Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (11 page)

The Saracens dig in
beyond the river near Mansura. The French try to build a dam and
create a ford, protecting it with their mobile towers, but the
Saracens have learned the art of Greek fire from the Byzantines.
Greek fire is a barrel-like container with a kind of big spear as a
tail. It is hurled like a lightning bolt, a flying dragon. It burns
so brightly that in the Christian camp at night one can see as
clearly as if it were day.

While the camp burns, a
Bedouin traitor leads the king and his men to a ford in exchange
for a payment of three hundred bezants. The king decides to attack.
The crossing is not easy; many are drowned and swept away by the
current, while three hundred mounted Saracens wait on the other
side. When the main body of the attack force finally comes ashore,
the Templars, as planned, are in the vanguard, followed by the
Comte d'Artois. The Moslem horsemen flee, and the Templars wait for
the rest of the Christian army. But Artois and his men dash off in
pursuit of the enemy.

The Templars, anxious to
avoid dishonor, then join in the assault, but catch up with Artois
only after he has penetrated the enemy camp and begun a massacre.
The Moslems fall back toward Mansura, which is just what Artois has
been hoping for. He sets out after them. The Templars try to stop
him; Brother Gilles, supreme commander of the Temple, tries
flattery, telling Artois that he has performed a wondrous feat,
perhaps the greatest ever achieved overseas. But Artois, eager for
glory, accuses the Templars of treachery, claiming that the
Templars and Hospitalers could have conquered this territory long
ago if they had really wanted to. He has shown them what a man with
blood in his veins can do. This is too much. The Templars must
prove that they are second to none. They charge into the city and
chase the enemy all the way to the wall on the opposite side. Then
suddenly the Templars realize that they have repeated the mistake
of Ascalon. While the Christians are busy sacking the sultan's
palace, the infidels reassemble and fall upon the now unorganized
group of jackals.

Have the Templars
allowed themselves to be blinded once again by greed? Some say that
before accompanying Artois into the city, Brother Gilles spoke to
him with stoic lucidity: "My Lord, my brothers and I are not
afraid. We follow you. But great is our doubt that any of us will
return." And indeed, Artois was killed, and many good knights died
with him, including two hundred and eighty Templars.

It was more than a
defeat; it was a disgrace. Yet not even Joinville recorded it as
such. It happened and that is the beauty of war.

Joinville's pen turns
many of these battles and skirmishes into charming ballets. Heads
roll here and there, implorations to the good Lord abound, and the
king sheds tears over a loyal follower's death. But the whole thing
is Technicolor, complete with crimson saddlecloths, gilded
trappings, the flash of helmets and swords under the yellow desert
sun, and an azure sea in the background. And who knows? Perhaps the
Templars really lived their daily butchery that way.

Joinville's perspective
shifts vertically, depending on whether he has fallen from his
horse or just remounted. Isolated scenes are sharply focused, but
the larger picture eludes him. We see individual duels, whose
outcome is often random. Joinville sets off to help the lord of
Wanpn. A Turk strikes him with his lance, Joinville's horse sinks
to its knees, Joinville falls over the animal's head, he stands up,
sword in hand, and Chevalier Erard de Siveiey ("may God grant him
grace") points to a ruined house where they can take refuge. They
are trampled by Turks on horseback. Chevalier Frederic de Loupey is
struck from behind, "which made so large a wound that the blood
poured from his body as if from the bunghole of a barrel." Siverey
receives a slashing blow in the face, so that "his nose was left
dangling over his lips." And so on, until help arrives. They leave
the house and move to another part of the battlefield, where there
are more deaths and last-minute rescues, and loud prayers to Saint
James. In the meantime, the good Comte de Soissons, wielding his
sword, cries, "Seneschal, let these dogs howl as they will. By
God's bonnet, we shall talk of this day yet, you and I, sitting at
home with our ladies!" The king asks for news of his brother, the
wretched Comte d'Artois, and Brother Henri de Ronnay, provost of
the Hospitalers, answers that he "has good news, for certainly the
count is now in Paradise." "God be praised for everything He
gives," says the king, big tears falling from his eyes.

