Today marks the 709th anniversary of the arrest of the Knights Templar on October 13th, 1307.
The tale of the Knights
Templar is a story with a larger-than life aura of myth, that finished in an
abrupt and almost unbelievable tragedy. Founded in 1119 by nine crusading French knights as a tiny band of dedicated protectors of Christians in the Holy Land, the Poor Fellow
Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon shot across the political landscape like a meteor, vaulting from obscure
guardians of pilgrims in Jerusalem into the most powerful and influential force
of their age. They were fierce warriors, devout monks, skilled diplomats, and international
bankers. Within just a half century of their birth, they walked with
kings and advised popes, brokered treaties, and built castles and preceptories
on a massive scale. Then, even
more inexplicable than their rise came their fall, less than two centuries after they began, in a harrowing plunge into
arrest, trial, flight and execution that shocked the medieval world, both East
and West.
The end began for them at dawn on Friday, October 13, 1307. The
sealed order to King Phillip IV's seneschals and bailiffs had gone out a full month
before. It was accompanied by a personal letter from the king, filled with
lofty prose about how heart-rending it was to be compelled to do his duty,
while detailing frightening accusations against the Templars. The letter would
have had an eye-popping effect on the king’s men, and their secrecy was undoubtedly
assured. The sealed arrest order was not to be opened until the appointed day.
At this time, France was the most populous nation of Europe,
even greater than Russia. France took up more than 40,000 square miles, an
enormous area to cover from the back of a horse. Yet Phillip IV managed to
carry off his own Night of the Long Knives, in a country without telephones,
trains, or automobiles. It was a stunning piece of work. Hundreds of the king’s
men simultaneously opened letters all over the country that morning, ordering them to converge
on every Templar castle, Commandery, Preceptory, farm, vineyard, or mill.
It was shockingly effective, instantly chopping off the head
of the Order. Phillip obviously had a hit list of the most important knights to
capture. Accounts differ wildly, but the most respected ones agree that 625 members
of the Order were arrested in the first wave. These included the Grand Master Jacques de Molay;
the Visitor-General; the Preceptors of Normandy, Cyprus, and Aquitane; and the
Templars’ Royal Treasurer.
The vast majority of the literally thousands of Templar
properties in France were small manors and farms, tended by as few as two or
three aging brethren. Often, a small Preceptory with a few serving brothers and
the occasional aged knight was all there was to meet these armed bailiffs of
the king. The average age of those arrested was 41. They were not, as a rule,
the cream of the Order’s hardened fighting force, and many of those tending
these unfortified properties were in their 60s and 70s.
The Templars were put into isolation, and immediately subjected
to the gruesome tactics of medieval interrogation on the very first day of
their arrest. The technique of the strapaddo
was common. It involved binding the victim’s wrists behind his back, passing
the rope over a high beam, pulling him off of the ground, and suddenly dropping
him, snapping his arms and dislocating his shoulders. Stretching the victim on
the rack was another favored method. Perhaps the most horrible was coating the
victim’s feet in lard or oil, and then slowly roasting them over a flame. More
than one knight was handed the tiny bones that fell from his burned feet by his
dedicated torturers. Subjected to these agonies, the overwhelming majority of the
knights confessed to any charge that was put to them.
Phillip’s goal was to arrest all the Templars, subject them
to torture immediately, and exact confessions from them on the very first day. He knew that the pope would be livid over
his actions, and that Church officials would be wary of agreeing to the kinds
of interrogations Phillip had in mind, so time was of the essence. He wanted to
hand Pope Clement V a stack of confessions so damning that the pope would lose his
stomach for siding with the Order.
The pope reacted just as Phillip had planned. His outrage
over the arrests turned to dread and resignation as the “evidence” was
presented to him. Phillip leaned on Clement to issue papal arrest warrants all
across Europe, which were largely ignored or skirted around by other monarchs.
