The Tragedy of the Templars

by Michael Haag

  After the death of Boniface, the College of Cardinals elected a new pope, but he died within a year. After long deliberation and pressure from Philip IV, the College produced a Frenchman, who came to the papal throne in 1305 as Clement V. Never throughout his papacy did Clement set foot in Rome or indeed Italy; instead he moved between Lyon and Poitiers until March 1309, when he set up court at Avignon in Provence, which at that time technically lay outside the jurisdiction of the kings of France. Clement then went on to pack the College of Cardinals with Frenchmen; not surprisingly the next six popes all resided at Avignon, and all were French.

  This did not mean that Clement V was a puppet of Philip IV; rather, the new pope understood that, if he was to achieve his papal ambitions, it would not be, as Boniface had insisted in Unam Sanctam, by trying to make Philip submit to his authority but by cultivating their relationship and securing Philip’s co-operation. Clement’s great ambition was a new crusade, but it would need the collaboration and leadership of the French king. The proposed venture had its difficulties, however, not least because since the fall of Ruad the Mongols had converted en masse to Islam, not to Christianity as had been hoped.

  Another difficulty was presented by Philip himself. Clement succeeded in persuading the king to take the cross at the end of December 1305; he freed Philip from the distraction of local conflict by negotiating a peace between the French king and King Edward I of England; and he diverted 10 per cent of the Church’s income in France to Philip’s coffers to finance the new crusade. But in Philip’s view a prerequisite for a successful crusade was the merging of the two military orders, the Templars and the Hospitallers. Moreover, Philip would command the new order; it would become an instrument of France, for Philip’s propagandists also insisted that eventually his command should pass to one of his sons, who likewise should succeed him as king of Jerusalem. Then again, there was a large element of hypocrisy in these French plans. Recovering the Holy Land was not really Philip’s priority; rather, his ambition was to conquer the Christian Byzantine Empire and to establish himself on the ancient imperial throne at Constantinople.

  In May 1307 Pope Clement met with the Templar and Hospitaller Grand Masters at his court in France, where they submitted their own views on the proposed crusade and the unification of the orders. The comments made by the Grand Master of the Hospitallers, Fulk of Villaret, about the merging of the orders do not survive, but it seems that he was opposed, as his proposal for the crusade assumed that the Hospitallers and the Templars would operate independently. Fulk favoured a small initial expedition to the East, a policy the Hospitallers in fact pursued in June of that very same year, when they seized the island of Rhodes, which had been a Byzantine possession, an enterprise that gave them a well-fortified and independent state of their own. A large crusade, went Fulk’s argument, should follow only after forward bases had been secured.

  But after the Templars’ experience of the failure at Ruad, Jacques de Molay opposed a small-scale expedition and wanted an all-out crusade. This meant calling on the kings of Spain, Sicily, Germany, England and France to raise an army of between 12,000 and 15,000 knights and 5,000 soldiers on foot. This enormous force was to be raised secretly and transported on Venetian, Genoese and other Italian ships to Cyprus, from where it was to be launched against the coast of Palestine. Jacques de Molay’s plan was based on a serious and realistic assessment of the military problems facing a crusade aimed at the recovery of the Holy Land, although he knew that this was not in line with popular opinion, which wanted the rhetoric of crusade without the effort or commitment. Moreover it flew in the face of Philip’s hypocritical intentions. In the end Jacques de Molay’s plan amounted to wishful thinking, but to admit that would have meant reassessing the role of the Templars in changing times, something that was not in the nature of the Grand Master to do.

  On the matter of uniting the two orders, Jacques de Molay was also unaccommodating. He admitted that there could be some advantages in the merger, principally that a united order would be stronger. But he also pointed out that the question had been raised before, only to be rejected. Competition between the Templars and the Hospitallers made the orders more effective, he said, as it provided the stimulus for each to outdo the other. Nor did one duplicate the functions of the other; rather, they were complementaries, placing different emphases on providing alms, transporting men and supplies across the sea, protecting pilgrims and crusaders, and making war against the infidel. Ultimately the great purpose of the military orders was to further the crusade, wrote Jacques de Molay to the pope, and as the Hospitallers and the Templars ‘are better suited and more useful for reconquering and guarding the Holy Land than other peoples are’,5 they ought to be kept separate.

