Between 1095 and 1250, there were seven crusades, but after initial success in capturing Jerusalem, the crusaders failed to hold the Holy Land. Out of these nearly two hundred years of military expeditions in the name of God by medieval warriors came such romantic figures as the real King Richard the Lionheart and the fictional knights of the round table of King Arthur’s Camelot riding forth on a quest for the Holy Grail. But it was a twenty-first-century novel that lifted a group of Crusaders from history books to popular consciousness.
Of the Knights Templar, an eyewitness, Archbishop William of Tyre, wrote in 1118 that “certain noble men of knightly rank, religious men, devoted to God and fearing him, bound themselves to Christ’s service” and promised to live “without possessions, under vows of chastity and obedience.” Their leaders were Hugues de Payens, a knight of Burgundy, and Godefroid (Geoffrey) de St. Omer, from the south of France. Because they had “no church nor any fixed abode” when they arrived in Jerusalem, they were allowed “a dwelling place near the Lord’s Temple ” (the ruins of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem). Their primary duty was “protecting the roads and routes against the attacks of robbers and brigands.” This they did, William of Tyre noted, “especially in order to safeguard pilgrims.” For nine years following their founding, the Knights Templar wore secular clothing. They used “such garments as the people, for their soul’s salvation, gave them.”
Taking the name “Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon,” they became known as Templars. Sanctioned by the Church in 1128 at the Council of Troyes, they were soon renowned, and feared, for their ferocity in battle. “Following the retaking of Jerusalem by Islam in 1239, they obtained the island of Cyprus as their headquarters of the Order and used their vast accumulation of rich spoils of war to establish themselves as international financiers.” Inventing banking, they set up a Temple in Paris, becoming the medieval equivalent of today’s World Bank and World Trade Organization. Richer than any government on the continent, these former “Poor Knights of Christ” had evolved from nine members to between 15,000 and 20,000, with 9,000 manors and castles.
“They have now grown so great that there are in this Order today,” William of Tyre wrote at some time between 1170 and 1174, “about 300 knights who wear white mantles, in addition to the brothers, who are almost countless. They are said to have immense possessions both here and overseas, so that there is now not a province in the Christian world which has not bestowed upon the aforesaid brothers a portion of its goods. It is said today that their wealth is equal to the treasures of kings.”
The Templars had become so rich and powerful, William noted, they “have made themselves exceedingly troublesome.”
Their leader at this time was Jacques de Molay. “Born in 1244 in Vitrey, France, he entered the Knights Templar in 1265 at the age of twenty-one. After rising quickly through the ranks, he spent a great deal of time in Great Britain. Eventually appointed as visitor general and grand preceptor of all England, he was made head of the order following the death of its twenty-second grand master. He then moved from England to Cyprus. It was there in the autumn of 1307 that he found himself called back to France by order of King Philip IV, known as ‘the Fair,’ and Pope Clement V. It is believed that the summons was the result of kingly and papal fear and envy of the power and wealth of the Templars. Another explanation is that Philip the Fair was so deep in debt to the Templars that he decided the only way to eradicate it was by eliminating the order.
“On Friday, October 13, 1307, royal bailiffs entered Templar headquarters in Paris and arrested the knights. Imprisoned and tortured, they were forced to confess to heresies, among them devil worship and sexual perversions. They were offered a choice of recantation or death. While de Molay gave a confession under torture, he quickly renounced it. Condemned along with another Templar, he was taken to an island in the Seine River in the shadow of Notre Dame Cathedral and set ablaze in 1312.
“A legend arose that as the flames raged around him, he prophesied that the king and pope would die within a year. The prophecy came true. But before his death the pope dissolved the order and warned that anyone even thinking about joining the Templars would be excommunicated and charged as heretics.” Despite King Phillip and Pope Clement’s decision to eradicate the Templars, some escaped their clutches and, it is believed, established the Order in Scotland. Today the Knights Templar survive as a component of Freemasonry.
Although the archives of the Vatican and volumes of European history contain numerous accounts of interlacing objectives of kings and popes, and even instances of conspiracies, none matched the deal between Pope Clement V and Phillip the Fair to cloak avarice in religion. That Clement recognized the illegitimacy of the charges of heresy against the Knights Templar was recorded in a document that was placed in the Vatican ’s secret archives and remained there for seven centuries.
To the astonishment of historians in 2008, the Vatican announced it would be publishing 799 copies of the minutes of the trials against the Templars, Processus Contra Templarios (Papal Inquiry into the Trial of the Templars) which it planned to sell for about $8,000 (5,900 euros, 4,115 British pounds). The giant work would come in a soft leather case, with detailed reproductions of the original Latin documents on the Templars trials.
Known as the Chinon parchment, for the location in France where the trials were held, the document recorded why Pope Clement V dissolved the Templars and issued arrest warrants for all members. The small parchment had been discovered in the Vatican ’s secret archives in 2001 by Professor Barbara Frale.
“I could not believe it when I found it,” she said. “The paper was put in the wrong archive in the seventeenth century.
“The document…reveals that the Templars had an initiation ceremony which involved ‘spitting on the cross,’ ‘denying Jesus,’ and kissing the lower back, navel and mouth of the man proposing them for membership. The Templars explained to Pope Clement that the initiation mimicked the humiliation that knights could suffer if they fell into the hands of the Saracens, while the kissing ceremony was a sign of their total obedience. The Pope concluded that the ritual was not truly blasphemous, as alleged by King Philip when he had the knights arrested. However, he was forced to dissolve the Order to keep peace with the French and prevent a schism in the church.
“This is proof that the Templars were not heretics,” said Professor Frale.
“The document contains the absolution Pope Clement V gave to the Grand Master of the Temple, Jacques de Molay, and to the other heads of the Order, after they ‘had shown to be repented’ and asked to be forgiven by the Church. After the formal abjuration, which is compelling for all those who were even only suspected of heretical crimes, the leading members of the Templar Order are reinstated in the Catholic Communion and readmitted to receive the sacraments. The document deals with the first phase of the trial of the Templars, when Pope Clement V was still convinced he might be able to guarantee the survival of the military-religious order and meet the apostolic need to remove the shame of excommunication from the warrior friars, caused by their previous denial of Jesus Christ when tortured by the French Inquisitor.
“As several contemporary sources confirm, the pope ascertained that Templars were involved in some serious forms of immorality and he planned a radical reform of the Order to subsequently merge it into one body with another military-religious order… The Act of Chinon, a requirement to carry out the reform, remained however a dead letter. The French monarchy reacted by initiating a blackmail mechanism, which would have obliged Clement V to take a final decision during the Council of Vienna (1312). Unable to oppose the will of King, Phillip the Fair, who ordered the elimination of the Templars, the Pope heard the opinion of the Council Fathers and decided to abolish the Order… Clement stated that this suffered decision did not amount to an act of heretic condemnation, which could not be reached on the basis of the various inquiries carried out in the years prior to the Council…