But it isn't always a
ballet, angelic and bloodstained. Grand Master Guillaume de Sonnac
dies, burned alive by Greek fire. With the great stink of corpses
and the shortage of provisions, the Christian army is stricken with
scurvy. Saint Louis's men are finally routed. The king is so badly
racked by dysentery that he cuts out the seat of his pants to save
time in battle. Damietta is lost, and the queen has to negotiate
with the Saracens, paying five hundred thousand livres tournois to
ransom the king.

The crusades were
carried out in virtuous bad faith. On his return to
Saint-Jean-d'Acre, Louis is hailed as a victor; the whole city
comes out in procession to greet him, including the clergy, ladies,
and children. The Templars, seeing which way the wind is blowing,
try to open negotiations with Damascus. Louis finds out and,
furious at being bypassed, repudiates the new grand master in the
presence of the Moslem ambassadors. The grand master has to retract
the promises he made to the enemy, has to kneel before the king and
beg his pardon. No one can say the Knights haven't fought well¡Xand
selflessly¡Xbut the king of France still humiliates them, to
reassert his power. And, half a century later, Louis's successor,
Philip, to reassert his power, will send the Knights to the
stake.

In 1291
Saint-Jean-d'Acre is conquered by the Moors, and all its
inhabitants are put to the sword. The Christian kingdom of
Jerusalem is gone for good. The Templars are richer, more numerous,
more powerful than ever, but they were born to fight in the Holy
Land, and in the Holy Land there are none left.

They live in splendor,
isolated in their commanderies throughout Europe and in the Temple
in Paris, but they dream still of the plateau of the Temple in
Jerusalem in their days of glory, dream of the handsome church of
Saint Mary Lateran spangled with votive chapels, dream of their
bouquets of trophies, and all the rest: the forges, the saddlery,
the granaries, the stables of two thousand horses, the cantering
troops of squires, aides, and turcopoles, the red crosses on white
cloaks, the dark surplices of the attendants, the sultan's envoys
with their great turbans and gilded helmets, the pilgrims, a
crossroads filled with dapper patrols and outriders, and the
delights of rich coffers, the port from which instructions and
cargoes were dispatched for the castles on the mainland, or on the
islands, or on the shores of Asia Minor...

All gone now, my poor
Templars.

That evening, at
Pilade's, by then on my fifth whiskey, for which Belbo was paying,
insisted on paying, I realized that I had been dreaming aloud
and¡Xthe shame of it¡Xwith feeling. But I must have told a
beautiful story, full of compassion, because Dolores's eyes were
glistening, and Diotallevi, having taken the mad plunge and ordered
a second tonic water, was seraphically gazing toward heaven¡Xor,
rather, toward the bar's decidedly noncabalistic ceiling.
"Perhaps," he murmured, "they were all those things: lost souls and
saints, horsemen and grooms, bankers and heroes..."

"They were remarkable,
no doubt about it" was Belbo's summation. "But tell me, Casaubon,
do you love them?"

"I'm doing my thesis on
them. If you do your thesis on syphilis, you end up loving even the
Spirochaeta pallida."

"It was lovely," Dolores
said. "Like a movie. But I have to go now. I have to mimeograph the
leaflets for tomorrow morning. There's picketing at the Marelli
factory."

"Lucky you. You can
afford it," Belbo said. He raised a weary hand and stroked her
hair. Then he ordered what he said was his last whiskey. "It's
almost midnight. I say that not for normal people, I say it for
Diotallevi's benefit. But let's go on. I want to hear about the
trial. Who, what, when, and why."

"Cur, quomodo, quando,"
Diotallevi agreed. "Yes, yes."

