IV

Preliminary Report

...occupied with [the accusations] made against this Order, and the result of their efforts is in everyone's hands.

Despite this, there has been a lack of a complete history of the Order of the Temple Order of the Temple: The Knights Templar, a powerful Catholic military order founded in 1119 to protect pilgrims in the Holy Land and dissolved in 1312 until now, as most writers restricted themselves merely to its dissolution and the investigation of the accusations made against it, only briefly touching upon the history of its origin, progress, greatness, and fall.

The same cause that moved some scholars in Germany to devote some attention to the history of this ancient knighthood perhaps contributed much to the emergence of a scholar in France who—provided with sufficient knowledge and the necessary resources the original German "Hülfsmitteln" refers to the primary documents, archives, and scholarly tools available to the author—undertook to present this Order, which was exterminated five hundred years ago, as less guilty than most of his predecessors have done. To what extent he has succeeded in this is rightly left to the judgment of the historical researcher; yet it is clear from a brief overview of the present work that, as much as the author seeks to defend the Order as a whole, he never the errors and injustices of individual members con-