that already exist in the Nasuverse. They are a bit closer to what they were in real history.

### The Cathars

During the 12th century, the Cathar movement appeared in southern France. Its followers, the Albigensians, were named after the white ("albus") they wore as opposed to the black-clad inquisitors who hunted them down. The "Cathari" name itself is actually recent and was not used at the time. The Albigensians blamed the Catholic Church for having perverted authentic Christianity and campaigned for a return to basics. Catharism also clearly rejected the feudalism of the time, in particular when it came to the use of land. The land should "belong" in principle only to the person who works it, and not to any owner who does not have direct use of it. Hence its success among serfs and workers. There were also other notions such as the refusal to eat meat or to even eat anything at all, the rejection of the traditional Catholic sacraments... The Cathars who desired to officiate, after being ordained, practiced a life of asceticism and were called the "Perfects". Medieval Languedoc had a tradition of religious tolerance following cohabitation with several heresies and other religions, notably Arianism in the Visigothic period, but also with Islam, present in Spain at the time, and as such this tolerance could be found even among the local authorities, who even when not converted to the Albigensian faith still gave them some support.

The Albigensians claimed to return to the "Church of the Apostles", and to live their faith like the first Christians. Rejecting the sacraments of the official Church, they rebuked the Pope and the clergy for their opulence and their corruption. Rome at first tried to use preaching as an attempt to extinguish this movement, but then it was finally declared heretical after a few decades. The Albigensians began to be persecuted and attacked.

In 1208 Pope Innocent III launched the Albigensian Crusade, the first crusade to take place on the territory of Western Christianity. The official ecclesiastical objective was to subdue the heresy, but for the participating knights, the wealthy county of Toulouse was also a prey of choice. One of the secret reasons for which the crusade was launched was also that, according to the rumor, the Cathars had a vast treasure hoard which contained artifacts such as the True Grail, the Holy Grail that had contained the blood of Christ. The crusade was about 20,000 strong and as its first act the city of Béziers saw a large number of its inhabitants massacred. It was at the occasion of this massacre that Arnaud Amaury uttered the famous sentence "Kill them all; let God sort them out". On January 30, 1226, King Louis VIII himself took up arms against the Cathars. The war lasted twenty years, and then followed a period of relative peace where it was the medieval Inquisition which continued to track down the last heretics rather than the vassals of the kingdom of France.

The Château de Montségur had become the capital of the Cathar refugees, under the command of a Faydit knight named Pierre-Roger de Mirepoix. Montségur is believed to have housed the rich treasure of the Cathar church, including the Grail. In 1243, the Catholic council of Béziers decided to intensify the fight against the Cathars and to take the castle militarily, wanting to respond to a massacre of inquisitors in Avignonet. The castle was besieged by 6000 soldiers of the kingdom of France, and those of the Cathars who at the end of the siege refused to abjure their faith were burned alive on March 16, 1244. Before and during the siege, around Christmas 1243, several Cathars had left the castle and had slipped between the French lines, carrying with them the treasure of their church. During the following decades the Inquisition continued its grim work. Catharism was then eradicated from Languedoc and there were only few scattered survivors left.

The Cathari hoard has since been the subject of much speculation. Besides the Grail it was said to contain many other rare items, such as unpublished writings by Plato. These Cathars actually secretely took refuge near a stronghold in the area occupied by the Templars. The Templars were actually close to the Cathars, the two groups sharing ideals such as poverty, chastity, fidelity to the faith, and the two having links with the Manichaean teachings even if the Templars still served Rome. The remaining Cathar refugees secretly ceded the treasure to them and entered their order, bringing with them a number of beliefs and rituals that would later be damaging to the Templars.

### The original Templars

The Order of Solomon's Temple was created on the occasion of the Council of Troyes, opened on January 13, 1129, from a militia called the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon. Approved by the Pope, the Templars worked for the next two centuries to accompany and protect pilgrims to Jerusalem in the context of the holy war and the crusades, gradually gaining strong military and financial powers, especially in France where they originated, but also in Spain, England, and of course in the Holy Land.

With its wealth, the Order sometimes helped kings in financial difficulties, and was also responsible for protecting and transporting a large number of holy relics. Among the most important relics of the order were the mantle of Saint Bernard, pieces of the crown of thorns, fragments of the True Cross, etc. The Holy Grail, recovered from the Cathars, was secretly added to the Templar treasury in 1243.

