The Templars
Page 35
He would never see Cyprus again.
*
The crossing was slow and the Templar master missed the date of his appointment with the pope by several weeks, but it did not matter much. Clement had been struck down during the autumn by a crippling bout of intestinal trouble and was too ill to see anyone until the new year. James could therefore proceed in a leisurely fashion after his arrival in France – probably through the port of Marseilles, where the Templars had a strong naval presence and a house that managed the shipping between Cyprus and the west. His ultimate destination was the papal court in Poitiers, an elegant French town on the River Clain with a glorious palace including a vast receiving chamber built for Eleanor of Aquitaine, known as the Hall of Lost Footsteps. As he made his way there he had plenty of time to familiarize himself with the state of the French kingdom.
Philip IV’s dynasty, the Capetians, had ruled France for more than four centuries. During the thirteenth century they had greatly expanded the direct reach of the crown throughout the realm, asserting direct authority over Normandy, Anjou, Brittany and Toulouse, which had earlier been ruled by virtually independent magnates or foreign kings. From a small pocket of royal demesne (directly controlled land) around Paris the Capetians had mastered most of the western seaboard of the kingdom, and stamped their mark south to the Pyrenees and east to the river Rhône.
The dynasty claimed ultimate descent from Charlemagne. Their long history and recent sharp expansion had bred in successive generations of kings a pronounced sacerdotal self-importance. In 1297 Philip had secured sainthood for his illustrious grandfather Louis IX, and just as he idolized Louis, so he considered himself a superlatively Christian king of a genuinely special kingdom. He was keen that everyone else should acknowledge this as well.
Philip’s religiosity was not far from pomposity, and inevitably some of his subjects sniggered. They found in short order that this was a bad idea. In 1301 Bernard Saisset, bishop of Pamiers, called Philip a useless owl, ‘the handsomest of birds which is worth absolutely nothing... such is our king of France, who can do nothing except to stare at men’. This was both unwise and inaccurate and it landed the bishop on trial for sorcery, blasphemy, fornication, heresy and treason. Philip was a man of little warmth and no great intellectual curiosity, but he was a calculating zealot, committed to his own self-serving form of piety, able to convince himself of the worst intentions in others and quite unafraid of destroying anyone who stood in his way.
The most notorious example of Philip’s righteous anger was his vicious and highly personal vendetta against Pope Boniface VIII between 1296 and 1301. This had begun over Philip’s attempts to grab tax revenue raised from the French church to spend on his military projects, but it rapidly spiralled into an ill-tempered contest for absolute authority (a furious dispute over Bishop Saisset’s arrest was one battle in this fiercely fought war). Boniface tried to browbeat Philip with a series of papal edicts, culminating with a bull known as Unam Sanctam* which aggressively set out the spiritual supremacy of the church and argued that obedience to Rome was expected from all men, including kings. It stated with little ambiguity that ‘it is altogether necessary for salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman pontiff’.15
The king’s response to this was simple and brutal. In September 1303 Philip’s trusted minister William of Nogaret took several thousand mercenaries to Anagni, near Rome, surrounded Boniface in the papal residence there, barged in and roughed him up. Legend later had it that William of Nogaret slapped Boniface; whether or not this was true, the pope was held hostage for several days and his house ransacked. He was so badly shaken that he died within a month of returning to Rome, raging and delirious with fever.† Boniface’s successor, Benedict XI, died after only nine months, and the French had their way in the end with the election of Clement.
Churchmen were not the only group to have been ill-treated during Philip’s reign. The king’s pressing need for money, the catalyst for his first clashes with Boniface, arose from France’s continual involvement in wars against her neighbours. When Philip took the crown as a seventeen-year-old in 1285 he inherited a bitter and fruitless struggle against Aragon. Technically a crusade, although really nothing more than a southern turf war absurdly sanctified by a partisan pope, the French had lost the war and incurred large debts in the process.
