by Dan Jones
Therefore with a sad heart... we suppress, with the approval of the sacred council, the Order of the Templars, and its rule, habit and name, by an inviolable and perpetual decree, and we entirely forbid that anyone from now on enter the order, or receive or wear its habit, or presume to behave as a Templar. If anyone acts otherwise he incurs automatic excommunication.17
With the stroke of a scribe’s pen, and the application of the papal seal, the Order of the Temple, which had existed for 192 years, was abolished. The only small victory, if it could be seen as such, was that its property was not given to Philip IV, but reserved by the pope ‘for our disposition and that of the apostolic see’. Neither was there any mention of merging the military orders. In May 1312 it was decided that Templar property would be granted to the Hospitallers, to support their mission in the east. This was only partially good news for the Hospitallers. While in theory they gained huge tranches of property across 2,000 miles (3,200 km), the legal wrangling required to secure their claims to their new bounty tied them up for more than a decade.
In the Spanish peninsula the Templars’ lands were to be carved up between the secular rulers, the Hospitallers and the new military order based at Montesa in Aragon. In all likelihood the silver in the Templar treasury in Paris disappeared into the king’s mints, but Philip was never able to perpetrate a full land-grab, nor to assume for himself or his sons the role of crusader king in charge of a unified military order. His victory was strictly personal: he had triumphed over an organization which he had convinced himself was riddled with secrecy, heresy, filth, fornication, blasphemy, carnality and evil.
With Templar properties parcelled up, hundreds of prisoners needed to be rehabilitated or rehomed. The unrepentant were given a life sentence in prison, but many had voiced their supposed crimes and been granted forgiveness. These men were sent to live in other monastic institutions, supported by pensions paid by the papal court at Avignon. For the most part their lives would not have been so different to their existence in a Templar house. In areas where the Templars had been on active military duty, they were sometimes able to continue their work in a new guise. In Portugal in 1319 a new order was founded: the Order of Christ, which subsumed Templar properties and in some cases re-dressed Templar soldiers in new uniforms and allowed them to continue manning former Templar castles and participating in the holy war against the Moors.
A few stray Templars were untouched by the dissolution of the order altogether. The German chronicler Ludolph of Sudheim came across two old men wandering in Palestine in 1340, claiming to be Templars who had fallen into Mamluk hands with the fall of Acre in 1291.18
In the Muslim world the disappearance of the Templars was far from the cause for celebration that it would have been had Saladin managed to wipe out the order with his parade of beheadings in the aftermath of Hattin. Templars had not been seen in the Holy Land for a generation. In effect, they had been wiped out long ago.
For all of their martial renown, the Templars put up remarkably little fight. But some could not simply be paid to wear a new habit and then forgotten. In 1310 James of Molay, Hugh of Pairaud, Geoffrey of Charney and Geoffrey of Gonneville had been moved from Chinon to Gisors, a huge castle north of the Seine, halfway between Paris and Rouen (Raimbaud of Caron seems to have died in prison in Chinon). At his final appearances before the commissioners investigating the order, James had thrown himself pathetically on the mercy of the pope – a tactic he had clung to throughout the ordeal, which had ultimately paid no dividend whatsoever. Neither would it after the order was dissolved.
In December 1313 Clement turned his attention to the master and his three surviving colleagues. They had hoped to appeal to him in person, but Clement had evidently seen quite enough of the Templars. He appointed in his place a panel of cardinals to examine the four brothers. Arnaud Novelli, Arnaud of Auch and Nicholas of Fréauville would bear the responsibility of hearing one last round of evidence and deciding their sentence.
On 18 March 1314 a crowd gathered around a raised platform set up outside the church of Notre-Dame in Paris, to see these elderly men, who had once commanded the most famous military order in the world, sentenced for their role in its collapse. Among the crowd was Philip of Marigny, the archbishop of Sens whose episcopal enquiry had sent fifty-four Templars to their deaths. The three cardinals in their wide-brimmed hats inspected the accused and announced what penalty they were to suffer.
The continuator of a chronicle by the monk of Saint-Denis known as William of Nangis recorded that he had seen James of Molay and his colleagues examined that day. They were briefly questioned and all four stood by their confessions. They had been absolved of their sins, but their penances were to be exemplary and severe. ‘They were adjudged to be taken into hard, perpetual imprisonment,’ wrote the chronicler.19
For James of Molay, who had been in prison for six and a half years, this was too much. At one of his examinations before papal commissioners he had recalled his experience as a young man, when he had been sent to the Holy Land to fight the Saracens, and found himself chafing against the then master William of Beaujeu, whose only wish was to hold the peace. He had been frustrated then, and the frustration had continued ever since. In fact, James’s entire career had been a succession of disappointments, culminating in a trial in which he had been forced to confess to deeds that disgraced his name, imperilled his soul and destroyed the order to which he had given himself. Now he was told he would live out his days in stony solitude, and die a perjured failure.
To the shock of the audience before him, he decided to speak out. As one of the cardinals was lecturing the crowd, James interrupted him and began to argue again for his innocence. Geoffrey of Charney joined him, decrying the injustice both men had suffered. They berated the cardinal and the archbishop of Sens, ‘and without any respect began to deny everything they had confessed’.20
Behind James and Geoffrey of Charney, Hugh of Pairaud and Geoffrey of Gonneville kept quiet. Each man understood what was happening. To stay silent was to accept the sentence of imprisonment. To speak was to condemn oneself as a relapsed heretic to the flames. The crowd stood stunned. A stage-managed spectacle had taken an unexpected and unwanted turn. James of Molay continued to rave about his innocence until a sergeant standing by stepped forward, ‘and struck [the master] across the mouth so that he might speak no further, and he was dragged by his hair into a chapel’.21
Whatever due process ought to have taken place was jettisoned. Geoffrey of Charney was hauled off with James of Molay. The intention was for both to be held ‘until they could deliberate more fully over them the next day’. But word soon spread through the city of the scenes at Notre-Dame, and within hours the news had reached Philip IV. His patience was exhausted. ‘He consulted with his own advisors,’ wrote the chronicler, ‘and without speaking of it to the clergy, made a prudent decision to have the two Templars consigned to the flames.’22
As evening fell on 18 March, the master of the Temple and the preceptor of Normandy were taken in a little boat to an island in the River Seine known as the Île-des-Javiaux, not far from the gardens of the royal palace. Two pyres stood waiting, the wood already smouldering.
The Templar of Tyre heard an eyewitness account from a merchant who was in Paris that March and who saw what happened on the island. ‘The master begged them to suffer him to say his prayers, which he did say to God,’ he wrote. ‘Then his body was bound over to the working of their will.’23
Another French chronicler recorded in verse the last minutes of the two Templars, and described a calm scene in which James of Molay stripped to his underclothes without shivering or showing any signs of being afraid. As he was tied to the stake he asked to be allowed a prayer. He added: ‘God knows who is in the wrong and has sinned. Soon misfortune will come to those who have wrongly condemned us: God will avenge our death.’ Then he said he was ready to die. The flames were stoked, the wood crackled, and before long James of Molay was gone. ‘So gent
ly did death take him’, wrote the poet, ‘that everyone marvelled.’24 All that was left of the last master of the Order of the Poor Knights of the Temple was the curse that had spilled from his lips at the moment of his death.
*
Hugh of Pairaud and Geoffrey of Gonneville died in prison many years after the violent events in Paris. Geoffrey of Charney was also burned on 18 March, and it was variously reported that his bones and James of Molay’s were either saved for relics or burned and the ashes scattered. The Templar master’s hope that God would avenge his death could have meant anything, but it appeared to have some effect. The two men who had done most to destroy the Templars – Philip IV of France and Pope Clement V – were dead within the year. Clement’s health had never been good and in April he died of his long-standing intestinal complaint. Philip, who was only forty-six, suffered a fatal stroke while hunting in 1314 and was buried near his saintly predecessor Louis IX in Saint-Denis.
Had either of them gained anything from the destruction of the Order of the Temple? It was probably true that in 1306 the Templars and the Hospitallers were ripe for reform and amalgamation. Robbed of their purpose after the fall of Acre, they had been sustained for two decades by the ambition of a new crusade, refusing like many others to accept the reality of the drastically changed situation in the east following the arrival of the Mongols and the Mamluk conquests. In that sense Clement had contributed, albeit in a hamfisted and unnecessarily destructive fashion, to the redirection of Christian resources. Beyond that there was little to recommend in his conduct. When Dante Alighieri completed the Divine Comedy in 1320, his readers found Clement in hell, being roasted feet-first upside down. Dante described Clement as a ‘lawless shepherd from the west’ who had bought his position and been dealt with ‘softly’ by the king of France.25
Philip, meanwhile, had proven himself repeatedly throughout his reign to be cold, cruel and wilfully antagonistic towards any individual or group from whom he perceived the smallest slight towards his royal majesty or his self-image as the ‘most Christian king’. Shortly before his death he turned his moralizing paranoia on his own family. Needled by rumours that the wives of two of his sons were having adulterous affairs with a pair of Norman knights in a riverside watchtower known as the Tour de Nesle, he had all of them arrested, as well as his third son’s wife, who was believed to have some knowledge of the case. The knights were tortured, interrogated and brutally executed in public; his daughters-in-law were imprisoned for life.
The Tour de Nesle scandal brought Philip nothing but misery. It was nearly identical in its methods to the persecution of Pope Boniface, the French Jews and the Templars, all of which bound together the crown’s need for new sources of revenue with the king’s desire to stamp the authority of the crown over new parts of his kingdom and his extraordinary ability to convince himself of the foulest moral deviance in anyone who crossed his path. Even by the standards of his day he was a violent prig, and the best that can be said of his conduct was that the Templars were only one group of victims among many.
Between 13 October 1307 and 18 March 1314 the Templars were comprehensively crushed. Their property was impounded. Their wealth was taken. Their reputation was shredded. Their members were imprisoned, tortured, killed, ejected from their homes and humiliated. Those who survived this process either died in prison, were uprooted and sent to new homes, or in a few rare cases redeployed to new military orders. Despite colourful myths of their survival as a secret society, by the third decade of the fourteenth century the order had ceased to exist in any meaningful sense. The Templar central archive, their most valuable possession in the east after their treasury, was preserved on Cyprus and taken over by the Hospitallers, but it was subsequently lost, most likely in the sixteenth century when Cyprus was conquered by the Ottomans. So in the end, the Templars’ bodies were taken by the French monarchy that had done so much to help establish the order, and their memories were swallowed up by an Islamic enemy they had first been banded together to resist. ‘They were the fiercest fighters of all the Franks,’ wrote the Mosuli chronicler Ibn al-Athir, who knew the order in its prime. In the end they could simply fight no more.
*
The crusades in which the Templars had played a leading role did not end with the order’s disappearance. The idea of sanctified war was deeply ingrained in the minds of Europe’s faithful, and even if it had become practically impossible to raise the sorts of armies that had marched on Jerusalem, Damascus and Damietta between 1096 and 1250, the dream of reconquering the Holy Land lived on. So did the willingness of the Roman church to curry favour with secular rulers by allowing them to beg crusade status for their border wars and assaults on various ‘pagans’ on the fringes of Europe.
In Spain the Reconquista continued throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, during which a significant Muslim presence remained in the emirate of Granada – technically a vassal state of the kingdom of Castile but in practice a proudly independent Muslim realm. Moments of Castilian weakness or war with the neighbouring kingdoms of Aragon and Portugal generally caused flare-ups of violence emanating from Granada. These kept the military orders of Calatrava and Santiago engaged in garrisoning castles and guarding the mountain passes in the borderlands between Christian and Muslim territory. The emirate of Granada was only destroyed after King Ferdinand V of Aragon married Queen Isabella of Castile in 1479, joining their two great kingdoms and presenting a united front against the Nasrid ruler Muhammad XII. Piece by piece the two ‘Catholic monarchs’ began to dismantle the emirate and in January 1492 Muhammad was driven out of his Alhambra Palace in the capital city of Granada, never to return.
Beyond Spain, plans abounded to regain a Christian footing in the Holy Land, but few ever came to anything more than excited plans written by men who had more ideas than experience and had never seen a Mamluk in their lives. In 1318 Philip IV’s son and successor Philip V envisaged a noble-led mission to Outremer under his cousin Louis of Clermont, whom he appointed ‘captain, leader and governor general of all the men-at-arms whom we dispatch before the general passage by land or by sea for the assistance of the Holy Land’.26 A few years later the Venetian geographer Marino Sanudo Torsello presented Pope John XXII with a massive book, complete with detailed maps and charts of the Syrian and Egyptian coast, all illustrating his complex idea for a mass blockade, sea invasion and land march on the Nile delta, with participants coming from Genoa, Venice, Crete, Rhodes, Cyprus and Armenia, which required 5,000 knights merely to hold a sea blockade during the first military phase of operations.27 Needless to say, the crusade never took place.
As the Middle Ages advanced, the crusading spirit found new targets. During the 1330s and 1340s naval leagues were formed between Venetians, Cypriots and the Hospitallers to attack various Turkish Mediterranean ports. Between 1362 and 1369 King Peter I of Cyprus organized recruiting tours of Europe to raise crusader armies, piled them on to ships then used them to sack and in some cases briefly conquer Muslim towns including Adalia and Corycus on the Turkish coast, Alexandria and Rosetta on the Nile delta, and Sidon, Beirut, Tripoli, Tortosa and Latakia in the Mamluk empire. When the western church fell into schism in 1378, with rival popes elected in Avignon and Rome, each side recruited kings and nobles and declared their war on the opposite faction to be a crusade. Military campaigns in Bohemia against followers of the Czech spiritual leader Jan Hus were granted crusade status between 1420 and 1431.
North-east Europe had become another thriving theatre of Christian warfare, and much of the work here was done by the Teutonic Order. In 1309 they established their official headquarters in Marienburg, in the middle of a huge, all-but-autonomous Prussian state, their territories stretching hundreds of miles through northern Poland into Livonia. Their ostensible purpose was to aid the conversion of pagans, and the chronicle of their official historian-knight, Wigand of Marburg, abounds with stories of Reisen – mini-crusades against localized enemies. A typical entry from 1344 explains
that the then master, Ludolk König, allied with William, count of Holland, and ‘entered Lithuania, which he devastated for two days, inflicting a great deal of damage there, for the land was fertile. But because of the flooding caused by the snow melting and the ice breaking up he was forced to leave’.28 This was the story of much of the fourteenth century. Soon afterwards the order’s fortunes began to wane. Rather too successful in conversion and conquest, the men of the order ran short of pagan enemies to attack and instead fell to bickering with their Christian neighbours. Prussia developed into one of the great states of modern Europe, but it was by that stage out of Teutonic hands; by the beginning of the sixteenth century they held only a rump of territories in the Holy Roman Empire. They were formally dissolved as a military order by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1809 and today exist only as a small religious order of Catholic priests and nuns who offer care to expatriate Germans in various countries – a decline almost to their origins at the first siege of Acre of 1191.
Enriched with Templar possessions, albeit weighed down by the complexity of laying claim to all of them, the Hospitallers survived as the Templars had not. Crucial to their successful transition was their conquest of Rhodes, a large island at the far south of the Dodecanese, with shipping links to Constantinople, Cyprus, Beirut and Alexandria. They governed the island from a fortified harbour town and acquired a small chain of nearby islands including Kos and Leros. The order remained there for more than two centuries, involved in the busy trade of the Aegean Sea and occasionally joining Italian adventurers in military raids on Turkish ports such as Smyrna on the west coast of Asia Minor. But by the fifteenth century Rhodes itself had become a valuable prize, and the Hospitallers were forced to repel seaborne invasions, first by Mamluk forces in the 1440s and then by a new Islamic superpower, the Ottoman Empire, which rose like so many empires before it from Turkish tribal lands south of the Black Sea, sweeping away the Mamluks and eventually conquering Constantinople, Asia Minor, Greece, Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia, Hungary, Syria, Palestine and Egypt. The Hospitallers’ time on Rhodes came to an end in 1522 when the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent blasted the Hospitallers of Rhodes into submission with an armada said to have comprised more than 400 ships carrying 100,000 men.