Very few show trials went on outside of France, and there were no cases (outside
of the tortured knights in France) of Templars who admitted to any charges of
heresy.
In an outburst of courage and remorse, most of the arrested
Templars subsequently recanted their confessions, and proclaimed to Church
officials that their statements were made under the pain of torture and threat
of death. To intimidate the remaining Templars, Phillip ordered 54 of the
knights to be burned at the stake in 1310, for the sin of recanting their
confessions.
In 1312, Clement finally decided to end the situation at a
council in Vienne. Just to make certain the decision went the way he intended,
Phillip stationed his army on the outskirts of the city. The pliant pope
officially dissolved the Order, without formally condemning it. (In truth, he had secretly absolved the Order of all wrongdoing after his own investigation at Chinon in 1308 in a document that served to at least save the knights in the hereafter, even though he was powerless to stop Phillip in the temporal world.) All Templar possessions
apart from their cash were handed over to the Knights Hospitaller, and many
Templars who freely confessed were set free and assigned to other Orders. Those
who did not confess were sent to the stake. Phillip soothed his loss of the
Templars’ tangible assets by strong-arming a yearly fee from the Knights Hospitallers,
to defray his costs of prosecuting the Templars.
By 1314, both the pope and public opinion had completely abandoned
the Knights Templar. The four senior Templar officers in Phillip’s custody had
been waiting in prison for seven grim years. All of them were old, the youngest
being Geoffroy de Charney, who was almost 60. Jacques de Molay was in his 70s
and had spent four years in solitary confinement. The four men were finally led
onto a platform in front of Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral to hear the charges
and make their public confessions. The charges were read, and two of the men
accepted their fate of perpetual imprisonment and were led away.
But Jacques de Molay and his trusted follower Geoffroy de
Charney did not follow suit. Weakened with age and imprisonment, de Molay
shouted in a voice that startled the assembly that he and the Templars were
innocent of all the charges. They were returned to their cells at once, while
Phillip called together his council and quickly pronounced sentence, using the
insane logic of the Inquisition; if they had recanted their confessions, then
they were considered “relapsed heretics,” and the penalty was the stake.
Late that afternoon, de Molay and de Charney were led to the
place of execution, which was a tiny isolated island adjacent to the Île de la
Citè, called the Île-aux-Juifs (Island of the Jews) in the middle of the River Seine.
The condemned men could see Notre Dame Cathedral in the east, but the site was
not chosen for their view. Rather, it was chosen so that King Phillip could
enjoy the entertainment without leaving his palace just across the river.
Each man was stripped down to his shirt and tied to the
stake. Jacques de Molay, with unbelievable courage, asked not only that he be
turned to face the Cathedral, but that his hands be freed, so that he could die
at prayer. His request was granted. The two men were roasted alive by the
Inquisitional method that began with hot coals, so that their agony could be
prolonged as much as possible. It was dusk on March 18, 1314.
When the Pont Neuf was built, the Île aux Juifs was joined to
the rest of the Île de la Cité, and today there are not one but two plaques
near the bridge to commemorate this event. Jacques de Molay did not go to his
God in silence. Legends insist that he died defiantly shouting his innocence
and that of the Templars, calling on King Phillip and Pope Clement to meet him
before the throne of God in one year’s time, where they would all be judged together.
Indeed, both men, relatively young, would be dead within the year. One month
after the death of de Molay, Pope Clement V, age 54, died, it was said, of
cancer. Phillip the Fair, age 46, died in a hunting accident probably brought
on by a stroke. He died on November 29, 1314, managing to get in just under the
wire.
The gruesome death of Jacques de Molay is the last act of
the Templar story. At least, the last act of the accepted, scholarly story of
the Knights Templar that is told, in names and dates, between the covers of the
history books. But in reality, his death is only the beginning. It’s the
beginning of the myth of the Knights
Templar, which is the maelstrom around which an endless stream of fact blended
with speculation swirls, unabated.
(Excerpted from The Templar Code For Dummies)
