by Dan Jones
The allegations against them were ‘as impossible as they are obscene... false and mendacious’. Those who told them ‘are motivated by zealous cupidity and the ardour of jealousy’. They had been proposed by ‘liars and corruptors’, and only confirmed through brothers’ testimony because the brothers ‘were forced by death threats to make confessions that went against their consciences’.
Peter declared the commission illegal, and complained that his brothers remained in fear for their lives, unable to retract their false confessions since they were told daily that this would make them relapsed heretics, good for nothing but the agonies of the stake and a public bonfire. ‘Retraction, they say, inevitably means being burnt.’ He had promised at the start of his speech that the Templars intended to appear before the Council of Vienne (the meeting scheduled for October 1310 where Clement V would make final judgement on the case) to put the case for their survival before the pope. Were they to do so, given the limp results from inquisitions in other realms, they would have a very good case.
Neither the influx of Templars to Paris nor their solid legal representation before the commission was at all pleasing to Philip IV. More vexing still was the fact that on 4 April Pope Clement had postponed the Council of Vienne, pushing it back a year to October 1311, owing to the time it had taken to gather evidence fully. The trial of the Templars had been initiated with a lightning raid at dawn; over the years their ordeal had turned into an endless twilight. Decisive intervention was required.
The government began to cherry-pick who would be allowed to give evidence in Paris. Soft witnesses were brought before the commission, to repeat the usual slanders, amplifying the grotesque wherever they could: obscene kisses now shifted from navels to anuses. The king also sought a second round of legal opinion from the University of Paris, to confirm his right to cleanse the church in his realm.7 Then he shifted to the tactic that had always served him best: intimidation.
While the papal commission wrestled with the Templars’ spirited defence, many of the brothers who had come to testify were still under personal investigation for heresies and blasphemy. With this in mind the king turned to the ecclesiastical investigation covering the city of Paris, which lay in the diocese of Sens and was overseen by Archbishop Philip of Marigny, the brother of one of Philip’s closest councillors.
In the second week of May, the archbishop proceeded suddenly to a final judgement of fifty-four Templars who had been investigated before his local inquiry, but were now in Paris backing the Templars’ defence of their order as a whole. His intention was to point to the discrepancies between the confessions they had given to the episcopal inquiry and the evidence the same brothers had given before the papal commission, to demonstrate that the witnesses were effectively relapsed heretics.
Gilles of Aycelin, archbishop of Narbonne, the president of the panel investigating the order, immediately absented himself from his own hearings in disgust. His commission continued to sit without him, but on the morning of Tuesday 12 May 1310 they were interrupted by a messenger who informed them that the fifty-four Templars of Sens who had given evidence to them had indeed been found to be relapsed heretics and were to be burned at the stake without delay. Despite frantic efforts by Peter of Bologna and his fellow procurators to launch a legal challenge, the royal will now trampled over due process. The Templars of Sens were all gathered together by the king’s officers, strapped to wagons and taken through the streets of Paris to a field on the outskirts of Paris where dozens of stakes and pyres had been set up. Every single one of them was burned alive.
In a single furious act, the king had torched the Templars’ resistance. Reginald of Provins was from Sens, and although he was not one of the fifty-four who were reduced to ashes on 12 May, the implication was that he still might be. To continue his resistance would be a death sentence.
Peter of Bologna had complained bitterly to the commissioners of witness intimidation, but now the king showed what intimidation really looked like: Peter of Bologna simply disappeared. The commission was told flatly that he had escaped from the cell where he was being held at night. He was never seen again. With this one act of treachery the Templars’ legal defence dissolved and rank-and-file resistance broke down. Within weeks, volunteers had stopped coming forward to defend the order, while a stream of witnesses appeared to repeat the well-worn confessions with which the whole sorry episode had begun. Hearings continued for months as the commissioners continued to probe for evidence that the order was institutionally heretical. Little to the evidence previously compiled beyond the exotic fantasies of terrified men hoping to escape a fiery death. But the weight of confession quickly became damning. On 5 July 1311 the commissioners were called to Pontoise for an audience with Philip IV. He told them to stop work: they had quite enough material. The paperwork was forwarded to Clement V, to be considered at the Council of Vienne in October.
