Individual Details
Philippe IV "The Fair," King of France
(1268 - 29 Nov 1314)
Philip IV and Pope Clement arranged to have the Templars arrested in France.
Philip the Fair was very much a man of action. Consequently, he was frequently at odds with other monarchs and the Church. Pious though he was, he could not bear the idea that he was subject to the Pope in any other sense than spiritual. Thus,
when Pope Boniface VIII issued the bull Clericis Laicos, in which he forbade the clergy to pay taxes to any prince without papal consent, Philip was very much annoyed. So much so that he cut off the export of gold and silver from France, which
was a major problem to the Holy See, for whose finances the French money was direly needed. This time Boniface retracted his bull, but a new problem was already nearing critical mass. It so happened that Philip wished to see a bishop in
Southern France bide good-bye to his office, but Boniface did not agree to this. He saw that Philip was ousting the bishop for purely political reasons, and therefore declined to degrade the bishop, even when presented with a very creative list
of vices Philip had compiled of the bishop's doings. To make his point, he reissued the doctrine set out in Clericis Laicos.
Now, this was really a red cloth to Philip, who summoned the estates of his realm (for the first time ever) to gather the strength of his people against Boniface. He, on the other hand, was steadfast, and defaulted to the biggest cannon
available in the Papal fortress - he threatened Philip with excommunication. In the bull Unam Sanctam he spelled out his terms: no earthly prince was above the Pope, no matter who the prince happened to be. Philip realized the problematic
situation and decided to pre-empt the Pope's plans, and for this he sent Guillaume de Nogaret down to Anagni, Italy, where the Pope was staying with his relatives. Nogaret (who later figured prominently in the trial of the Templars) was one of
the early masters of disinformation who could make anyone look extremely bad in the eyes of the King and therefore available for proper punishment. He had shown his talent already in the case of the Bishop of Troyes, and so he was chosen to
assemble a task force of selected thugs for the operation at hand. First Nogaret drew up a list of vices he smeared Boniface with: he was, among other things, said to be a heretic, a sorcerer, an assassin of ecclesiastics, and, to top all this
off, guilty of keeping mistresses to hide the fact that he was, in reality, a sodomist.
Nogaret seized the Pope and held him captive for some days until the local nobles forced him to free the Pope. Boniface, an old man already by medieval standards, never recovered from the shock of being the first viceroy of Christ to be
kidnapped. He died soon after and thus freed Philip of the threat he might have had trouble with later on. As soon as the next Pope, Benedict IX, was inaugurated, he proceeded to blame Nogaret for what he had caused Boniface; note the target of
the accusation - not Philip, whom Benedict wished not to infuriate, but Nogaret, who was a hired gun. Disappointingly Benedict died within a year of his office begun, and never found out if his strategy worked or not. This time Philip was en
garde and subtly (probably like a rhino) let the French members of the College of Cardinals know that he would be happy if a Frenchman were elected Pope. And to everyone's surprise - Bertrand de Got, Archbishop of Bordeaux, got the job, and
assumed the name of Clement V.
As soon as Clement was in office he was approached by Nogaret, who wished to have his name cleared of any wrongdoing in the case of the unfortunate Boniface. Of course, the new Pope was very much against letting Nogaret have his honor back -
after all, he had caused considerable suffering to the late Pope. For six years Nogaret nagged the Pope, until he had no choice but to reopen the case. Nogaret was allowed to present his side of the story, which was surprisingly good, if not
true but in a few items. Nogaret even had the nerve to ask the Pope to exhume Boniface and have his bones publicly burned. Such audacity seldom goes unrewarded and the Pope did compromise with the King and his men: all ecclesiastical (I just
love typing that word) punishments the King or his men had suffered were lifted, and the Pope went so far as to claim the King had acted justly and rationally in this case. He did not, however, cause the late Boniface to be publicly condemned.
All this was necessary to tell here, because it is an essential element in understanding the fate of the Templars. It shows how the King handled his enemies with ruthlessness and almost fanatical fervour. Not long before the King showed the way
of the world to the Holy See did Acre fall from the Templars into Muslim hands in 1291. Now the Order was devoid of its main function, that of keeping Pilgrims safe on their dangerous journey. It is not exactly clear how much Philip feared the
aimless military force the Templars possessed, and just how much he barely needed the money of the Order, but one thing is clear: when he set out to crush the Order, he did so with terrifying force.
The Templars were assigned a massive set of accusations by Philip the Fair. The King put his top man, Guillaume de Nogaret, on the job, and he was very thorough with the task. (Another man he put on the job was his Lord Chancellor, de Marigny,
who later was accused of embezzlement and withcraft and hanged). De Nogaret had successfully drawn up accusations for many of Philip's campaigns against the King's enemies, but this time he really went out of his way. The full list contains 127
articles, but Barber sums them up in the following seven groups.
The denial of saints, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus Christ as Saviour. It was said that the Templars held Christ to be a false prophet and therefore no redemption would be forthcoming from Him. This charge also included spitting or urination on
the Crucifix, trampling on it or dragging it on the ground in mockery of the suffering of Christ.
Idolatry, especially the adoration of a certain head called Caput (or Capud) LVIII, or Head 58. For more information on the Caput, see the topic The Mystical Head in the Pub.
The renouncement of holy sacraments and omission of words of consecration in mass.
The belief that the Grand Master and other high officials of the Order can hear confession and offer absolution, even thought they were laymen.
The claims of obscene kisses of new recruits on their mouth, navel, stomach, lower spine, or buttocks, and other charges of homosexuality and other sexual misbehaviour.
The Order was said to seek funds with lawful and unlawful methods and misusing donated funds by hoarding them instead of putting them to good use.
The Order was charged with keeping secret, heavily guarded meetings. Disclosure of Order secrets was punishable by death.
In fairness it must be said that most of these accusations were fabricated along the lines of previous trials against the enemies of the King. It is also noteworthy that even if quite a few confessions were obtained that admitted to these
charges, no such testimonies were received outside Philip the Fair's realm. This makes it quite clear that he obtained the testimonies through torture.
Philip's order of the arrests is dated 14 September 1307. The letter was remarkably well kept secret. In it Philip poses as a defender of the Faith, at first reluctant to believe the heinous crimes the Templars were said to have committed, but
"as evidence mounted, he had no chance but to start investigating the matter", as he put it. Philip claimed that information of Templar crimes was passed on to him by pious and righteous people who wanted to see the Faith purified of all
blasphemous and heretical tendencies in which the Order was said to excel. In the letter Philip claimed to have Papal consent on the arrests after having consulted the Pope on how to deal with the accusations. In reality, the Pope Clement V was
not aware of the impending operation. True, Philip had talked with him on the Order, but in a general manner, with no indication of the upcoming hunt.
After the arrests, Philip had virtually all Templars in France under his thumb. Philip was very much under pressure to extract as many confessions from the prisoners as possible, because the arrests had been done on such flimsy grounds. He had
to be able to demonstrate that the Order had indeed been a genuine threat to the Catholic faith and that he had acted in the best interest of the Holy Church. The Pope Clement V was not at all happy because of the arrests, since he had been
discussing such action with Philip only at a very superficial level, with no details at all.
Philip wrote to his neighboring rulers to try and persuade them to follow suit agains the Order. He wrote as the head of the French government, as if it was France that was pressing the charges, not the Church. To the fellow monarchs, this only
added to the confusion. Lack of overt Papal endorsement on the matter cast serious doubts as to the legitimacy of the affair, and kings were on their guard. The King also set Guillaume de Paris to write to the Inquisition officials in Toulouse
and Carcassonne on September 22, 1307. He was to enlist the Inquisition in the process of hearing the Templars and to see if they were to prove successful with their advanced methods.
So we have the Order subjected to intense questioning, loss of sleep, deprivation of food other than bread and water, and arduous physical humiliation. Ato de Salvigny, Preceptor of the Templar house of La Chapelle in the Cahors region,
sustained for four weeks in irons before confessing to the alleged crimes. The Inquisition did not need to put out fully, since most of the Templars were but simple workers, whose minds were enough terrorized merely by the fact that they were
in the hands of the King and not in the daily tasks of the Order. Still, there were several methods of torture used:
The strappado - the victim was tied to a triangular frame with his hands behind his back, an lifted from the hands only to be dropped and stopped a few feet short of the ground, the violent jolt resulting in serious pain.
some prisoners had the soles of their feet rubbed with fat and then subjected to fire until the fat caught fire. Bones dropped off Bernard de Vaho's feet a few days after that kind of treatment.
weights were attached to the testicles of some prisoners, sometimes even on those already on the strappado.
