Templars in Portugal
Templars in Portugal, the Military Order of the Temple was founded in France, more precisely in the Champagne region, in 1120 at the Council of Nablus, one of the most well-known military orders in Europe. Medieval Christian created mainly to protect pilgrims to the Holy Places of Christianity in the Middle East Under increasing ascendancy of Islam.
The Templars were first born in dependence on the Canons of the Holy Sepulcher, quickly becoming autonomous with the leadership of their first Grand Master, Huges de Payns.
The Templars, Freires of Christ or Freires of the Temple of Solomon were also known, who were associated with their religious consecration by the profession of the evangelical counsels of Poverty, Chastity and Obedience, the commitment to surrender their lives in favor of the protection of the pilgrims and Of Christianity’s defense against the threat of Islamic power facing Christians.
The Order of the Temple, as well as other military orders such as that of Santiago, Calatrava, Hospital and Avis, helped the armies of Christian kings and lords in the crusades against the so-called “Infidel” both in the Middle East and in Iberian Peninsula, seeking to reconquer the territories of old Christian dominion, however conquered by the Muslims with the due compensation of course.
Due to factors that have not yet been fully clarified, the Order of the Temple was, almost seven hundred years ago, after almost two hundred years of existence, undergoing a tragic process that led to its extinction, this “antitemperary” process led by the King of France, Philip IV. Belo, who together with Pope Clement V, considered the Order of the Temple guilty of grave deviations and faults accusing her of heresy.
Templars in Portugal
In such a way that the French monarch, although today without knowing with certainty if with fair proofs, obtain from the Pope until the extinction of the Order itself and even the condemnation of its most important leaders, culminating in the death at the stake of his last Grand Master , Jacques de Molay, in 1314.
This process had still begun in 1308 with a papal bull sent to the Christian princes to clarify the situation of the Templars and to declare the necessity of its extinction. Nevertheless, the king of Portugal D. Dinis, decided not to accept the papal directive that had ordered to extinguish the Order of the Temple, conscious of the very excellent service that had always provided and continued to provide in the defense and settlement of the Portuguese territory.
Through a lot of diplomacy, he managed to obtain from the Pope a solution to abide by the extinction, not actually extinguishing this elite Order, but rather changing his name, maintaining the same strengths, same goods and organizational structure, but the Order became called Order of Christ, with this diplomacy, D. Dinis saved the Templars that came to be integrated in the Order of Christ, in the background, the new name of the Order of Time or the Knights of Christ.
Our days we know how important was this decision of D. Dinis in avoiding the extinction of the Templars in Portugal, in the same order, the Order of Christ will promote and finance the sea voyages of the Portuguese discoveries, through the leadership of one of the most famous Grand Masters Of the Order of Christ, the Infante D. Henrique, Portugal was in world history as the first global empire of humanity and the pioneer of the construction of globalization.
Templars who were
The Order of Christ commanded in the fifteenth century the whole process of discovering new maritime routes and new territories and peoples officially unknown as a consequence of the extra-European expansionist policy promoted by the Avis Dynasty founded by King João I.
With the conquest of Ceuta in 1415, the first officially discovered territory on the Atlantic was the Madeira Archipelago in 1419/20, to which a series of voyages culminated in the navigation of the entire African coast, the difficult passage of the Storms, the arrival in India by sea (1498) and the official discovery of Brazil in 1500.
Travels that allowed to establish the first great modern imperial network in the new World under Portuguese rule, in direct competition with Spain, competition that was regulated under the auspices of the Holy See and enshrined in the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 with the division of the world into two parts.
In the light of the theory of the Mare Clausum, in order to reconcile the two Christian monarchies with regard to the superintendence of the discovered territories and to discover by these two great European powers.
This construction of the empire was accompanied, as we know, by the Catholic Church in the new worlds discovered through the action of the missionaries of various orders, with the Expansion of the Faith.
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