Authors: Jonathan Phillips
Long before 1291 there had been discussions about a merger between the Templars and the other great Military Order, the Hospitallers. The latter’s medical vocation gave them an additional and important raison d’être, and it was intimated that the united order would follow a rule closer to the Hospitallers’ charitable way of life with less of the Templars’ more militaristic focus. James vociferously opposed the plan because he feared his organization would be absorbed into the Hospitallers and, more seriously, that the new entity would come under the dominance of one of the scheme’s most enthusiastic advocates, Philip of France.
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Crucially—and again, an issue of circumstance—one prime source of protection for any religious order was particularly feeble at this time: the frail Pope Clement V (1305–14) was based in Poitiers rather than Rome and there were times when he seems to
have been bullied by the same French churchmen responsible for his election to the papal crown.
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Once Philip had the order in his sights he moved extremely fast: Templar property was seized and the crown initiated a vicious and wide-ranging propaganda campaign against the knights. The king gave his officers a sweeping mandate to discover the “truth.” He wrote of “the strength of the presumptions and suspicions” raised and he described the Templars as “enemies of God, religion and nature, those opponents of human society.” Philip acknowledged that some of the men might be innocent, but argued that it was still appropriate they “should be tested in the furnace like gold and cleared by due process of judicial examination.”
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The king had convinced himself of the knights’ guilt and he mandated torture as an entirely legitimate way to extract a confession.
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Inquisitors used a variety of horrific techniques, including the application of fire to a prisoner’s feet; a process accelerated by smothering the feet in fat before they were placed in the flames. To allow further questioning a board could be placed between the feet and the fire and on occasion the torture was so extreme that some of the victim’s foot bones dropped out. The rack, a triangular-shaped frame onto which the detainee was tied, was another option open to the interrogators. A windlass was attached to the ropes that bound the prisoner’s ankles and wrists and when it was turned their joints dislocated. Finally, there was the strappado, a procedure in which a prisoner’s hands were tied behind his back and attached to a rope passed over a ceiling beam. Weights could be attached to his testicles or feet before the knight was hoisted high off the ground and then allowed to plummet down, the rope stopping him inches from the floor and the violent deceleration causing excruciating pain. In October and November 1307, 138 knights were questioned and in the face of such a terrifying array of machinery only four failed to confess to some or all of the crimes alleged. The testimony of James of Molay was damning—he admitted to the denial of Christ (although like many colleagues he claimed to have spoken such words without meaning them in his heart) and spitting on the cross; other Templars confessed to kissing on the mouth and stomach. James was made to repeat his disclosure before the scholars of Paris University, thus providing vital publicity for King Philip’s case.
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By Christmas, however, Clement had begun to stand his ground a little, furious at Philip’s uncompromising and extensive interference in Church
matters. Soon he suspended the French Inquisition and sent his own cardinals to see the Templars; unsurprisingly they all retracted their statements and claimed they were given under extreme duress. By 1308 Clement established a papal commission and many of the knights continued to plead their innocence. Brother Ponsard of Gizy stated that “if he continued to be tortured he would deny everything he was now saying and would say whatever any man wanted. While he was prepared to suffer death by decapitation, fire or boiling water for the honour of the Order, he was incapable of bearing such long torments as he had suffered in the more than two years he had been in prison.”
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The recent discovery of a document hidden for centuries in the labyrinthine Vatican archives sheds fascinating new light on the ebb and flow of these proceedings. In spite of Philip’s continued obstruction, a papal commission managed to meet the Templar leaders at the castle of Chinon on the River Loire in August 1308. In the presence of the pope’s representatives the master and his companions denied the charges against them and were duly absolved of heresy—an intriguing development that showed, at this point, Clement’s unwillingness to accept certain of the accusations directed at the order.
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James of Molay began to make a positive case for his brethren: he emphasized their religiosity and frequent veneration of proper relics; he also noted their generosity to the poor in alms-giving and their willingness to risk life and limb in their vocation of fighting the Muslims.
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While Molay’s efforts were of limited effect, the defense mounted by Brother Peter of Bologna, a man trained in canon law, was considerably more powerful. He challenged the jurisdiction of Philip’s churchmen and also raised what was, arguably, the most telling factor in this whole inquiry: the progress of other investigations across Christian Europe. As he indicated: “Outside the kingdom of France no brother of the Temple can be found in whatever country on earth who tells or has told these lies; hence it is plainly obvious why these lies were told in the kingdom of France, namely because those who told them were corrupted by fear, persuasion or bribery when they made their depositions.”
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In complete contrast to Philip the Fair, King Edward II of England and King James II of Aragon flatly refused to countenance the idea that the Templars were guilty, and in Germany and Cyprus—without the use of torture—the inquisitors secured no confessions at all.
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In fact, in the case of Cyprus, for which a manuscript of the trial hearings survives, numerous non-Templar witnesses testified to the good faith and charity of the
brothers.
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The only other areas where confessions were made were Navarre and Naples—both regions ruled by relatives of the Capetian royal house.
Philip’s response to the Templars’ show of defiance was swift and effective. In May 1310 the archbishop of Sens, a close associate of the crown, convoked a council to judge the individual charges against the Templars in his custody. He pushed aside objections from Peter of Bologna and rejected the idea that his process was running counter to the papal inquiry. On May 12 he ordered fifty-four knights, all hopelessly protesting their innocence, to be loaded onto carts and burned to death in a field near the convent of Saint Antoine outside Paris. By this brutal display of force Philip broke the resistance of many of the brothers and more began to make confession and seek absolution.
