Secrets of the Knights Templar

by S. J. Hodge

  The Latin kingdom moved to the island of Cyprus, with the Templars and the Hospitallers both setting up new headquarters there. In 1192, they had bought Cyprus from Richard the Lionheart. He charged them 100,000 Saracen bezants for it and they made an initial payment of 40,000 bezants, aiming to raise the rest of the money by taxing the Cypriot people. This was so unpopular with the inhabitants that a plot was hatched to murder the small force of Templars stationed there. On hearing of this, the Order gave the island to Guy de Lusignan (who had lost his right to be King of Jerusalem on the death of his wife Queen Sibylla in 1190). While Guy’s descendants ruled Cyprus, the Templars and the Hospitallers built castles there and a small group of each Order maintained a presence to protect the de Lusignan kings. So when the Christians were banished from the Holy Land, the Templars were not as badly off as those civilians who had escaped with their lives but little else. Most ordinary Christians fled with only what they were wearing and had to fall upon the charity of their fellow Christians in Europe. The Templars simply joined their brothers in Cyprus and made plans for rebuilding their future.

  However, this was not as straightforward as might be supposed. Although they had castles on Cyprus, the entire rationale of the Order had changed. They had been formed in the East with the singular purpose of protecting pilgrims as they travelled to the holy shrines and of defending the holy sites against the infidel. Though there were also important sites of Christian pilgrimage in the West, none were as significant as those in the Holy Land and the Templars found themselves being needed, not to fight and defend, but to farm and make money to sustain the Order. With few battles to be fought, they used Cyprus mainly as a base for their financial and commercial endeavours and, in July 1296, Pope Boniface VIII issued a papal bull, granting them a tax-free status on exports and imports to and from Cyprus. They held this privilege virtually everywhere else, but this affirmed their continued standing in the eyes of the Church.

  The Fall of Ruad

  In 1293, Jacques de Molay was elected Grand Master of the Knights Templar. Having spent 30 years serving the Order as a knight in Outremer, his ambition was to lead a new Crusade and win back the Holy Land for Christendom. One of the first things he did was to travel across Europe to raise support for the Templars and for another Crusade. Along with the Pope, Charles II of Naples and Edward I of England also pledged their support and helped the Order to rebuild their forces after their terrible recent losses. De Molay had reasons to believe that his plan would be successful. In the Holy Land there were already several uprisings against the brutal and oppressive Mamluk rule and a Christian Crusade would benefit from such disunity. Food and ships were amassed, and a surge of fresh hope swept across Europe in 1300 in anticipation of the forthcoming campaign. As the year was also the 1300th anniversary of the birth of Christ, Pope Boniface announced it to be a jubilee year, promising salvation and redemption to all who visited St Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

  To continue the celebration of the Christian faith, that summer the Templars, Hospitallers, Teutonic Knights and Henry, the King of Cyprus, sailed to the small island of Ruad (also known as Arwad) in Syria, and launched a series of attacks on it. In 1291, the Templars had lost Atlit Castle, and since then, the Mamluks had been consistently destroying any remaining Crusader ports and fortresses. The Crusaders decided that the Syrian port of Tortosa was the best location to establish another stronghold, with a view to attacking the Mamluks and recapturing territory in the Holy Land. They planned to coordinate an offensive with the Mongols, with whom they had been negotiating and who fiercely hated the Mamluks. By landing on Ruad, they were just three kilometres (two miles) from Tortosa, but although the Crusaders reached there at the appointed time and began their raid on Tortosa, the Mongols did not arrive, and the Crusaders were forced to retreat back to Cyprus. They left a small garrison on Ruad and, from the end of 1301, under the command of the Templar marshal Barthélemy de Quincy, 120 Templar knights, 500 archers and 400 servants were established in the newly strengthened fortress.

  In 1302, the Mamluks sent a fleet of 16 ships from Egypt to Tripoli from where they besieged Ruad. After weeks of hardship and nearstarvation, the Templars were forced to emerge and fight. Barthélemy de Quincy was killed, all the bowmen and Syrian Christians were executed, and the surviving Templars were taken as prisoners to Cairo, where they died of starvation anyway. Ruad had been the last Crusader foothold in the Holy Land. Though they had their headquarters in Cyprus and maintained various enterprises, the Templar Order now had no clear purpose or influence, although it still had enormous financial power.