  But unfortunately for the Templars there was no hope of the sort of mass crusade envisioned by Jacques de Molay. The Hospitallers had shown a keener awareness of current realities by going for the lesser option, one that all but guaranteed their survival by creating a state of their own on Rhodes. The Templars once again were left in limbo and were now increasingly the victims of attacks on their seeming idleness.

  The Templars, wrote Rostan Berenguier, a poet of Marseille at around this time, ‘waste this money which is intended for the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre on cutting a fine figure in the world; they deceive people with their idle trumpery, and offend God; since they and the Hospital have for so long allowed the false Turks to remain in possession of Jerusalem and Acre; since they flee faster than the holy hawk; it is a pity, in my view, that we do not rid ourselves of them for good’.6

  After his meeting with the pope, Jacques de Molay travelled to Paris, where on 12 October 1307 his apparent intimacy with the royal family was evident for all to see when, in the presence of Philip IV himself, he walked in procession holding one of the pall cords at the funeral of the king’s sister Catherine of Courtenay. Other Templar leaders, usually based in Cyprus, were also in Paris at this time.

  The following day at dawn, Friday 13 October, Jacques de Molay was arrested by the king’s men, led by William of Nogaret.

  Philip’s order for the arrest of the Templar leadership in Paris and of every Templar throughout France had been circulated secretly the month before: ‘A bitter thing, a lamentable thing,’ went the opening lines of the order, dated 14 September, ‘a thing horrible to contemplate, terrible to hear, a heinous crime, an execrable evil, an abominable deed, a hateful disgrace, a completely inhuman thing, indeed remote from all humanity.’7

  24

  The Trial

  RUMOURS had long been circulating of strange rituals practised by the Templars. Even Jacques de Molay, while attending a chapter meeting in Cyprus in 1291, either before or after the fall of Acre but before he became Grand Master, said that ‘he wanted to eradicate from the order all things which displeased him, fearing that, if he did not do so, it would eventually harm the order’.1 One story told of novice Templars undergoing humiliating initiation ceremonies which forced them to demonstrate their subjugation to their superiors, in some cases even kissing their behinds. At the papal coronation in late autumn 1305 King Philip repeated these rumours to Clement V, saying they were going round in both religious and secular circles, and asked him to investigate.

  In May 1307, at the same time as Clement was interviewing the Templar and Hospitaller Grand Masters about uniting the two orders and their plans for a crusade, the pope heard something of these bizarre practices from Jacques de Molay himself. In the pope’s words, the Grand Master told him of ‘many strange and unheard-of things’ which had caused Clement ‘great sorrow, anxiety and upset of heart’.2 The Grand Master feared that these initiation ceremonies, which had been going on for a century or more, were getting out of hand, and the Pope agreed to instigate an inquiry to root out these practices before they erupted into scandal. Clement was a worldly man who came from a military family and understood well enough the sort of barrack room behaviour that took place between soldiers. But Philip had bee
n telling him something more. For years he had been planting spies within the order, and now he was suggesting to the pope that through their practices and beliefs the Templars were undermining the very tenets of the faith. Lewd behaviour was one thing, but the Templars were a religious order on the same footing as the Benedictines, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, all directly responsible to the pope, and Clement was being confronted with the possibility that the Templars were infected with heresy.

  On 24 August 1307 Clement wrote to Philip telling him that ‘we could scarcely bring our mind to believe what was said at that time’,3 but there was no need for haste as he was not feeling well and would be visiting thermal baths in September to take the cure; a formal papal investigation into the order would begin in the middle of October when he returned.

  Seizing the initiative, this was the moment that Philip began laying his plans for the arrest and destruction of the Templars. The middle of October was his deadline, set by Clement’s cure.

