The First Black Friday
How the Secret History of Banking Shaped the Modern World
Overview
With this essay, we continue the conclusion of Volume II of the System Failure constellation of ideas. Follow our progress on the Idea Map. Last week’s essay asserted that while economic conditions have gradually improved over the course of human history, this improvement is usually opposed by the ruling classes in each epoch.
In today’s essay, that dynamic comes into sharp focus as we zoom in on the transition from the Medieval period to the Modern Era, and the role of secret societies in the rise of bankers to prominence in international politics.
For the purposes of this essay, we’re going to accept that after being driven underground by political persecution in the early 14th century, the Knights Templar re-emerged as Freemasons after the Church lost much of its political power. This is admittedly a subject of debate among historians. To support this contention, the essay below contains quotes from historians Barbara Tuchman and Winston Churchill suggesting that a secret society was indeed behind the massive Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.
I’ve also included, in the Further Materials section at the bottom, the entire introduction to John J. Robinson’s book Born in Blood: The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry. It’s fairly lengthy. But for those who are interested, Robinson details the evidence that led him to begrudgingly accept a historical relationship between the Knights Templar and the Freemasons.
Introduction
In the aftermath of the Crusades, a proto-banking organization called the Knights Templar rose to power and wealth. Their rise threatened secular and ecclesiastical authorities, who stamped them out and seized their wealth. The Knights of continental Europe were destroyed completely, but their brethren on the British Isles were driven underground. There, they drove the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and eventually reemerged as the Freemasons. This made London the site of the world’s first central bank and the hub of a global financial empire that arose during the Industrial Revolution.
The Knights Templar
On the morning of Friday, October 13th, 1307 officials across France simultaneously unsealed secret orders from their king, Philip IV. They were ordered to arrest the Knights Templar, a powerful order of warrior monks. Thousands of Knights were rounded up and thrown in prison, including the Grand Master of the secretive organization, Jacques de Molay. These events are why Friday the 13th is still considered unlucky to this day.
The Knights Templar had arisen during the Crusades, and pioneered a system of transnational payments that made them the world’s first international bankers. A pilgrim on the road to Jerusalem could visit any Temple Church (like the one that still stands today on Fleet Street in London) and exchange coinage for a letter of credit. These letters of credit worked like Travelers Cheques; they could be redeemed elsewhere in Christendom for coins again. This prevented pilgrims from having to carry large sums of money on the dangerous road to the Holy Land, which was rife with bandits.
Through these banking activities, the Templars amassed staggering wealth. Philip IV fell hopelessly into debt to them; the events of the very first Black Friday were Philip's solution to his financial woes. He had the Templars arrested, extracted confessions of sexual perversion and devil-worship through torture, and then cleared his debts to the Templars by seizing their wealth.
The wealth and political power of the Templars also threatened the Pope. The month after the first Black Friday, in November of 1307, Pope Clement V issued a papal bull which instructed all Christian monarchs to arrest the Templars and seize their properties.
King Edward II of England balked at the Pope’s orders. He hesitated for a few crucial months before finally carrying out Clement’s commands. While the Templars of France were stamped out, the Templars in England—and particularly in Scotland where the Pope had little influence—went underground.
The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381
The transition from the feudal economy of the Middle Ages—with its peasants and lords—to the modern capitalist economy—with its employees and employers—was kicked off by the plague. Fifty years after the first Black Friday, the Black Death wiped out a third of the population of Europe. It exposed the Church as utterly powerless to stop the dying, and sowed seeds of doubt about the exclusive connection to God claimed by the Vatican.
With a third of the peasantry moldering in early graves, the survivors realized their labor was in high demand. Instead of swearing fealty to any one feudal lord, the labor shortage prompted peasants to start playing the nobility off against each other in bidding wars for their labor. A new economic paradigm was in the offing. One in which workers sold their labor to the highest bidder instead of swearing fealty to any particular lord.
