by Dan Jones
How or why he volunteered this information is not clear. The most plausible explanation is that he was simply trapped. Having admitted the order’s established practices of kissing new inductees the master may well have sought to offset it with a defence of the Templars’ uncompromising code of discipline. He had, after all, boasted of the order’s extreme rigour in his memo arguing against union of the orders. Now, perhaps, he tried to demonstrate to the king just how tough sanctions against wayward brothers were by means of a purely self-deprecating anecdote, meant to illustrate the severity of Templar penance – so harsh that at times he took pity on his brothers and absolved them himself. James of Molay may have been offering up a minor fault as a virtue. If so, he had badly misread his audience. For when it came to the Templars, Philip IV and his ministers were not looking to be persuaded. They were looking for evidence.
The meeting with Philip did not kill off rumours of Templar misconduct. By late August these were worrying enough for James of Molay to decide he needed to act, and the man he turned to for help was the pope. On 24 August Clement wrote to the king of France, explaining that the master of the Templars had come to him in person asking for an inquiry to be opened into ‘slanders of which Your Majesty has been informed’. He went on to say that James had implored him ‘to inquire into the deeds with which they have been unjustly charged, so that they may be given penance if they are found guilty, or be discharged from this accusation if they are innocent’.27 The pope concurred that there were indeed ‘many strange and unheard of things’ being spoken about the order. Therefore, Clement said, he would be inspecting the Templar Rule for himself. As soon as he returned from a bout of treatment for his bowel problems, due to run from 1 September until 15 October, he would open an official inquiry to settle the matter once and for all. This sounded like a chance for a fair hearing and for the Templars to subject themselves to minor, voluntary reform.
With the pope on medical leave, William of Nogaret and the French party seized their moment. On 14 September sealed letters composed at the royal abbey of St Mary, near Pontoise, were distributed to government officials. These were to be acted upon one month from their receipt, when co-ordinated action was to be taken against the brothers of the Temple, carried out with the same efficiency as the expulsion of the Jews.
Eight days later another set of letters were sent by the king’s personal confessor William of Paris, an energetic Dominican friar who also served as the chief papal inquisitor in France. He was officially a servant of the church: the man with overall responsibility for rooting out heresy and wayward belief. His ultimate master was Clement V, but his position in the royal household, where he had direct access to Philip, made him a creature of the king. On 22 September he wrote to his teams of inquisitors all over the realm, telling them to prepare for a burst of activity against the Templars. The letters were kept secret. On 30 September one brother fled the order, but three days later, brothers were still being initiated, plainly suspecting nothing.
In early October James of Molay travelled to Paris, where he joined Philip at the funeral of the king’s sister-in-law Catherine, the titular Latin empress of Constantinople. The Templar master was appointed a pallbearer, hardly suggesting he was out of favour.
At dawn on the morning after the funeral all across France the king’s bailiffs and seneschals moved into action. At every Templar house in the realm, from Normandy to Toulouse, men wearing the royal livery and carrying warrants bearing the royal seal appeared before the gates, demanding that the brothers inside surrender. They were to leave their houses and come into royal custody. The charges against them were utterly heinous and scandalous almost beyond description.
‘The brothers of the Order of the Knights of the Temple, wolves in sheep’s clothing, in the habit of a religious order vilely insulting our religious faith, are again crucifying our Lord Jesus Christ,’ read the royal letters. The bailiffs were ordered to ‘hold them captive to appear before an ecclesiastical court; you will seize their moveable and immoveable goods... until you receive further instructions from us on this matter’.28
So the round-ups began. There was little resistance and only a handful of brothers tried to flee. Instead, the Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon, long renowned for their valour on the battlefield, trooped out blinking into the autumn dawn to be led away meekly to their fate.
It was Friday 13 October 1307.
* From its opening words, ‘In one holy catholic and apostolic church...’
† When Boniface’s corpse was exhumed and examined in 1605 the legend that he had died after gnawing off his own hands was finally put to rest.
‡ The large number of Jews in France (estimated by Jordan, W.C., The French Monarchy and the Jews: From Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians (Philadelphia: 1989) 203–4, as being between 40,000 and 140,000) was in part a result of expulsions elsewhere. The Jews of Europe had fled to French royal lands seeking safety as refugees.
§ The small matter of Boniface having been dead for three years was no impediment. A papal corpse had been tried at least once before, when in 897 the late pope Formosus was exhumed and held to account for perjury, for which he was found guilty. His papacy was duly struck from the records.
# There is a peculiar and problematic story in the chronicle of the Templar of Tyre, suggesting the source of discord between king and Temple was a huge loan made to the king by the Templar treasurer John of Tour, which was supposedly unauthorized by James of Molay. By this account, James of Molay sacked the treasurer and then refused to reinstate him on the king’s request, throwing a letter sent via the pope in the fire. Few historians give any credit to this story, which appears to be an ill-informed and garbled piece of anti-James prejudice, and stands in sharp contrast to the excellent eyewitness testimony in the Templar of Tyre’s account of the fall of Acre in 1291. Crawford, P. (ed.), The ‘Templar of Tyre’, Part III of the Deeds of the Cypriots (Aldershot: 2003) 179–80.
20
‘Heretical Depravity’
There has recently echoed in our ears, to our not inconsiderable astonishment and vehement horror, vouched for by many people worthy to be believed, a bitter thing, a lamentable thing, 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. Having weighed up its seriousness we felt the immensity of our grief increase in us the more bitterly as it became evident that crimes of this nature and importance were so great as to constitute an offence against the divine majesty, a loss for the orthodox faith and for all Christianity, a disgrace for humanity, a pernicious example of evil and a universal scandal.1
The letters, written in the king’s voice, burned with a righteous fury kindled by the Templars’ despicable crimes. They were addressed to bailiffs and seneschals – men of knightly rank who had the power to make arrests in the name of the crown – and spoke of dark deeds and strange rituals performed as new brothers were received into the order. The inspiration for the charges was the kiss of peace given to each new brother, but fed through the royal propaganda machine directed by William of Nogaret, this had become a ceremony of orgiastic depravity calculated to shock all faithful Christians.
According to ‘very reliable people’, brothers were forced on entering the order to deny Christ three times, spit on his image, remove their clothes and stand naked before their receiver, who celebrated their entry to the order by kissing them ‘first on the lower part of the dorsal spine, secondly on the navel and finally on the mouth, in accordance with the profane rite of their Order but to the disgrace of the dignity of the human race’. Having thus entered the Temple, brothers were obliged by their vows to have sex with one another, ‘and this is why the wrath of God has fallen on these sons of infidelity’. Sodomy, heresy, attacks on the image of Jesus Christ and a dash of black magic: familiar charges to anyone who had fallen foul of Philip IV of France to date. A reference was made to the Temp
lars having ‘made offerings to idols’, which would come to have great importance as investigations proceeded. The government had heard that the cord binding the brothers’ habits had been ‘blessed’ by touching it to ‘an idol in the form of a man’s head with a large beard, which head they kiss and worship in their provincial chapters’.
For all their scandalized verbiage, the letters authorizing the arrests were mostly hot air and familiar assertions of Philip’s personal righteousness (the king described himself as ‘we who have been placed by the Lord on the watchtower of regal eminence to defend the liberty of the faith of the Church’). The king claimed that ‘the deeper and fuller’ his investigation had gone, ‘the greater are the abominations that are uncovered, as when one knocks down a wall’. Just what these further abominations were was never specified. So although the king gave notice of the crown’s intention to try every Templar in France, announcing the engagement of his confessor William of Paris, ‘inquisitor of heretical depravity’, to lead the effort and promising to freeze Templar assets until the truth was determined, a close reading of the arrest warrant revealed nothing beyond a hysterically exaggerated account of the Templars’ idiosyncratic induction ceremony, puffed up with insults and titillating hearsay.
A second note, sent out on 22 September, was more revealing. It gave specific instructions for the bailiffs and seneschals who would be making the arrests.2 By royal order they were to impound, inventory and guard the order’s properties and make provision to continue any farming work necessary on vineyards and in the fields. Meanwhile, they were to take the brothers themselves into solitary confinement, where they should ‘determine the truth carefully, with the aid of torture if necessary’.
*
James of Molay was among hundreds of brothers arrested and processed between October and November 1307 under the instruction of William of Nogaret and William of Paris. The king’s men questioned Raimbaud of Caron, preceptor of Cyprus; Hugh of Pairaud, visitor of France; Geoffrey of Charney, preceptor of Normandy and John of Tour, trusted financial advisor to the crown and treasurer of the Paris Temple. Beyond this circle of high-ranking officers most of the men arrested were middle-aged and distinctly unwarlike. Most Templars in France were not warriors. They were agricultural managers, shepherds and pig-farmers, carpenters or wine merchants.3 Only a tiny minority were knights, since by the early fourteenth century some preceptories were staffed entirely by sergeants: this was true in areas of Champagne, Picardy, Auvergne, Poitou and Limousin.4 Forty per cent of those questioned were over fifty years old. A third were veterans of the order, having served in this apparent hotbed of sodomy and irreligion for more than twenty years without complaint.5
All the same, the king’s orders called for torture and there is no reason to think they were disobeyed. The methods of the day were not inventive but they were well-tested: starvation, sleep deprivation, solitary imprisonment, relentless questioning, shackling, racking, foot-burning and the strappado, a device that yanked the victim’s tethered arms behind him until he was raised from the ground and his shoulders dislocated. One Templar, Ponsard of Gisy, later described having his arms tied so tightly behind his back that blood flowed from under his nails, and being kept in a pit so small he could only take a single step in any direction – an experience to which he said death by decapitation, burning or scalding with boiling water would be greatly preferable.6
Rooting out heretics had been an obsession of church leaders and pious secular rulers in western Europe ever since a fear of heresy first gripped the Roman church in the 1160s. At the beginning of the thirteenth century Pope Innocent III had approved the so-called ‘Albigensian Crusade’, a mass persecution of non-conformist Christians known as Cathars in southern France. From the 1230s the Inquisition had become a fully fledged institution, organized by the church but operated in tandem with earthly authorities who had the power to inflict corporal punishment on heretics who would not reform their ways. The goal of the Inquisition was to bring heretics back to the correct teachings of the church, and to stop them from infecting others. In practice that meant persecuting people who had either strayed from official doctrine or were objectionable in some other way that could be framed in heretical terms.7 Those who admitted to heresy and agreed to reform could be given penance and accepted back into the church. Those who refused were often tormented until they changed their mind. Pope Innocent IV had explicitly sanctioned the use of torture against heretics in a papal ruling of 1252. Those who confessed and later relapsed were deemed to be the worst of all: they could be handed over from the Inquisition to the secular authorities for capital punishment, which often meant being burned alive. The papal Inquisition largely employed the mendicant preaching orders – the Dominicans and Franciscans – as inquisitors. These men tended to combine a solid knowledge of approved church teachings with a self-selecting interest in the sufferings of the flesh and, occasionally, an outright taste for violence. In 1307 they knew what they were doing, and they knew what they were looking for.
The inquisitors’ job was to extract confessions that would match the accusations levelled at the order in Philip IV’s letters. This was not a task of open-minded inquiry but of confirmation: to supply the evidence to prove that irreligion ran through the order like poison. Heresy was the essential charge to prove, since it was a crime that was rooted out by the church but punished by the secular authorities. Proving it was rife among the Templars would allow the king to take over from the pope the task of winding up the order and redirecting its resources.
James of Molay was staying in Paris on the night of the arrests, following his attendance at the empress of Constantinople’s funeral. He was still there eleven days later, for on 24 October 1307 he made a confession before the inquisitors at the Paris Temple, one of 138 brothers to appear at the same session over the course of a fortnight. Brought before William of Paris and his staff of notaries and witnesses, the Templar master placed his hand on the Gospels and testified that he was telling ‘the full, whole and complete truth about himself and others in a case pertaining to the faith’.8
He had been a Templar for forty-two years, James said, having been received in the Temple house at Beaune (between Dijon and Lyon) by Brother Humbert of Pairaud and several other brothers, most of whose names he could not remember. According to the inquisitors’ report, James then said that:
After many promises made by him concerning the observances and statutes of the said Order, they placed a mantle on his neck. The said receiver caused a 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 spat only once, and he remembered this clearly.
The master denied having ever had carnal relations with his brothers, but he said other brothers’ receptions resembled his and as master he had ordered this to be so.
The other senior Templars interrogated around the same time gave much the same answers; so similar indeed that the inquisitors’ records suggest they were simply being induced to admit a specific list of misdeeds, offered with face-saving caveats. Geoffrey of Charney, the preceptor of Normandy, described denying an image of Jesus once and said he could not remember if he spat on the image because it was ‘thirty-seven or thirty-eight years previously’ and they had been acting in haste. He admitted he had ‘kissed the receiving master on the navel’, and had once heard it said in a chapter meeting that it would be better for brothers to have sex with one another than ‘to assuage their lust with women’. He confessed to receiving one brother in the same fashion as himself, before realizing that ‘the manner in which he had been received was wicked, profane and contrary to the Catholic faith’.9
When Hugh of Pairaud, visitor of France, was interrogated on 9 November he was given special attention by the inquisitors – considerably more so than James of Molay. Whi
le the master had spent almost his entire adult career in the east, Hugh was a veteran of forty-four years’ service, the greater part of which had been spent in the west. He had held the highest rank in England, France and Provence, and was a prominent figure in French politics, having been close enough to the king to support him in his clash with Pope Boniface. His confession carried the maximum possible value, as his admission could be said to characterize Templar activity throughout France. The king’s inquisitors were more invested in Hugh’s testimony than in that of any other Templar.
Hugh began by describing his induction in 1263. He told his interviewers he had denied Christ once, but had disobeyed the command to spit on the cross and only kissed his receiver on the mouth in a conventional kiss of peace. He then said that when performing reception ceremonies for others, he took his new recruits ‘to some secret place’ and forced them to go through with the whole foul rigmarole: kissing his spine and navel, denying Christ three times and spitting on the cross. Apparently this information had been wrung out of Hugh with the promise that it could be forgiven if he admitted to the deed but claimed he regretted it. Added to his description of those perverted inductions was the statement: ‘although this is what he ordered them to do, he did not do it with his heart’. A similar disclaimer accompanied his admission that he had allowed some brothers to relieve the ‘heat of nature’ with other brothers. He maintained he only did so ‘because it was the usage according to the statutes of the order’.10
Up to this point, Hugh was providing model answers: he had overseen depravity of precisely the sort described in the king’s letters, painting a picture of sodomy and blasphemy rotting the order in France from the top down. Halfway through his deposition, however, Hugh seemed to lose his way. First he equivocated: asked whether other senior members of the order had carried out the same induction process as he did, he said ‘he did not know, since what took place in chapters could not in any way be revealed to people who were not present’. Then, ‘asked whether he thought that all the brothers of the said order were received in that manner, he replied that that was not his opinion’.