  The Templars were taken by surprise when Philip IV’s officers came for them in the early hours of the morning of Friday 13 October 1307. They were arrested simultaneously throughout France – about two thousand men in all, from knights down to the most humble agricultural workers and household servants. There was no resistance. Most of the Templars were unarmed and many were middle aged or even elderly, and except for the Paris Temple their houses were unfortified; with their active soldiers badly needed in the East, the Templars resident in France were no more a fighting force than the Franciscans or Cistercians. The close relationship between the French crown and the Templars probably explains why the king’s officials were able to walk right in to the Temple on that Friday dawn. The keep, which had been the Templars’ stronghold, immediately became their prison, and the Templars arrested throughout France were also brought here for incarceration, examination and torture.

  The efficiency of the operation benefited from previous raids when King Philip struck against Italian bankers resident in France in 1291 and against Jews in 1306, in each case arresting them, throwing them out of the country and seizing their property and their money to reduce his debts. A few Templars did escape – about twenty-four, it seems – though only one of any importance, Gerard of Villiers, the master of France. Several were apprehended later, despite disguising themselves by a change of dress and shaving off their beards; some had gone to ground in the countryside, one was picked up off the streets of Paris where he was living as a beggar, and another fled to England, where he was arrested later. Some even fled to Muslim countries, or were there as prisoners at the time of the arrests; in 1323 an Irish Franciscan, Brother Simon, who came to Cairo during a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, met a man called Peter, now married but once a Templar knight. He was still looking after pilgrims, as he had always done, this time as one of three dragomen sent to interpret for the visiting Franciscan and to provide him with a pass to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. According to Simon, all three were secret worshippers of Christ. ‘All are very courteous and generous and useful to the poor and to pilgrims. They are very wealthy, possessing abundance of gold, silver and precious stones and costly garments and other wealth, and living in great pomp.’4

  The charge against the Templars was heresy. When being inducted into the order, went the accusations, initiates were required to deny Christ, to spit, piss or trample on the cross or images of Christ, and to kiss the receiving official on the mouth, navel, base of the spine, and sometimes on the bottom or the penis. They were also obliged to submit to homosexual practises as required within the order, which practised institutionalised sodomy. And they wore a small belt which had been consecrated by touching a strange idol which looked like a cat or a human head with a long beard called Baphomet (possibly an Old French distortion of Mohammed). Moreover the Templars held their reception ceremonies and chapter meetings in secret and at night; the brothers did not believe in the sacraments, and the Templar priests did not consecrate the host; and although not ordained by the Church, high Templar officials, including the Grand Master, absolved brothers of their sins. And drawing a contrast with the Hospitallers, the Templars were accused of failing to make charitable gifts as they were meant to do, nor did they practise hospitality.

  Philip was able to arrest and charge the Templars owing to a loophole in the law going back to the time of the Cathars and their trials nearly eighty years earlier. So serious was the spread of the Cathar heresy in the early 1200s that Pope Honorius III had bestowed extraordinary powers on the Inquisition, extending its reach even to the exempt orders, the Templars, the Hospitallers and St Bernard’s Cistercians, whenever there was a suspicion of heresy. After the Cathar heresy was eradicated, this grant of powers was forgotten by the papacy, but it was never revoked. This meant that the Templars, though otherwise answerable to no secular or religious authority other than the pope, were vulnerable to the charge of heresy – a discovery made by Philip IV’s assiduous lawyers, who now used it to devastating effect.

  As heresy was the one possible charge that the king could successfully level against the Templars, so heresy it had to be. No time was wasted in mounting a propaganda campaign against the Templars: the king’s minister William of Nogaret announced the heresy before a large crowd in Paris, and under the Inquisitor’s instructions the charge was repeated from church pulpits. The mere mention of heresy had the immediate effect of blackening the order’s reputation.

