by Steven Sora
History plays down the fact that the Crusades were more often cruel adventures planned by manipulative and greedy rulers and carried out by peasants more intent on looting and rape. Christian soldiers were told that nothing they did in God’s army was a sin because their cause was noble.10 The first battle pitted western European Christians against Hungarian Christians as the entourage of the Crusades began to blaze through eastern Europe in the late eleventh century. The original mission was distorted the moment the crusaders left their own land. An army under Peter the Hermit, which started out in Cologne in April of 1096, burned the Christian city of Belgrade in May. German crusaders torched the houses of peasants after stealing their goods. One governor ordered a counterattack against the crusaders and killed ten thousand men—all before the army ever came near the Saracens in Jerusalem whom they were supposed to fight. Peter the Hermit finally lost control of the thirty thousand men who had survived fighting eastern Christians. The fighting force continued to attack Christian villages. When they finally reached an opposing Turkish force, they were exhausted from killing and looting fellow Christians. Their weakened force was so badly beaten that only three thousand escaped death or capture. These survivors fled to a castle by the sea where still another attack ended what is called the “People’s Crusade.”
In Italy the unified states were controlled by another Norman whose roots went back to France and further back to Norway, although the family was not allied with the Sinclairs. The Norman Tancred launched his own crusade. When his force reached Jerusalem in June 1099, they killed fifty thousand Saracens and Jews alike, taking no prisoners.11 Tancred’s men went through every house, one by one, in the holy city, killing, raping, and looting the unfortunate denizens until the streets flowed with blood. Coptic Christians believed that they were safe by the fact of their religion. Tancred ordered them expelled from the city but not before many were tortured in an effort to steal their wealth, real or imagined. Tancred’s competition was the knight Baldwin, whose goal was to loot as many great cities of the east as he could. Baldwin took Edessa, while Tancred took Bethlehem in 1099. It was Baldwin, however, who declared himself the king of Jerusalem in 1100.
Into this immoral war marched the original nine Knights Templar in 1118. As we have seen, they were granted permission to use the royal palace built over Solomon’s temple to serve as their headquarters. Before their return trip to Europe nine years later they may have done more excavating than fighting. Robert Payne, in his work The Dream and the Tomb, states, “From the beginning, Hugh of Payen appears to have had a larger aim.”12 Their only recorded accomplishment over the course of those nine years is such excavation work, though, ostensibly they also protected the highways for pilgrims. Finding a wall to the stables of the ancient king, they broke through it and returned to France.
Were the Templars more interested in looting than protecting the pilgrims of the highway? The original force appears to be guilty of that charge. Both the impossibility of the task and their strange actions indicate that Robert Payne was correct in assessing that they had very different goals. Later Templar armies would distinguish themselves in battle against Saracens, often taking the role of fighting last-ditch efforts so that others might escape and leading suicidal charges against an enemy much greater in size.13 One grand master of the Templars led 130 men against a Saracen force of seven thousand. The rank and file may have taken their mission seriously and seen dying for Christ as a sure route to heaven.
With few exceptions, however, the leaders of the Crusades distinguished themselves only for being corrupt, cruel, and self-serving. The doge of Venice, the home base of the Zenos’ power, backed one crusade only after forcing it to attack Zara in modern-day Yugoslavia first, to settle a score for the doge. The Venetian crusade fought against another crusader force and finally burned Constantinople, the most important Christian city in the east.
The Children’s Crusade (A.D. 1212) was the result of the vision of a European teenager, Stephen of Cloyes. An army of children was recruited to fight the Saracens in the Middle East. However ridiculous that crusade seemed in the first place, the entire army of children was sold into slavery in Africa by an unscrupulous fleet owner. Frederick II, the grandson of Frederick Barbarossa, found the Saracens to be much more civilized than his fellow Europeans, and he surrounded himself with the enemy. His love for his sworn opponents led him to attack a Templar force in Acre, an act that ended in his excommunication by the pope.
Such infighting and greed among the Europeans contributed to their downfall. No act would compare, however, with the brutality and horror the Church and France unleashed on its own people. It is often left out of of the history of the Crusades that Rome launched a crusade into the Languedoc region of France. Before the Church and its minions were done killing Jews, Coptic Christians, Saracens, and anyone else who stood in their path to the Holy City, it committed possibly the worst act of genocide Europe would see until the time of Hitler. The south of France was occupied by people called Cathari.14 Named for their purist beliefs, this faith regarded everything on Earth as evil. God had created a planet, yet the devil’s work was evident everywhere. Their religion restricted their diet and their view of sex (also considered evil, since it created more humans on an evil Earth). For the most part the Cathari were a gentle, religious people whom even the warmongering Saint Bernard believed posed no threat. His investigation of them led him to say, “No sermons are more Christian than theirs.”
While the religious beliefs of the Cathari are possibly very closely related to the Essene faith and the beliefs of early Christianity, they were not in tune with the new Roman political entity. They believed no one should stand between man and God and that priests could not save sinners. Their life was based on imitation of the apostles. This earned them Rome’s enmity, especially after they pointed out that Roma, the Italian name for Rome, was the exact opposite of the message of Christ, in French, Amor. The Church set out to prove it.
