250 POLITICAL HERESY. — THE STATE. rich and powerful that they could scarce have been suppressed but for the secret and sudden movement of Philippe le Bel. Villani, who was also a contemporary, says that their power and wealth were well-nigh incomputable. As time went on conceptions be- came magnified by distance. Trithemius assures us that it was the richest of all the monastic Orders, not only in gold and silver, but in its vast dominions, towns and castles in all the lands of Europe. Modern writers have even exceeded this in their efforts to present definite figures. Maillard de Chambure assumes that at the time of its downfall it numbered thirtv thousand knights with a revenue of eight million livres Tournois. AYilcke estimates its income at twenty million thalers of modern money, and asserts that in France alone it could keep in the field an army of fifteen thousand cavaliers. Zockler calculates its income at fifty-four millions of francs, and that it numbered twenty thousand knights. Even the cautious Havemann echoes the extravagant statement that in wealth and power it could rival all the princes of Christendom, while Schott- miiller assumes that in France alone there were fifteen thousand brethren, and over twenty thousand in the whole Order.* The peculiar secrecy in which all the affairs of the Order were shrouded renders such estimates purely conjectural. As to num- bers, it has been overlooked that the great body of members were serving brethren, not fighting-men — herdsmen, husbandmen, and menials employed on the lands and in the houses of the knights, and adding little to their effective force. When they considered it a legitimate boast that in the one hundred and eighty years of their active existence twenty thousand of the brethren had per- ished in Palestine, we can see that at no time could the roll of knights have exceeded a few thousand at most. At the Council of Yienne the dissolution of the Order was urged on the ground that more than two thousand depositions of witnesses had been taken, and as these depositions covered virtually all the prisoners
- Wilcke, Geschichte des Ordens der Tempelherren, II. Ausgabe, 1860, n. 51,
103-4, 183.— Chron. Anonyme (Bouquet, XXI. 149).— Villani Cron. vin. 92.— Mag. Chron. Belgic. (Pistor. III. 155).— Trithem. Chron. Hirsaug. ann. 1307. — Regie et Statuts secrets, p. 64. — Real-Encyklop. XV. 305. — Havemann, Geschichte des Ausgangs des Tempelherrenordens, Stuttgart, 1846, p. 165. — Schottin tiller, op. cit. I. 236, 695.