War with Aragon was followed in the late 1290s by a sapping series of military campaigns against England’s ageing warrior-king Edward I over his refusal to play the role of a French subject with respect to his lands in Gascony. By 1305 this had been settled with a peace treaty that betrothed Philip’s daughter with Edward’s son, but the end of hostilities had been complicated by a major series of campaigns against Flanders. On top of this, Philip’s wife of twenty years, Jeanne of Navarre, died at the end of March 1305, and Philip, given over to superstition as well as suspicion, came to believe she had been murdered by the sorcery of Guichard, bishop of Troyes, whom he hounded from the kingdom.16
By the time of James’ arrival in France in 1306, France’s greatest problems were neither Philip’s bereavement nor the threat of foreign kings. They were financial: the kingdom was in the throes of a full-blown monetary crisis. The cost of the campaigns against England and Flanders had been enormous, and the government had resorted to a number of precarious financial tactics to cope with the strain on its treasury. The most damaging of these was currency manipulation. Louis IX had undertaken a major review of the coinage, issuing in 1266 a new coin of almost pure silver known as the gros tournois. These were worth twelve deniers, the common physical currency of the realm. The official monetary value of the gros was at first stable and the coin was trusted. But this changed in 1295, when Philip and his ministers began to devalue the currency in order to meet the needs of the king’s war policy.17 To raise money for the straining royal treasury, the gros was revalued at 15 deniers, and the amount of silver in each coin was reduced. Eight years later, in 1303, the gros was revalued again to 26 and a quarter deniers. By 1306 there were 41 and a half deniers to a gros, and the government had been forced to ban its subjects from taking coin out of the country to preserve what scarce supply of silver they had left in circulation. This ruinous policy had crashed the French currency, causing rapid and damaging inflation and reducing the real value of money more than threefold.
In the summer of 1306 Philip’s ministers had attempted to reverse the policy by taking a large amount of money out of circulation. This new initiative was sold with a pious twist as a return to the ‘good money’ of St Louis, but a sharp deflationary policy was even more unpopular than the drift to devaluation, since it meant people had to return their coins to the royal mints, where they were paid out a much smaller amount than they put in. Meanwhile, debts and food prices were still accounted in the old, ‘bad’ money – which remained in circulation.
The cost of living doubled at a stroke and in Paris on 30 December there was such serious rioting – exacerbated by dreadful weather and flooding – that the king was forced to take refuge behind the gates of the Temple, which he decided was a safer stronghold than the royal palace on the Île de la Cité.
The first victim of Philip’s financial policies was France’s Jewish population. Jews in the west had traditionally been protected by their Christian monarchs, who permitted them to engage in moneylending at interest – which was in theory prohibited to followers of the Roman church. Through a combination of heavy one-off taxes and loans extorted with menaces, many secular rulers had found the Jews to be a valuable source of revenue. The rise of Italian banking in the late thirteenth century had diminished the importance of Jews to royal finance, just as poisonously anti-Semitic attitudes arose across Europe, making mistreatment of Jewish communities a tool of easy populist policy. Jews were lampooned in public plays, attacked by mobs, and became the subjects of absurd myths which portrayed them as child-murderers and sexual monsters. Philip IV believed and encouraged a popular prejudice which
held that French Jews would obtain communion wafers and attack them with water, fire and knives, thus re-crucifying Christ, whose presence was held to be contained within.18
Driven by financial opportunism and naked bigotry, kings and nobles had begun to expel Jews from their lands, taking or auctioning their property. Philip Augustus had ordered Jews to leave the royal lands around Paris in 1182. Jews had been thrown out of Brittany in 1240 and Philip’s cousin Charles II of Anjou had ejected the Jews from his lands in 1289. Edward I, who had his own cripplingly expensive wars to fund, expelled the Jews of Gascony and England by royal edict in 1288 and 1290 respectively, helping himself to a windfall seizure of Jewish wealth, estates, shops and houses.
