Danger Flags #7: Structural Problems

RELAPSED HERETICS

“Jacques de Molay and three other senior Templars remained in prison, awaiting the Pope’s decision. In late December 1313, [Pope] Clement finally set up a council to determine the fate of the four men. […] All were old men: de Molay was at least 70 […] They were led out to a platform in front of Notre-Dame, where the sentences were read out. As all four men stood guilty of heresy, they were condemned to ‘harsh and perpetual imprisonment’. [Two senior Templars] accepted the sentence, and were led away to die miserably in jail.
 
“At this moment, perhaps dreading the thought of being reimprisoned (he had spent the last four years in solitary confinement), Jacques de Molay began shouting that he and his Order were innocent of all crimes, and he publicly retracted his confession. This astounded the cardinals and doctors, and they suddenly did not know what to do. After seven years of captivity, during which time he had consistently failed to defend his Order, Jacques de Molay’s finest hour was suddenly at hand. He adamantly refused to confess his guilt. Geoffroi de Charney rallied to his Master, and likewise insisted on the Order’s innocence. The two men were taken back to their cells while news of the unexpected turn of events were rushed to [King of France] Philip. The King now had a legal and ecclesiastical emergency on his hands. He summoned the lay members of his council and the matter was resolved. As the two Templars were insisting upon their innocence, they were guilty of being relapsed heretics, and there was only one punishment for that – death by fire.”
 
-- Sean Martin, “ The Knights Templar: The History and Myths of the Legendary Military Order ”
 
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FEROCIOUS DISCIPLINE AND CHARISMA
 
The Knights Templar remain one of the strangest and most interesting organizations across all of history.
 
From 1095 to 1099, the First Crusade was called by Pope Urban II to reconquer Jerusalem and the region of “Outremer” – roughly, the western coast of the Middle East – from the Muslims who had driven back and conquered the region from previous Christian inhabitants some 400 years before.
 
Europe was widely fractured at this point, but was almost completely Christianized. The Northern Europeans, Germans, and Balkans had almost entirely gone over to Christianity with just a few holdouts, and Christian forces had finally started to have some successes in the Reconquista  against the Muslims in modern Spain and Portugal.
 
Lacking pagans to fight, the newly-Christian Kings and Lords kept fighting amongst themselves, until Urban II called for the Crusade, perhaps primarily as a way to unify the infighting Christians against a common enemy.
 
It was something of a surprise to all parties when the First Crusade actually succeeded – it was a ragtag mess, barely an army, but then, Islam was at a relatively low period in its military history, with a number of its caliphates and kingdoms breaking apart under their own weight. These things tend to oscillate across history.
 
The Knights Templar were formed as “The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon,” one of many Christian knightly orders formed in the aftermath of the First Crusade with a particularly rare mix of fierce discipline, austerity, and charismatic leadership.
 
The initial knights were indeed “Poor Fellow-Soldiers,” only a little more than a dozen knights formed the order to police the roads and guard pilgrims traveling to the Christian holy sites in Outremer.
 
Around 1119, the Frenchman Hugues de Payens became Magister Militum Templi  – Grandmaster of the Knights Templar. De Payens was incredibly charismatic, and from 1120 to 1136, he took trips across all of Western Europe, telling the stories of pilgrims to the Holy Land and the perils they faced from raiders and bandits, and how the Knights Templar lived in complete austerity while devoting themselves to fighting for Christendom.
 
Rarely do leaders mix austerity, piety, discipline, and charisma – but this is what Hugues de Payens evidently did; he and the Knights Templar became wildly popular in Western Europe, and the ranks of the Templars swelled into the thousands, and they were granted revenues, churches, and lands from many monarchs across Western Europe.
 
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CODES OF AUSTERITY
 
The Templars adopted a “ Latin Rule ” of 72 points that all members of the order were required to follow. The people that framed this “constitution” drew from a mix of monastic orders, humanistic past Church leaders like Augustine, and – at least on this amateur historian’s reading of it – seem to have drawn a lot of inspiration from the contemplative and martial practices of Islam.
 
