The Knights Templar II

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Lead: Beginning in 1307, jealousy, envy, desire to appropriate its vast assets and the waning purpose for its existence, brought arrest, torture, trial and eventual dissolution to the Knights Templar.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

 Content: Born of crisis in the years following the First Crusade, the Knights Templar was also known as the Temple. It was an order of warrior monks assigned to defend the Holy Land from Muslim forces. To finance its military and charitable mission, the Temple took donations of cash and real estate from all over Catholic Europe and the Mediterranean. The Templars even developed a rudimentary form of banking which permitted east-bound pilgrims to deposit funds in, say, Spain and to carry a letter of credit which they could cash when they reached the Holy Land. All this was making the Templars very very rich.

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The Knights Templar I

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Lead: In October 1307, King Philip IV rounded up members of the Knights Templar in France. Of those captured, many were examined under torture, tried, convicted and executed. The Order was then disbanded.     

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.            

Content: The French King was in heavy debt to the Templars so his actions and similar strikes elsewhere in Europe were an attempt to crush and appropriate the assets of one of the most successful medieval Catholic holy military orders. Philip wanted the order’s financial stake, but he was also attacking an institution that was at once secret, rich, powerful, and perceived as a threat to powers of church and state.

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History’s Turning Points: Ambitious Corporal II (Bonaparte)

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Lead: Historical study often helps reveal twists in the human journey. Consider history’s turning points: the ambitious corpora1’s legacy.

Intro: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts

Content: Napoleon Bonaparte was a daring and effective military commander, yet his lasting legacy may have been off the battlefield. He continued the destruction of aristocratic rule that began with the French Revolution in France and wherever his armies conquered. Though he created a modified aristocracy loyal to him and made himself Emperor of the French, this artifice collapsed when he was defeated and exiled. The Congress of Vienna 1815 tried to put the pieces back together again, but if anything the decades after Napoleon demonstrated a steady collapse of autocracy and the steady flowering of democracy.

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History’s Turning Points: Ambitious Corporal I (Bonaparte)

PermalinkToday's AMIT, ,
Lead: Historical study often helps reveal twists in the human journey. Consider history’s turning points: the ambitious corpora1.

Intro: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts

Content: French historian and romantic author, Francois-René Vicomte Chateaubriand, wrote of Napoleon Bonaparte, “the mightiest breath of life which ever animated human clay.” He can be forgiven a flight of hyperbole, but for the first decade of the 19th century there is little doubt that Bonaparte straddled the wide continent of Europe virtually unimpeded. He was the Corsican corporal whose ambition made him Emperor of the French and whose military genius and daring shattered all before him. Yet, perhaps it was not his conquests which were fleeting or his empire which faded at his fall which set Napoleon firmly astride one of history’s great turning points. It was the system of aristocratic rule that he wounded, the legal system that he established wherever his armies conquered, and the dark and vicious concept of nationalism that lingered long after its author perished on St. Helena. Those things transformed him from transitory tyrant to a figure whose influence approaches the eternal.

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President Wilson and the League II

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Lead: To secure support for the Treaty ending World War I, and, for Wilson, its most important provision, the League of Nations, President Woodrow Wilson had to overcome several hurtles. His biggest was the United States Senate.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: While most citizens were generally sympathetic with Wilson's goals, most Americans were still isolationists. The people were willing to go to a foreign war in a just cause, but fighting should be concluded as swiftly as possible and national attention allowed to return to domestic affairs.

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President Wilson and the League I

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Lead: Returning from the Peace Conference concluding World War I in 1919, President Woodrow Wilson faced a skeptical U.S. Senate.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: On January 8, 1918 Wilson brought before Congress a plan consisting of Fourteen Points which he insisted would provide the basis of a just and lasting settlement after the conclusion of World War I. Point number fourteen was the key to Wilson's vision of a post-war world. He called for a League of Nations which would guarantee "political independence and territorial integrity" and thereby enforce the peace.

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George Sand

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Lead: In November 1830 in a chateau in central France, an unhappy 26-year-old woman discovered in her husband’s desk a fat envelope on which was written her name and the words, “Only to be Opened After My Death.” For the Baroness Aurore Dudevant it became cause for her declaration of independence.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: In the packet, her husband Casimir had poured out volumes of bitterness and rancor built up in their years of marriage. For Aurore the role of dutiful wife and mother of their two young ones had never been particularly agreeable and the letter seemed good cause to break away from a man with whom she had little in common and whom she considered a drunken idler. Though her inheritance had provided the family its income, a married women in that era had little rights to her own money therefore when Madame Dudevant left for Paris she had to make her living as a writer.

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Francis of Assissi II

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Lead: Born into a prosperous commercial family Francesco di Pietro di Bernardone, Francis of Assisi, in 1208 answered a spiritual call to a life of poverty and service. His movement brought repentance and reform to a church in deep need of renewal.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: Struggling to maintain its authority the face of a growing challenge from newly emerging nation states, the Roman Catholic Church was focused on institutional survival. Many ordinary believers, however, were convinced the Church had lost its way and were turning elsewhere for spiritual solace. Into such a environment came Francesco di Bernardone. A popular youth, he was raised in the central Italian town of Assisi, north of Rome in the Umbrian hills. In 1208 he had a spiritual crisis which, in turn, drew him into a life of pious service. Francis was a layman, whose spiritual journey included preaching and a life of consistent imitation of Christ. He celebrated poverty and stripped himself of all possessions and worldly encumbrances; he never insisted that personal poverty was the Christian ideal, but invited his followers to such a lifestyle. He considered that all nature reflected the divine and called all creatures his brothers and sisters.

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