First they condemned the Cathari, but did little. Then the rabid Dominic Guzman and his Dominicans brought the Inquisition to Europe. The misguided madness that lasted up to modern times at first allowed that anyone instigating prosecution of a heretic could then take his property. Greed in the name of religion had the Church prosecuting even the dead. In 1209 an army of thirty thousand descended on the south of France. One by one, Beziers, Perpignan, Narbonne, Carcassone, and Toulouse were attacked and their populations slaughtered by the forces of Rome. For the next twenty-five years the slaughter continued unabated. It culminated in the siege of Montsegur. There the Cathari who had survived the extermination campaign against them sought refuge in a castle atop a limestone mountain. For ten months, four hundred people—some Cathari, and some Christian Templar knights defending the Cathari—held out against the papal forces. It had seemed like an unequal struggle, with thousands of trained soldiers blockading a few hundred, but the countryside was replete with Cathar sympathizers who helped the besieged get food and water despite the standing army. Finally, the fortress surrendered but asked for a brief period to make a truce. The knights would be allowed to leave simply for their act of surrender. The devout, too, would be allowed safe passage only if they renounced their faith. If not, they would be burned alive.
In the brief period of truce, legend has it that a treasure sacred to the Cathari was smuggled out of Montsegur by three of the faithful and a guide, climbing down the thousand-foot cliff walls of Montsegur on ropes in the dark cover of night.15 Their mission was to take the Cathar treasure, some already hidden in the forests below, to the caves of the Sabarthes. This treasure has never been found. Then the truce ended. Some of the knights had actually accepted the Cathar faith during the truce. The others were allowed to depart as promised. The faithful, including the new members, said they could not renounce their faith. They were put into a stockade and burned alive.
Just what the treasure of the Cathari is remains unknown. How much gold and silver could have been
the property of a people hunted and starved out by their oppressors is in question. The south of France had once flourished, and the landowners at least were very wealthy. Legends of the treasure say that something of far greater value was being protected. Many believe that treasure is the Holy Grail.16 The Holy Grail is often regarded as the cup from which Jesus Christ drank at the Last Supper. It figures deeply in the Arthurian cycle of mythology and in legends in France and Great Britain. Modern-day treasure hunters still search the nearby caves for whatever treasures might be found. In one is the gigantic grotto of the Lombrives, one of the largest in Europe. Deeply inscribed into a large wall in the cave is a five-pointed star, the pentagram. The cave also holds a huge dolmen, a tablelike rock structure with a large slab on three stone legs. The Celts left such structures all along the Atlantic coast of western Europe, but this may be the only one erected in a cave. The treasure has never emerged.
The Church defeated her enemies in southern France and in the east, but success in the Holy Land was not to last. The Saracens retook Jerusalem in 1188, and the war for Europe was lost. The Templars and another rival order, the Knights Hospitalers (also known as the Knights of Saint John) were among the Europeans who returned home. By the end of the Crusades, the Templars were a very strong order indeed, rivaled only by governments of Europe. In the course of executing their duties as guardians to the pilgrims that traveled to the Holy Lands, they created and established the practices that would lead to modern banking. A noble in Paris could deposit funds in Paris with the Templar “bank” and withdraw them from a Templar “bank” in Venice or Jerusalem. This protected the noble’s funds while he was on the road, and it enabled the Templars to use deposited funds by making loans to kings and nobles alike. The deposits earned the Templars income, and the Templar lands earned them rents. Their growing strength, however, gained them the enmity of those jealous of such wealth and power.
Their greatest enemy was Philip IV of France. He had been denied entrance to the order, and he owed them great sums of money that he was unable to repay. Because he was broke, he levied even higher taxes against his own people, the result of which had him fleeing mobs and hiding for a time in the Paris temple. And he blamed much of his debt on his inability to tax the lands of the Templars, which were not subject to the king. In 1306 this king had ordered all the lands of the Jews in France confiscated so that he could shore up his own finances. Now he needed a new scapegoat. In 1307 he turned on his friends. Jacques de Molay had been godfather to one of the sons of Philip and pallbearer for the king’s brother-in-law, Charles of Valois. Such loyalty had no merit with Philip.
While he could not simply confiscate the lands of the Templars and their rightfully owned properties, he was forced to use another strategy. The tried and true means for attacking and stealing property from Christians and Jews alike would work again. He accused them of heresy and devil worship, with sexual perversion thrown in for good measure. The French king needed an ally to accomplish the feat of getting rid of the Templars and keeping their wealth. He turned to the only man on Earth to whom the Templars answered, the pope. He persuaded the pope to ban the Order of the Knights Templar, which was done by a papal decree in 1312. Why would the pope allow his own force to be attacked?
