I went to a reading at the little hermetic group I'm a member of last Sunday. A Belgian scholar gave a reading about both the history of the crusades and of the templars. He insisted on how the general opinion has been biased by biographers who were all too eager to destroy their reputation. The movie 'the Kingdom of Heaven' especially was full of historical nonsense.

At the end of his talk he gave away a secret still sought after by many: a Spanish professor, Ignacio de la Torre, discovered the treasure of the Templars. And it's gone.
Devaluation during that era was not an abstract calculation as it is now. At the dawn of the 14th century, the king of France had almost bankrupted his country. Hence the amount of silver in a coin dropped dramatically each year. De la Torre calculated that this amount of silver suddenly grew spectacularly during the year following the cursed Friday the 13th, 1307 when the Templars were arrested. So much in fact that it would have taken more than 200 years to the crown to make it happen using its normal revenues.

The book "Los templarios y el origen de la banca" is only available in Spanish.

From the blurb: "Why did the Templar Knights develop a powerful banking network in the XIII century? Were these financial activities related to the arrest of the Templars in 1307?  Based on six years of extensive research in the archives of France, England and Spain, this book offers a complete panorama of the Templars’ financial activities across Europe & the Latin East, descriptions & examples of the main banking services rendered by the Order, a comparison of these with the services performed by Italian houses and other Military Orders, and a penetrating study of the role that the Templar banking network could have played in the fall of the Order.  This is the first serious academic book on the matter since 1939.  In the words of Nobel Prizewinner Prof. Sir Aaron Klug (U. Cambridge) “this book is a critical work in the history of banking and of the Order of Temple,” and in those of Prof. Malcolm Barber (U. Reading, author of The New Knighthood, the best reference work on the Templars) “a key study in an under-explored area which well deserves its translation into English.”
"As a conclusion, the book offers an extensive description of the collapse of the finances of French King Philip IV, the working of the Templar treasury in Paris, and the financial motivations behind the arrest of the Templars.  "