  This is a coloured engraving of 1805, showing the castle of Ruad or Arwad, off the coast of Tortosa.

  THE DESCENT

  King Edward I of England (1239–1307) with priests and members of his court. In 1263, Edward ransacked the treasury of the London Temple to aid his fight against the Baron’s Revolt. Eight years later, in an unrelated event, his life was saved by Thomas Bérard, the master of the Knights Templar. Edward had been attacked by an assassin with a poisoned knife and Bérard sent drugs to cure him.

  Founded to defend the Holy Land and protect pilgrims there, after the final, crushing loss of Ruad, the Knights Templar were left without a purpose. Yet Pope Boniface appeared undaunted, and continued his assertion of Papal dominance as if nothing had happened to challenge the authority of the Catholic Church.

  More than any other pope, Boniface VIII made lofty claims about papal supremacy. In his Bull of 1302 he pushed the concept of papal power to an unparalleled extreme in proclaiming that ‘it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman pontiff’. This belief and his constant intervention in worldly matters led to many bitter quarrels between himself and various European powers, including the Holy Roman Emperor Albert I of Habsburg, the Roman Colonna family, King Philip IV of France, and even the writer Dante Alighieri, who wrote his essay De Monarchia to challenge Boniface’s claims of papal domination. His disagreements with Philip IV of France arose out of their common, incompatible ambitions about increasing their individual power.

  During his reign, Philip hired lawyers instead of the clergy for all his legal administration. Since the Fall of Rome, legal issues had been dealt with by the clergy, but the legal profession was redeveloping by the mid-13th century and Philip was one of the first monarchs to depend on secular lawyers rather than having the monastic orders deal with his legal matters. He also taxed the French clergy to finance ongoing wars against the English. To counteract this, in a bull of February 1296, Clericis laicos, Boniface forbade secular taxation of the clergy without prior papal approval. Philip retaliated by stopping the export of gold, silver, precious stones and even food from France to the Papal States, effectively obstructing an important source of Church income. Philip also banished papal agents from France. Angrily, Boniface declared that ‘God has set popes over kings and kingdoms’. But although the resentment continued, in September 1296, Boniface almost capitulated, by sanctioning voluntary contributions from the clergy for the defence of the state, and he gave the king the right to determine when that would be necessary. So Philip revoked his ruling about exports and accepted Boniface as mediator in one of his many disputes with Edward I of England. In his negotiations, Boniface settled most of the issues in Philip’s favour.

  However, in 1301, the feud between the Pope and the French king escalated once more, and Boniface sent Bishop Bernard Saisset to protest against Philip’s opposition to Church influence in political affairs. Instead of tactfully easing the situation, however, Bernard Saisset’s outspoken comments against the king resulted in Philip arresting him and charging him with high treason. Boniface ordered the king to free his bishop and, in February 1302, he issued a new bull, Ausculta fili, that pointed out the king’s offences against the Church and State and invited him to do penance and change his behaviour. In response, King Philip had the bull ceremoniously burned in Paris before himself and a large crowd. That
November, Boniface issued another bull, Unam Sanctam, that claimed papal supremacy and stated that kings were subordinate to the Pope. In response, William de Nogaret (1260–1313), Philip’s chief minister, publicly denounced Boniface as a heretical criminal. While Boniface prepared to excommunicate both the king and Nogaret, on 12 March 1303, a royal assembly was held in the Louvre at which Nogaret read a long series of accusations against the Pope, and demanded that a general Council be called to try him. By September of that year, Nogaret had gathered a large force of men and marched to Anagni in Italy, Boniface’s birthplace, where he demanded the Pope’s resignation. Boniface declared that he would ‘sooner die’ than resign from the papacy. Although he was protected by a few Templars and Hospitallers, Nogaret’s large band of men overpowered and captured him. Some of the band called for his murder, but instead they beat him up and then released him. The shock and humiliation left him a broken man, and the following month in Rome, he died.

