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Tony McMahon
Personal blog · thetemplarknight.comhistory
Tony McMahon writes The Templar Knight, a personal blog at thetemplarknight.com about history. Since 2022, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 3 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-22, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link this blog as a source on Knights Templar history, including their usury and banking, and the Church's tolerance of it. The comments cite it as support rather than praising the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The Templar Knight explores all the history and mystery behind the Knights Templar from the medieval period until today.
What Hacker News says?
If you read Wikipedia, there was the Massacre of the "Latins" in Constantinople in 1182. That almost certainly made it easy to make it a revenge play for the Venetians and associates. What I find most interesting is the Romans were unbeatable in battle, even the Byzantines. However, maintaining a large military presence was expensive and politically difficult to manage. So they used annual mercenaries from the north…
Comment linking /2021/12/13/cyprus-knights-templar/
on “Silver amulet is the oldest evidence of Christianity north of the Alps”Submitted The Knights Templar in Gaza as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThey are also historically credited with inventing usury, so presumably yes. This describes the situation fairly accurately: https://thetemplarknight.com/2010/12/22/templar-usury/ Essentially, the Roman Catholic Church turned a blind eye to the Templars usury, largely because of the value provided by the Templars in enabling an endless stream of warriors for Christendom. They did set some arbitrary limits on the amo…
Comment linking /2010/12/22/templar-usury/
on “The Knights Templar started London's first bank (2017)”