But the European nobility was accustomed to giving orders, not listening to demands. They tried to preserve the dying feudal economic order by force; ruling classes across Europe passed laws capping wages. In England, society lapsed into chaos as a result of these laws. The peasantry revolted in 1381 and 100,000 peasants marched on London that summer, led by a mysterious figure named Wat Tyler.
Barbara Tuchman, in her history of the fourteenth century, A Distant Mirror, said this rebellion spread "with some evidence of planning."
Winston Churchill, in his capacity as a historian, wrote in The Birth of Britain, “Throughout the summer of 1381, there was a general ferment. Beneath it all lay organization. Agents moved round the villages of central England, in touch with a 'Great Society' which was said to meet in London...the spark of rebellion was being fanned vigorously, and finally the signal was given.”
75 years after their order was destroyed in continental Europe—and driven underground in the British Isles—the Knights Templar were striking back at the structures of ecclesiastical and secular power that had betrayed them.
The 14-year-old King Richard II of England managed to put down this massive Peasants Revolt. Wat Tyler died a painful death. But the Medieval economic order was beyond salvation. The hesitation of his great-grandfather, Edward II, to persecute the Templar bankers set in motion a chain of events that—during the Industrial Revolution—resulted in England becoming a global banking empire on which the sun never set.
Freemasonry
In 1648, the Peace of Westphalia completed the turbulent transition from the Middle Ages to modernity that began with the Black Death. That treaty severely curtailed the political power of the pope, setting the stage for a modern political order where banks—not popes—dominate international geopolitics.
In 1694, less than fifty years later, the worlds first central bank popped up: the Bank of England. It was created by a consortium of forty London and Edinburgh merchants in exactly the location where the English monarch had once hesitated to ruin the Knights Templar banking operation.
In 1717, only 20 years later, the remnants of the old Knights Templar reemerged as the Freemasons and founded their Grand Lodge in London. To this day, the Freemasons retain the trappings of secrecy that protected the Knights Templar during the centuries when they were hunted by the Church. Many of those old rituals and symbols live on in Freemasonry.
For example, Freemasonry contains a degree called "Order of Knights Templar".
The skull and crossbones is a prominent symbol in Freemasonry. According to legend, the Knights Templar buried their dead with their legs crossed, and used the skull and crossbones to mark the grave-sites of fallen Knights. Legend also has it that fleets of Templar ships evaded seizure by the authorities in 1307, and began sailing under flags bearing skulls and crossbones as a sign of their status as stateless outlaws.
Other symbols commonly attributed to both the Knights Templar and the Freemasons include the twin pillars of Solomon’s temple (named Jachin and Boaz in the Bible), The Cross and Crown, The Red Cross, The Triangle or Delta, The Double-Headed Eagle, and The Blazing Star.
Another interesting tie-in with Freemasonry is the name of the leader of the Peasants’ Revolt, Wat Tyler. Historian John J. Robinson wrote, “it seemed at first to be mere coincidence that [Tyler] bore the title of the enforcement officer of the Masonic lodge. In Freemasonry the Tyler, who must be a Master Mason, is the sentry, the sergeant‐at‐arms, and the officer who screens the credentials of visitors who seek entrance to the lodge. In remembrance of an earlier, more dangerous time, his post is just outside the door of the Lodge room, where he stands with a drawn sword in his hand.”
Finally, many of the individuals who founded the Bank of England were Freemasons or had close ties to the Masonic community. For example, one of the bank's key founders, Sir John Houblon, was not only the first Governor of the Bank of England but also a prominent Freemason.
Conclusion
Prominent historians, like Barbara Tuchman and Winston Churchill, believed that the Peasants’ Revolt which roiled English society over the summer of 1381 was organized behind-the-scenes by a secret society. The further back in history one looks, the more difficult it becomes to untangle myth from fact. And it becomes even more difficult when one is digging into the histories of secret societies that intentionally hide from public view. Nevertheless, the list of tie-ins between the Knights Templar and the Freemasons is so lengthy that it becomes impossible to write them all of as mere coincidences. The persecution of the Knights Templar, their secret operation underground, and their re-emergence seem to be a major part of the story of the transition from the Medieval politics of papal authority to the era of modern politics dominated by international bankers.
