Explanation: The Knights Templar were a medieval monastic knightly order. Despite their name being dragged through the mud for any number of conspiracies and dubious histories, they were a mostly-anodyne group (by the standards of medieval European crusading military orders, which, admittedly, is not a high bar) which placed high value on contractual obligations. The members of the Order swore vows of poverty, but the Order itself was fantastically wealthy due to early banking practices, wherein they would give out loans in exchange for collateral; said collateral then being used to generate income while the loan was still owed, as charging formal interest was against Church law of the period. They were successful in no small part because of their insistence on the fulfillment of contractual obligations - that is to say, they were trustworthy.

King Philip IV of France owed a great deal of money to the Jews of France, and acted in the usual way for medieval Christian nobles in debt - he expelled the Jews rather than repay them. Free money, no more debt!

King Philip IV of France also owed a great deal of money to Italian merchants in France. So he had them arrested, those filthy money-grubbing commoners, and all their property seized. Free money, no more debt!

King Philip IV also owed a great deal of money to the Knights Templar. You can probably see where this is going.

After leveling a whole host of bizarre charges against the Templars, he used his leverage over the Pope to sanction an effective ‘blank check’ to ‘investigate’ the Order. Philip IV then had the Templars arrested en masse, confessions extracted by torture, which ‘conveniently’ confirmed all of Philip’s accusations, and then had them burned at the stake and their property seized before anything bad could happen, like the Pope dying, or the accused being able to testify at their own trials, or people looking too closely into the official accounts of Templar satanism and ritual homosexual gangbangs for all initiates.

Even at the time, it was nakedly apparent that Philip IV was just doing his best to murder his way out of his debts, and the charges weren’t really taken seriously outside of earshot of the French monarch.