Desperate for a supply of silver with which to stock the royal mints, Philip issued orders on 21 June 1306 for his officials to carry out a co-ordinated round-up one month and one day later. On 22 July around 100,000‡ Jewish men, women and children were arrested and imprisoned while their wealth and property was inventoried. They were told to leave the kingdom within a month on pain of death. The persecution of the Jews was not limited to land directly ruled by the king: it was carried out, pointedly, in parts of France where another lord technically held sovereignty over the Jewish population. ‘Every Jew must leave my land, taking none of his possessions with him; or let him choose a new God for himself, and we will be One People.’ This was the sentence of exodus later attributed by a Jewish writer to Philip IV as columns of hungry, broken refugees traipsed towards the Pyrenees, the Netherlands and the Holy Roman Empire.
The expulsion of the Jews, closely supervised by William of Nogaret, had been completed just weeks before James of Molay’s arrival in France, and the master must have heard about it at first hand. In itself the policy did not concern the Templars, or bear any relevance to the policies he had come to discuss. But its outcome would. The physical expulsion of the Jews was completed successfully, but it did not bring in anything like the amount of silver that the king needed to restore the currency to its former value. This left Philip’s government critically short of options, and casting about for other rich groups to raid.
The Templars were hardly inconspicuous in this regard. Their treasuries in Aragon, England and Cyprus held hundreds of kilograms in silver, as did the vaults in the Paris Temple.19 In 1306 the Temple was still providing essential accounting services to the king under its treasurer John of Tour, who advanced the crown credit to make routine payments. These services made the Temple valuable, but they would also make it vulnerable.
Philip was in a particularly zealous mood that summer, more determined than at any other point in his reign to demonstrate his special credentials as the ‘most Christian king’. Expelling the Jews was both expedient and a demonstration of the king’s muscular hatred of all false faith. His ‘good money’ financial policy explicitly cast him as a true heir to his grandfather St Louis. To emphasize his link Philip had also rearranged the royal tombs in the abbey of Saint-Denis, so that his own resting place would be close to his grandfather’s.
In May 1307 Philip IV was at the papal court in Poitiers, hectoring a reluctant Clement V to give him permission to put Pope Boniface VIII on posthumous trial for a familiar cocktail of ridiculous charges including heresy, sodomy, sorcery and murder.§ Blackening Boniface’s reputation served a dual purpose: it satisfied Philip’s grudge against the pope, and it pounded home the notion of the God-sponsored wondrousness of French kingship.
Clement was deeply uneasy, and tried to make a bargain: he would formally forgive all of those involved in the Agnani incident (chief among them William of Nogaret) if the king would withdraw his persecution of Boniface’s memory. No deal was forthcoming and Philip took his leave around 15 May, not long before James of Molay reached the papal court. It is likely that William of Nogaret and his colleague William of Plaisians, another leading minister of Philip IV, remained with the pope long enough to encounter the Templar master. The mood can only have been tense. It was well known that the French king had raised with the pope the issue of uniting the Templars and the Hospitallers. One ambassador at the papal court wrote to his master in Aragon, saying that ‘according to insistent rumour the Pope must deal with the merging of the Orders, and intends to do so with them’.20
By the time James crossed paths with William of Nogaret in Poitiers, the minister had begun to compile a dossier on the Templars: quietly interviewing disgruntled members of the order who had been expelled or had otherwise left under a cloud. The purpose of the dossier was not yet clear – but at best it was a ledger of skeletons in the closet, to be stored away for future use as ammunition against the Templars and, by proxy, the pope. Whatever the initial intention, its contents were already lurid.
The first contributor to William of Nogaret’s files was a dissolute townsman by the name of Esquin of Floyran, from Béziers in the Languedoc. Around 1305 he had been in prison with a Templar who had run away from the order, and he claimed that while they were locked up together his cell-mate had confided tales of immorality, particularly involving the ceremonies by which new knights and sergeants were received.