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Outside France, the prosecution of the Templars varied sharply, according to the preoccupations and character of the ruler in question. Nowhere was this more apparent than in England, where Edward II had come to the throne in July 1307, just three months before the mass arrests in France. His first reaction to the accusations levelled at the order was ridicule. This was rather in keeping with his character: occasionally clear-sighted but often politically quite stupid. Twenty-three at the time of his accession, Edward was betrothed to Philip IV’s daughter Isabella. Some might have counselled discretion, but on receiving the news of the Templars’ arrests Edward wrote immediately to the kings of Aragon, Navarre, Castile, Portugal and Naples telling them the allegations were absurd and that they should be careful what they believed. He had complied with Pastoralis praeeminentiae only reluctantly, and when 144 English Templars (only fifteen of whom were knights) were arrested in January 1308, the sheriffs who made the arrests were warned not to put the brothers into ‘hard and vile’ prisons.8 The English master William of la More was allowed good rooms in Canterbury, a daily spending allowance and several servants, and he could wander the town as he pleased. Later in the same month Edward travelled to France to marry Philip’s daughter, but even when he returned he showed no great interest in carrying out the persecutions his new father-in-law wished to see.
What eventually changed Edward’s attitude towards the Templars was his own shallow self-interest. Although he married Isabella of France in Boulogne in January 1308, he did not much care for her. He was far more interested in an older friend from his youth by the name of Piers Gaveston. The king and Gaveston formed a very obnoxious couple in the eyes of the English political class, and in May a coalition of English bishops and nobles forced the king to exile his favourite to Ireland, on pain of excommunication if he returned. From this point everything in Edward’s life became secondary to bringing Gaveston safely home. The backing of Clement V, who had the power to lift Gaveston’s suspended excommunication, became suddenly important – and Edward’s Templar policy changed accordingly. In November Edward ordered the re-arrest of all the Templars in England who had been allowed to live in relative freedom. This had exactly the desired effect: by spring 1309 Gaveston’s excommunication had been cancelled and by June he was home, much to the displeasure of Edward’s barons. In September Edward allowed two papal inquisitors into his realm to begin investigating Templar malpractice.
The order in England was still not battered as roughly it had been in France. In part this was because the whole concept of Inquisition was foreign to the English, whose legal system was built around the testimony of juries, not on confessions wheedled out of agonized suspects. Torture was not widely practised and on the few occasions when it was suggested during the inquiry into the Templars, it mostly failed. Three centres of investigation were set up, in London, Lincoln and York, and almost every brother who came before the papal delegates denied every charge on the long list put before them. The worst that could be wrung out of most was a mistaken belief that when a brother was flogged for breaking one o
f the order’s rules, the master’s subsequent grant of forgiveness was a holy absolution and not an internal declaration of a disciplinary case being closed. This was small beer indeed.
Proceedings continued against the Templars until the summer of 1311, during which time the French inquisitors wrote letters expressing their frustration and wondering whether they could carry out extraordinary rendition: taking all their prisoners to the French county of Ponthieu (held by Edward II but owing its ultimate feudal loyalty to Philip IV) where they could be properly interrogated. In the end all these efforts came to nothing. There was a brief flurry of excitement when a pair of runaways were caught and attempted to buy their way out of trouble by admitting they had denied Christ at their receptions, but in the end this came to very little. The inquiry broke up with most brothers sent off to monasteries, some to do penance for minor sins and others simply to be adopted into different religious orders. Only the two highest-ranking suspects faced any serious punishment, more for their status than their deeds. William of la More, the master in England, was sent to the Tower of London, and died in 1312 still awaiting absolution from the pope. Imbert Blanke, preceptor for Auvergne, who had managed to flee arrest in France by skipping across the Channel in 1307, was also jailed. He probably died in custody some time after 1314. Neither had admitted to any wrongdoing. Edward II took control of Templar lands for more than ten years, adding the revenues of their estates, once catalogued so diligently by Master Geoffrey Fitz Stephen, to the royal coffers, until in 1324 they were taken over by the Hospitallers. It was a quiet and unspectacular death.