Further Materials
The following is from the introduction of the book Born in Blood: The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry by John J. Robinson, published in 1989:
The research behind this book is not originally intended to reveal anything about Freemasonry or the Knights Templar. Its objective had been to satisfy my own curiosity about certain unexplained aspects of the Peasants' Revolt in England in 1381, a savage uprising that saw upwards of a hundred thousand Englishmen march on London. They moved in uncontrolled rage, burning down manor houses, breaking open prisons, and cutting down any who stood in their way.
One unsolved mystery of that revolt was the organization behind it. For several years, a group of disgruntled priests of the lower clergy had traveled the towns, preaching against the riches and corruption of the church. During the months before the uprising, secret meetings had been held throughout central England by men weaving a network of communication. After the revolt was put down, rebel leaders confessed to being agents of a “Great Society”, said to be based in London. So very little is known of that alleged organization that several scholars have solved the mystery simply by deciding that no such secret society ever existed.
Another mystery was the concentrated and especially vicious attacks on the religious order of the Knights Hospitaller of St. John, now known as the Knights of Malta. Not only did the rebels seek out their properties for vandalism and fire, but their prior was dragged from the Tower of London to have his head struck off and placed on London Bridge, to the delight of the cheering mob.
There was no question that the ferocity that was unleashed on the crusading Hospitallers had a purpose behind it. One captured rebel leader, when asked for the reasons for the revolt, said, 'First, and above all...the destruction of the Hospitallers.' What kind of secret society could have that special hatred as one of its primary purposes?
A desire for vengeance against the Hospitallers was easy to identify in the rival crusading order of the Knights of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. The problem was that those Knights Templar have been completely suppressed almost seventy years before the Peasants' Revolt, following several years during which the Templars had been imprisoned, tortured and burned at the stake. After issuing the decree that put an end to the Templar order, Pope Clement V had directed that all of the extensive properties of the Templars should be given to the Hospitallers. Could a Templar desire for revenge actually survive underground for three generations?
There was no incontrovertible truth, yet the only evidence suggest the existence of just one secret society in fourteenth‐century England, the society that was, or would become, the order of Free and Accepted Masons. There appeared to be no connection, however, between the revolt and Freemasonry, except for the name or title of its leader. He occupied the center stage of English history for just eight days and nothing is known of him except that he was the supreme commander of the rebellion. He was called Walter the Tyler, and it seemed at first to be mere coincidence that he bore the title of the enforcement officer of the Masonic lodge. In Freemasonry the Tyler, who must be a Master Mason, is the sentry, the sergeant‐at‐arms, and the officer who screens the credentials of visitors who seek entrance to the lodge. In remembrance of an earlier, more dangerous time, his post is just outside the door of the Lodge room, where he stands with a drawn sword in his hand.
I was aware that there had been many attempts in the past to link the Freemasons with the Knights Templar, but never with success. The fragile evidence advanced by proponents of that connection had never held up, sometimes because it was based on wild speculation, and at least once because it had been based on a deliberate forgery. But despite the failures to establish that link, it just will not go away, and the time‐shrouded belief in some relationship between in two orders remains as one of the more durable legends of Freemasonry. That is entirely appropriate, because all of the various theories of the origin of Freemasonry are legendary. Not one of them is supported by any universally accepted evidence.
I was not about to travel down that time‐worn trail, and decided to concentrate my efforts on digging deeper into the history of the Knights Templar to see if there was any link between the suppressed Knights and the secret society behind the Peasants' Revolt. In doing so, I thought that I would be leaving Freemasonry far behind. I couldn't have been more mistaken.