Surely it is easy to see why the methods proved extraordinarily successful. Out of the 138 Templars questioned in Paris, a full 134 admitted to the charges either in full or in part, and about the same rate applies throughout France. Obviously
such results did not flood in from outside France, where the Inquisition had no jurisdiction. Most Templars portrayed themselve as hapless victims of a cruel and inhuman Order, which suited Philip just fine, as it was against the Order he
fought, not against individuals. The confessors said they had committed the crimes ore et non corde, in the mouth only and not in the heart, in vain attempts to save themselves. Very few risked themselves by attempting to defend the Order.
ogaret's evidence against the Order was not enough to satisfy all in the proceedings. There were retractions of confessions and even denials, especially after a papal commission set out in February 1310 to hear any Templars who wished to come
forward on behalf of the Order. This pulled out more than 500 Templars who wanted to speak to the Commission.
he commission heard Templars in Paris, recording retractions and denials for later perusal. The main defence was given by Pierre de Bologna, a scholar of law and a high official of the Order, and Renaud de Provins. Their well
presented testimony made a significant influence on the Commission. The atmosphere within the investigation began to shift to the side that the Order itself may have been pure, even if it had some heretical members. Even Bernard Gui, a
Dominican witch-hunter par excellence, was confused as to which side to take in the light of the contradicting evidence.
In the spring of 1310 things may even have looked somewhat bright to the Templars languishing in dungeons and gaols. However, this was not for long. Philip IV figured that he needed to put the trial back on course, and to do this he assembled
54 Templars to a field outside Paris on 12 May, and roasted them at the stake. This was all it took to put the Templar defence down. By November there was not one Templar willing to speak for the Order - all were more willing to stay quiet and
hope to save their necks. Philip gained his goal by that single event, and could thereafter concentrate on getting Clement V to do his bidding.
Trial and Suppression
------------------------------------------------------------------------
In 1308 Pope Clement V announced that he would hold a General Council in Vienne, Southern France (not Vienna, mind you) in May 1310. As with all large projects, schedules slipped slightly, and the Council of Vienne opened in October
1311. Clement had seen to it that all data collected in all Europe was sent to him in advance for strict inspection. It was absolutely necessary for both Philip and Clement to justify their joint venture by the prestige of a General Council,
and it had to run smoothly.
owever, nine Templars attempted to stage a defence effort. They were quickly arrested by Clement to prevent them from messing with the agenda. Word got out, though, that the Templars had prepared to speak out, and the Council got
bogged down thinking whether they should be allowed to speak their piece or not. In all this, Clement gradually lost control of the Council, which was not good news to Philip. He, being the man of action he was, parked his army outside Vienne
on 20 March 1312 and went on to demand the immediate and complete suppression of the Order then and there. Clement held a secret consistory of the Council, and two days after that he asked the General Council to vote on the matter.
The Council decided to suppress the Order by a 4/5 majority. On 3 April 1312 Clement read out his bull for the day, titled Vox in Excelso. (He was accompanied by Philip on his side, making sure the document remained unedited.) The main point in
this bull was the wording of it: the Order was suppressed - not condemned. By this choice of words Clement indicated that the evidence against the Templars was not sufficient to warrant condemnation, which would have yielded a much wider
palette of possible punishments for the accused Templars. From this we can judge the veracity of the accusations: the Church lost no time condemning heretics, as we saw with the Albigensian Crusade.
Two big problems arose as the verdict was issued and the dust had settled: what to do with the Templars still in custody, and what to do with the Templars' property. Philip had an all-in-the-family-type solution to this, and he proposed the
formation of a new Order on the ruins of the Templars, one with his son on the Grand Master's seat. Even he sensed the animosity of the Council for such an outrageous proposition and he dropped the project.
Clement came up with his solution when he issued his bull Ad Providam on 2 May 1312. In it he stated that the property of the Templars was to go to the Hospitallers, except in the Iberian Peninsula whose kings had struck personal deals with
Clement to have the properties there pass on to local Orders. Philip was awarded costs for the burden of having had to arrest and maintain the Templars during the long battle.
It was no easy task to say that the property was to be the Hospitallers from now on. Kings availed themselves to the defenseless properties of Templars, which were, as we know, of formidable value. For example in England, Edward II sold wood
and grain in his own name, paid clerks' wages that were in arrears with Templar funds, and even had meat and fish taken for his coronation from the Templars' stockhouses. Local lords also saw that their moment was come, and they acted on it in
a manner much reminiscent of a pack of hyenas attacking a cow. Templar lands, while large and productive, were often given to the Order by grants from rivalling lords. Such grants were a good reason to dispute the donation and place the land in
temporary custody which soon turned permanent. Therefore the Hospitallers only received a fraction of what was their due.
Of the famed Templar treasure the Hospitallers got even less. When coffers were opened at the largest preceptories, they were primarily empty. Even given that the loss of Acre, being the last in a long series of hardships, had caused a negative
cash flow along with the necessary evacuation of Palestine, the small amount of liquid assets led to an ongoing controversy over the large fortune the Order amassed in its days of glory.
As to the Templars in custody, a two-tier approach was adopted. All leaders were to be judged by the papal authorities, and all brothers were to be left to the hands of the local authorities. The low-rank brothers were treated with much
lenience, as they were allowed to reside in Templar houses and draw on Templar funds for their upkeep. In 1317 ex-Templars were given permission to join the Hospitallers, and in 1318 Franciscans and Dominicans in the Naples region were
instructed to support surviving Templars. The Order of Jesus Christ in Portugal, which actually was the Templars under a new brand name, even retained Templar ranks. ($64,000 question: ever wonder why Christopher Columbus had a red cross on the
sails of his ships? Right. He was a member of the Order of Jesus Christ.) There are records of Templars living in scattered sites around Europe, for example there were 12 Templars drawing pension in England in 1338, and the last surviving
Templar on record was one Berengar dez Coll in the preceptory of Mas Deu in Roussillon, France.
Leaders were still hoping for the Order to continue, either in new form or underground, but such hopes were crushed when Jacques de Molay, Geoffroi de Charnay, Hugues de Pairaud and Geoffroi de Gonneville went to be interrogated by papal
authorities. Expecting a life sentence, De Molay and de Charnay revoked their testimonies and were sentenced to be burned at stake.
n France, the last of Grand Masters of the order was selected, Jacques de Molay. The Templar's had made some sizeable loans to the king of France, Philip the Fair. Philip was embroiled in Papal politics and he was able to get his own puppet
Pope on the throne. In 1306, Philip was still desparate for funds. He built an audacious plan to take the Templar treasure. Only one crime allowed a king to confiscate property, heresy. On October 13th, all Templars in France were arrested by
order of the pope and thus he disbanded his own personal army. He requested all Christian rulers to follow Phillips lead. Then the torture began. Nearly all the Templars arrested were tortured in one way or another. They confessed to all sorts
of nonsense from outright devil worship to systematic, organized homosexuality. Over the next few years, the order was broken up in all countries. In 1314 on March 18 (the day this page was launched), the last of the Templars was burned at the
stake. Supposedly, deMolay had time for a curse. He called for Pope Clement and Philip IV to join him within the year. Clement died the next month and Philip IV seven months later.
The idea that the Knights Templar were devil worshippers arose out of tortures of the Inquisition. In order for Philip the Fair to confiscate the Templar holdings, they must be found guilty of heresy. So, using techniques later perfected during
the witch trials that peaked around 1600, the Knights were tortured until they signed confessions. The fact that so many of the recanted (withdrew their confessions) as soon as the torture stopped was not a sign of innocence. The prevailing
sense of the time was that people told the truth while being tortured. The thought that people would tell you whatever you wanted them to just didn't make sense at the time. The Templar treasurer was quoted as saying, "Under such torture, I
would have confessed to killing God."
Under such torture, the Templars confessed to all sorts of crimes. At their initiations they, supposedly spat and walked on the cross, denied that Christ was the son of God, and promised to relieve all sexual desires with their Brothers. They
were supposed to exchange lewd kisses on the lower back or navel (kissing on the mouth was actually an approved exchange between men at the time). They also confessed to idol worship. Several, though not many, of the confessions mentioned a
head, made of metal or wood, that was sometimes referred to as Baphomet (see Temple of Easter Knowledge for a further discussion of Baphomet).
Ultimately, although a large number of Templars were burned at the stake as heretics, the charges against the Order as a whole, fell through. Ultimately the Pope dissolved the order with the excuse that the accusations alone would prevent
people from joining it. It had therefore outlived its usefulness. To make sure that this attitude stuck, the Pope went on to say that anyone joining the Order in the future would be excommunicated and labeled a heretic. Aside from the
confessions, again, most of them recanted after the torture, there was very little evidence that the Templars deviated from the basic Catholocism of the time. One theory is that during their initiation, they did recreate Peter's renunciation of
Christ as part of the ritual. It was this that became the basis for some of the charges against them. Baphomet was never found.
