This fact was connected with the trial against Boniface VIII and that against the Templars, amounting as a whole to a plan to destabilise: a bishop, a Pope and a whole religious order had fallen under accusation for terrible crimes such as heresy and sorcery, and this showed that the Church of Rome was riddled with corruption in every part of its body. Philip the Fair’s lawmen were planning to dig up the body of Boniface VIII to subject it to a public trial, at whose end it was to be burned under the charge of heresy, sorcery and blasphemy. The dead pope’s burning would have placed the whole Church in an illegal position: the whole reign of Boniface VIII would have been considered invalid, and everything that happened after the abdication of Celestine V, not excluding the election of Clemens V, would have proved null and void. With the College of Cardinals split and most French bishops loyal to Philip, the King threatened a schism that would separate the Church of France from that of Rome. Clemens V was faced with a dreadful dilemma: he had to choose whether to condemn the order of the Temple as the sovereign demanded, or save it and risk the burning of Boniface VIII’s body and the French schism with all its consequences.[37]
The Pontiff chose to protect the unity of the institution for which he was responsible, sacrificing a part to preserve the whole. The Order of the Temple was by now effectively destroyed, blasted away by the wave of scandal and defamation. Many brothers had died in the King’s jails, many more had lost their motivation for good. In the spring of 1312 an Ecumenical Council was gathered in Vienne to decide, among other things, the fate of the Templar order; the Pope did not conceal that the judgment was most controversial and a large part of the council opposed their condemnation. After long thought, he felt there was only one way to solve the issue, avert irreparable scandal, and serve the interest of the Crusade: avoid a verdict and act instead by way of administrative decision; that is an official act required for practical reasons. Being a great expert in canon law, he sought for an expedient not to condemn the Order of the Temple, of whose innocence at least where the most serious charges were concerned he was certain: in the Bull Vox in excelso, the Pope declared that the Order could not be condemned for heresy, and was therefore “closed” by administrative fiat and without a verdict, to avoid grave danger to the Church. The goods of the Templars were handed over to the other great religious-military order, the Hospitallers; that at least made them safe from the greed of the French crown, and so they might possibly still serve the cause of re-taking the Sepulchre and Jerusalem, the reason why so many people had in the past donated gifts to the Temple. Philip the Fair did not exactly accept that decision happily; in the end, however, the Hospitallers were able to have a consistent part of what had been the Temple’s patrimony.[38]
Though unjust, the end of the Templar order was proving historically convenient: the scandal roused by the trial had to be placated, and the doubts created by the Templars’ confessions needed to be silenced. The scandal had made the Order odious to sovereigns and to all Catholics; it would no longer be possible to find an honest man willing to become a Templar. The order had therefore lost its usefulness to the Crusader cause for which it had been established, and furthermore, if a swift decision on the issue had not been reached, the king would have completely squandered its goods. Clemens V therefore decided to get the Templar order “out of the way” by refusing to issue a final sentence, but forbade any further use of name, habit and distinctive signs of the Temple under the penalty of automatic excommunication for anyone who ever dared proclaim himself a Templar in future. The Pope thus eliminated the Order from contemporary reality, but by not issuing a formal sentence he left judgment on the Order in abeyance.
In the end, then, there was no conviction or convict, but a defendant severely punished for crimes other than those he had been indicted for. Something of the same kind also happened with the trial against the late Boniface VIII; which is hardly surprising, since the two issues were intimately bound up with each other, and their resolution was the result of a long diplomatic struggle made not just of negotiations but also of actual blackmail from both sides.
The fate of the leading Templars was still undecided, and they awaited the Pope’s judgment, when, on 18 March 1314, after proclaiming the Order innocent, Grand Master Jacques de Molay and Preceptor of Normandy Geoffroy de Charny were abducted by royal soldiers and condemned to be burned on a little island in the Seine without any reference to the Pontiff. Old, sick for years and severely tested by that long clash with the French monarchy, Clemens V was no longer in any condition to exert influence; he died about a month later, and his death marked the start of the Church of Rome’s exile in Avignon. Later Popes, pressed by other emergencies, preferred not to deal with the odd situation of the Templar order, never condemned but practically shut down by virtue of a wholly exceptional decision.[39]
The mysterious presence
The most recent research into the documents of the Templar trial has allowed many points to be clarified. They proved among other things that the construct of Philip the Fair’s indictment had an explosive impact because it was built on some foundation of fact; certain charges such as the denial of Christ, the obscene kisses and the spitting on the Cross came from a few actual facts, suitably distorted and reworked into evidence of heresy. A few years before he moved openly against the Temple, the King of France had secretly intruded into the Order some spies to collect any kind of information that might help damage it; then a group of royal men of law led by Guillaume de Nogaret had worked the information into a detailed and imposing castle of accusations. These clever technicians of the law started from a few basic points and derived facts from them just as is done in mathematical sciences when building a theorem. It’s no exaggeration to say that Nogaret and Co. built the “theorem of Templar heresy”. Their technique was that of the half-truth: every charge they wanted to prove must have a hook in a genuine fact, unpleasant or censurable, but committed without intention of sin; Templars would admit the fact itself under questioning – such as that they had been forced to deny Christ – but they would then deny the charge that hung from it, that is that they did not believe in Christ. But at that point, their position hardly looked solid.[40] The very same identical scheme was employed to argue that the Templars had turned their back on Christ en masse to indulge the worship of a mysterious idol.