Like anyone curious about medieval history, I had developed an interest in the Crusades, and perhaps more than just an interest. Those holy wars hold an appeal that is frequently as romantic as it is historical, and in my travels I had tried to drink in the atmosphere of the narrow defiles in the mountains of Lebanon through which Crusader armies had passed, and had sat staring into the castle ruins of Sidon and Tyre, trying to hear the clashing sounds of attack and defense. I had marveled at the walls of Constantinople and had strolled the Arsenal of Venice, where Crusader fleets were assembled. I had sat in the round church of the Knights Templar in London, trying to imagine the ceremony of its consecration by the Patriarch of Jerusalem in 1185, more than three hundred years before Columbus set sail west to the Indies.
The Templar order was founded in Jerusalem in 1118, in the aftermath of the First Crusade. Its name came from the location of its first headquarters on the site of the ancient Temple of Solomon, helping to fulfill a desperate need for a standing army in the Holy Land, the Knights of the Temple soon grew in numbers, in wealth, and in political power. They also grew in arrogance, and their Grand Master de Ridfort was a key figure in the mistakes that led to the fall of Jerusalem in 1187. The Latin Christians managed to hold on to a narrow strip of territory along the coast, where the Templars were among the largest owners of the land and the fortifications.
Finally, the enthusiasm for sending men and money to the Holy Land waned among the European kingdoms, which were preoccupied with their wars against each other. By 1296 the Egyptian sultan was able to push the resident Crusaders, along with the military orders, into the sea. The Holy Land was lost, and the defeated Knights Templar moved their base to the island of Cyprus, dreaming of yet one more Crusade to restore their past glory.
As the Templars planned to go on a new Crusade against the infidel, King Philip IV of France was planning his own private crusade against the Templars. He longed to be rid of his massive debts to the Templar order, which had used its wealth to establish a major international banking operation. Philip wanted the Templar treasure to finance his continental wars against Edward I of England.
After two decades of fighting England on one side and the Holy Roman Church on the other, two unrelated events gave Philip of France the opportunity he needed. Edward I died, and his deplorably weak son took the throne of England as Edward II. On the other front, Philip was able to get his own man on the Throne of Peter as Pope Clement V.
When word arrived on Cyprus that the new pope would mount a Crusade, the Knights Templar thought that their time of restoration to glory was at hand. Summoned to France, their aging Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, went armed with elaborate plans for the rescue of Jerusalem. In Paris, he was humored and honored until the fatal day. At dawn on Friday, the thirteenth of October, in the year 1307, every Templar in France was arrested and put in chains on Philip's orders. Their hideous tortures for confessions of heresy began immediately.
When the pope's order to arrest the Templars arrived at the English court, young Edward II had took no action at all. He protested to the pontiff that the Templars were innocent. Only after the pope issued a formal Bull was the English king forced to act. In January 1308, Edward finally issued orders for the arrest of the Knights Templar in England, but the three months of warning had been put to good use. Many of the Templars had gone underground, while some of those arrested managed to escape. Their treasure, their jeweled reliquaries, even the bulk of their records, had totally disappeared. In Scotland, the papal order was not even published. Under those conditions England, and especially Scotland, became targeted havens for fugitive Templars from continental Europe, and the efficiency of their concealment spoke to some assistance from outside, or from each other.
The English throne passed from Edward II to Edward III, who bequeathed the crown to his ten‐year‐old grandson who, as Richard II, watched from the Tower as the Peasants' Revolt exploded throughout the city of London.
Much had happened to the English people along the way. Incessant wars had drained the king's treasury and corruption had taken the rest. A third of the population had perished in the Black Death, and famine exacted further tolls. The reduced labor force of farmers and craftsmen found that they could earn more for their labor, but their increased income came at the expense of land‐owning barons and bishops, who were not prepared to tolerate such a state of affairs. Laws were passed to reduce wages, and prices to pre-plague levels. Genealogies were searched to reimpose the bondage of serfdom and villeinage on men who thought themselves free. The king's need for money to fight the French wars inspired new and ingenious taxes. The oppression was coming from all sides, and the pot of rebellion was brought to the boil.