-- MERGED NOTE ------------
Philip IV and Pope Clement arranged to have the Templars arrested in France.
Philip the Fair was very much a man of action. Consequently, he was frequently at odds with other monarchs and the Church. Pious though he was, he could not bear the idea that he was subject to the Pope in any other sense than spiritual. Thus,
when Pope Boniface VIII issued the bull Clericis Laicos, in which he forbade the clergy to pay taxes to any prince without papal consent, Philip was very much annoyed. So much so that he cut off the export of gold and silver from France, which
was a major problem to the Holy See, for whose finances the French money was direly needed. This time Boniface retracted his bull, but a new problem was already nearing critical mass. It so happened that Philip wished to see a bishop in
Southern France bide good-bye to his office, but Boniface did not agree to this. He saw that Philip was ousting the bishop for purely political reasons, and therefore declined to degrade the bishop, even when presented with a very creative list
of vices Philip had compiled of the bishop's doings. To make his point, he reissued the doctrine set out in Clericis Laicos.
Now, this was really a red cloth to Philip, who summoned the estates of his realm (for the first time ever) to gather the strength of his people against Boniface. He, on the other hand, was steadfast, and defaulted to the biggest cannon
available in the Papal fortress - he threatened Philip with excommunication. In the bull Unam Sanctam he spelled out his terms: no earthly prince was above the Pope, no matter who the prince happened to be. Philip realized the problematic
situation and decided to pre-empt the Pope's plans, and for this he sent Guillaume de Nogaret down to Anagni, Italy, where the Pope was staying with his relatives. Nogaret (who later figured prominently in the trial of the Templars) was one of
the early masters of disinformation who could make anyone look extremely bad in the eyes of the King and therefore available for proper punishment. He had shown his talent already in the case of the Bishop of Troyes, and so he was chosen to
assemble a task force of selected thugs for the operation at hand. First Nogaret drew up a list of vices he smeared Boniface with: he was, among other things, said to be a heretic, a sorcerer, an assassin of ecclesiastics, and, to top all this
off, guilty of keeping mistresses to hide the fact that he was, in reality, a sodomist.
Nogaret seized the Pope and held him captive for some days until the local nobles forced him to free the Pope. Boniface, an old man already by medieval standards, never recovered from the shock of being the first viceroy of Christ to be
kidnapped. He died soon after and thus freed Philip of the threat he might have had trouble with later on. As soon as the next Pope, Benedict IX, was inaugurated, he proceeded to blame Nogaret for what he had caused Boniface; note the target of
the accusation - not Philip, whom Benedict wished not to infuriate, but Nogaret, who was a hired gun. Disappointingly Benedict died within a year of his office begun, and never found out if his strategy worked or not. This time Philip was en
garde and subtly (probably like a rhino) let the French members of the College of Cardinals know that he would be happy if a Frenchman were elected Pope. And to everyone's surprise - Bertrand de Got, Archbishop of Bordeaux, got the job, and
assumed the name of Clement V.
As soon as Clement was in office he was approached by Nogaret, who wished to have his name cleared of any wrongdoing in the case of the unfortunate Boniface. Of course, the new Pope was very much against letting Nogaret have his honor back -
after all, he had caused considerable suffering to the late Pope. For six years Nogaret nagged the Pope, until he had no choice but to reopen the case. Nogaret was allowed to present his side of the story, which was surprisingly good, if not
true but in a few items. Nogaret even had the nerve to ask the Pope to exhume Boniface and have his bones publicly burned. Such audacity seldom goes unrewarded and the Pope did compromise with the King and his men: all ecclesiastical (I just
love typing that word) punishments the King or his men had suffered were lifted, and the Pope went so far as to claim the King had acted justly and rationally in this case. He did not, however, cause the late Boniface to be publicly condemned.
All this was necessary to tell here, because it is an essential element in understanding the fate of the Templars. It shows how the King handled his enemies with ruthlessness and almost fanatical fervour. Not long before the King showed the way
of the world to the Holy See did Acre fall from the Templars into Muslim hands in 1291. Now the Order was devoid of its main function, that of keeping Pilgrims safe on their dangerous journey. It is not exactly clear how much Philip feared the
aimless military force the Templars possessed, and just how much he barely needed the money of the Order, but one thing is clear: when he set out to crush the Order, he did so with terrifying force.
The Templars were assigned a massive set of accusations by Philip the Fair. The King put his top man, Guillaume de Nogaret, on the job, and he was very thorough with the task. (Another man he put on the job was his Lord Chancellor, de Marigny,
who later was accused of embezzlement and withcraft and hanged). De Nogaret had successfully drawn up accusations for many of Philip's campaigns against the King's enemies, but this time he really went out of his way. The full list contains 127
articles, but Barber sums them up in the following seven groups.
The denial of saints, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus Christ as Saviour. It was said that the Templars held Christ to be a false prophet and therefore no redemption would be forthcoming from Him. This charge also included spitting or urination on
the Crucifix, trampling on it or dragging it on the ground in mockery of the suffering of Christ.
Idolatry, especially the adoration of a certain head called Caput (or Capud) LVIII, or Head 58. For more information on the Caput, see the topic The Mystical Head in the Pub.
The renouncement of holy sacraments and omission of words of consecration in mass.
The belief that the Grand Master and other high officials of the Order can hear confession and offer absolution, even thought they were laymen.
The claims of obscene kisses of new recruits on their mouth, navel, stomach, lower spine, or buttocks, and other charges of homosexuality and other sexual misbehaviour.
The Order was said to seek funds with lawful and unlawful methods and misusing donated funds by hoarding them instead of putting them to good use.
The Order was charged with keeping secret, heavily guarded meetings. Disclosure of Order secrets was punishable by death.
In fairness it must be said that most of these accusations were fabricated along the lines of previous trials against the enemies of the King. It is also noteworthy that even if quite a few confessions were obtained that admitted to these
charges, no such testimonies were received outside Philip the Fair's realm. This makes it quite clear that he obtained the testimonies through torture.
Philip's order of the arrests is dated 14 September 1307. The letter was remarkably well kept secret. In it Philip poses as a defender of the Faith, at first reluctant to believe the heinous crimes the Templars were said to have committed, but
"as evidence mounted, he had no chance but to start investigating the matter", as he put it. Philip claimed that information of Templar crimes was passed on to him by pious and righteous people who wanted to see the Faith purified of all
blasphemous and heretical tendencies in which the Order was said to excel. In the letter Philip claimed to have Papal consent on the arrests after having consulted the Pope on how to deal with the accusations. In reality, the Pope Clement V was
not aware of the impending operation. True, Philip had talked with him on the Order, but in a general manner, with no indication of the upcoming hunt.
After the arrests, Philip had virtually all Templars in France under his thumb. Philip was very much under pressure to extract as many confessions from the prisoners as possible, because the arrests had been done on such flimsy grounds. He had
to be able to demonstrate that the Order had indeed been a genuine threat to the Catholic faith and that he had acted in the best interest of the Holy Church. The Pope Clement V was not at all happy because of the arrests, since he had been
discussing such action with Philip only at a very superficial level, with no details at all.
Philip wrote to his neighboring rulers to try and persuade them to follow suit agains the Order. He wrote as the head of the French government, as if it was France that was pressing the charges, not the Church. To the fellow monarchs, this only
added to the confusion. Lack of overt Papal endorsement on the matter cast serious doubts as to the legitimacy of the affair, and kings were on their guard. The King also set Guillaume de Paris to write to the Inquisition officials in Toulouse
and Carcassonne on September 22, 1307. He was to enlist the Inquisition in the process of hearing the Templars and to see if they were to prove successful with their advanced methods.
So we have the Order subjected to intense questioning, loss of sleep, deprivation of food other than bread and water, and arduous physical humiliation. Ato de Salvigny, Preceptor of the Templar house of La Chapelle in the Cahors region,
sustained for four weeks in irons before confessing to the alleged crimes. The Inquisition did not need to put out fully, since most of the Templars were but simple workers, whose minds were enough terrorized merely by the fact that they were
in the hands of the King and not in the daily tasks of the Order. Still, there were several methods of torture used:
The strappado - the victim was tied to a triangular frame with his hands behind his back, an lifted from the hands only to be dropped and stopped a few feet short of the ground, the violent jolt resulting in serious pain.
some prisoners had the soles of their feet rubbed with fat and then subjected to fire until the fat caught fire. Bones dropped off Bernard de Vaho's feet a few days after that kind of treatment.
weights were attached to the testicles of some prisoners, sometimes even on those already on the strappado.