He declares that he saw,
the day before, five hundred and four brothers of the order led to
the stake because they would not confess the above-mentioned
errors, and he heard it said that they were burned. But he fears
that he himself would not resist if he were to be burned, that he
would confess in the presence of the lord magistrates and anyone
else, if questioned, and say that all the errors with which the
order has been charged are true; that he, if asked, would also
confess to killing Our Lord.

¡XTestimony of Aimery de
Villiers-le-Duc, May 13, 1310

A trial full of
silences, contradictions, enigmas, and acts of stupidity. The acts
of stupidity were the most obvious, and, because they were
inexplicable, they generally coincided with the enigmas. In those
halcyon days I believed that the source of enigma was stupidity.
Then the other evening in the periscope I decided that the most
terrible enigmas are those that mask themselves as madness. But now
I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a
harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to
interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

With the collapse of the
Christian kingdoms of the Holy Land, the Templars were left without
a purpose. Or, rather, they soon turned their means into an end;
they spent their time managing their immense wealth. Philip the
Fair, a monarch intent on building a centralized state, naturally
disliked them. They were a sovereign order, beyond any royal
control. The grand master ranked as a prince of the blood; he
commanded an army, administered vast landholdings, was elected like
the emperor, and had absolute authority. The French treasury was
located in the Temple in Paris, outside the king's control. The
Templars were the trustees, proxies, and administrators of an
account that was the king's only in name. They paid funds in and
out and manipulated the interest; they acted like a great private
bank but enjoyed all the privileges and exemptions of a state
institution. The king's treasurer was a Templar. How could a ruler
rule under such conditions?

If you can't lick ¡¥em,
join ¡¥em. Philip asked to be made an honorary Templar. Request
denied. An insult no king could swallow. He suggested that the pope
merge Templars and Hospitalers and place the new order under the
control of one of his sons. Jacques de Molay, grand master of the
Temple, arrived with great pomp from Cyprus, where he lived like a
monarch in exile. He handed the pope a memorandum that supposedly
assessed the advantages of the merger but actually emphasized its
disadvantages. Molay brazenly argued that, among other things, the
Templars were far wealthier than the Hospitalers, that the merger
would enrich the latter at the expense of the former, thus putting
the souls of his knights in jeopardy. Molay won this first round:
the plan was shelved.

The only recourse left
was slander, and here the king held good cards. Rumors about the
Templars had been circulating for a long time. Imagine how these
"colonials" must have looked to right-thinking Frenchmen, these
people who collected tithes everywhere while giving nothing in
return, not even¡Xanymore¡X their own blood as guardians of the
Holy Sepulcher. True, they were Frenchmen. But not completely.
People saw them as pieds noirs; at the time, the term was poulains.
The Templars flaunted their exotic ways; it was said that among
themselves they even spoke the language of the Moors, with which
they were familiar. Though they were monks, their savage nature was
common knowledge: some years before, Pope Innocent III had issued a
bull entiSed De insolentia Templariorum. They had taken a vow of
poverty, but they lived with the pomp of aristocrats, with the
greed of the new merchant classes, and with the effrontery of a
corps of musketeers.

The whispering campaign
was not long in coming: the Templars were homosexuals, heretics,
idolaters worshiping a bearded head of unknown provenance. Perhaps
they shared the secrets of the Isma'ilis, for they had had dealings
with the Assassins of the Old Man of the Mountain. Philip and his
advisers put these rumors to good use.

Philip was assisted by
his two evil geniuses, Marigny and Nogaret. It was Marigny who
ultimately got control of the Templar treasury, administering it on
the king's behalf until it was transferred to the Hospitalers. It
is not clear who got the interest. Nogaret, the king's lord
chancellor, in 1303 had been the strategist behind the incident in
Anagni, when Sciarra Colonna slapped Boniface VIII and the pope
died of humiliation less than a month later.

Then a man by the name
of Esquin de Floyran appeared on the scene. Apparently, while
imprisoned for unspecified crimes and on the verge of being
executed, Floyran encountered a renegade Templar in his cell and
from him heard a terrible confession. In exchange for his life and
a tidy sum, Floyran told everything. Which turned out to be exactly
what everybody was already rumoring. Now the rumors became formal
depositions before a magistrate. The king transmitted Floyran's
sensational revelations to the pope, Clement V, who later moved the
papal seat to Avignon. Clement believed some of the charges, but
knew it would not be easy to interfere in the Temple's affairs. In
1307, however, he agreed to open an official inquiry. Molay, the
grand master, was informed, but declared that his conscience was
clear. At the king's side, he continued to take part in official
ceremonies, a prince among princes. Clement V seemed to be
stalling, and the king began to suspect that the pope wanted to
give the Templars time to disappear. But no, the Templars went on
drinking and blaspheming in their commanderies, seemingly unaware
of the danger. And this is the first enigma.

On September 14, 1307,
the king sent sealed messages to all the bailiffs and seneschals of
the realm, ordering the mass arrest of the Templars and the
confiscation of their property. A month went by between the issuing
of this order and the arrest on October 13. But the Templars
suspected nothing. On that October morning they all fell into the
trap and¡Xanother enigma¡Xgave themselves up without a fight. In
fact, in the days before the arrests, using the most feeble
excuses, the king's men, wanting to make sure that nothing would
escape confiscation, had conducted a kind of inventory of the
Temple's possessions throughput the country. And still the Templars
did nothing. Come right in, my dear bailiff, take a look around,
make yourself at home.

When he learned what had
happened, the pope hazarded a protest, but it was too late. The
royal investigators had already brought out their irons and ropes,
and many Knights had begun to confess under torture. When they
confessed, they were handed over to inquisitors, who had methods of
their own, even though they were not yet burning people at the
stake. The Knights confirmed their confessions.

This is the third
mystery. Granted, there was torture, and it must have been
vigorous, since thirty-six Knights died in the course of it. But
not a single one of these men of iron, seasoned by their battles
with the cruel Tlirk, resisted arrest. In Paris only four Knights
out of a hundred and thirty-eight refused to confess. All the
others did, including Jacques de Molay.

"What did they confess?"
Belbo asked.

"They confessed exactly
what was charged in the arrest warrant. There was hardly any
variation in the testimony, at least not in France and Italy. In
England, where nobody really wanted to go through with the trial,
the usual accusations appeared in the depositions, but they were
attributed to witnesses outside the order, whose testimony was
hearsay. In other words, the Templars confessed only when asked to,
and then only to what was charged."

"Same old inquisitional
stuff. We've seen it often," Belbo remarked.

"Yet the behavior of the
accused was odd. The charges were that during their initiation
rites the Templars denied Christ three times, spat on the crucifix,
and were stripped and kissed in posteriori parte spine dorsi, in
other words, on the behind, then on the navel and the mouth, in
humane dignitatis opprobrium. That they then engaged in mutual
fornication. That they were then shown the head of a bearded idol,
which they had to worship. Now, how did the accused respond to
these charges? Geoffroy de Charnay, who was later burned at the
stake with Molay, said that, yes, it had happened to him; he had
denied Christ, but with his mouth, not his heart; he didn't recall
whether he spat on the crucifix, because they had been in such a
hurry that night. As for the kiss on the behind, that also had
happened to him, and he had heard the preceptor of Auvergne say
that, after all, it was better to couple with brothers than to be
befouled by a woman, but he personally had not committed carnal
sins with other Knights. In other words: Yes, it's all true, but it
was only a game, nobody really believed in it, and anyway it was
the others who did it, I just went along to be polite. Jacques de
Molay¡Xthe grand master himself¡Xsaid that when they gave him the
crucifix, he only pretended to spit on it and spat on the ground
instead. He admitted that the initiation ceremonies were more or
less as described, but¡Xto tell the truth¡Xhe couldn't say for
sure, because he had initiated very few brothers in the course of
his career. Another Knight said that he had kissed the master, but
only on the mouth, not the behind; it was the master who kissed him
on the behind. Some did confess to more than was necessary, saying
that they had not only denied Christ but also called Him a
criminal, and they had denied the virginity of Mary, and they had
urinated on the crucifix, not only on the day of their initiation,
but during Holy Week as well. They didn't believe in the
sacraments, they said, and they worshiped not only Ba-phomet but
also the Devil in the form of a cat..."

Equally grotesque,
though not as incredible, is the pas de deux that now begins
between the king and the pope. The pope wants to take charge of the
case; the king insists on seeing the trial through to its
conclusion. The pope suggests a temporary suspension of the order:
the guilty will be sentenced, then the Temple will be revived in
its original purity. The king wants the scandal to spread, wants it
to involve the entire order. This will lead to the order's complete
dissolution¡Xpolitically, religiously, and, most of all,
financially.

At one point a document
is produced that's a pure masterpiece. Some doctors of theology
argue that in order to prevent them from retracting their
confessions, the accused should be denied any defense. Since they
have already confessed, there is no need for a trial. A trial is
required only if some doubt about the case exists, and here there
is no doubt. "Why allow them a defense, whose only purpose would be
to shield them from the consequences of their admitted errors? The
evidence renders their punishment inescapable."

But there is still a
risk that the pope might take control of the trial, so the king and
Nogaret set up a sensational case involving the bishop of Troyes,
who is accused of witchcraft by the secret testimony of a
mysterious conspirator named Noffo Dei. It will be discovered later
that Dei lied¡Xand he will be hanged for his trouble¡Xbut in the
meantime the poor bishop is publicly accused of sodomy, sacrilege,
and usury; the same crimes as the Templars. Perhaps the king is
trying to show the sons of France that the Church has no right to
sit in judgment on the Templars, since it is itself not untouched
by their sins; or perhaps he is simply giving the pope a warning to
stay away. It's all very murky, a crisscrossing of various police
forces and secret services, mutual infiltrations and anonymous
accusations. The pope is now cornered, and he agrees to interrogate
seventy-two Templars, who repeat the confessions they made under
torture. But the pope observes that they have repented, and uses
their abjuration¡Xa trump card¡Xas an excuse to pardon
them.

And here something else
happens¡Xit was a problem I had to resolve in my thesis, but I was
torn between contradictory sources. Just when the pope has finally
won jurisdiction over the knights, he suddenly hands them back to
the king. Why does this happen? Molay retracts his confession;
Clement allows him a defense, and three cardinals are summoned to
interrogate him. On November 26, 1309, Molay proudly defends the
order and its purity; he even goes so far as to threaten its
accusers. But then he is visited by an envoy from the king,
Guillaume de Plaisans, whom Molay considers a friend. He is given
some obscure advice, and two days later, on November 28, he issues
a meek and vague deposition, in which he claims to be a poor,
uneducated knight, and he confines himself to listing the (now
remote) merits of the Temple, its acts of charity, the blood the
Templars shed in the Holy Land, and so on. To make matters worse,
Nogaret suddenly arrives and reminds everyone that the Temple once
had dubious contacts with Saladin. Now the implied crime is high
treason. Molay's excuses are pathetic. He has endured two years in
prison, and in this deposition he seems a broken man, but he seemed
a broken man immediately after his arrest, too. In March of the
following year Molay adopts a new strategy in a third deposition.
Now he refuses to speak at all, saying that he will address the
pope himself but no one else,

A dramatic twist, and
here the epic theater begins. In April of 1310, five hundred and
fifty Templars ask to be allowed to speak in defense of the order.
They denounce the torture to which they have been subjected and
deny the charges against them. They demonstrate that all the
accusations are implausible. But the king and Nogaret know what to
do. Some Templars have retracted their confessions? Fine. Their
retraction only makes them recidivists and perjurers¡Xrelapsi¡Xa
terrible charge in those days. He who confesses and repents may be
pardoned, but he who not only does not repent but also retracts his
confession, forswears himself, and stubbornly denies that he has
anything to repent, he must die. Fifty such perjurers are condemned
to death.