Read The Tragedy of the Templars Online
Authors: Michael Haag
The Tragedy of the Templars (45 page)
Since 1308 Pope Clement had been intending to hold an ecumenical council at Vienne in the Rhone-Alps region of France to consider three great matters: the Templars, the Holy Land and the reform of the Church. Originally scheduled for October 1310, it had to be postponed a year because the pope's contest with the king of France over the Templars was dragging on. Now in the summer of 1311 Clement had gathered information about the Templars from investigations all round France and abroad to present at the council. What he found was that only in France and in regions under French domination or influence were there substantial confessions from Templars â that is, areas where the French authorities and their collaborators had applied ferocious tortures to their victims, or where their testimony was deliberately distorted to turn admitted irregularities into heresy. Clement was becoming eager to wind up the Templar matter before its controversies caused wider and deeper troubles for the Church.
Clement had senior advisers who argued that no time should be wasted on discussion or defence, and that the pope should use his executive powers to abolish the Templars forthwith. One said that the Templars had âalready caused the Christian name to smell among unbelievers and infidels and have shaken some of the faithful in the stability of their faith'. He added that suppression of the order should take place without delay in case âthe capricious spark of this error ignites in flames, which could burn the whole world'.
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But then in late October a dramatic event occurred which did much to counter the arguments of those in favour of swift abolition â seven Templars appeared at the council to argue for the defence of the order. The pope reacted swiftly and had them locked up.
But this was not a matter that the overwhelming majority of the clergy attending the council was prepared to overlook. As Henry Ffykeis, an Englishman attending the council, wrote home to the bishop of Norwich on 27 December 1311:
        Concerning the matter of the Templars there is great debate as to whether they ought in law to be admitted to the defence. The larger part of the prelates, indeed all of them, excepting five or six from the council of the King of France, stand on their behalf. On account of this the Pope is strongly moved against the prelates. The King of France more so; and he is coming in a rage with a great following.
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Indeed Philip was soon demonstrating his usual technique of intimidation by appearing at various places upriver from Vienne, creating the powerful sensation in the pope that the king was about to descend upon him. On 2 March 1312 the king sent a thinly veiled ultimatum to the pope, reminding him of the crimes and heresies of the Templars, âWhich is why, burning with zeal for the orthodox faith and in case so great an injury done to Christ should remain unpunished, we affectionately, devotedly and humbly ask Your Holiness that you should suppress the aforesaid order'.
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Just in case Clement did not get the message, on 20 March the king with his brothers, sons and a considerable armed force arrived at Vienne.
On 3 April, having silenced the members of the council on pain of excommunication, and with the king of France sitting at his side, the pope made public his decision, already committed to writing twelve days earlier in the form of a bull,
Vox in Excelso
, dated 22 March 1312, that the Templars, though not condemned, were suppressed on the grounds that the order was too defamed to carry on.
        Considering therefore the infamy, suspicion, noisy insinuation and the other things above which have been brought against the Order, and [. . .] considering, moreover, the grave scandal which has arisen from these things against the Order, which it did not seem could be checked while this Order remained in being, and also the danger both to faith and souls, and that many horrible things have been done by very many of the brothers of this Order [. . .] who have lapsed into the sin of wicked apostasy against the Lord Jesus Christ himself, the crime of detestable idolatry, the execrable outrage of the Sodomites [. . .] we abolish the aforesaid Order of the Temple and its constitution, habit and name by an irrevocable and perpetually valid decree, and we subject it to perpetual prohibition with the approval of the Holy Council, strictly forbidding anyone to presume to enter the said Order in the future, or to receive or wear its habit, or to act as a Templar.
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Under the circumstances it was probably the best that Clement could do. Another bull,
Ad Providam
, dated 2 May, granted the Templars' property to the Knights Hospitaller. Soon after, Philip extracted a huge sum of money from the Hospitallers in compensation for his costs in bringing the Templars to trial.
The Church had now washed its hands of the Templars. In accordance with Church practice, once it had decided on a defendant's fate he was handed over to the secular authorities for punishment. In this case almost all the Templars in France had been in royal hands all along, and the dispensing of their fates did not require the transfer of their persons. The treatment meted out by the royal authorities to individual Templars varied. Those who had confessed were subjected to penances, and these were sometimes heavy, including lengthy imprisonment. Others who had confessed to nothing or were otherwise of little account were sent to monasteries for the rest of their lives.
The leading Templars, including the Grand Master, had to wait until 18 March 1314 before their cases were dealt with. They might well have expected their cases to have been disposed of long before, at Chinon, when they received papal absolution, and almost certainly they would now have been expecting to be treated accordingly. But the hearings at Chinon still remained secret, and instead Hugh of Pairaud, Geoffrey of Gonneville, Geoffrey of Charney and Jacques de Molay were brought for final judgement before a small commission of French cardinals and ecclesiastics at Paris, among them that same archbishop of Sens who had so happily for the king burned fifty-four Templars in May 1310.
The sentence was handed down. On the basis of their earlier confessions, as twisted by the crown, all four men were condemned to harsh and perpetual punishment â in effect, to starve and rot in prison until they were released by a lingering death. Hugh of Pairaud and Geoffrey of Gonneville accepted their fate in silence. âBut lo', wrote a chronicler of the time,
        when the cardinals believed that they had imposed an end to the affair, immediately and unexpectedly two of them, namely the grand master and the master of Normandy, defending themselves obstinately against the cardinal who had preached the sermon and against the archbishop of Sens, returned to the denial both of the confession as well as everything which they had confessed.
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Jacques de Molay was in his seventies; he and Geoffrey of Charney, the master of Normandy, had been in the king's dungeons for the last seven years. For six of those years they had lived under the expectation that their absolution by the pope would free them from their nightmare, that they would live again in sunlight among those loved by the Church and Christ. But now in the midst of betrayal and despair they refused to give themselves into perpetual incarceration in a living hell. Loudly protesting their innocence and asserting that the order of the Templars was pure and holy, Jacques de Molay and Geoffrey of Charney put themselves into the hands of God.
At once the king ordered that they be condemned as relapsed heretics, and on that same evening, at vespers, they were taken to the Ile des Javiaux, a small island in the Seine west of Notre Dame, and bound to the stake. The chronicler described their last moments: âThey were seen to be so prepared to sustain the fire with easy mind and will that they brought from all those who saw them much admiration and surprise for the constancy of their death and final denial'.
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The last of the Templars went to their deaths with courage, in the tradition of their order.
An early 1930s aerial view of the Temple Mount from the south. The Dome of the Rock rises at the centre, on the site of the Jewish Temple, while in the foreground is the Asqa mosque, the headquarters of the Templars for much of the twelfth century.
A nineteenth century photograph of the Aqsa mosque seen from the north. The three central arches of the facade are very fine Templar work.
Covered in marble and mosaics, the Dome of the Rock has been described as âa purely Byzantine work'; in plan it was closely modelled after the domed Rotunda of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
The dome of the Rotunda of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in the left foreground, stands high on the western hill of Jerusalem and overlooks the Dome of the Rock. The Mount of Olives rises in the distance.
Bethlehem welcomed the First Crusade as liberators. Palestine in the eleventh century was overwhelmingly Christian.