Esquin had talked up these salacious stories to his jailors, and on release he had attempted to sell his story to the highest bidder. He began with the king of Aragon, James II, securing an audience with the king’s confessor and offering to give up his story in return for 1,000 livres in annual income and 3,000 in ready cash if what he said was found to be true. James had brushed him off, but Esquin was not discouraged: he took the story to the king of France. On arriving at court he was pushed towards William of Nogaret, who saw the value in keeping track of whatever gossip he could that might be detrimental to the order at a sensitive time. Esquin was questioned, his story was taken down, and further evidence was sought out. Moles were planted in Templar houses in France. So it was that a pool of accusation, hearsay, rumour and gossip began to be assembled at the French royal court. By the time James of Molay reached the papal court at Poitiers, surveillance had been underway for as long as two years. William was not quite ready to act on the evidence he was compiling. But he could and he would.
*
In the early summer of 1307 James travelled north from Poitiers to Paris, where, on 24 June, a general chapter of the order was held: a conference of leading officials at which the foremost topics of discussion must have been the threat of merger. The master was often in the company of Hugh of Piraud, who had held many senior offices, including the posts of master of France, acting master of Provence and visitor (a senior supervisory post) of England and France. It must have given James a degree of confidence to know that Hugh had backed Philip decisively during the conflict with Boniface, and that the Temple in Paris had retained many of its financial duties to the kingdom on his watch, working in tandem with royal accountants in the Louvre, and paying troops and royal wages on behalf of the crown under the supervision of John of Tour.
James returned to the papal court towards the end of July, and on 4 August the master struck out from Poitiers to visit Montgauguier in Angoulême. Here he wrote a few letters addressing the election of a new provincial master in Aragon and Catalonia, including one to King James II. By 8 September he had returned to Poitiers and was still focused on the Aragonese mastership, now settled on Simon of Lenda.21 Micromanaging Simon’s accession to his new job occupied the next few days, as James dictated several long letters, exhorting him to do his duty to God, the Temple and himself and telling him what to do with the effects and servants of his predecessor. Another letter was dashed off to Blanche, queen of Aragon, recommending the ‘provident and trustworthy’ new master.22
All this was business as usual. Yet as he went about his work, James was filled with a growing sense that something was awry.# It was later claimed that on a visit to Philip’s court that summer he had appeared in front of the king and some of his ministers and ‘explained several statutes of his Order’.
The first stories of Templar impropriety to reach the royal co
urt, by way of Esquin of Floyran, concerned reception ceremonies. New recruits would be lectured about the onerous duties and tough existence of a brother, questioned about their willingness to devote themselves to the harsh existence of knighthood in the east, and promised that they would receive ‘the bread and water and poor clothing of the house and much pain and suffering’.23 Then they would be given their white or black mantle, and would receive a prayer from the Temple chaplain, before the person leading the induction (usually a senior official of the order) ‘should raise him up and kiss him on the mouth and it is customary for the chaplain brother to kiss him also’.24
Exchanging kisses was an accepted part of feudal relationships and a common way of expressing Christian peace. If it shocked the king or his ministers, they made no mention of it in their first meeting with James. Neither did they take the master to task on any other issues of sexualized contact between brothers in the order, although the Rule certainly mentioned them. Several clauses denounced the ‘filthy, stinking sin’ of sodomy. An entry in the case studies on penance related the story of three brothers who had been caught having sex with one another, who were sentenced to perpetual imprisonment in Château Pèlerin.25
The king chose to take issue with another, seemingly more innocuous practice: that of irregular confession. James admitted that as master he had sometimes heard the confessions of fellow knights who were unwilling to speak of their sins to a chaplain for fear of the harsh penalties they would impose for even small misdemeanours. He explained that he often heard the brothers confess and gave them absolution privately, overlooking the fact that since he was not ordained as a priest he had no spiritual authority to do so.26