Quote Originally Posted by Empirate
The Templars were actually fried because a King indebted to them asked the inquisition nicely...
More precisely, he pulled the Pope's strings to have the Templar inquisition sanctioned. The accepted reasoning he did this was as you stated, he was A> deeply in debt to them and B> saw how much they were worth anyway. A distant second reason would be that he feared their growing power based.