Surely it is easy to see why the methods proved extraordinarily successful. Out of the 138 Templars questioned in Paris, a full 134 admitted to the charges either in full or in part, and about the same rate applies throughout France. Obviously
such results did not flood in from outside France, where the Inquisition had no jurisdiction. Most Templars portrayed themselve as hapless victims of a cruel and inhuman Order, which suited Philip just fine, as it was against the Order he
fought, not against individuals. The confessors said they had committed the crimes ore et non corde, in the mouth only and not in the heart, in vain attempts to save themselves. Very few risked themselves by attempting to defend the Order.
ogaret's evidence against the Order was not enough to satisfy all in the proceedings. There were retractions of confessions and even denials, especially after a papal commission set out in February 1310 to hear any Templars who wished to come
forward on behalf of the Order. This pulled out more than 500 Templars who wanted to speak to the Commission.
he commission heard Templars in Paris, recording retractions and denials for later perusal. The main defence was given by Pierre de Bologna, a scholar of law and a high official of the Order, and Renaud de Provins. Their well
presented testimony made a significant influence on the Commission. The atmosphere within the investigation began to shift to the side that the Order itself may have been pure, even if it had some heretical members. Even Bernard Gui, a
Dominican witch-hunter par excellence, was confused as to which side to take in the light of the contradicting evidence.
In the spring of 1310 things may even have looked somewhat bright to the Templars languishing in dungeons and gaols. However, this was not for long. Philip IV figured that he needed to put the trial back on course, and to do this he assembled
54 Templars to a field outside Paris on 12 May, and roasted them at the stake. This was all it took to put the Templar defence down. By November there was not one Templar willing to speak for the Order - all were more willing to stay quiet and
hope to save their necks. Philip gained his goal by that single event, and could thereafter concentrate on getting Clement V to do his bidding.
Trial and Suppression
------------------------------------------------------------------------
In 1308 Pope Clement V announced that he would hold a General Council in Vienne, Southern France (not Vienna, mind you) in May 1310. As with all large projects, schedules slipped slightly, and the Council of Vienne opened in October
1311. Clement had seen to it that all data collected in all Europe was sent to him in advance for strict inspection. It was absolutely necessary for both Philip and Clement to justify their joint venture by the prestige of a General Council,
and it had to run smoothly.
owever, nine Templars attempted to stage a defence effort. They were quickly arrested by Clement to prevent them from messing with the agenda. Word got out, though, that the Templars had prepared to speak out, and the Council got
bogged down thinking whether they should be allowed to speak their piece or not. In all this, Clement gradually lost control of the Council, which was not good news to Philip. He, being the man of action he was, parked his army outside Vienne
on 20 March 1312 and went on to demand the immediate and complete suppression of the Order then and there. Clement held a secret consistory of the Council, and two days after that he asked the General Council to vote on the matter.
The Council decided to suppress the Order by a 4/5 majority. On 3 April 1312 Clement read out his bull for the day, titled Vox in Excelso. (He was accompanied by Philip on his side, making sure the document remained unedited.) The main point in
this bull was the wording of it: the Order was suppressed - not condemned. By this choice of words Clement indicated that the evidence against the Templars was not sufficient to warrant condemnation, which would have yielded a much wider
palette of possible punishments for the accused Templars. From this we can judge the veracity of the accusations: the Church lost no time condemning heretics, as we saw with the Albigensian Crusade.
Two big problems arose as the verdict was issued and the dust had settled: what to do with the Templars still in custody, and what to do with the Templars' property. Philip had an all-in-the-family-type solution to this, and he proposed the
formation of a new Order on the ruins of the Templars, one with his son on the Grand Master's seat. Even he sensed the animosity of the Council for such an outrageous proposition and he dropped the project.
Clement came up with his solution when he issued his bull Ad Providam on 2 May 1312. In it he stated that the property of the Templars was to go to the Hospitallers, except in the Iberian Peninsula whose kings had struck personal deals with
Clement to have the properties there pass on to local Orders. Philip was awarded costs for the burden of having had to arrest and maintain the Templars during the long battle.
It was no easy task to say that the property was to be the Hospitallers from now on. Kings availed themselves to the defenseless properties of Templars, which were, as we know, of formidable value. For example in England, Edward II sold wood
and grain in his own name, paid clerks' wages that were in arrears with Templar funds, and even had meat and fish taken for his coronation from the Templars' stockhouses. Local lords also saw that their moment was come, and they acted on it in
a manner much reminiscent of a pack of hyenas attacking a cow. Templar lands, while large and productive, were often given to the Order by grants from rivalling lords. Such grants were a good reason to dispute the donation and place the land in
temporary custody which soon turned permanent. Therefore the Hospitallers only received a fraction of what was their due.
Of the famed Templar treasure the Hospitallers got even less. When coffers were opened at the largest preceptories, they were primarily empty. Even given that the loss of Acre, being the last in a long series of hardships, had caused a negative
cash flow along with the necessary evacuation of Palestine, the small amount of liquid assets led to an ongoing controversy over the large fortune the Order amassed in its days of glory.
As to the Templars in custody, a two-tier approach was adopted. All leaders were to be judged by the papal authorities, and all brothers were to be left to the hands of the local authorities. The low-rank brothers were treated with much
lenience, as they were allowed to reside in Templar houses and draw on Templar funds for their upkeep. In 1317 ex-Templars were given permission to join the Hospitallers, and in 1318 Franciscans and Dominicans in the Naples region were
instructed to support surviving Templars. The Order of Jesus Christ in Portugal, which actually was the Templars under a new brand name, even retained Templar ranks. ($64,000 question: ever wonder why Christopher Columbus had a red cross on the
sails of his ships? Right. He was a member of the Order of Jesus Christ.) There are records of Templars living in scattered sites around Europe, for example there were 12 Templars drawing pension in England in 1338, and the last surviving
Templar on record was one Berengar dez Coll in the preceptory of Mas Deu in Roussillon, France.
Leaders were still hoping for the Order to continue, either in new form or underground, but such hopes were crushed when Jacques de Molay, Geoffroi de Charnay, Hugues de Pairaud and Geoffroi de Gonneville went to be interrogated by papal
authorities. Expecting a life sentence, De Molay and de Charnay revoked their testimonies and were sentenced to be burned at stake.
n France, the last of Grand Masters of the order was selected, Jacques de Molay. The Templar's had made some sizeable loans to the king of France, Philip the Fair. Philip was embroiled in Papal politics and he was able to get his own puppet
Pope on the throne. In 1306, Philip was still desparate for funds. He built an audacious plan to take the Templar treasure. Only one crime allowed a king to confiscate property, heresy. On October 13th, all Templars in France were arrested by
order of the pope and thus he disbanded his own personal army. He requested all Christian rulers to follow Phillips lead. Then the torture began. Nearly all the Templars arrested were tortured in one way or another. They confessed to all sorts
of nonsense from outright devil worship to systematic, organized homosexuality. Over the next few years, the order was broken up in all countries. In 1314 on March 18 (the day this page was launched), the last of the Templars was burned at the
stake. Supposedly, deMolay had time for a curse. He called for Pope Clement and Philip IV to join him within the year. Clement died the next month and Philip IV seven months later.
The idea that the Knights Templar were devil worshippers arose out of tortures of the Inquisition. In order for Philip the Fair to confiscate the Templar holdings, they must be found guilty of heresy. So, using techniques later perfected during
the witch trials that peaked around 1600, the Knights were tortured until they signed confessions. The fact that so many of the recanted (withdrew their confessions) as soon as the torture stopped was not a sign of innocence. The prevailing
sense of the time was that people told the truth while being tortured. The thought that people would tell you whatever you wanted them to just didn't make sense at the time. The Templar treasurer was quoted as saying, "Under such torture, I
would have confessed to killing God."
Under such torture, the Templars confessed to all sorts of crimes. At their initiations they, supposedly spat and walked on the cross, denied that Christ was the son of God, and promised to relieve all sexual desires with their Brothers. They
were supposed to exchange lewd kisses on the lower back or navel (kissing on the mouth was actually an approved exchange between men at the time). They also confessed to idol worship. Several, though not many, of the confessions mentioned a
head, made of metal or wood, that was sometimes referred to as Baphomet (see Temple of Easter Knowledge for a further discussion of Baphomet).
Ultimately, although a large number of Templars were burned at the stake as heretics, the charges against the Order as a whole, fell through. Ultimately the Pope dissolved the order with the excuse that the accusations alone would prevent
people from joining it. It had therefore outlived its usefulness. To make sure that this attitude stuck, the Pope went on to say that anyone joining the Order in the future would be excommunicated and labeled a heretic. Aside from the
confessions, again, most of them recanted after the torture, there was very little evidence that the Templars deviated from the basic Catholocism of the time. One theory is that during their initiation, they did recreate Peter's renunciation of
Christ as part of the ritual. It was this that became the basis for some of the charges against them. Baphomet was never found.