  Philip IV of France

  Philip IV (1268–1314) was nicknamed ‘Le Bel’ or the Fair because he was tall, blond and handsome. At the age of 16, he had married his childhood sweetheart, Joan I of Navarre, and the following year, 1285, when he was just 17 years old, he became King of France. Through his marriage, he had the additional titles of Philip I, King of Navarre and Count of Champagne. From the start of his reign, however, his arrogance and inflexibility gained him several other nicknames and enemies. Bernard Saisset, who described him as ‘more handsome than any man in the world’, also said of him: ‘He is neither man nor beast. He is a statue.’ As a sign of his extreme piety, Philip wore a hair shirt beneath his finery and his piousness earned him the description from Giles of Rome as ‘more than man, wholly divine’.

  As a consequence of the wars his predecessors had fought against the English and the Albigensians, the land he ruled was larger than it had been for previous French monarchs. His ambition was to lead a Crusade, to gain glory and to found a French empire in the eastern Mediterranean, while he aimed to establish his brother Charles as ruler of the Byzantine Empire. Yet this determination to follow his father and grandfather’s examples and strengthen the power and standing of the French monarchy resulted in many unpopular policies. Given his intention to lead a Crusade and continual conflicts with the English and their allies in Flanders, as well as financial problems inherited from his father’s war against Aragon and his own personal extravagances, he was constantly desperate for money. One of his most unpopular methods of raising money was to devalue the French currency, and by 1306 it was reduced to a third of the value it had been when he came to the throne in 1285. In consequence, rioting broke out in Paris, forcing Philip to briefly seek refuge in the headquarters of the Knights Templar: the Paris Temple that was also their centre of finance. In another of his efforts to acquire revenue, Philip imposed taxes on the French clergy of one half of their annual income. The ensuing disquiet among the clergy prompted Pope Boniface to issue his bull forbidding the transference of any church property to the French Crown without his permission. It provoked the prolonged quarrel between the king and the Pope and led to Philip sending William de Nogaret to put Boniface under house arrest, which ultimately resulted in the Pope’s death. Clearly a man who bore a grudge, for years afterwards, Philip pursued legal action to have Boniface posthumously condemned.

  Pope Boniface VIII, proclaiming the jubilee in 1300; a fragment from a fresco painted in 1300 by Giotto di Bondone (1266–1337).

  Pope Clement V

  The new Pope immediately following Boniface, Benedict XI, died within a year. After pressure from Philip IV, the next Pope was a Frenchman. Raymond Bertrand de Got (c.1264–1314) came to the papal throne as Clement V in 1305 and never set foot in Rome or even Italy. For the first four years of his pontificate, he moved between Lyons and Poitiers and, in 1309, he set up court in Avignon in Provence. Early in 1306, he annulled Boniface’s Unam Sanctam bull that had threatened Philip’s political plans. Clement’s great ambition was a new Crusade, but for this to work, he required the collaboration and leadership of the French king. He succeeded in persuading Philip to take the cross in December 1305; he negotiated peace between Philip and Edward I, and he gave 10 per cent of the Church’s income in France to Philip’s exchequer to help fund the Crusade. In his plans for this Crusade, Philip was determined to merge the Templars and the Hospitallers to create a larger, more unified force.

  In view of this plan, in May 1307, Clement met with the Templar and Hospitaller Grand Masters at his court in France. The Grand Master of the Hospitallers, Fulk de Villaret, favoured the idea of the two orders remaining separate but thought that first they should send a modest expedition containing members of both orders to the East to conquer small areas, preparing the ground for a large Crusade to follow. After the loss of Ruad, Jacques de Molay opposed the idea of small-scale attacks, so he disagreed with Villaret’s plan. He wanted to call upon the European rulers to unite and raise a vast army between them who could then be transported on ships from Venice and Genoa to Cyprus and from there on to Palestine. His argument against the unification of the two orders was that the competition between them was stimulating; when one followed one tactic, the other tried something else. Any successes within one order were swiftly challenged by the other. But partly because Philip and the Pope were considering a Mongol alliance for the proposed Crusade and neither Grand Master had suggested this, both men’s ideas were ignored by the Pope and his ministers. Jacques de Molay’s suggestions were dismissed as being particularly unrealistic in the circumstances. The time of European monarchs leading large allied armies to the Holy Land had passed and the Templar Order was not big enough to do it alone. It is ironic that the Templars were one of the few groups who throughout the decades had retained the original focus of the Crusades, but they had simply not been large enough on their own to win. Now, once again, they were left without a direct function.