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For a while the papal commission stalled King Philip’s momentum, but the weakening Clement was driven toward a definitive pronouncement at the Council of Vienne in March 1312. The arrival of King Philip and an armed force ensured that the pope made the “correct” statement. On March 22 Clement held a secret meeting at which it was decided to suppress the Order and on April 3 a formal announcement was read out in public. In language saturated with biblical texts Clement made his position known: “Not slight is the fornication of this house, immolating its sons, giving them up and consecrating them to demons and not to God, but to gods whom they do not know. Therefore this house will be desolate and in disgrace, cursed and uninhabited . . . let it not be lived in but reduced to a wilderness. Let everyone be astonished at it and hiss at all its wounds [Jeremiah 50:12–13].”
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The pope noted how, initially at least, he had been unwilling to believe the stories that circulated about the order. He then spoke of Philip’s “zeal for the orthodox faith,” and he was careful to distance the king from any hint of financial concerns. The absolution granted to the Templar leaders at Chinon was seemingly disregarded when Clement outlined the various confessions, including that of James of Molay, and he concluded that the brethren were guilty of apostasy, idolatry, sodomy, and various other heresies. He added that his own officers had made further enquiries and claimed that these had unearthed more incriminating information.
A majority of the council favored giving the Order a chance to defend itself, but Clement adjudged that “although legal process against the Order up to now does not permit its canonical condemnation as heretical . . . its
good name has been largely taken away by the heresies attributed to it.” Because, he argued, so many individuals were guilty of heresy the order as a whole remained suspect and for that reason no one of any caliber would wish to join it in future, thus it was rendered worthless in the task of recovering the Holy Land. Clement felt that further delay would only mean the final dilapidation of Templar property—land given to them in good faith to aid Christ’s cause. “Therefore, with a sad heart . . . we suppress the Order of Templars, and its rule and habit and name, by an inviolable and perpetual decree and we entirely forbid that anyone from now on enter the Order, or receive its habit or presume to behave as a Templar.”
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Those brothers who had confessed and been absolved were to become Knights Hospitaller, while many of those who refused to recant were imprisoned. Templar lands were usually given over to other Military Orders, particularly the Hospitallers; within a couple of years, however, the rapacious King Philip had managed to acquire large amounts of this property in France.
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For the leading Templars, however, there was to be little mercy. They had languished in prison at Gisors since 1310 but were not brought to trial in Paris until December 1313.
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James was to be tried on the basis of his initial confession, which he had retracted once, but since returned to. At a public gathering in front of the church of Notre Dame he, along with three senior colleagues, was sentenced to life imprisonment. Two of the men remained silent, but James, along with Geoffrey of Charney, commander of the Templars in Normandy, stood up. Surely aware of the danger, once again they denied everything they had confessed, stubbornly refuted the charges against them, and affirmed that they were good Christians. They argued passionately that they had never turned aside from their task and had suffered for God and justice. The presiding cardinals were taken aback and ordered the men to be kept under guard until the matter could be debated further. Calamitously for the prisoners, however, their custodian was a royal official who told the king. Philip snapped into action: he quickly consulted his advisers and, without any reference to the Church authorities, he commanded the two men to be burned at the stake that very day. They were sent to the little island at the tip of the Île de la Cité, below the gardens of the king’s palace (today known as the place du Vert-Galant; a memorial plaque marks the place of this shameful episode) where the stake was set up. A royal cleric, Geoffrey of Paris, witnessed the scene and wrote a verse chronicle
of the event. James’s serene bearing at this terrible moment profoundly moved those present:
The master, who saw the fire ready
,
Stripped with no sign of fear
.
And, as I myself saw, placed himself
Quite naked in his shirt
Freely and with good appearance;
Never did he tremble
No matter how much he was pulled and jostled
.
They took him to tie him to the stake
And without fear he allowed them to tie him
.
They bound his hands with a rope
But he said to them: “Gentlemen, at least
Let me join my hands a little
And make a prayer to God
For now the time is fitting
.
Here I see my judgement
When death freely suits me;
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
.
Gentlemen,” he said, “make no mistake
,
All those who are against us
Will have to suffer because of us
.
In that belief I wish to die . . . ”
And so gently did death take him
That everyone marvelled.
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Through his intimidation of the papacy and by his brutal and relentless persecution of the Templars, King Philip achieved something beyond the powers of the Muslims of the Near East: the destruction of a Military Order. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that some of their difficulties were self-inflicted: for example, their reception ceremonies were arcane and secretive, yet in truth, they were a flawed, rather than a heretical, organization
and had been the victims of a greedy and paranoid king. Nowhere other than France were they treated with such barbarity: elsewhere their membership simply dwindled and then expired; by the late fourteenth century the Templars were gone forever.
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By coincidence—or fate, if you believed the Templars’ supporters—James’s final curse came true: one month later Pope Clement died and in November of the same year King Philip was killed in a riding accident.
The problems endured by the Templars help to illustrate the crisis that faced the crusading movement after the fall of Acre—but it would be wrong to suggest that there was no hope of recovering the Holy Land. The Christians still held Cyprus as a base in the eastern Mediterranean and for a short time there seemed the possibility of an alliance with the Ilkhan Mongols of Persia, who, in 1299, had inflicted a heavy defeat on the Mamluks and then took Jerusalem. Rumors flashed across Europe that the Mongol khan Ghazan had handed over the Holy Sepulchre to local Christians. Pope Boniface VIII solemnly announced as much to Edward I of England in a letter of April 7, 1300, and the Christian West briefly regarded Ghazan as an instrument of divine will. The pope tried to fan enthusiasm for a new crusade but once the truth emerged this bubble of excitement quickly burst: Ghazan had not surrendered Jerusalem and it was soon under Mamluk rule again. Furthermore, the khan was not, as rumored, a Christian (he was a Muslim), although in 1302 he sent an embassy to Edward I that sought cooperation against the Mamluks.
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