Despite their power and their relics, the second half of the 13th century marked the end of the golden age of the order. Many Templar soldiers perished at the battle of Mansourah in 1250, and the Holy Land was gradually retaken from the Europeans, with the siege of Acre in 1291 signing the last of these battles. Once expelled from the Holy Land, with the virtual impossibility of reconquering it, the question of the usefulness of the Order of Solomon's Temple was raised because it had originally been created to defend the pilgrims going to Jerusalem to the tomb of the Christ. The Templars had to produce a memoir at the second council of Lyon to continue to justify their existence to the religious authorities.

With this loss of their original reason of existence, part of the order becomes perverted, a certain number of the Knights Templar becoming arrogant and greedy lords. Rich and dangerous militarily, they were gradually considered a threat by the kingdom of France. King Philip IV the Fair further suspected that they were the ones who had recovered the Cathar treasure and the Grail, and had long desired their destruction, but still lacked publicly acceptable evidence and confessions to be able to do so. Over the years stories of denial of Christ, obscene practices of the rites of entry into the order and sodomy between brothers emerged, in reality a mixture of phenomena. After actually welcoming the Cathars, several members of the order had indeed started to study magic in order to try and use the powers of their relics to hold the Holy Land and then later retake it. The Templars had also attracted several women into their ranks, these however having to pretend to be men, creating the rumors of homosexual behavior. All these facts could already be seen as witchcraft and heresy, but some Templars now also practiced other things taken from the Cathars, such as the disrespect of the cross or the rejection of the traditional Catholic sacraments. Jacques de Molay was aware of what was all happening among his knights, and supported these changes, wishing to prepare the reconquest of the Holy Land at any cost, even if it meant breaking with the official practices of the Church and what he considered to be a narrow dogma. Feeling that he finally had something to bring them down, Philip IV prepared himself so that on the morning of Friday, October 13, 1307, almost all the Templars of France were arrested by royal decree.

"Almost" all the Templars, because their unofficial support for the Cathars had actually won them the friendship of a certain number of Albigensian sympathizers in southern France, who secretly warned the knights of the fate that awaited them. It was already too late for the southern Templars to warn the leaders of the order, then in Paris, so those who were warned hastened to flee and load what treasure they could onto the ships of their large fleet. The day before the arrest of the Templars, on October 12, 1307, their ships weighed anchor from La Rochelle for an unknown destination.

Philip IV launched a great trial against those he had managed to capture, under the leadership of his confessor, Guillaume Humbert of Paris, also Grand Inquisitor of France. Under torture several Templars confessed to having committed heresy, idolatry and sodomy. The political conflict between the King of France and the Roman papacy led to several years of investigations and negotiations. At the Council of Vienna on October 16, 1311, the Pope finally ordered the dissolution of the order and the restitution of its properties to the Church. The Templars themselves who confessed or who were declared innocent would be granted an annuity and could live, while all those who denied or recanted would suffer the death penalty. Jacques de Molay and Geoffrey de Charny (Beatrix de Charny's uncle) were among these, burned in front of Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral in 1314 (with Beatrix as a witness). The other branches of the order were gradually dissolved until it was finally destroyed, leaving behind a legacy of tragedy and mystery. The fall of the Capetians would later be attributed to the curse launched by de Molay against Philip IV. In popular culture, Friday the 13th (the day of the original betrayal) was now forever seen as a day of misfortune.

In 1308, Pope Clement V decided to secretly absolve the last Grand Master of the Templars, Jacques de Molay, and the other leaders of the Order of Solomon's Temple, inspired by the philosophy of de Molay who believed that in order to be able to serve the Lord Christians had to be prepared to use certain techniques officially considered undesirable in a controlled manner. The Assembly of the Eighth Sacrament was then created to try to partially take over certain roles and methods of the Templars. This act was recorded in the Chinon Parchment.