Philip the Fair was very much a man of action. Consequently, he was frequently at odds with other monarchs and the Church. Pious though he was, he could not bear the idea that he was subject to the Pope in any other sense than spiritual. Thus,
when Pope Boniface VIII issued the bull Clericis Laicos, in which he forbade the clergy to pay taxes to any prince without papal consent, Philip was very much annoyed. So much so that he cut off the export of gold and silver from France, which
was a major problem to the Holy See, for whose finances the French money was direly needed. This time Boniface retracted his bull, but a new problem was already nearing critical mass. It so happened that Philip wished to see a bishop in
Southern France bide good-bye to his office, but Boniface did not agree to this. He saw that Philip was ousting the bishop for purely political reasons, and therefore declined to degrade the bishop, even when presented with a very creative list
of vices Philip had compiled of the bishop's doings. To make his point, he reissued the doctrine set out in Clericis Laicos.
Now, this was really a red cloth to Philip, who summoned the estates of his realm (for the first time ever) to gather the strength of his people against Boniface. He, on the other hand, was steadfast, and defaulted to the biggest cannon
available in the Papal fortress - he threatened Philip with excommunication. In the bull Unam Sanctam he spelled out his terms: no earthly prince was above the Pope, no matter who the prince happened to be. Philip realized the problematic
situation and decided to pre-empt the Pope's plans, and for this he sent Guillaume de Nogaret down to Anagni, Italy, where the Pope was staying with his relatives. Nogaret (who later figured prominently in the trial of the Templars) was one of
the early masters of disinformation who could make anyone look extremely bad in the eyes of the King and therefore available for proper punishment. He had shown his talent already in the case of the Bishop of Troyes, and so he was chosen to
assemble a task force of selected thugs for the operation at hand. First Nogaret drew up a list of vices he smeared Boniface with: he was, among other things, said to be a heretic, a sorcerer, an assassin of ecclesiastics, and, to top all this
off, guilty of keeping mistresses to hide the fact that he was, in reality, a sodomist.
Nogaret seized the Pope and held him captive for some days until the local nobles forced him to free the Pope. Boniface, an old man already by medieval standards, never recovered from the shock of being the first viceroy of Christ to be
kidnapped. He died soon after and thus freed Philip of the threat he might have had trouble with later on. As soon as the next Pope, Benedict IX, was inaugurated, he proceeded to blame Nogaret for what he had caused Boniface; note the target of
the accusation - not Philip, whom Benedict wished not to infuriate, but Nogaret, who was a hired gun. Disappointingly Benedict died within a year of his office begun, and never found out if his strategy worked or not. This time Philip was en
garde and subtly (probably like a rhino) let the French members of the College of Cardinals know that he would be happy if a Frenchman were elected Pope. And to everyone's surprise - Bertrand de Got, Archbishop of Bordeaux, got the job, and
assumed the name of Clement V.
As soon as Clement was in office he was approached by Nogaret, who wished to have his name cleared of any wrongdoing in the case of the unfortunate Boniface. Of course, the new Pope was very much against letting Nogaret have his honor back -
after all, he had caused considerable suffering to the late Pope. For six years Nogaret nagged the Pope, until he had no choice but to reopen the case. Nogaret was allowed to present his side of the story, which was surprisingly good, if not
true but in a few items. Nogaret even had the nerve to ask the Pope to exhume Boniface and have his bones publicly burned. Such audacity seldom goes unrewarded and the Pope did compromise with the King and his men: all ecclesiastical (I just
love typing that word) punishments the King or his men had suffered were lifted, and the Pope went so far as to claim the King had acted justly and rationally in this case. He did not, however, cause the late Boniface to be publicly condemned.
All this was necessary to tell here, because it is an essential element in understanding the fate of the Templars. It shows how the King handled his enemies with ruthlessness and almost fanatical fervour. Not long before the King showed the way
of the world to the Holy See did Acre fall from the Templars into Muslim hands in 1291. Now the Order was devoid of its main function, that of keeping Pilgrims safe on their dangerous journey. It is not exactly clear how much Philip feared the
aimless military force the Templars possessed, and just how much he barely needed the money of the Order, but one thing is clear: when he set out to crush the Order, he did so with terrifying force.
The Templars were assigned a massive set of accusations by Philip the Fair. The King put his top man, Guillaume de Nogaret, on the job, and he was very thorough with the task. (Another man he put on the job was his Lord Chancellor, de Marigny,
who later was accused of embezzlement and withcraft and hanged). De Nogaret had successfully drawn up accusations for many of Philip's campaigns against the King's enemies, but this time he really went out of his way. The full list contains 127
articles, but Barber sums them up in the following seven groups.
The denial of saints, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus Christ as Saviour. It was said that the Templars held Christ to be a false prophet and therefore no redemption would be forthcoming from Him. This charge also included spitting or urination on
the Crucifix, trampling on it or dragging it on the ground in mockery of the suffering of Christ.
Idolatry, especially the adoration of a certain head called Caput (or Capud) LVIII, or Head 58. For more information on the Caput, see the topic The Mystical Head in the Pub.
The renouncement of holy sacraments and omission of words of consecration in mass.
The belief that the Grand Master and other high officials of the Order can hear confession and offer absolution, even thought they were laymen.
The claims of obscene kisses of new recruits on their mouth, navel, stomach, lower spine, or buttocks, and other charges of homosexuality and other sexual misbehaviour.
The Order was said to seek funds with lawful and unlawful methods and misusing donated funds by hoarding them instead of putting them to good use.
The Order was charged with keeping secret, heavily guarded meetings. Disclosure of Order secrets was punishable by death.
In fairness it must be said that most of these accusations were fabricated along the lines of previous trials against the enemies of the King. It is also noteworthy that even if quite a few confessions were obtained that admitted to these
charges, no such testimonies were received outside Philip the Fair's realm. This makes it quite clear that he obtained the testimonies through torture.
Philip's order of the arrests is dated 14 September 1307. The letter was remarkably well kept secret. In it Philip poses as a defender of the Faith, at first reluctant to believe the heinous crimes the Templars were said to have committed, but
"as evidence mounted, he had no chance but to start investigating the matter", as he put it. Philip claimed that information of Templar crimes was passed on to him by pious and righteous people who wanted to see the Faith purified of all
blasphemous and heretical tendencies in which the Order was said to excel. In the letter Philip claimed to have Papal consent on the arrests after having consulted the Pope on how to deal with the accusations. In reality, the Pope Clement V was
not aware of the impending operation. True, Philip had talked with him on the Order, but in a general manner, with no indication of the upcoming hunt.
After the arrests, Philip had virtually all Templars in France under his thumb. Philip was very much under pressure to extract as many confessions from the prisoners as possible, because the arrests had been done on such flimsy grounds. He had
to be able to demonstrate that the Order had indeed been a genuine threat to the Catholic faith and that he had acted in the best interest of the Holy Church. The Pope Clement V was not at all happy because of the arrests, since he had been
discussing such action with Philip only at a very superficial level, with no details at all.
Philip wrote to his neighboring rulers to try and persuade them to follow suit agains the Order. He wrote as the head of the French government, as if it was France that was pressing the charges, not the Church. To the fellow monarchs, this only
added to the confusion. Lack of overt Papal endorsement on the matter cast serious doubts as to the legitimacy of the affair, and kings were on their guard. The King also set Guillaume de Paris to write to the Inquisition officials in Toulouse
and Carcassonne on September 22, 1307. He was to enlist the Inquisition in the process of hearing the Templars and to see if they were to prove successful with their advanced methods.
So we have the Order subjected to intense questioning, loss of sleep, deprivation of food other than bread and water, and arduous physical humiliation. Ato de Salvigny, Preceptor of the Templar house of La Chapelle in the Cahors region,
sustained for four weeks in irons before confessing to the alleged crimes. The Inquisition did not need to put out fully, since most of the Templars were but simple workers, whose minds were enough terrorized merely by the fact that they were
in the hands of the King and not in the daily tasks of the Order. Still, there were several methods of torture used:
The strappado - the victim was tied to a triangular frame with his hands behind his back, an lifted from the hands only to be dropped and stopped a few feet short of the ground, the violent jolt resulting in serious pain.
some prisoners had the soles of their feet rubbed with fat and then subjected to fire until the fat caught fire. Bones dropped off Bernard de Vaho's feet a few days after that kind of treatment.
weights were attached to the testicles of some prisoners, sometimes even on those already on the strappado.
