They received other gifts in the Low Countries, in Spain, and in Portugal.  After a voyage to the West, Hugh des Payens, the chief of the nine Templars, returned to the East with three hundred knights enlisted in his order; and a hundred and fifty years after its foundation the order of the Temple, divided into fourteen or fifteen provinces,—­four in the East and ten or eleven in the West,—­numbered, it is said, eighteen or twenty thousand knights, mostly French, and nine thousand commanderies or territorial benefices, the revenue of which is calculated at fifty-four millions of francs (about ten and a half million dollars).  It was an army of monks, once poor men and hard-working soldiers, but now rich and idle, and abandoned to all the temptations of riches and idleness.  There was still some fine talk about Jerusalem, pilgrims, and crusades.  The popes still kept these words prominent, either to distract the Western Christians from intestine quarrels, or to really promote some new Christian effort in the East.  The Isle of Cyprus was still a small Christian kingdom, and the warrior-monks, who were vowed to the defence of Christendom in the East, the Templars and the Hospitallers, had still in Palestine, Syria, Armenia, and the adjacent lands, certain battles to fight and certain services to render to the Christian cause.  But these were events too petty and too transitory to give serious employment to the two great religious and military orders, whose riches and fame were far beyond the proportions of their public usefulness and their real strength; a position fraught with perils for them, for it inspired the sovereign powers of the state with the spirit rather of jealousy than fear of them.

In 1303 the king and the pope simultaneously summoned from Cyprus to France the Grand Master of the Templars, James do Molay, a Burgundian nobleman, who had entered the order when he was almost a child, had valiantly fought the infidels in the East, and fourteen years ago had been unanimously elected Grand Master.  For several months he was well treated, to all appearance, by the two monarchs.  Philip said he wished to discuss with him a new plan of crusade, and asked him to stand godfather to one of his children; and Molay was pall-bearer at the burial of the king’s sister-in-law.  Meanwhile the most sinister reports, the gravest imputations, were bruited abroad against the Templars; they were accused “of things distasteful, deplorable, horrible to think on, horrible to hear, of betraying Christendom for the profit of the infidels, of secretly denying the faith, of spitting upon the cross, of abandoning themselves to idolatrous practices and the most licentious lives.”  In 1307, in the month of October, Philip the Handsome and Clement V. had met at Poitiers; and the king asked the pope to authorize an inquiry touching the Templars and the accusations made against them.  James de Molay was forthwith arrested at Paris with a hundred and