### Journey of the True Grail

* After collecting the blood of Jesus on his cross, the Grail was kept in Jerusalem.
* The Temple of Herod, built on the ruins of the Temple of Solomon, was in turn destroyed by the Roman troops of Titus in the year 70. Their booty was then brought back to Rome, including the Holy Grail.
* A few centuries later, on August 24, 410, Rome was invaded by the Visigoths of Alaric. For several days and several nights the Visigoths plundered the city, constituting a veritable war chest that they would bring back to the city of Toulouse, which would remain their capital for a century.
* In 508, the Franks of Clovis left Bordeaux where they had spent the winter, resuming the offensive against the Visigoths. Toulouse passed into the hands of the Franks, and here we officially lose track of the treasure of the Visigoths. Rumor has it that a large part of the hoard was moved to the important fortified town of Rennes-le-château, itself 60 kilometers from Montségur, where the Holy Grail was placed, in future Cathar territory.
* The Knight Percival of the Round Table went in search of the Grail in the name of King Arthur. The Welshman traveled to France, where he followed a trail that the Grail was in a castle whose name he interpreted as "Montsalvat", the Mount of Salvation. He saw the Grail there but failed to retrieve it, and spent the rest of his life searching for it. His adventures were later transcribed by Chrétien de Troyes in the novel "Perceval, the Story of the Grail" and by the Bavarian Wolfram von Eschenbach in the epic poem "Parzifal".
* During the siege of Montségur by the Albigensian crusade, the Grail was brought by the Cathars to the Templars, who accepted it. The relic was then brought to the Holy Land and stored in the new Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, the headquarters of the order, before being rushed back to France after the fall of Acre.
* A day before the royal order to arrest all French Templars was enforced, the Templar fleet left its home port of La Rochelle for an unknown destination, rumored to take with it part of the mythical treasure of order as well as the Holy Grail. No one knows how far they went: perhaps in Portugal, in Scotland, or also in America two hundred years before its official discovery. The newly created Assembly of the Eighth Sacrament of the Church closely monitored the maritime expedition of Christopher Columbus, which was suspected of being an attempt to find the lost Templar fleet, in particular because of the symbol of the red cross adorning the sails of his caravels.
* At the end of the 19th century, Abbot Saunière became famous for his extravagant spending. It was thought that he had found a large treasure in the region of Rennes-le-château, which revived speculation as to the hidden treasure of the Templars.
* In 1931 and 1932, SS writer Otto Rahn explored the Montségur region. Steeped in medieval literature, this adventurer sought to prove the historical veracity of the epic poem Parzifal, adapted by Richard Wagner, the favorite composer of the Nazi leaders. In 1934 he published a work entitled "Kreuzzug gegen den Gral" (Crusade Against the Grail). Otto Rahn was convinced that Montsalvat was actually Montségur. Heinrich Himmler organized expeditions on three occasions to find the legendary Grail, which the author of the book always located at the Château de Montségur, moving himself with an elite SS guard in 1940. After their failure to find the Grail in France, the Nazis instead turned their attention to the magical ritual known as the "Grail War" to try to create ÜberSoldaten, super soldiers.

### Renaissance of the order

To be discovered! The modern confederated Templar cells are the following:

* The French ultranationalists
* The English monster hunters
* The Spanish zealots
* The Swiss scholars
* Nova Security, the military wing

## Technology

Nova security detail at the CERN.Officer of the 1st Parapsychic Corps.A CRUSADER exo-skeleton with anti-Servant armaments.A Nova Security armored personnel carrier.
## References

* https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharisme
* https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Si%C3%A8ge\_de\_B%C3%A9ziers
* https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisition\_m%C3%A9di%C3%A9vale#La\_fin\_du\_catharisme
* https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisition\_m%C3%A9di%C3%A9vale#L'Inquisition\_et\_les\_Templiers
* https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Si%C3%A8ge\_de\_Monts%C3%A9gur
* https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%A2teau\_de\_Monts%C3%A9gur
* https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tr%C3%A9sor\_des\_cathares
* https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croisade\_des\_albigeois
* https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilhem\_B%C3%A9libaste
* https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faydit\_(croisade)
* https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-Roger\_de\_Mirepoix
* https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%A2teaux\_du\_Pays\_cathare
* https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pays\_cathare
* https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronologie\_de\_la\_croisade\_des\_albigeois
* https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9gendes\_au\_sujet\_des\_Templiers
* https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordre\_du\_Temple
* https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques\_de\_Molay
* https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proc%C3%A8s\_de\_l%27ordre\_du\_Temple
* https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flotte\_de\_l%27ordre\_du\_Temple
* http://dossiers.secrets.free.fr/enquetes/templiers.cathares.htm
* https://www.lexpress.fr/informations/quand-les-nazis-cherchaient-le-graal\_681369.html
* https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceval\_ou\_le\_Conte\_du\_Graal
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parzival
* https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceval