The Templars

by Dan Jones

  *

  In Poitiers at the end of June Philip’s ministers changed the tone of their negotiations. Seeing that Clement would not respond to outright threats and harassment, they decided instead to present him with a carefully curated gallery of the accused, inviting him to come to his own conclusions. This was a sharp strategy. As things were, Clement could go neither forward nor back; he could not rescind his orders for arrests, but nor could he proceed to a full trial if it appeared he was doing so as a puppet of the French king. On 29 June the first of a hand-picked group of seventy-two Templars were brought to the papal court, and over the next four days they once again recounted their sins in the hope of winning a swift pardon and penance. In many cases these had become rather more colourful since their first confession: some gave the impression of having been deliberately inflated to provide the pope with a legitimate sense of horror. Circumstantial details were added: some spoke of being physically manhandled or threatened with swords at the time of reception; others gave shape and life to the strange idols they claimed to have worshipped. One brother, Stephen of Troyes (an informer to William of Nogaret from the beginning) spoke of being forced to adore a jewel-encrusted head that represented Hugh of Payns.21

  By 2 July Clement V had seen enough to convince him either that the Templars were guilty, or (more likely) that he could accede to the French demands without seeming simply to be rolling over. To the Templars who had confessed before him he granted personal absolution. Then he turned to the order at large. On 12 August he issued a bull known as Faciens misericordiam (‘Granting forgiveness’) setting up two parallel investigations: a series of diocesan hearings, where individual Templars would be investigated by panels of bishops, cathedral canons and Dominican or Franciscan friars; and a central, papal commission to examine the fabric of the Order of the Temple itself. In France this was to be conducted in the province of Sens (which effectively meant Paris, the biggest city in that area), and parallel hearings would be set up in England, Cyprus, Aragon and every other state where the Templars had a significant presence. Each of these would investigate 127 articles, to establish the credibility and purity of the order at large and whether it could be saved. After this work was complete, an assembly would gather in Vienne, near Lyon on the borders of France and the Holy Roman Empire, for a general council of the church, scheduled for 1 October 1310. Here, on the basis of all the assembled evidence, a final decision on the order’s future would be taken.

  The pope prepared to leave Poitiers and struck out towards the Alps. He aimed to get as far away as practical from Paris, Philip IV, William of Nogaret, and the men who had made his first thirty months in office so disagreeable. He could not go back to Rome, for Philip had made it known that the condition of their co-existence was Clement’s continued residence in France. He chose, therefore, to go to Avignon – on the fringe of the French king’s territories, but close enough to communicate quickly with Rome. In early August the papal court at Poitiers began to disperse, preparing to reassemble in its new home by the beginning of December. Thus was the ‘Avignon papacy’ established, where popes would continue to be based for nearly seventy years, a time that they came to speak of bitterly as a Babylonian captivity.

  21

  ‘God Will Avenge Our Death’

  While the pope was heading to one form of captivity in Avignon, Master James of Molay, Hugh of Pairaud, visitor of France, Raimbaud of Caron, preceptor of Cyprus, Geoffrey of Charney, preceptor of Normandy, and Geoffrey of Gonneville, preceptor of Poitou and Aquitaine, were enduring another, more literal one: locked in Chinon castle, a large, round-towered stone fortress above a bend in the river Vienne, some 62 miles (100 km) north of Poitiers. All had been damaged by their experiences; James of Molay had reportedly shown a cardinal the scars across his upper body left by the inquisitors when retracting his initial confession. All the same, no chances were taken with such high-profile captives. In February 1308 a prominent Templar accountant, Oliver of Penne, preceptor of Lombardy, had fled from house arrest, causing significant embarrassment to his jailors. Another escapee would not do.

  None of the Templar leaders had been taken to testify before the pope in Poitiers, despite the city’s relative proximity to Chinon. The official explanation was that they were not fit to travel – and that may have been so, although it was also the case that the brothers who had been presented to Pope Clement in late June had been carefully vetted to convince him of their guilt. Naturally there was a risk that the order’s senior officials might have disrupted this carefully staged performance.

  On 14 August, the day before the pope’s departure, a deputation of cardinals and royal ministers was sent to Chinon. The party included two French cardinals, Bérengar Frédol and Stephen of Suisy, and one Italian, Landolf Brancacci. They reached the gates of the castle on the 17th, and one by one the five Templars went through their stories while notaries busied themselves scribbling down the new statements. These were later written up on a large piece of parchment which was sent to Clement to be stored in the papal archives.*

  The first to be questioned was Raimbaud of Caron, the tough preceptor of Cyprus. He admitted to denying Christ once following his reception into the order, but otherwise said he had no knowledge of any wrongdoing. The only sodomy he knew of in the order’s entire history, he said, was that of the three brothers in the east who had been caught and sentenced to perpetual imprisonment in Château Pèlerin: a case so unusual and abhorrent it had been preserved in the Rule as an example of extreme waywardness.

  When he was finished, Raimbaud knelt before the cardinals and begged for forgiveness, which he was granted. He was absolved from his sins and reinstated ‘in the communion of the faithful and the sacraments of the Church’.

  This same process followed for his four colleagues. Geoffrey of Charney, the preceptor of Normandy, who had also seen service on Cyprus as the order’s draper, admitted to denouncing a crucifix at his initiation and kissing his receiver on the mouth and ‘on the chest, through garments, to show respect’, a new piece of information he had not revealed at the time of his first confession. He asked forgiveness and was absolved. Geoffrey of Gonneville – who had travelled between Cyprus and the papal court as a messenger for Master James of Molay – said he had refused to deny Christ but had promised to pretend to do so to keep his receivers from getting into trouble. Hugh of Pairaud admitted to scorning a crucifix, but said that this was only after being threatened. He said he had forced others to kiss him on the back and belly and had condoned sodomy in preference to sex with women, although he insisted he had never indulged in it himself. He also repeated his former assertion about the strange head in Montpellier. Both men were forgiven and welcomed back into the communion of the church.

  On 20 August James of Molay finally appeared. In December he had gone back on his confession, but now he changed his mind again, hoping to secure for himself papal absolution. The only charge he admitted was that of denying Christ, but that was enough to satisfy his interviewers. The notary recorded for posterity that the master ‘had denounced in our presence the aforementioned and other heresy’ and had been dealt with in the same merciful fashion as his colleagues. Later that day, the account of each man’s confession was read aloud to him in his native tongue, and he swore that it was true. All five remained imprisoned after their absolution, for the papal investigators looking into the corruption of the order as an institution were due to start in Paris later in the year, and would want to hear their evidence too. But with regard to their personal confession the process was completed. The cardinals packed up and left Chinon, imagining that they had saved their brothers.

  *

  The wide-scale inquiry set up by the pope now swung slowly into motion. Across France and throughout the Catholic world, bishops began to establish commissions to examine the conduct of the Templars in their dioceses, with the aim of inducing confessions, which could then be followed by absolutions and penance.

  In France the t
ransfer of responsibility for the Inquisition from king to pope had done nothing to improve conditions for the brothers lined up to admit their misdeeds, as most of the bishops overseeing the regional inquiries had close links to the crown. Recalcitrant Templars faced long periods of imprisonment without warm clothing, a paltry diet of bread and water, shackling, repeated interrogation, violent threats and, finally, torture. A number of brothers went mad or died as a result of harsh treatment, some turning up with their brains so addled by months of isolation and beatings that they were unable to respond to questioning at all.1 Those who could speak were taken through a set list of questions designed to tick off however many misdeeds as could be levered out of them. Eighty-seven or eighty-eight articles were presented to each brother, who either admitted or denied each in turn. Any interesting features of the confession would be noted down, but otherwise this was an exercise in bureaucratic terror.

  The questions were repetitive, formulaic and numbing: Did the brother deny Christ at his reception? Was this done with the whole community? Was it repeated afterwards? Were they taught that Jesus was not the true God, or a false prophet? Did they spit on a cross? Did they trample on a cross? Did they do it regularly? Did they urinate on the cross? Did they trample on the cross and urinate on it? Was this done at Easter? Did they deny the sacraments of the church? Did they confess to the master instead of to an ordained priest? Did they ever kiss another brother improperly? Where did they kiss him? On his back? His belly? His penis? Were they told they could have sex with their brothers? Did they do it? Did they penetrate or were they penetrated? Did anyone tell them this was not a sin? Did they worship idols? Did the idols look like heads? Did the idols look like heads with three faces? How did they worship them? Did they call them ‘God’? Did they call them ‘Saviour’? Did some of their brothers do this? Did most of their brothers do this? Did anyone tell them the idol would save them? Make them rich? Make the soil fertile? Make the trees flower?

  And so on, and so on.2 Eventually, most brothers confessed, defeated both by their physical sufferings and the sheer relentlessness of the process – although sometimes it took many months to break them. The Council of Vienne had been set for October 1310, and would eventually be postponed until October 1311. Time was on the interrogators’ side, and they made full use of it. After a year or more of being locked up in the cold on thin rations, most Templars either gave up or died. In one area one third of the brothers who had been arrested in 1307 were dead five years later.3

  *

  By the spring of 1310, investigators from Ireland to Cyprus had gathered their evidence, interviewing Templar brothers and non-aligned witnesses. In most places this revealed that the charges concocted by Philip IV’s ministers and circulated by the pope were unproven and largely fantastical. Yet in France, the order’s heartland, the picture that emerged from almost every one of the brutal inquisitions was of a diabolically corrupt order. From Easter 1309 the French crown had begun leasing out confiscated Templar property for profit, working on the assumption that it would never be returned and thus pre-empting not only the individual investigations but the central inquiry into the corruption of the order as a whole. The injustice was palpable.

  The Templars’ central leadership was in poor shape to resist. James of Molay had been personally absolved in Chinon, but his long and violent incarceration had taken its toll. Having endured gruelling interrogation in Paris and Chinon, he was now taken back to the French capital to appear before the papal commission, whose aim was to take evidence about the order as a whole.

  On Wednesday 26 November and Friday 28 November 1309 the broken Templar master was brought to the ancient abbey of Sainte-Geneviève to appear before a panel of justices made up largely of French bishops and cardinals. The president of the panel, Gilles Aycelin, archbishop of Narbonne, was a member of the king’s council. James gave muddled, erratic answers. At first he said he was neither wise nor learned enough to defend the order, and could only remark that he thought it ‘very surprising’ that the church wanted to destroy the Templars when they had threatened for thirty-two years to depose Frederick II Hohenstaufen without ever getting around to it.4 When his previous, self-incriminating statements were read to him he became irate, made the sign of the cross and said that ‘may it please God that what was practised by Saracens and Tartars might be practised against evil-doers in this case, for those Saracens and Tartars either chop off the heads of evil-doers they find or else cleave them in two’. At this point William of Plaisians, listening from outside the room, walked in and put his arm around the master, telling him ‘to take care not to demean or destroy himself unnecessarily’. The master asked for time to think over what he had said and his deposition was postponed until later in the week.

  When James returned on Friday 28th, he seemed in no fitter state of mind to answer questions. Asked if he wished to defend the order he told them he was an ‘impoverished knight who knew no Latin’, but he understood there was a letter in existence by which the pope reserved the right to deal with his case in person. Informed that his own deeds were not the business of the Paris commission, which was looking into the order as a whole, James said that he had only three things to contribute: the order had better churches than any of their rivals; they distributed more alms; and ‘he knew of no other Order... more prepared to expose their bodies to death in defence of the Christian faith against its enemies’. Then, once again, he started to rant about the war for the Holy Land, launching into an animated but irrelevant story about Louis IX’s brother Robert of Artois leading Templars to their deaths in Damietta in 1250.