Religion didn't help, either. The landowning church was as merciless a master as the landowning nobility. Religion would have been a source of confusion for the fugitive Templars as well. They were a religious body of warrior monks who owed allegiance to no man on earth except the Holy Father. When their pope turned on them, chained them, beat them, he broke their link with God. In fourteenth‐century Europe there was no pathway to God except through the vicar of Christ on earth. If the pope rejected the Templars and the Templars rejected the Pope, they had to find a new way to worship their God, at a time when any variation from the teachings of the established church was blasted as heresy.
That dilemma called to mind a central tenet of Freemasonry, which requires only that a man believe in a Supreme Being, with no requirements as to how he worships the deity of his choice. In Catholic Britain such a belief would have been a crime, but it would have accommodated the fugitive Templars who had been cut off from the universal church. In consideration of the extreme punishment for heresy, such an independent belief also made sense of one of the more mysterious of Freemasonry's Old Charges. The charge says that no Mason should reveal the secrets of a brother that may deprive him of his life and property. That connection caused me to take a different look at the Masonic Old Charges.
They took on new direction and meaning when viewed as a set of instructions for a secret society created to assist and protect fraternal brothers on the run and in hiding from the church. That characterization made no sense in the context of a medieval guild of stonemasons, the usual claim for the roots of Freemasonry. It did make a great deal of sense, however, for men such as the fugitive Templars, whose very lives depended upon their concealment. Nor would there have been any problem finding new recruits over the years ahead: there were to be plenty of protesters and dissidents against the church among future generations. The rebels of the Peasants' Revolt proved that when they attacked abbeys and monasteries, and when they cut off the head off of Archbishop of Canterbury, the leading Catholic prelate in England.
The fugitive Templars would have needed a code such as the Old Charges of Masonry, but the working stonemasons clearly did not. It had become obvious that I needed to know about the Ancient Order of Free and Accepted Masons. The extent of the Masonic material available at large in public libraries surprised me, as did the fact that it was housed in the department of education and religion. Not content with just what was readily available to the public, I asked to use the library in the Masonic Temple in Cincinnati, Ohio.
I told the gentlemen there that I was not a Freemason, but wanted to use the library as part of my research for a book that would probably include a new examination of the Masonic order. His only question to me was, 'Will it be fair?' I assured him that I had no desire or intention to be anything other than fair, to which he replied, “Good enough.” I was left alone with the catalog and the hundreds of Masonic books that lined the walls. I also took advantage of the publications of the Masonic Service Association in Silver Springs, Maryland.
Later, as my growing knowledge of Masonry enabled me to sustain a conversation on the subject, I began to talk to Freemasons. At first, I wondered how I would go about meeting fifteen or twenty Masons and, if I could meet them, would they be willing to talk with me?
The first problem was solved as soon as I started asking friends and associates if they were Masons. There were four in one group I had known for about five years, and many more among men I had known for twenty years and more, without ever having realized that they had any connection with Freemasonry. As for the second part of my concern, I found them quite willing to talk, not about the secret passwords and hand grips (by then, I had already knew them), but about what they have been taught concerning the origins of Freemasonry and its ancient Old Charges.
They were as intrigued as I about the possibilities of discovering the lost meanings of words, symbols, and ritual for which no logical explanation was available, such as why a Master Mason is told in his initiation rights that “this degree will make you a brother to pirates and corsairs.”
We agreed that unlocking the secrets of those Masonic mysteries would contribute most to unearthing the past, because the loss of their true meanings had caused the ancient terms and symbols to be preserved intact, lest subject to change over the centuries, or by adaptations to new conditions.