Surely it is easy to see why the methods proved extraordinarily successful. Out of the 138 Templars questioned in Paris, a full 134 admitted to the charges either in full or in part, and about the same rate applies throughout France. Obviously
such results did not flood in from outside France, where the Inquisition had no jurisdiction. Most Templars portrayed themselve as hapless victims of a cruel and inhuman Order, which suited Philip just fine, as it was against the Order he
fought, not against individuals. The confessors said they had committed the crimes ore et non corde, in the mouth only and not in the heart, in vain attempts to save themselves. Very few risked themselves by attempting to defend the Order.
ogaret's evidence against the Order was not enough to satisfy all in the proceedings. There were retractions of confessions and even denials, especially after a papal commission set out in February 1310 to hear any Templars who wished to come
forward on behalf of the Order. This pulled out more than 500 Templars who wanted to speak to the Commission.
presented testimony made a significant influence on the Commission. The atmosphere within the investigation began to shift to the side that the Order itself may have been pure, even if it had some heretical members. Even Bernard Gui, a
Dominican witch-hunter par excellence, was confused as to which side to take in the light of the contradicting evidence.
In the spring of 1310 things may even have looked somewhat bright to the Templars languishing in dungeons and gaols. However, this was not for long. Philip IV figured that he needed to put the trial back on course, and to do this he assembled
54 Templars to a field outside Paris on 12 May, and roasted them at the stake. This was all it took to put the Templar defence down. By November there was not one Templar willing to speak for the Order - all were more willing to stay quiet and
hope to save their necks. Philip gained his goal by that single event, and could thereafter concentrate on getting Clement V to do his bidding.
Trial and Suppression
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1311. Clement had seen to it that all data collected in all Europe was sent to him in advance for strict inspection. It was absolutely necessary for both Philip and Clement to justify their joint venture by the prestige of a General Council,
and it had to run smoothly.
bogged down thinking whether they should be allowed to speak their piece or not. In all this, Clement gradually lost control of the Council, which was not good news to Philip. He, being the man of action he was, parked his army outside Vienne
on 20 March 1312 and went on to demand the immediate and complete suppression of the Order then and there. Clement held a secret consistory of the Council, and two days after that he asked the General Council to vote on the matter.
The Council decided to suppress the Order by a 4/5 majority. On 3 April 1312 Clement read out his bull for the day, titled Vox in Excelso. (He was accompanied by Philip on his side, making sure the document remained unedited.) The main point in
this bull was the wording of it: the Order was suppressed - not condemned. By this choice of words Clement indicated that the evidence against the Templars was not sufficient to warrant condemnation, which would have yielded a much wider
palette of possible punishments for the accused Templars. From this we can judge the veracity of the accusations: the Church lost no time condemning heretics, as we saw with the Albigensian Crusade.
Two big problems arose as the verdict was issued and the dust had settled: what to do with the Templars still in custody, and what to do with the Templars' property. Philip had an all-in-the-family-type solution to this, and he proposed the
formation of a new Order on the ruins of the Templars, one with his son on the Grand Master's seat. Even he sensed the animosity of the Council for such an outrageous proposition and he dropped the project.
Clement came up with his solution when he issued his bull Ad Providam on 2 May 1312. In it he stated that the property of the Templars was to go to the Hospitallers, except in the Iberian Peninsula whose kings had struck personal deals with
Clement to have the properties there pass on to local Orders. Philip was awarded costs for the burden of having had to arrest and maintain the Templars during the long battle.
It was no easy task to say that the property was to be the Hospitallers from now on. Kings availed themselves to the defenseless properties of Templars, which were, as we know, of formidable value. For example in England, Edward II sold wood
and grain in his own name, paid clerks' wages that were in arrears with Templar funds, and even had meat and fish taken for his coronation from the Templars' stockhouses. Local lords also saw that their moment was come, and they acted on it in
a manner much reminiscent of a pack of hyenas attacking a cow. Templar lands, while large and productive, were often given to the Order by grants from rivalling lords. Such grants were a good reason to dispute the donation and place the land in
temporary custody which soon turned permanent. Therefore the Hospitallers only received a fraction of what was their due.
Of the famed Templar treasure the Hospitallers got even less. When coffers were opened at the largest preceptories, they were primarily empty. Even given that the loss of Acre, being the last in a long series of hardships, had caused a negative
cash flow along with the necessary evacuation of Palestine, the small amount of liquid assets led to an ongoing controversy over the large fortune the Order amassed in its days of glory.
As to the Templars in custody, a two-tier approach was adopted. All leaders were to be judged by the papal authorities, and all brothers were to be left to the hands of the local authorities. The low-rank brothers were treated with much
lenience, as they were allowed to reside in Templar houses and draw on Templar funds for their upkeep. In 1317 ex-Templars were given permission to join the Hospitallers, and in 1318 Franciscans and Dominicans in the Naples region were
instructed to support surviving Templars. The Order of Jesus Christ in Portugal, which actually was the Templars under a new brand name, even retained Templar ranks. ($64,000 question: ever wonder why Christopher Columbus had a red cross on the
sails of his ships? Right. He was a member of the Order of Jesus Christ.) There are records of Templars living in scattered sites around Europe, for example there were 12 Templars drawing pension in England in 1338, and the last surviving
Templar on record was one Berengar dez Coll in the preceptory of Mas Deu in Roussillon, France.
Leaders were still hoping for the Order to continue, either in new form or underground, but such hopes were crushed when Jacques de Molay, Geoffroi de Charnay, Hugues de Pairaud and Geoffroi de Gonneville went to be interrogated by papal
authorities. Expecting a life sentence, De Molay and de Charnay revoked their testimonies and were sentenced to be burned at stake.
n France, the last of Grand Masters of the order was selected, Jacques de Molay. The Templar's had made some sizeable loans to the king of France, Philip the Fair. Philip was embroiled in Papal politics and he was able to get his own puppet
Pope on the throne. In 1306, Philip was still desparate for funds. He built an audacious plan to take the Templar treasure. Only one crime allowed a king to confiscate property, heresy. On October 13th, all Templars in France were arrested by
order of the pope and thus he disbanded his own personal army. He requested all Christian rulers to follow Phillips lead. Then the torture began. Nearly all the Templars arrested were tortured in one way or another. They confessed to all sorts
of nonsense from outright devil worship to systematic, organized homosexuality. Over the next few years, the order was broken up in all countries. In 1314 on March 18 (the day this page was launched), the last of the Templars was burned at the
stake. Supposedly, deMolay had time for a curse. He called for Pope Clement and Philip IV to join him within the year. Clement died the next month and Philip IV seven months later.
The idea that the Knights Templar were devil worshippers arose out of tortures of the Inquisition. In order for Philip the Fair to confiscate the Templar holdings, they must be found guilty of heresy. So, using techniques later perfected during
the witch trials that peaked around 1600, the Knights were tortured until they signed confessions. The fact that so many of the recanted (withdrew their confessions) as soon as the torture stopped was not a sign of innocence. The prevailing
sense of the time was that people told the truth while being tortured. The thought that people would tell you whatever you wanted them to just didn't make sense at the time. The Templar treasurer was quoted as saying, "Under such torture, I
would have confessed to killing God."
Under such torture, the Templars confessed to all sorts of crimes. At their initiations they, supposedly spat and walked on the cross, denied that Christ was the son of God, and promised to relieve all sexual desires with their Brothers. They
were supposed to exchange lewd kisses on the lower back or navel (kissing on the mouth was actually an approved exchange between men at the time). They also confessed to idol worship. Several, though not many, of the confessions mentioned a
head, made of metal or wood, that was sometimes referred to as Baphomet (see Temple of Easter Knowledge for a further discussion of Baphomet).
Ultimately, although a large number of Templars were burned at the stake as heretics, the charges against the Order as a whole, fell through. Ultimately the Pope dissolved the order with the excuse that the accusations alone would prevent
people from joining it. It had therefore outlived its usefulness. To make sure that this attitude stuck, the Pope went on to say that anyone joining the Order in the future would be excommunicated and labeled a heretic. Aside from the
confessions, again, most of them recanted after the torture, there was very little evidence that the Templars deviated from the basic Catholocism of the time. One theory is that during their initiation, they did recreate Peter's renunciation of
Christ as part of the ritual. It was this that became the basis for some of the charges against them. Baphomet was never found.
-- MERGED NOTE ------------
Philip IV and Pope Clement arranged to have the Templars arrested in France.