Historians have debated the role of Pope Clement V. His defenders say he was cornered into such ignominious action by the French king and his charges of heresy. The French King had supported one military action against Clement’s predecessor, Boniface VIII, who had excommunicated him. The next pope had been poisoned. Clement V very likely had much to fear from Philip.17
Detractors say that the pope also had his own agenda, which included such minor sins as selling everything from indulgences to passports, and other, more serious needs, including the protection of Rome and the papal powers against a much stronger France. Whatever motivation caused the pope to allow Philip to proceed, he did. On Friday the thirteenth, 1307, he ordered all the Templars arrested.18 In total there may have been two thousand surviving Templars at the time. They offered little resistance, because their grand master assumed that he could clear them against any charges put by a mere king. Philip’s plan, however, called for more than their arrest. The Templars were subjected to the worst the Inquisition had to offer. Many died or even committed suicide as a result of the torture.
Under hideous torture, only four of one hundred and thirty-eight captured French Templars failed to confess to the crimes their torturers invented. The crimes they would confess to included devil worship; teaching women to abort; infanticide; spitting on, repudiating, and trampling on the Christian cross; homosexuality; and the worship of a skull (or bearded head) named Baphomet. Some of the crimes had a basis in what the Roman Church believed was heresy. Devil worship was an obvious charge to lay on a heretic. The crime of spitting on the cross could have been based on the Cathar belief that the cross, the murderous object of Jesus’ torture, is an evil symbol. Homosexuality could be charged against any group of men who had been separated from women for so long.
Philip’s plan would not be effective if the Templars were banned only in France; he needed to push the pope to carry the banner of his own anti-Templar crusade. England reacted against the Templars only after the papal decree, and even then without the same vigor as the French. Edward II, the king of England, waited until a second order came, on the fifteenth of December, 1307. After this order he waited another three weeks before ordering the Templars arrested. By this time only two Templars were to be found. They were not subjected to the Inquisition-style tortures that the French Templars received.
In England, where torture had been outlawed, there would be no confessions of worshiping a severed head, defiling the sacred cross, or homosexuality. The pope kept pushing Edward for both more arrests and more confessions, but Edward held firm against torture. To counter this stance, in 1310 the pope ordered Edward II to allow his own torturers access to the imprisoned Templars. He signed the order to torture in the name of God on Christmas Eve. Despite the acts of the pope, few English Templars suffered the fate of their French brother knights.
Outside France, reaction to the pope was mixed. Arrests and torture did take place in the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily, but most of the Templars survived. In German lands (there was no united Germany, only an ever changing network of principalities), the knights walked boldly into court armed with their weapons. They were determined to go to war with this anti-pope and their accusers. No one challenged them. The German Templars would find a haven in the Teutonic Knights when the Templar order itself was disbanded.
Only in Scotland and Portugal were the claims of the French king and the orders of the pope completely ignored. The Templars lucky enough to escape France and flee to such safe havens would survive. Scotland, at odds with England, was one of the safest refuges to the escaping Templars, and many fled there to the open arms of Robert the Bruce and the Sinclair family, which had been instrumental in organizing them centuries earlier.19
The pope would get his way in banning the Templars, but many survived and took much of their wealth underground. The properties of the Templars, their lands, and some of their monies were seized by Philip, and he decided, of course, that these confiscated lands all belonged to him. Most of the Templar wealth, however, was not to be found. As agents of the French king searched the cities and the countryside for Templars and their wealth, the resistance grew more well organized. In the course of fighting a war, the Templars had built up a fleet so substantial that some ports banned it because the citizens were afraid it would rival the trading ability of their own fleets. The principal ports of La Rochelle and nearby Le Havre, which would later become significant in the Atlantic trade, were the last of France that many of the escaping knights saw.
When the agents of the French king reached the Templar precept in Paris, they expected to find massive hoards of gold, the backbone of the Templar bank. Instead they found very little. The Templars had been tipped off, and a wagon train
laden with whatever had been stored in Paris was secreted and quickly made its way to La Rochelle. In the port city it was loaded on Templar ships and disappeared from the clutches of the greedy king and from history. Only legend tells us where the treasure fleet of the Parisian Knights Templar might have gone. These legends, in fact, do not agree with each other, variously saying that the treasure reached Mediterranean seaports, Portugal, Ireland, Scotland, and possibly even Scandinavia. All were possible. While the only Templars arrested in Scotland admitted they had escaped by sea, they refused to reveal any of the ports that had granted the Templars safe passage or landing. Nor does history record any such official guarantee of safe conduct granted by any nation.
The only ports where the Templar fleet and the escaping Templar knights might be considered welcome would be places that were hostile to the pope. Scotland at the time was reeling from the murder of John Red Comyn in the church of the Grey Friars, and Bruce and others had earned excommunication for the sacrilegious act. But the larger ports of Scotland, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and even Aberdeen were being watched by English spies. In fact, these ports were blockaded part of the time by the English king, who was trying to find and capture Robert the Bruce. In England the enemies of the Templars were disappointed as well. The treasury of the London temple simply disappeared. How much of this wealth made it safely to Scotland and the guardianship of the Sinclair family is unknown, but part of it was used to buy weapons for Robert the Bruce.