Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language.

This is Episode 91, Traders and Trators.

In this episode, we're going to continue our look at what happened when East Met West

in the 11th and 12th centuries.

Many histories of this period tend to treat these events as a clash of civilizations, exemplified

by the Crusades.

But that was just one part of a larger story.

While Muslims and Christians were trading blows in the Near East, they were also trading

goods throughout the Mediterranean and Southern Europe.

That meant that products from the Near East were starting to flow into Western Europe.

And the words for those products were starting to pass into French and English.

So while the two sides were making war, they were also making money.

And no group combined those two goals better than the order of knights known as the Knights

Templar.

They were holy Crusaders, and they were also medieval bankers.

So this time we'll explore the interaction of faith and money, Crusaders and Traders,

and Loyalty versus treason.

So before we begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is historyofenglishpodcast.com.

And you can sign up to support the podcast at patreon.com.

Just go to historyofenglishpodcast.com and link from there.

Now before I begin, I should note that this episode is much longer than normal.

I had a lot that I wanted to discuss, and much of this story is linked together with some

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