Years ago, when investigating the area from Monaco to nearby Eze, I saw a sign for a long-destroyed Templar fort on a steep hill some 2,000 feet above the port of Monaco cuddled in the French Riviera. The fort could protect the harbor from pirates by using rocks in well-aimed catapults. I wondered how Monaco could have avoided major destruction or annexation by the surrounding country of France or other European powers and what the relation to the Templars was. After many years, I discovered that solving this mystery required expanding the investigation to how microstates like Monaco could have survived.
This book focuses on what happened to the Templar's huge wealth after the massive coordinated raids ordered by the king of France and the Pope. The Templars clearly had learned that raids were coming and had moved much, but not all, of their transportable wealth. As an example, the main Templar office and repository in Paris, known as the Paris fortress, was found to be empty when it was raided by the king's soldiers.
We use techniques of money tracing, modern communications systems, geopolitical analysis, interactive maps, and techniques of "big history" to discover connections to many hitherto unsuspected places where some of that missing wealth had been taken. Underlying themes include the difficulties that small countries have when surrounded by powerful enemies, and the tendency of conquerors to remove all signs, especially religious ones, of the countries they conquered. Unlike many books and articles about the Templars, we show the details of the methods and analyses used to support our conclusions, so that the careful reader can verify them.
What did all the existing microstates have in common? Powerful neighbors, proximity to large Templar installations, and hereditary rulers who had huge amounts of hidden wealth that seemed to have been obtained sometime after the coordinated raids on Templar property. Their rulers are among the richest men in the world. They found hidden Templar wealth!