The charge started with a material and evident fact. The Templars wore a little strand of linen string over their tunics. That was something nobody could deny, because everyone had seen it, indeed it was clearly mentioned in the part of Templar statutes dealing with the brothers’ dress. The Templars knew that it had some kind of symbolic rather than practical value, since they were under obligation never to take it off – even when they slept at night – but they did not have any clear idea what it was. Leaning on this unarguable fact of the little linen string, Nogaret and the King’s other strategists would argue that that object had in fact a perverted meaning, and stated that it had been in contact with a devilish object, a dark and mysterious idol in the shape of the head of a man with a long beard. According to the charge, the Templars offered this idol special liturgies, reserved only for the highest dignitaries. These were solemn ceremonies during which it was worshipped, kissed and rubbed with the linen strands that would later be distributed to all brothers in the Order.
The linen belt was a most banal little object which could never in itself have been used to defame the Templars; but it was something that concerned the whole Order, all its members, one by one. The idol on the other hand was a wholly exclusive matter, that could only be used against the higher officials. Making the Templar linen strands be somehow “fouled” by contact with the dark idol, however, Nogaret threw the charge of idolatry on every single monk of the Temple, “contaminated” by the idol possibly without knowing it thanks exactly to that little belt he wore every day.
Of all the charges thrown at the Templars, idolatry is no doubt the darkest, and it is n
ot at all strange that such a suggestion inspired so many novelists. Curiously, however, this charge was not Nogaret’s Pièce de résistance in the trial, not his chief weapon, but a kind of little side corollary stuck on as a kind of tail to so many other charges: in his indictment, Philip the Fair made it quite clear that only a very few Templars knew of the idol. Why such a disagreement between potential effect and actual work? The answer is simple: the prosecution, who had built a theorem on solid bases from a decade’s worth of reports from its moles, knew quite well that the three disgusting acts of the ritual of admission were common matters practised in every command of the Temple. Practically every Templar could be led by threats or other methods to admit facts that were part of the daily life of the Temple, facts which could be manipulated and distorted; but the existence of the idol, whatever it was, was an issue purely for the elite, and the hope of wringing any confession seemed very distant indeed. Rumours about that mysterious object were, to Nogaret, very attractive; they would have allowed him to create a theatrically effective comparison to shock the Pope: just as Moses came back to find, to his rage and grief, that the Jews had in his absence abandoned the cult of the sole God and had built themselves a golden calf, so Pope Clemens V was to have the evidence that the Templars, themselves monks in a religious order, secretly worshipped a strange idol that had fallen into their hands. There was however a severe problem: if only the leaders of the Temple knew of the idol, it could be expected that only a very few confessions could be gathered.
What Philip the Fair wanted was the entire demolition of the Order, so he had to convince the Pope that the whole Templar body was poisoned by corruption and heresy; the condemnation of the leaders alone was no good to the King, they would have been removed and replaced, while a mass indictment of the whole Order would allow him to demand from the Pope its total extinction. A few confessions, however red-hot, were worth little to the prosecution: even if ten or 20 Templars could be found to admit that they practised sorcery and raised devils, that would have amounted to nothing, because the thing would have seemed a sin – if a dire and inexcusable one – that affected only the culprits. At that point the Inquisition would convict the individuals. Nogaret and Philip the Fair, however, needed large numbers, and had to find charges that, even if less serious, were so widespread in the Order as to let them say that one could hardly find one Templar innocent of them. The military ritual of admission suited this need exactly; the secret ceremony with its apparent outrages against Christian religion, was ideal. The ritual was known to be commonly practised, though in widely divergent forms, so nearly every member of the Order could admit that they had carried out at least some of those guilty acts, such as denying Christ or spitting on the Cross: and since judicial procedures at the time weren’t too refined, the general confusion raised by the scandal could well be used to suggest that the whole order was affected by anti-Christianity. Emphasis on the idol in the prosecution’s scheme would have been ill-advised, since it risked suggesting that the whole castle of charges was built on mere calumny. Like the smart lawyer he was, Nogaret preferred to bet on charges that the monks themselves were more likely to confirm, and reduced the matter of the idol to an obscure, if chilling, detail: so he made it clear in the indictment that the existence of this simulacrum was unknown to the vast majority of monks. As had been expected, the harvest of reports of idolatry was exceedingly small, scarce and mutually highly contradictory, though Philip the Fair’s strategists did what they could to manipulate and paint them in the grimmest possible colours.
A mosaic of fragments
Examination of the documents leaves no doubts whatever. Only a small, tiny minority of the Templars who appeared in the trial were able to say anything at all on this phantom object. And even within this tiny minority, many mentioned it only because they had heard talk about it from others, that is, from no personal knowledge at all. That is a pretty sad haul when compared to the near totality of testimonies that have nothing whatever to say about it. Out of 1,114 Templar testimonies recorded during the trial, only 130 include even a hint of the idol, and most of those do nothing but repeat what the prosecution said; clearly these are the miserable product of torture and other forms of violence. Only 52 statements give any information at all about the idol, that is, 4.6% of the total. On this at least Philip the Fair did not lie: very few Order members were aware of the matter, as against the immense majority who had no idea what so ever. We may take this as reliable, since the inquisitors and the royal lawmen were hardly short of means to persuade. These very few witnesses, utter exceptions to the rule, don’t even describe the same object, giving in fact the most wildly different detail. I think that all this must have discouraged historians from looking with due scholarly care in this field: in effect, the great variety of images makes it all seem like a big hodgepodge of things said at random. So the whole area was condemned without distinction, as a set of tragic lies caused by torture.
Matters are further complicated by the fact that some monks gave more than one statement in the course of the trial, changing their stories from one inquiry to another for reasons that we can sometimes only guess at (torture, promised rewards, the desire to avenge some personal wrong, etc). A classic case is that of Brother Raoul de Gisy, preceptor of the command of Latigny and charged with exacting the king’s taxes in the county of Champagne: this man went from a red-hot first account of events, in which he claimed to have seen the idol no less than seven times and that it was the image of a devil, to a wholly different one where he had seen it only once, by chance, and had no idea what it really was. The explanation lies in the fact that Raoul de Gisy made his first confession on 9 November 1307 under pressure by Guillaume de Nogaret and the Inquisitor of France; an interrogation carried out immediately after the wave of illegal arrests, when the King needed most serious evidence against the Order, and fast, to justify before the Pope his violation of the rights of the Church; the second was released on 15 January 1312 in an inquiry carried out by a commission of bishops, when the Pope had already taken control of the trial and interrogations took place with greater guarantees.[41]
Historians may find themselves as disconcerted as archaeologists would when, on opening the site of an ancient garbage pit, they meet with thousands of tiny pieces of pottery, different in make, material and colour, each of which will have to be carefully identified and re-made. In spite of the difference between the disciplines, there is only one way to make order out of chaos and reach a sufficiently valid understanding: one has to work with minute patience, bringing all fragments of the same type together and at the same time discarding extraneous material that does not help and that has found its way into the heap by chance.
Some certainties may be reached as soon as we start reading with care the circumstances in which individual question sessions with the Templars took place, and they greatly help to understand many things about the trial. We know, for instance, that in some cases Templars were questioned once; but the inquisitors were not being satisfied with their statements. Instead of taking the testimonies as they were, they had the brothers tortured, then gave them time to think it over, and finally staged a second question session: this time their confessions, full of detail that their tormentors found satisfactory, were accepted and taken down as evidence. We also know that the trial went through several phases, and that these phases were widely different both in the methods used by questioners, and in their good faith. Therefore the statements sought by the questioners also changed widely according to date and place; he who asks the question is very able to influence the answer.[42]
The issue of the idol is one of the most complex, since it was a charge that lent itself more than any other to becoming coloured by fantasy, in part because of the violence in questioning the Templars, and in part because of the power of psychological suggestion – a mighty power and never to be underestimated – that rose everywhere in the dark climate of the scandal. Once we get over th
e first, disconcerting impact, it becomes clear that behind all the descriptions of the idol there are only five kinds of object that appear over and over again, if maybe with varying details. Three of these were cult objects, that is things basically not different from many others that mediaeval faithful saw every day in their churches: a reliquary-sculpture showing head, neck, upper chest and shoulders, a painting on wood, and finally the portrait of a man with a rather strange and ill-defined frame. No doubt, if such portraits were worshipped in secret, that made it the more urgent for investigators to know who was the man they represented, but the presence alone of such objects in Templar churches was not enough to support a charge of heresy. On the other hand, the other two objects lent themselves to it wonderfully, for they were things that could make an enormous impression in the mind of mediaeval men: had the prosecution only been able to find any such thing in a Templar command and take it to the Pope, that might have been enough to get a swift condemnation of the entire Order. The first of these supposed “idols” that the questioners tried to make the captive monks describe was a portrait of Mohammed, presented as evidence that the Templars had betrayed the Christian faith and gone secretly over to Islam. The second was some kind of monstrous or even devilish image, useful to prove that the Templars had been practising sorcery.
Portraits of Islam
The Templars and the Shroud of Christ Page 5