  The prisoners were interrogated and tortured by royal agents under the direction of William of Nogaret, who in 1303 had taken part in the attempt to overthrow Pope Boniface VIII, since when he had remained excommunicated. William’s family had suffered persecution because his grandfather had been a Cathar, but by his cleverness and cynicism he had risen in Philip’s court and was ennobled in 1299, becoming the king’s Keeper of the Seals and his right-hand man. These facts may have contributed to William of Nogaret’s contempt for the papacy and his unscrupulous ambition to make France the greatest power in the world.

  Many of those arrested were simple men, not battle-hardened Templar knights but ploughmen, artisans and servants who helped keep the order running, and these would have succumbed to torture or even the threat of torture fairly quickly. The knights themselves, however, had been long prepared for the worst in Outremer, for that day when they might be captured and thrown into a Muslim dungeon, be tortured or face execution unless they abjured their faith. And yet these too rapidly and all but unanimously confessed. The tortures could be savage: scores died undergoing what was called ecclesiastical procedure, which did not mean breaking limbs or drawing blood but which routinely included being kept chained in isolation and fed on bread and water; being drawn on the rack until the joints were dislocated, being raised over a beam by a rope tied to the wrists that had been bound behind the victim’s back and sometimes with weights attached to the testicles, and having fat rubbed into the soles of the feet, which were then placed before a fire. One tortured Templar priest was so badly burned that the bones fell out of his feet. Another of the accused said that he would have agreed ‘to kill God’5 to stop his torment.

  Yet physical torture was far from the only element in the confessions. Instead, one of the worst problems for the Templars was the overturning of their spiritual and social universe. They had spent their lives in the enclosed world of a military elite to which they owed absolute loyalty and were constantly reminded of the support they in turn received from the rest of society. But now they were reviled, told that they were heretics, and no support seemed to be forthcoming from any quarter. The walls, ceiling and floor of their enclosed world had fallen away, leaving them exposed, bewildered and lost. Under these conditions it is not surprising that Jacques de Molay, the Grand Master, Geoffrey of Charney, preceptor of Normandy, and Hugh of Pairaud, whose rank of visitor of France made him the most elevated Templar in Western Christendom after Jacques de Molay, were among the near unanimity of Templars who rapidly confessed.

  On 19 October 13
07 the Inquisitorial hearings began at the Paris Temple. On 25 and 26 October Jacques de Molay was called to testify. His confession, made before the hearing, was recorded and sent to the pope as proof of heresy. In less than two weeks since their arrest, the Templars’ honour had been stained for ever, and the news of their guilt reverberated throughout the whole of Christendom.

  Jacques de Molay’s confession, made on 24 October, stated that his initiation ceremony, which took place forty-two years earlier, followed the usual observances and statutes of the order, but then after the receptor placed the mantle on his shoulders he

  caused a certain bronze cross bearing the image of the Crucified to be brought into his presence, and told and ordered him to deny Christ whose image was there. Against his will he did this. Then the said receiver ordered him to spit on it but he spat on the ground. Asked how many times, he said on oath that he only spat once, and he remembered this clearly. Asked if, when he vowed chastity, anything was said to him about homosexual practices with the brothers, he said on oath that this was not the case and that he had never done this. Asked on oath whether other brothers of the said order were received in this manner, he said that he believed there was no difference between his and others’ receptions. [. . .] Asked whether he had told or included any lie or omitted any fact in his deposition because of threat, fear or torture or imprisonment or any other reason he said on his oath that he had not; indeed he told the whole truth for the salvation of his soul.6

  Although Jacques de Molay did not admit to much, his confession acquires greater force when seen in conjunction with others made at about the same time. On 21 October, Geoffrey of Charney, preceptor of Normandy, went down the same list of offences in the same order. After the mantle was placed on his shoulders, ‘there was brought to him a certain cross bearing the image of Jesus Christ, and the said receptor told him not to believe in the one whose image was portrayed there since he was a false prophet and was not God. And then the said receptor made him deny Jesus Christ three times, but he claimed to have done this only with his tongue and not with his heart’.7 Geoffrey of Charney could not remember if he had then spat on the image, but he did recall kissing his receptor on the navel and being told it was better to have sex with brothers than with women, although he said he never did this.