The rules are rather remarkable to read in modern context, especially if you also have some background in the precepts and codes of modern military special forces – many of them are remarkably similar.

Take, for instance, the rules on dress –
 
“17. We command that all the brothers' habits should always be of one colour, that is white or black or brown. And we grant to all knight brothers in winter and in summer if possible, white cloaks; and no-one who does not belong to the aforementioned Knights of Christ is allowed to have a white cloak, so that those who have abandoned the life of darkness will recognise each other as being reconciled to their creator by the sign of the white habits: which signifies purity and complete chastity. Chastity is certitude of heart and healthiness of body. For if any brother does not take the vow of chastity he cannot come to eternal rest nor see God, by the promise of the apostle who said: Pacem sectamini cum omnibus et castimoniam sine qua nemo Deum videbit. That is to say: 'Strive to bring peace to all, keep chaste, without which no-one can see God.
 
“18. But these robes should be without any finery and without any show of pride. And so we ordain that no brother will have a piece of fur on his clothes, nor anything else which belongs to the usages of the body, not even a blanket unless it is of lamb's wool or sheep's wool. We command all to have the same, so that each can dress and undress, and put on and take off his boots easily. And the Draper or the one who is in his place should studiously reflect and take care to have the reward of God in all the above-mentioned things, so that the eyes of the envious and evil-tongued cannot observe that the robes are too long or too short; but he should distribute them so that they fit those who must wear them, according to the size of each one.”
 
You can see how the Knights Templar would become so successful, then – their rules mandated highly functional and not-adorned clothing, the type that would very much turn off “show horses” and really only appeal to “work horse” type people; flashier nobles and lords would have little interest in this.
 
Likewise, at least semi-intentionally, the Templars were concerned with optics  and say so right in their descriptions – “…so that the eyes of the envious and evil-tongued cannot observe…” – they were concerned with external appearances, appearing pious to all who observed them.
 
Finally, they imbued their code and principles into everything – their dress, their weapons, their usage of horses, their ranks, and so on. The colors and styles they chose represented certain spiritual and martial values, and thus, even the littlest things they would do would be constant reminders of it.
 
They banned a variety of frivolous things –
 
“22. We prohibit pointed shoes and shoe-laces and forbid any brother to wear them; nor do we permit them to those who serve the house for a fixed term; rather we forbid them to have shoes with points or laces under any circumstances. For it is manifest and well known that these abominable things belong to pagans. Nor should they wear their hair or their habits too long. For those who serve the sovereign creator must of necessity be born within and without through the promise of God himself who said: Estote mundi quia ego mundus sum. That is to say: 'Be born as I am born.”
 
They ate in complete silence –
 
“23. In the palace, or what should rather be called the refectory, they should eat together. But if you are in need of anything because you are not accustomed to the signs used by other men of religion, quietly and privately you should ask for what you need at table, with all humility and submission. For the apostle said: Manduca panem tuum cum silentio. That is to say: 'Eat your bread in silence.' And the psalmist: Posui ori meo custodiam. That is to say: 'I held my tongue.' That is, 'I thought my tongue would fail me.' That is, 'I held my tongue so that I should speak no ill.”
 
They prayed multiple times per day, and after the end-of-day’s prayers, no talking was permitted –
 
“31. When the brothers come out of compline they have no permission to speak openly except in an emergency. But let each go to his bed quietly and in silence, and if he needs to speak to his squire, he should say what he has to say softly and quietly. But if by chance, as they come out of compline, the knighthood or the house has a serious problem which must be solved before morning, we intend that the Master or a party of elder brothers who govern the Order under the Master, may speak appropriately. And for this reason we command that it should be done in such a manner.”
 
Showing a keen sense of optics and appearances, the rules were to be held as closely as possible when doing fundraising and civil missions back in Europe –
 
“37. Brothers who are sent throughout divers countries of the world should endeavour to keep the commandments of the Rule according to their ability and live without reproach with regard to meat and wine, etc. so that they may receive a good report from outsiders and not sully by deed or word the precepts of the Order, and so that they may set an example of good works and wisdom; above all so that those with whom they associate and those in whose inns they lodge may be bestowed with honour. And if possible, the house where they sleep and take lodging should not be without light at night, so that shadowy enemies may not lead them to wickedness, which God forbids them.”
 
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THE FIRST BANK OF CHRISTENDOM
 
Wikipedia: Knights Templar: Rise  –
 
“Although the primary mission of the order was military, relatively few members were combatants. The others acted in support positions to assist the knights and to manage the financial infrastructure. The Templar Order, though its members were sworn to individual poverty, was given control of wealth beyond direct donations. A nobleman who was interested in participating in the Crusades might place all his assets under Templar management while he was away. Accumulating wealth in this manner throughout Christendom and the Outremer, the order in 1150 began generating letters of credit for pilgrims journeying to the Holy Land: pilgrims deposited their valuables with a local Templar preceptory before embarking, received a document indicating the value of their deposit, then used that document upon arrival in the Holy Land to retrieve their funds in an amount of treasure of equal value. This innovative arrangement was an early form of banking and may have been the first formal system to support the use of cheques; it improved the safety of pilgrims by making them less attractive targets for thieves, and also contributed to the Templar coffers.
 
“Based on this mix of donations and business dealing, the Templars established financial networks across the whole of Christendom. They acquired large tracts of land, both in Europe and the Middle East; they bought and managed farms and vineyards; they built massive stone cathedrals and castles; they were involved in manufacturing, import and export; they had their own fleet of ships; and at one point they even owned the entire island of Cyprus. The Order of the Knights Templar arguably qualifies as the world's first multinational corporation.”
 
Nothing succeeds like success, eh?
 
You can see similarities in the martial and spiritual codes of the Templars to modern elite military units like U.S. Navy SEAL Teams and U.S. Army’s Delta Force. Life was strenuous, hard, and unadorned.
 
As such, their reputation grew for discipline and ferocity.
 
That, combined with charismatic leadership, led the Templars to grow in prominence and renown rapidly throughout Europe.
 
The first Grand Master of the Knights Templar, Hugues de Payans, died in 1136 in Jerusalem. Three years later, Pope Innocent II made a Papal Bull – something similar to a modern executive order – giving the Knights Templar formal extraordinary rights and privileges.
 
This Bull, “ Omne Datum Optimum ,” made the Knights Templar exempt from all taxes and tithes across Europe and Outremer.
 
Within 10 years, two more Bulls followed – Milites Templi and Militia Dei – granting an extraordinary range of privileges to the Templars. Most importantly, they were given free passage through all of Christendom without needing permission from local kings or magistrates, and they were allowed to collect their own taxes and offerings through Christendom.
 
This laid the groundwork for them becoming “arguably the world's first multinational corporation” – given that they were exempted from import and export taxes, and their members could move freely without permission throughout Europe, they were thus able to set up fortresses and churches that did banking-type operations across Europe and Outremer.
 
Pairing with these large privileges were the strict codes of discipline and the heavily armed nature of the order: in a time of raiding and banditry, transiting gold and money was a dangerous things. The Templars eventually came to own ports and fleets, and many heavily guarded fortresses. Eventually, nobles could deposit their money with one branch of the Knights Templar, and receive a letter of credit to withdraw it at another Templar branch.
 
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DANGER FLAGS #7: STRUCTURAL PROBLEMS
 
In under 50 years, the Knights Templar went from being formed with a dozen poor knights, to being one of the most powerful organizations in the world. They held with position for another 150 years, and then – seemingly very abruptly – they were thrashed apart, their leaders burned at the stake in France, and the Order was dissolved.
 
This is the second-to-last chapter of Danger Flags, and differs slightly from the first six.
 
Our premise, again: before a person does something bad, there’s often predictable signs that they were going to do it.
 
The rest of the series on Danger Flags has looked at a mix of character and attributes that tend to predict bad future behavior. This chapter, we’ll look at that too, but additionally at structural problems  that can predict vulnerability to such a cataclysmic downfall.
 
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STRUCTURAL PROBLEM #1: IF YOU OWE THE BANK…
 
There’s a famous American quote: “If you owe the bank $100 dollars, that's your problem; if you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.”
 
It’s disputed who said it, but it’s worth carefully thinking through.
 
Over their first 200 years, the Templars had became closely intertwined with the King of France’s finance – eventually, a number of the key treasury posts in France came to be staffed by Templars, and they had a close working relationship.
 
Over time, the French Crown’s debt to the Templars grew and kept growing. The Middle Eastern Crusades, in particular, always cost far more in gold and supplies than they reclaimed in resources and tax revenues. Reconquering and garrisoning cities like Jerusalem and Tiberias would often cost in the neighborhood of 10x more than the annual tax yields and resources from those cities; every Crusade, thus, brought European monarchs deeper into debt.
 
During the Seventh Crusade in 1249, King Louis IX of France was captured in the field by the Mamluk Sultan Qutuz.  Louis was ransomed for 400,000 livres – whereas the annual Crown revenues in France were only 1,250,000 livres.

Reflect on that for a moment: one-third of France's annual revenues went to paying a single ransom . You can see how the Crusades would rapidly lead to heavy expenses.
 
The French Crown kept adding debts to the Knights Templar; it was only two generations later that the French King Philip IV had them arrested and destroyed – historians frequently note the debts as one of the key reasons motivating the action.
 
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STRUCTURAL PROBLEM #2: ROLLBACK FROM THE MISSION
 
The Knights Templar had been granted immense authority in large part because no monarch or emperor was strong enough to coordinate the fight in Outremer alone; the Templars, as a multinational organization exempt from local rules, could much better coordinate weapons, supplies, and money across the Crusades from the many disparate kingdoms and principalities of Europe.
 
They both lost prestige and lost their core mission when Islamic forces began rolling back the Crusades in the late 1100’s under Saladin. The Egyptian Mamluks and Khwarezmi Turks were also both formidable, and by 1244, Jerusalem was captured by the Turks. By 1303, the Mamluks conquered the last Templar base in the Middle East.
 
There were calls for a new Crusade at this time, but the raison d’etre  of the Knights Templar had faded greatly. They were no longer successfully operating the fortresses and forward operating bases of Christendom, leaving them with their wealthy possessions and banking operations in Europe, but without the overseas bases and infrastructure that had led to them being granted immense privileges and rights in the first place.
 
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STRUCTURAL PROBLEM #3: TRADITION AND SINGLE POINTS OF FAILURE
 
The Papal Bulls under Innocent II had made the Templars answerable only the Pope himself: this broadly meant immunity from taxes, tithes, regulations, and accountability to local kings and princes.
 
When the Crusades were on the ascent and things seemed going well, this might have slightly chafed some lords, but the Templars were extremely popular.
 
By the first decade of the 1300’s, this popularity – and the general feelings towards Crusading and Outremer in general – had faded immensely, and hostility towards the Templars rose in the process.
 
At this time, the Templars were clearly in their weakest position since their founding – but since so long had elapsed since then, the leaders seemed to have taken for granted their status. They looked backwards at tradition and did not see how vulnerable they were.
 
The Knights Templar were still, on paper, only accountable to the Pope – but Pope Clement V was a native Frenchman and cousins with King Philip IV. When Philip IV decided to act against the Templars, he did so with a Pope who was largely favorable to his cause.
 
The Templar leadership perhaps could have been aware of this dynamic, but having held their positions for so long in living memory, they seemed to be largely unaware and surprised when the danger rose against them.
 
***
 
THE END OF THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR
 
Wikipedia: Knights Templar: Arrests, Charges, and Dissolution  –
 
“At dawn on Friday, 13 October 1307 (a date sometimes linked with the origin of the Friday the 13th superstition) King Philip IV ordered de Molay and scores of other French Templars to be simultaneously arrested. The arrest warrant started with the phrase: "Dieu n'est pas content, nous avons des ennemis de la foi dans le Royaume" ["God is not pleased. We have enemies of the faith in the kingdom"]. ”
 
The Templars did not defend themselves well – from this amateur historian’s point of view, they seemed confused  by what happened.
 
Torture was very much legal in France, and Templars were tortured to produce all manner of confessions. The Templar Treasurer, when recanting his confession later, said: “Under such torture, I would have confessed to killing God.”
 
Nevertheless, Philip IV moved decisively – Templars who recanted their confessions were burned alive shortly afterwards, eventually culminating in the execution of the Order’s final leaders via burning by fire, and their possessions were divided between other knightly orders and various monarchs of the countries that had Templar bases.
 
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DANGER FLAG REGARDING MONEY USAGE
 
Following the normal format of Danger Flags, we must flag bad usage of money  as a danger flag – people who “never had enough money” are prone to bribery, corruption, and crime.
 
You should be exceedingly careful around anyone who has a pattern of bad usage of money, who is in constant debt, and so on. Throughout history, this predicts a wide range of bad behavior.
 
For your part, if you have money problems, it can be worth spending a few years – and it might take years – to reduce your expenses to less than your incomes and clear your debt. Debt can lead to a lot of awful situations.
 
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GUIDANCE REGARDING STRUCTURAL PROBLEMS
 
But that’s nothing new – it’s been known across the ages that people who handle money poorly are prone to do bad things.
 
More interestingly and importantly, you should be aware of structural problems  that presage potential problems.
 
The Knights Templar had a few:

*Many powerful people were indebted to them, and thus had a reason to benefit from their persecution.

*Their raison d’etre  of being the forward-operating base and elite troops during the Crusades had faded when Outremer was conquered by the Kurds, Mamluks, and Turks.

*They had a single point of failure  that they had became blind to  as a result of tradition – they didn’t consider that such a thing could happen.
 
In any of these instances – when a powerful person would benefit from the downfall of an individual or organization, when an organization’s mission becomes obsolete or greatly lessens in importance, and when there’s a single point of failure that hasn’t been adequately noticed and prepared – all of these lead towards being more fragile and in a riskier position.
 
You can see these patterns repeat throughout history – Philip IV also persecuted and expelled the Jews from France for similar reasons he liquidated the Knights Templar. In modern times, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait largely to cancel the debts he’d made to the Kuwaitis while fighting the Iran/Iraq War.
 
There are similar structural problems beyond the scope of this piece regarding envy and authority – you can look backwards at assassinations within royal and imperial families, even Augustus Caesar’s own children, for example. In modern times, when two cofounders of a company both believe they should be CEO, that’s a similar structural problem  that presages problems if things start going poorly.
 
In all these instances, just becoming aware of the problems goes a long ways – Sergey Brin and Larry Page were probably very wise to hire Eric Schmidt to be the CEO of Google, and to the best of my knowledge, there was no breach between them and no falling-out as is so common among very talented founders of fast-growing companies.
 
Structural problems can be mitigated over time, but first and foremost comes awareness of them.
 
The biggest danger is in blindness to them – people often fail to realize the sources of their authority and power when they’ve traditionally held those roles for long periods of time; thus, they can become blind to rising risks and potential downsides.
 
So yes, do danger flag people with poor money usage – but also become aware of structural problems and structural risks that might make an adversary act against yourself or your organization.