_Cyprus and Rhodes._ Settled in Cyprus, the Knights renewed their zeal and their resources. Here they began to build that fleet of galleys which, increased later in Rhodes, became most formidable. When they and the Templars left forever the Holy Land the Templars took the position that their vow to protect the holy places was now either fulfilled or at least at an end, and they distributed themselves among their numerous preceptories all over Europe, where they made themselves _personae non gratae_ to their civil rulers, because of their own real power, their oriental ostentation, and their secularization and distasteful entrance into and interference with the social and political life and customs of their new environment. Things went from bad to worse, public feeling was more and more aroused, and their extermination was only a matter of time. Finally Pope Clement V and King Phillip le Bel undertook this task with barbarous ruthlessness. Kings, nobility and the people joined hands in the common task. The Templars had acquired various properties, by capture, by bequest, and in every lawful and unlawful manner, which yielded in the aggregate relatively enormous revenues, too strong a temptation for needy secular rulers to resist. The Pope had at last to intervene in order to prevent the total secularization of all this great spoil, and thus it happened that no small proportion of it was, after its sequestration, allotted to the Order of St. John, whose Grand Masters and Knights had not forgotten nor abandoned their original vows and purposes, and who held that the inviolacy of their obligations required their continuous residence in some such oriental city as Rhodes. And here we may part company, as did they, only quite peacefully, with the Templar Knights. Driven from Europe they made their last stand in Great Britain, and of their lives and deeds there we have no more readable nor interesting historical account than Scott has given us in Ivanhoe. Any further allusion to them here will be most casual. They offer the conventional picture, only _in extenso_, of original poverty and self-abnegation, coupled with devotion and valor, changed to arrogance, treason, abandonment of purpose, unbridled lawlessness leading to crime and cruelty, all brought about because of affluence, acquired power, selfishness, cupidity and every debasing human weakness. Small wonder then, that they could be no longer tolerated in Christendom.