  This time, as the master was speaking, William of Nogaret entered the room. Where William of Plaisians had been avuncular, Nogaret was sinister and unpleasant. Upon hearing history being rehearsed he announced that he himself had read chronicles at the royal abbey of Saint-Denis claiming that the Templars had treacherously paid homage to Saladin, but that the sultan had despised them, believing they had lost the battle of Hattin in 1187 because ‘they were labouring under the vice of sodomy’.5

  As informed historical debate this had very little to recommend it. The only point it illustrated was that James of Molay was now a rambling old man whose ability to save his order from destruction was somewhere near nil, and that although the commission was fronted by bishops, the king’s ministers were directing it from behind the scenes. Called back to give evidence for a third time on 2 March 1310, James of Molay was now beyond even anecdotes, and merely asked to be sent to the pope for judgement.

  As the master bumbled his way through his inadequate depositions, a sense of defiance began to grow among the Templars’ ordinary membership. Across France literally hundreds of brothers were arriving in Paris to give evidence to the commission. They were kept under curfew in venues across the city, ranging from the Paris Temple to bishops’ houses equipped with secure rooms. However, some were allowed limited freedom to travel and communicate with one another, and collectively the brothers began to organize a serious and spirited defence. In February more than 500 Templars presented themselves at the abbey, volunteering to give testimony in praise of the order. Some of their evidence was heard by the commissioners, but soon so many brothers had been brought to the capital that a form of official representation had to be arranged.

  In late March an open-air meeting was held in the abbey grounds at which hundreds of the assembled Templars angrily declared the accusations against them to be baseless. The commissioners asked them to put forward ‘procurators’ who might advocate for the brothers en bloc. Four men were chosen: two chaplains and two knights. The chaplains were Peter of Bologna, a forty-four-year-old who had represented the order as an ambassador to the pope, and Reginald of Provins, the preceptor of Orléans; the knights were William of Chambonnet and Bertrand of Sartiges, both long-standing veterans. In a series of presentations they complained about the conditions in which brothers were kept, questioned the legal grounds for the trial and challenged the acti
vities of the king’s ministers who were interfering in what ought to be strictly a church matter.

  On 7 April, Peter of Bologna led his delegation into the hearing chamber and put forward the Templars’ case for survival. His presentation was a fierce and fearless demolition of everything that had been done by the king and his men since Friday 13 October 1307.

  Every single piece of evidence gathered by the commissioners, he argued, should be tossed out, as the Templars who had incriminated themselves ‘will have spoken... under compulsion, force or corruption, persuasion, bribery or from fear’. In future, he asked that no layperson – and here the names of William of Nogaret and William of Plaisians hung unspoken in the air – should be present at any Templar interrogation ‘nor any person whom they might rightly fear... since all brothers in general are so struck by fear and terror that it is not surprising how some tell lies’. Nowhere but in France, said Peter, could any Templar brother be found ‘who tells or has told these lies’. Those who tried to tell the truth ‘have suffered and are suffering daily in prisons so many tortures, punishments, tribulations, hardships, insults, calamities and miseries, with only their conscience to drive them on’.6

  Peter then recounted the Templars’ foundation story: they were an order ‘developed in the charity and love of true brotherhood... without the filth or dirt of any vice. There is and always has been a strong monastic discipline [and] a strong observance for our salvation’. Reception to the order was no perverted rite of sexualized blasphemy:

  Whoever enters this Order promises four essentials, namely obedience, chastity, poverty and the deployment of all his strength in the service of the Holy Land... He is received with the pure kiss of peace, takes his habit with the cross which he wears permanently on his breast... and is taught to observe the Rule and ancient customs handed down to them by the Roman Church and the holy fathers.