Among those lost secrets were the meanings of words used in the Masonic rituals, words like tyler, cowan, due‐guard, and Juwes. Masonic writers have struggled for centuries, without success, to make those words fit with their preconceived convictions that Masonry was born in the English‐speaking guilds of medieval stonemasons.
Now I would test the possibility that there was indeed a connection between Freemasonry and the French‐speaking Templar order. By looking for the lost meanings of those terms, not in English, but in medieval French. The answers began to flow, and soon a sensible meaning for every one of the mysterious Masonic terms was established in the French language. It even provided the first credible meaning for the name of Hiram Abiff, the murdered architect of the Temple of Solomon, who is the central figure of Masonic ritual. The examination established something else as well. It is well known that in 1362 the English courts officially changed the language used for court proceedings from French to English. So the French roots of all of the mysterious terms of Freemasonry confirmed the existence of that secret society in the fourteenth century, the century of the Templar suppression and the Peasants' Revolt.
With that encouragement I addressed other lost secrets of Masonry: the circle and mosaic pavement on the lodge room floor, gloves and lambskin aprons, the symbol of the compass and the square, even the mysterious legend of the murder of Hiram Abiff. The Rule, customs and traditions of the Templars provided answers to all of those mysteries. Next, came a deeper analysis of the Old Charges of ancient Masonry that define a secret society of mutual protection. What the “lodge” was doing was assisting brothers in hiding from the wrath of church and state, providing them with money, vouching for them with the authorities, even providing the “lodging” that gave Freemasonry the unique term for its chapters and its meeting rooms. There remained no reasonable doubt in my mind that the original concept of the secret society that came to call itself Freemasonry had been born as a society of mutual protection among fugitive Templars and their associates in Britain, men who had gone underground to escape the imprisonment and torture that had been ordered for them by Pope Clement V. Their antagonism toward the Church was rendered more powerful by its total secrecy. The suppression of the Templar order appeared to be one of the biggest mistakes the Holy See has ever made.
In return, Freemasonry has been the target of more angry papal bulls and encyclicals than any other secular organization in Christian history. Those condemnations began just a few years after Masonry revealed itself in 1717 and grew in intensity, culminating in the bull Humanum Genus, promulgated by Pope Leo XIII in 1884. In it, the Masons are accused of espousing religious freedom, the separation of church and state, the education of children by laymen, and the extraordinary crime of believing that people have the right to make their own laws and to elect their own government, “according to the new principles of liberty.”
Such concepts are identified, along with the Masons, as part of the kingdom of Satan. The document not only defines the concerns of the Catholic Church about Freemasonry at that time, but, in the negative, so clearly defines what Freemasons believe that I have included the complete text of that papal bull as an appendix to this book.
Finally, it should be added that the events described here were part of a great watershed of Western history. The feudal age was coming to a close. Land, and the peasant labor on it, had lost its role as the sole source of wealth. Merchant families banded into guilds, and took over whole towns with charters as municipal corporations. Commerce led to banking and investment, and towns became power centers to rival the nobility in wealth and influence.
The universal church, which had fought for a position of supremacy in a feudal context, was slow to accept changes that might affect that supremacy. Any material disagreement with the church was called heresy, the most heinous crime under heaven. The heretic not only deserved death, but the most painful death imaginable.
Some dissidents run for the woods and hide, while others organize. In the case of the fugitive Knights Templar, the organization already existed. They possessed a rich tradition of secret operations that had been raised to the highest level through their association with the intricacies of Byzantine politics, the secret ritual of the Assassins, and the intrigues of the Moslem courts which they met alternately on the battlefield or at the conference table. The church, in its bloody rejection of protest and change, provided them with a river of recruits that flowed for centuries.
More than six hundred years have passed since the suppression of the Knights Templar, but their heritage lives on in the largest fraternal organization ever known. And so the story of those tortured crusading knights, of the savagery of the Peasants' Revolt, and of the lost secrets of Freemasonry becomes the story of the most successful secret society in the history of the world.