“As though the Lord God sends his grace there where he pleases, worthy knights, who were of the land beyond the sea, proposed to stay for ever in the service of Our Lord, and to live in common, like regular canons. In the hand of the patriarch they vowed chastity and obedience, and renounced all property.... The king and the other barons, the patriarch and other prelates of the Church, gave them funds to live on and to clothe themselves.... The first thing which was enjoined on them in pardon for their sins was to guard the roads by which the pilgrims passed, from robbers and thieves, who did great harm. This penance the patriarch and the other bishops enjoined. Nine years they remained thus in secular habit, wearing such garments as were given them by the knights and other good people, for the love of God. In the ninth a council was assembled in France in the city of Troyes. There were assembled the archbishops of Rheims and Sens and all their bishops. The bishop of Albano especially was there as papal legate, the abbots of Citeau and Clairvaux, and many other of the religious. “There were established the order and the rules by which they were to live as monks. Their habit was ordered to be white, by the authority of Pope Honorius and the patriarch of Jerusalem. This order had already existed nine years, as I have told you, and there were as yet only nine brothers, who lived from day to day on charity. From that time their numbers began to increase, and revenues and tenures were given them. In the time of Pope Etigenius it was ordered that they should have sewn upon their copes and on their robes a cross of red cloth, so that they should be known among all men.... From thence have their possessions so increased as you can see, that the order of the Temple is in the ascendant.... Hardly can you find on either side of the sea a Christian land where this order has not to-day houses and brethren, and great revenues.”[109] The council of Troyes was held in 1128, and in the next fifty years, in proportion as the feudal organization of the Latin kingdom decayed, the military orders increased in wealth and power. The Hospital held nineteen thousand manors in Europe, the Temple nine thousand, and each manor could maintain a knight in the field. At Paris the house of the Temple filled a whole quarter; its donjon was one of the most superb buildings of the Middle Ages; at a later period, when the corporation took to banking, it served as a place of deposit for both public and private treasure, and in times of danger the king himself was glad to take shelter within its walls.