Philip the Fair was very much a man of action. Consequently, he was frequently at odds with other monarchs and the Church. Pious though he was, he could not bear the idea that he was subject to the Pope in any other sense than spiritual. Thus,
when Pope Boniface VIII issued the bull Clericis Laicos, in which he forbade the clergy to pay taxes to any prince without papal consent, Philip was very much annoyed. So much so that he cut off the export of gold and silver from France, which
was a major problem to the Holy See, for whose finances the French money was direly needed. This time Boniface retracted his bull, but a new problem was already nearing critical mass. It so happened that Philip wished to see a bishop in
Southern France bide good-bye to his office, but Boniface did not agree to this. He saw that Philip was ousting the bishop for purely political reasons, and therefore declined to degrade the bishop, even when presented with a very creative list
of vices Philip had compiled of the bishop's doings. To make his point, he reissued the doctrine set out in Clericis Laicos.
Now, this was really a red cloth to Philip, who summoned the estates of his realm (for the first time ever) to gather the strength of his people against Boniface. He, on the other hand, was steadfast, and defaulted to the biggest cannon
available in the Papal fortress - he threatened Philip with excommunication. In the bull Unam Sanctam he spelled out his terms: no earthly prince was above the Pope, no matter who the prince happened to be. Philip realized the problematic
situation and decided to pre-empt the Pope's plans, and for this he sent Guillaume de Nogaret down to Anagni, Italy, where the Pope was staying with his relatives. Nogaret (who later figured prominently in the trial of the Templars) was one of
the early masters of disinformation who could make anyone look extremely bad in the eyes of the King and therefore available for proper punishment. He had shown his talent already in the case of the Bishop of Troyes, and so he was chosen to
assemble a task force of selected thugs for the operation at hand. First Nogaret drew up a list of vices he smeared Boniface with: he was, among other things, said to be a heretic, a sorcerer, an assassin of ecclesiastics, and, to top all this
off, guilty of keeping mistresses to hide the fact that he was, in reality, a sodomist.
Nogaret seized the Pope and held him captive for some days until the local nobles forced him to free the Pope. Boniface, an old man already by medieval standards, never recovered from the shock of being the first viceroy of Christ to be
kidnapped. He died soon after and thus freed Philip of the threat he might have had trouble with later on. As soon as the next Pope, Benedict IX, was inaugurated, he proceeded to blame Nogaret for what he had caused Boniface; note the target of
the accusation - not Philip, whom Benedict wished not to infuriate, but Nogaret, who was a hired gun. Disappointingly Benedict died within a year of his office begun, and never found out if his strategy worked or not. This time Philip was en
garde and subtly (probably like a rhino) let the French members of the College of Cardinals know that he would be happy if a Frenchman were elected Pope. And to everyone's surprise - Bertrand de Got, Archbishop of Bordeaux, got the job, and
assumed the name of Clement V.
As soon as Clement was in office he was approached by Nogaret, who wished to have his name cleared of any wrongdoing in the case of the unfortunate Boniface. Of course, the new Pope was very much against letting Nogaret have his honor back -
after all, he had caused considerable suffering to the late Pope. For six years Nogaret nagged the Pope, until he had no choice but to reopen the case. Nogaret was allowed to present his side of the story, which was surprisingly good, if not
true but in a few items. Nogaret even had the nerve to ask the Pope to exhume Boniface and have his bones publicly burned. Such audacity seldom goes unrewarded and the Pope did compromise with the King and his men: all ecclesiastical (I just
love typing that word) punishments the King or his men had suffered were lifted, and the Pope went so far as to claim the King had acted justly and rationally in this case. He did not, however, cause the late Boniface to be publicly condemned.
All this was necessary to tell here, because it is an essential element in understanding the fate of the Templars. It shows how the King handled his enemies with ruthlessness and almost fanatical fervour. Not long before the King showed the way
of the world to the Holy See did Acre fall from the Templars into Muslim hands in 1291. Now the Order was devoid of its main function, that of keeping Pilgrims safe on their dangerous journey. It is not exactly clear how much Philip feared the
aimless military force the Templars possessed, and just how much he barely needed the money of the Order, but one thing is clear: when he set out to crush the Order, he did so with terrifying force.
The Templars were assigned a massive set of accusations by Philip the Fair. The King put his top man, Guillaume de Nogaret, on the job, and he was very thorough with the task. (Another man he put on the job was his Lord Chancellor, de Marigny,
who later was accused of embezzlement and withcraft and hanged). De Nogaret had successfully drawn up accusations for many of Philip's campaigns against the King's enemies, but this time he really went out of his way. The full list contains 127
articles, but Barber sums them up in the following seven groups.
The denial of saints, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus Christ as Saviour. It was said that the Templars held Christ to be a false prophet and therefore no redemption would be forthcoming from Him. This charge also included spitting or urination on
the Crucifix, trampling on it or dragging it on the ground in mockery of the suffering of Christ.
Idolatry, especially the adoration of a certain head called Caput (or Capud) LVIII, or Head 58. For more information on the Caput, see the topic The Mystical Head in the Pub.
The renouncement of holy sacraments and omission of words of consecration in mass.
The belief that the Grand Master and other high officials of the Order can hear confession and offer absolution, even thought they were laymen.
The claims of obscene kisses of new recruits on their mouth, navel, stomach, lower spine, or buttocks, and other charges of homosexuality and other sexual misbehaviour.
The Order was said to seek funds with lawful and unlawful methods and misusing donated funds by hoarding them instead of putting them to good use.
The Order was charged with keeping secret, heavily guarded meetings. Disclosure of Order secrets was punishable by death.
In fairness it must be said that most of these accusations were fabricated along the lines of previous trials against the enemies of the King. It is also noteworthy that even if quite a few confessions were obtained that admitted to these
charges, no such testimonies were received outside Philip the Fair's realm. This makes it quite clear that he obtained the testimonies through torture.
Philip's order of the arrests is dated 14 September 1307. The letter was remarkably well kept secret. In it Philip poses as a defender of the Faith, at first reluctant to believe the heinous crimes the Templars were said to have committed, but
"as evidence mounted, he had no chance but to start investigating the matter", as he put it. Philip claimed that information of Templar crimes was passed on to him by pious and righteous people who wanted to see the Faith purified of all
blasphemous and heretical tendencies in which the Order was said to excel. In the letter Philip claimed to have Papal consent on the arrests after having consulted the Pope on how to deal with the accusations. In reality, the Pope Clement V was
not aware of the impending operation. True, Philip had talked with him on the Order, but in a general manner, with no indication of the upcoming hunt.
After the arrests, Philip had virtually all Templars in France under his thumb. Philip was very much under pressure to extract as many confessions from the prisoners as possible, because the arrests had been done on such flimsy grounds. He had
to be able to demonstrate that the Order had indeed been a genuine threat to the Catholic faith and that he had acted in the best interest of the Holy Church. The Pope Clement V was not at all happy because of the arrests, since he had been
discussing such action with Philip only at a very superficial level, with no details at all.
Philip wrote to his neighboring rulers to try and persuade them to follow suit agains the Order. He wrote as the head of the French government, as if it was France that was pressing the charges, not the Church. To the fellow monarchs, this only
added to the confusion. Lack of overt Papal endorsement on the matter cast serious doubts as to the legitimacy of the affair, and kings were on their guard. The King also set Guillaume de Paris to write to the Inquisition officials in Toulouse
and Carcassonne on September 22, 1307. He was to enlist the Inquisition in the process of hearing the Templars and to see if they were to prove successful with their advanced methods.
So we have the Order subjected to intense questioning, loss of sleep, deprivation of food other than bread and water, and arduous physical humiliation. Ato de Salvigny, Preceptor of the Templar house of La Chapelle in the Cahors region,
sustained for four weeks in irons before confessing to the alleged crimes. The Inquisition did not need to put out fully, since most of the Templars were but simple workers, whose minds were enough terrorized merely by the fact that they were
in the hands of the King and not in the daily tasks of the Order. Still, there were several methods of torture used:
The strappado - the victim was tied to a triangular frame with his hands behind his back, an lifted from the hands only to be dropped and stopped a few feet short of the ground, the violent jolt resulting in serious pain.
some prisoners had the soles of their feet rubbed with fat and then subjected to fire until the fat caught fire. Bones dropped off Bernard de Vaho's feet a few days after that kind of treatment.
weights were attached to the testicles of some prisoners, sometimes even on those already on the strappado.
