Within the fields of Christendom, far within, wherever long immunity from heathen or from Saracen pressure had half corrupted the life of Christian men, the Temple boasted its wealth or exalted its luxury. In London, in Ravenna, in Aragon--principally here in Paris--everywhere it was the richest and the greatest thing. Christendom counted perhaps one hundred thousand manors; nine thousand were in the hands of the Temple. Saving perhaps the Papacy itself, the enormous wealth of the Jewish financiers, and the Courts of the Angevins and of the Capetians, there was no such strength of gold anywhere in Europe. It was the rival of all of these, and I think their superior. And this vast Order, as it was thus so enormously strong through gold, was strong also through two other things--ubiquity and noble lineage; and through a third thing it was strong--secrecy. For those younger sons of the great nobles, those many squires and those knights returned from wars in Spain or in the Levant, who formed its not very numerous but dominating body, were bound by so strict a discipline and acted with such solidarity behind their fortress gates in every capital and garrison, that it seemed as though Christendom had now within it some alien body separate from itself, and already half an enemy to the great traditions of the common people and of the universal Church, and of those open public servants, the kings. There was a grumbling and a hatred against Templars everywhere. It had endured for fifty years. What was all this wealth and all this secrecy? Of what sort was the evil that hid behind those walls? And how could there be tolerated in Christendom, whose nature it is to be both homogeneous and free, something so jealously separate and possessed of such unaccredited dominion?