Elsewhere the pattern of proceedings varied according to the local conditions. In Ireland the inquisitors proceeded in lacksadaisical fashion, performing only perfunctory interviews and pensioning off the brothers in 1312 without even requiring them to join another order. On the Spanish peninsula the Templars were more of a fighting force than in France or England, and this was a major consideration in their arrest. King James II was as doubtful as Edward, and like Edward he initially resisted acting against them. In the five years preceding the arrests in France James had actually been helping the order to build up its landholdings in his other kingdom of Valencia.9 However, their military capability in Aragon soon became a reason for their effective destruction. Once the arrests began in France, the Aragonese Templars began to prepare for an attack: stockpiling goods, converting their wealth into gold for easy transportation and reinforcing their numerous castles. James was not naturally hostile to the order, but the prospect of fortresses being held against the crown was unacceptable. Over the new year of 1308 he arrested the local master and started besieging Templar fortresses. One angry brother cursed James II for his ingratitude, recounting the number of times that the Templars had given their lives in service to the kingdom of Aragon. James took no notice. A small civil war ensued as royal forces besieged Templar strongholds in Miravet, Monzón, Asco and several other fortresses originally built for holy war against the Moors. It took the king months to starve the last of the defenders from their bolt-holes: the huge fortress at Monzón (where James’ grandfather had been raised under Templar guardianship) and Chalamera only surrendered in July 1309.
Prisoners were taken and some were tortured, although the practice was found to be as ineffective in Aragon as it was in England. No Aragonese Templars admitted to any serious wrongdoing, and in 1312 proceedings against the order were abandoned without a single confession having been extracted.10 The brothers were sent off with pensions to live as men of religion in monastic houses and their property was divided up between the king, the Hospitallers and a new military order based at Montesa in Valencia, which modelled itself on the Order of Calatrava. The Order of the Temple was soon nothing more than a memory.
In Castile-León the Templars were examined and found innocent in 1310. No serious scandal was unearthed in Mallorca. In the various Italian states there was only passing interest in the proceedings against the Templars. While some brothers admitted to the usual gamut of indiscretions, from walking on crucifixes to sodomy and idol-worship, the convulsions caused were relatively small, and in regions such as the north-west of Italy the investigators forbade torture and actively tried to prove the innocence of their captives.11 In Sicily the authorities were largely uninterested in persecuting the brothers, and although there were arrests and trials, these produced unsalacious findings and appear to have involved only a small number of brothers, none of whom lost his life.12
Likewise in Germany, individual rulers took limited action against the order’s members, and without great enthusiasm. The further north-east one travelled through Christendom, the fewer Templars there were to be found. The German principalities were far more heavily populated by the Teutonic Order. There was one novelty to the movement against the Templars in Germany, which concerned the nuns of a house in Mühlen. Since 1272 their convent had been officially owned and governed by the order, an arrangement brokered by the bishop of Worms, who was probably influenced by the fact that the Teutonic Order admitted women as full sisters away from the front line. When the Templars were wound up, the nuns of Mühlen were forcibly transferred to membership of the Hospitallers, although they were not happy about it and complained about their treatment.13
In Cyprus as in Aragon the Templars presented a real military force as well as an alleged spiritual menace. Since the early summer of 1307 they had been imprisoned in various locations on the island. Nearly three years passed before hearings began on 5 May 1310.14 Of the 118 Templars originally arrested, only 76 were by then alive and fit to answer questions. More than half of these were knights – a far greater ratio than in the west, where only one in ten were of knightly rank. To a man, every Templar flatly denied the whole list of allegations. All they would say was that there had been an entirely proper kiss of peace to welcome each new member. They affirmed that normal Templar procedure meant that chapter meetings were secret affairs closed to outsiders.