Surely it is easy to see why the methods proved extraordinarily successful. Out of the 138 Templars questioned in Paris, a full 134 admitted to the charges either in full or in part, and about the same rate applies throughout France. Obviously
such results did not flood in from outside France, where the Inquisition had no jurisdiction. Most Templars portrayed themselve as hapless victims of a cruel and inhuman Order, which suited Philip just fine, as it was against the Order he
fought, not against individuals. The confessors said they had committed the crimes ore et non corde, in the mouth only and not in the heart, in vain attempts to save themselves. Very few risked themselves by attempting to defend the Order.
ogaret's evidence against the Order was not enough to satisfy all in the proceedings. There were retractions of confessions and even denials, especially after a papal commission set out in February 1310 to hear any Templars who wished to come
forward on behalf of the Order. This pulled out more than 500 Templars who wanted to speak to the Commission.
presented testimony made a significant influence on the Commission. The atmosphere within the investigation began to shift to the side that the Order itself may have been pure, even if it had some heretical members. Even Bernard Gui, a
Dominican witch-hunter par excellence, was confused as to which side to take in the light of the contradicting evidence.
In the spring of 1310 things may even have looked somewhat bright to the Templars languishing in dungeons and gaols. However, this was not for long. Philip IV figured that he needed to put the trial back on course, and to do this he assembled
54 Templars to a field outside Paris on 12 May, and roasted them at the stake. This was all it took to put the Templar defence down. By November there was not one Templar willing to speak for the Order - all were more willing to stay quiet and
hope to save their necks. Philip gained his goal by that single event, and could thereafter concentrate on getting Clement V to do his bidding.
Trial and Suppression
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1311. Clement had seen to it that all data collected in all Europe was sent to him in advance for strict inspection. It was absolutely necessary for both Philip and Clement to justify their joint venture by the prestige of a General Council,
and it had to run smoothly.
bogged down thinking whether they should be allowed to speak their piece or not. In all this, Clement gradually lost control of the Council, which was not good news to Philip. He, being the man of action he was, parked his army outside Vienne
on 20 March 1312 and went on to demand the immediate and complete suppression of the Order then and there. Clement held a secret consistory of the Council, and two days after that he asked the General Council to vote on the matter.
The Council decided to suppress the Order by a 4/5 majority. On 3 April 1312 Clement read out his bull for the day, titled Vox in Excelso. (He was accompanied by Philip on his side, making sure the document remained unedited.) The main point in
this bull was the wording of it: the Order was suppressed - not condemned. By this choice of words Clement indicated that the evidence against the Templars was not sufficient to warrant condemnation, which would have yielded a much wider
palette of possible punishments for the accused Templars. From this we can judge the veracity of the accusations: the Church lost no time condemning heretics, as we saw with the Albigensian Crusade.
Two big problems arose as the verdict was issued and the dust had settled: what to do with the Templars still in custody, and what to do with the Templars' property. Philip had an all-in-the-family-type solution to this, and he proposed the
formation of a new Order on the ruins of the Templars, one with his son on the Grand Master's seat. Even he sensed the animosity of the Council for such an outrageous proposition and he dropped the project.
Clement came up with his solution when he issued his bull Ad Providam on 2 May 1312. In it he stated that the property of the Templars was to go to the Hospitallers, except in the Iberian Peninsula whose kings had struck personal deals with
Clement to have the properties there pass on to local Orders. Philip was awarded costs for the burden of having had to arrest and maintain the Templars during the long battle.
It was no easy task to say that the property was to be the Hospitallers from now on. Kings availed themselves to the defenseless properties of Templars, which were, as we know, of formidable value. For example in England, Edward II sold wood
and grain in his own name, paid clerks' wages that were in arrears with Templar funds, and even had meat and fish taken for his coronation from the Templars' stockhouses. Local lords also saw that their moment was come, and they acted on it in
a manner much reminiscent of a pack of hyenas attacking a cow. Templar lands, while large and productive, were often given to the Order by grants from rivalling lords. Such grants were a good reason to dispute the donation and place the land in
temporary custody which soon turned permanent. Therefore the Hospitallers only received a fraction of what was their due.
Of the famed Templar treasure the Hospitallers got even less. When coffers were opened at the largest preceptories, they were primarily empty. Even given that the loss of Acre, being the last in a long series of hardships, had caused a negative
cash flow along with the necessary evacuation of Palestine, the small amount of liquid assets led to an ongoing controversy over the large fortune the Order amassed in its days of glory.
As to the Templars in custody, a two-tier approach was adopted. All leaders were to be judged by the papal authorities, and all brothers were to be left to the hands of the local authorities. The low-rank brothers were treated with much
lenience, as they were allowed to reside in Templar houses and draw on Templar funds for their upkeep. In 1317 ex-Templars were given permission to join the Hospitallers, and in 1318 Franciscans and Dominicans in the Naples region were
instructed to support surviving Templars. The Order of Jesus Christ in Portugal, which actually was the Templars under a new brand name, even retained Templar ranks. ($64,000 question: ever wonder why Christopher Columbus had a red cross on the
sails of his ships? Right. He was a member of the Order of Jesus Christ.) There are records of Templars living in scattered sites around Europe, for example there were 12 Templars drawing pension in England in 1338, and the last surviving
Templar on record was one Berengar dez Coll in the preceptory of Mas Deu in Roussillon, France.
Leaders were still hoping for the Order to continue, either in new form or underground, but such hopes were crushed when Jacques de Molay, Geoffroi de Charnay, Hugues de Pairaud and Geoffroi de Gonneville went to be interrogated by papal
authorities. Expecting a life sentence, De Molay and de Charnay revoked their testimonies and were sentenced to be burned at stake.
n France, the last of Grand Masters of the order was selected, Jacques de Molay. The Templar's had made some sizeable loans to the king of France, Philip the Fair. Philip was embroiled in Papal politics and he was able to get his own puppet
Pope on the throne. In 1306, Philip was still desparate for funds. He built an audacious plan to take the Templar treasure. Only one crime allowed a king to confiscate property, heresy. On October 13th, all Templars in France were arrested by
order of the pope and thus he disbanded his own personal army. He requested all Christian rulers to follow Phillips lead. Then the torture began. Nearly all the Templars arrested were tortured in one way or another. They confessed to all sorts
of nonsense from outright devil worship to systematic, organized homosexuality. Over the next few years, the order was broken up in all countries. In 1314 on March 18 (the day this page was launched), the last of the Templars was burned at the
stake. Supposedly, deMolay had time for a curse. He called for Pope Clement and Philip IV to join him within the year. Clement died the next month and Philip IV seven months later.
The idea that the Knights Templar were devil worshippers arose out of tortures of the Inquisition. In order for Philip the Fair to confiscate the Templar holdings, they must be found guilty of heresy. So, using techniques later perfected during
the witch trials that peaked around 1600, the Knights were tortured until they signed confessions. The fact that so many of the recanted (withdrew their confessions) as soon as the torture stopped was not a sign of innocence. The prevailing
sense of the time was that people told the truth while being tortured. The thought that people would tell you whatever you wanted them to just didn't make sense at the time. The Templar treasurer was quoted as saying, "Under such torture, I
would have confessed to killing God."
Under such torture, the Templars confessed to all sorts of crimes. At their initiations they, supposedly spat and walked on the cross, denied that Christ was the son of God, and promised to relieve all sexual desires with their Brothers. They
were supposed to exchange lewd kisses on the lower back or navel (kissing on the mouth was actually an approved exchange between men at the time). They also confessed to idol worship. Several, though not many, of the confessions mentioned a
head, made of metal or wood, that was sometimes referred to as Baphomet (see Temple of Easter Knowledge for a further discussion of Baphomet).
Ultimately, although a large number of Templars were burned at the stake as heretics, the charges against the Order as a whole, fell through. Ultimately the Pope dissolved the order with the excuse that the accusations alone would prevent
people from joining it. It had therefore outlived its usefulness. To make sure that this attitude stuck, the Pope went on to say that anyone joining the Order in the future would be excommunicated and labeled a heretic. Aside from the
confessions, again, most of them recanted after the torture, there was very little evidence that the Templars deviated from the basic Catholocism of the time. One theory is that during their initiation, they did recreate Peter's renunciation of
Christ as part of the ritual. It was this that became the basis for some of the charges against them. Baphomet was never found.
Events
| Birth | 1268 | Fontainebleau, Seine-et-Marne, France | |||
| Marriage | 16 Aug 1284 | Notre Dame de Paris, Paris, Seine, France - Joan I, Queen of Navarre | |||
| Acceded | 1285 | ||||
| Death | 29 Nov 1314 | Fontainebleau, Seine-et-Marne, France | |||
| Interred | 9 Dec 1314 | St Denis, Seine-St-Denis, France | |||
| Title (Facts Page) | King of France, King of Navarre |
Families
| Spouse | Joan I, Queen of Navarre (1271 - 1305) |
| Child | Isabella de France (1292 - 1358) |
| Father | Philippe III "The Bold," King of France (1245 - 1285) |
| Mother | Isabelle of Aragon (1247 - 1271) |
| Sibling | Charles, Count of Valois (1270 - 1325) |