It's Friday the 13th!

Have you ever wondered why Friday the 13th is considered to be an unlucky day?

It all dates back to medieval times in the early 14th century. This was a time of constant power feuds between kings and even the Catholic popes. The period of the Crusades had ended only a century before. European inhabitants had discovered the benefit of trade with Asia, particularly from the Middle East and the Orient, and demanded spices and goods. Traders and businessmen made regular trade journeys into the Middle East. Christianity, the dominant religion in Europe, encouraged believers to take pilgrimages to the Holy Land. The Middle East, though, was a very dangerous place full of robbers and other threats. Into that environment arose the Poor Knights of Christ, later becoming the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, also popularly known as the Knights Templar.

The Templars formed in the early 12th century with the purpose of defending the ruins of King Solomon's Temple and the City of Jerusalem, with that task extending somewhat into protecting pilgrims and others coming to Jerusalem. The Templars were the people who developed what was to become our modern banking system, as they arranged to take deposits and serve as a sort of medieval ATM as the wealthy traveled across Europe and the Near East. They became a very large, wealthy, and powerful order.

Early in the 14th century, the French king Philip IV needed cash to continue his war with England, found himself broke, and found himself heavily in debt to the Templars. With the help of Pope Clement V, a man Philip had personally politicked into the Vatican, Philip arranged for all Templars all across Europe to be simultaneously arrested though a secret plan with Vatican imprimatur so the Templars could be charged with trumped up charges, tortured, and forced into signing false confessions. Many of the Templars were burned at the stake for alleged heresies.

What the king and pope didn't count on, though, was that the Templars were very popular with the common people. They were saddened when they saw what was being done to their beloved Templars, and it was the common people who began the tradition of an unlucky day, the day when the Templars were all arrested, Friday, October 13, 1407.