To widen the inquiry, evidence was also heard from fifty-six non-Templar witnesses, including some of the island’s loftiest figures: Philip of Ibelin, the royal seneschal; Rupen of Montfort, the titular lord of Beirut; the bishop of Beirut and two abbots. These men crossed the sharp political divide between Henry II and his brother Amalric, who had deposed the king and exiled him to Armenia. All of them swore to the probity and upstanding character of the Templars. Many noted that they had seen the Templars take communion, and distribute large amounts of alms to the poor: ‘bread, meats and sometimes money, and this (occurred) every week’.15 The character witnesses could not have been more glowing. The testimony was shot through with a deep-rooted pride in and affection for the order, which for all its faults was held in high esteem on the front line of the war against Islam. One witness, John of Norris, treasurer of Limassol and canon of Paphos, recounted that there was a common saying among Cypriots which went, ‘I will defend you in the manner of the Templars, whether you are right or wrong.’16
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The Council of Vienne opened in October 1311 and issued its judgement on 22 March 1312. Many of the senior clerics who attended from all across Christendom – including four patriarchs, twenty cardinals and scores of archbishops and bishops – were sceptical of the accusations levelled against the Templars, and demanded to hear their defence. This was not in itself unreasonable, but weighed against their outrage was the nearby presence of the king of France, who kept an army 18 miles (30 km) away in Lyon, and wrote letters to the pope demanding the Templars’ suppression and the creation of a new order that could resume the fight against the infidel. The message was clear: Clement V had to make his choice. He could either suffer the fate of Boniface VIII, or he could accept the truth that had burdened him ever since the papal tiara had landed on his head in 1305. He was a French pope, and in the end he would do the bidding of the French king.
The decision regarding the Templars was summed up in a papal bull known as Vox in excelso (‘A voice on high’). Framing his words i
n Biblical quotation drawn from the Old Testament, Clement summarized the Templar affair from the beginning. He described how the church had honoured and respected the Temple, but ‘against the Lord Jesus Christ himself... they fell into the sin of impious apostasy, the abominable vice of idolatry, the deadly crime of the Sodomites and various heresies’. The pope fawned to Philip IV, ‘our dear son in Christ’, who ‘had no intention of claiming or appropriating for himself anything from the Templars’ property... he was on fire with zeal for the orthodox faith, following in the well-marked footsteps of his ancestors’. The list of misdeeds and blasphemies was repeated and summed up with the allegation that ‘the master, preceptors, and other brothers of the order as well as the order itself had been involved in these and other crimes’, all of which were proved by the many confessions the inquisitors had compiled. Clement mentioned specifically the confessions made at Chinon by James of Molay, Hugh of Pairaud, Raimbaud of Caron and their colleagues and noted that they had been granted absolution. Then he announced his final decision:
These confessions render the order very suspect... The infamy and suspicion render it detestable to the holy Church of God, to her prelates, to kings and other rulers and to Catholics in general. It is also believed that in all probability from now on there will be no good person who wishes to enter the Order, and so it will be made useless to the Church of God and the carrying on of the undertaking to the Holy Land.
The Templars were not given the chance to defend themselves at Vienne, and although fanciful rumours circulated that 2,000 of them were waiting on the outskirts of the city waiting to barge their way into the conference hall, nothing of the sort occurred. They had gone undefended and largely unseen at the very gathering that decided their fate. In Vox in excelso the pope worked his way deftly around this blatant injustice, arguing that to delay his decision for enough time to hear counter-arguments would have caused Templar possessions to fall into ruin and their usefulness to the crusading mission to be impaired. No good would come from more procrastination.