  A 14th-century illuminated manuscript showing Philip ‘the Fair’ of France. This is a Council meeting held by the king in Paris concerning his conflict with Pope Boniface VIII over the taxing of the clergy and on the besieging of Lille in 1297.

  The arrests

  After the meeting, Jacques de Molay travelled to Paris where, on Thursday, 12 October 1307, he was one of the main mourners in the funeral cortège of Philip IV’s sister, Catherine de Courtenay. The following morning, on Friday, 13 October 1307, a group of the king’s men led by William de Nogaret marched to the Paris Temple and arrested him. Across France, it is believed that approximately 15,000 Templars were arrested simultaneously. The order for the arrests had been circulated secretly a month before, and there is much debate as to whether or not the Templars were taken completely by surprise or whether they had known about what was coming and had taken measures to protect themselves. Whatever had been happening, among the arrests were many middle-aged and elderly men who worked for the Order as farmers, servants, artisans, ploughmen or sergeants. Unarmed, confused and living in unfortified properties, they put up little resistance. Made in the name of the Inquisition, the arrests followed the pattern established by Philip in 1291 when he attacked the Lombards, Italian bankers who were living in France, and again in 1306, when he arrested Jewish merchants also resident in France. The pattern was arrest, expulsion from the country, and then seizure of the exiles’ possessions.

  Although the news of the Templar arrests was greeted with shock by the public, through their banking provision many had borrowed from them and were in debt to the Order, so few men of influence hastened to their defence. Because it was so unpleasant and instigated by the king, many simply ignored what was happening. Certain nobles were already aggravated by the Templars. Their ancestors had given away land to the Order, but it was seen to have failed by not maintaining a Christian presence in the Holy Land, and so many of these nobles felt that the donations had been accepted under false pretences and many believed that, with the Templars out of the way, they could reclaim their property. The cl
ergy, meanwhile, had long resented the special privileges enjoyed by the Templar Order, so little sympathy was elicited from that quarter. In any case, nobody took it too seriously. The Templars were under papal protection and they belonged to a holy and religious confraternity that had been established for nearly two centuries.

  Reprisals

  The year before the arrests, when Philip’s currency devaluation had triggered riots and he had sought safety in the Paris Temple, he was made aware of the vast amount of wealth the Templar Order had amassed and was guarding for others. As soon as he left the Temple, he showed no restraint. As with Pope Boniface, William de Nogaret took charge of the attack on the Templars. Unscrupulous and merciless, little is known of Nogaret’s background, but it is said that his grandparents and parents, citizens of Toulouse, had been condemned as heretics during the Albigensian Crusade. He had studied law, gaining a doctorate and a professorship, and he prospered under Philip IV’s patronage. In 1299, he was made a knight and, in September 1307, the king made him Keeper of the Seal. From his study of Roman law, he adhered to the belief of the absolute supremacy of the monarch, and as a zealous royal supporter, he seemed to thrive on cruelty and the persecution of others. He was the first to bring up the notion of a link between the Templars and the Cathars, just as he was the first to proclaim that Pope Boniface was a heretic. His excommunication by Boniface in 1303 was not revoked until 1311 by Clement V. Yet he continued to act in the name of the king, and he found many enemies of the Templars to testify against them, including men who had been expelled from the Order who were prepared to give evidence against their former fellows, and he drew up the full list of accusations against the Templars a short time later. As with the Lombards and the Jews, all Templar property was confiscated on arrest. But unlike the Lombards and the Jews, the Templars were neither foreigners nor infidels: they were members of a Holy Order and subject to the Pope. Philip declared that the warrants for the arrests were recommended by the Pope, but that was not true. Clement had not been consulted and he wrote angrily to the king in October 1307: