sixteen

The Temple Assaulted

The ‘outrage’ at Anagni scandalised Europe and was compared by Dante, despite his dislike of Boniface VIII, to the recrucifixion of Christ. Horrified by the sacrilege, the conclave that gathered to choose a successor excommunicated the two Colonna cardinals and excluded them from its deliberations. Unanimously, the remaining cardinals chose Niccolò Boccasino, the Cardinal Archbishop of Ostia, but within a year of his accession he fell ill with dysentery and died.

The cardinals reassembled to choose a successor but there was a deadlock between those who wanted vengeance for the outrage at Anagni and those who sought accommodation with the Colonnas and the King of France. The former were in a majority but were divided by the personal ambition of two cardinals from the Orsini family. After eleven months of inconclusive deliberations, the cardinals decided to consider candidates from the wider Church. They were subject to overt outside pressure: King Charles II of Naples came to Perugia to join a delegation sent by King Philip IV of France.

In June 1305, ten of the fifteen cardinals agreed on a Frenchman, the Archbishop of Bordeaux, Bertrand of Got. The third son of Béraud of Got, Lord of Villandraut, his was a family deeply entrenched in the political and ecclesiastical establishment of Gascony. Esteemed by their suzerain, King Edward I of England, members of the Got family had been sent on delicate diplomatic missions, and Bertrand’s elder brother, Béraud, had risen to become a cardinal and Archbishop of Lyons. Bertrand rose in his wake, becoming his brother’s Vicar-General, a papal chaplain, a bishop and finally Archbishop of Bordeaux.

Taking the name Clement V, Bertrand of Got was no doubt aware that his elevation to the throne of the supreme pontiff was not due to any positive qualities but because he was the least objectionable candidate to the different parties concerned. King Philip IV of France had reason to think that the new Pope would be amenable to his bidding. King Edward I of England showed his approval of the elevation of the son of one of his vassals with rich gifts to him both in Bordeaux and in Lyons at the time of his coronation. To the Italians, however, Clement V was the puppet of King Philip of France, a perception substantiated, in their eyes, by the fact that never as pope did he set foot in Rome.

Certainly, in the previous two centuries, popes had only resided there for eighty-two years, often preferring for reasons of health or security to hold court in Orvieto, Viterbo, Anagni or Naples; but on the whole, they had chosen cities within the Papal States, or at any rate in Italy: Clement V was never to cross the Alps; and though he would sojourn in cities such as Lyons, Vienne, and finally Avignon, which were technically outside the jurisdiction of the French King, they were not beyond the reach of his armed forces as he was to discover at the Council of Vienne.

Why did Clement V remain so close to France? Two Italian chroniclers, Agnolo of Tura and Giovanni Villani, wrote that Cardinal Niccolò da Prato had arranged a meeting between Bertrand of Got when he was still Archbishop of Bordeaux and Philip the Fair, at which the King had specified four conditions for his support: reconciliation with the Colonnas and all those involved in the outrage at Anagni; a formal denunciation of Boniface VIII; the nomination of Francophile cardinals; and a secret clause, ‘mysterious and great’, which the King would communicate to Bertrand of Got at a later date.

According to these conspiracy theorists, Bertrand’s response to Philip’s command was ‘You will command and I will obey’; and even though the story is now considered imaginary, ‘it reflects the background of Clement’s election as perceived on the Italian peninsula’.327 It also appears from his later actions that Clement V met the King’s demands: in December 1305, he appointed ten new cardinals, nine of them from the Kingdom of France, including Angevin possessions, and one from England. Four of the new cardinals were the Pope’s relatives and one, Arnaud of Poyanne, an old friend. Their choice was not just a matter of favouritism but secured for the new Pope a team he could trust.328 The balance in favour of cardinals from the Kingdom of France was confirmed by a second nomination of five cardinals in 1310, two of them the Pope’s nephews and all from France. But this preponderance of French churchmen was not simply to pay off a debt. Rather, the Pope’s cultivation of Philip the Fair was because ‘collaboration with the king of France was … imperative for the realisation of Clement’s dearest goal, the crusade’.329

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The heady optimism about the Holy Land that had prevailed in the Papal Curia in 1300 had been exposed as wishful thinking. The Mameluks had reoccupied Palestine; Ruad had fallen and the Mongol Il-khan, Ghazan, who was to have delivered Jerusalem into the hands of the Christians, proclaimed in 1304 that the official faith throughout his dominions was to be Islam. The last Christian principality on the mainland of Asia, Cilician Armenia, was assailed by both Mongols and Mameluks. On 14 November 1305, Clement was crowned with the papal tiara in the Church of Saint-Just in Lyons in the presence of King Philip the Fair, his brother Charles of Valois, Jean II, Duke of Brittany, and Henry, Duke of Luxembourg: two days later he issued an encyclical that proclaimed a new crusade.

To Clement, who had taken the name of the earlier Pope who had worked in such harmony with Saint Louis, a crusade could only succeed if it was led by the King of France. To this end, he not only persuaded Philip the Fair to take the Cross, which he did in Lyons on 29 December 1305, but he also worked assiduously to resolve the disputes that might prevent the fulfilment of his vow such as that between France and England. He brokered a treaty between Philip IV and Edward I and, appreciating the strains on Philip’s financial resources, he granted him a tenth of the income of the Church in France to fund the crusade – five or six times the revenue of the King.

King Philip’s intention at this juncture was to fulfil his vow, not simply to gain glory by delivering the Holy Places from the infidel but also to establish a French empire in the eastern Mediterranean. The weakness of the Byzantine Emperor that had enabled the Hospitallers to seize the island of Rhodes now led King Philip IV to covet the throne of the eastern Empire for his brother, Charles of Valois. It might not conform to the plan of Clement V, but France, Venice, Aragon and Naples ‘were openly committed to the winning of Constantinople’.330

In Philip’s mind, a prerequisite to a successful crusade was the merger of the military orders. He would command the united order and be succeeded by one of his sons. The idea was not new and is to be found in many of the treaties written around this time to advise the Pope on the recovery of the Holy Land. Of particular significance was De recuperatione terre sancte by a Norman lawyer, Pierre Dubois, a propagandist for the French government, a spin doctor of his time. His proposal was in essence ‘a plan for the establishment of French hegemony over the west and the east, through a crusade’.331 Central to his scheme was the uniting of the Temple and the Hospital and the harnessing of their resources by the French King. Ominously, in a postscript to his treatise, Dubois added that it might be expedient ‘to destroy the Order of the Templars completely, and for the needs of justice to annihilate it totally’.332 However, the idea of merging the two orders was almost universal: the Mallorcan writer, Ramón Lull, who devoted much time and ultimately his life to the problems posed by Islam, actually damned to hell those who opposed it.

Almost the only man who did so was the Grand Master of the Temple, James of Molay. In response to a request from Pope Clement V, he produced a memorandum putting forward his views. He started with the pedigree of the proposal to merge the orders, tracing it back to the Second Council of Lyons in 1274 and listing the popes, among them Boniface VIII, who had decided against it. James of Molay recognised that there would be some advantages to a merger – a united order would be in a stronger position to defend itself against its enemies – but on balance he thought they would be more effective if they remained separate. Competition between the Temple and the Hospital was beneficial and, while their aims were similar, they each had a distinct ethos – the Hospital gave precedence to its charitable work while the Temple was primarily a military force ‘founded especially as a knighthood’. Overall, he felt that the two orders were more likely to achieve their objectives of giving alms, protecting pilgrims, and waging war against the Saracens if they retained their independence.

A second memorandum was presented by James of Molay, at the Pope’s request, on the future conduct of the crusade. Here again, the Grand Master went against the prevailing view at the time that favoured the passagium particulare – the limited incursion of a professional force to bolster the forces of Cilician Armenia. The lesson to be learned from the Temple’s loss of Ruad, he suggested, was that such small-scale operations were bound to fail. Nor could he recommend an alliance with the Armenians. In their dealings with them over the Amanus march, the Templars had found them untrustworthy. Because they disliked the Franks and suspected their intentions, the Armenians would not allow them to enter their castles. Moreover, the climate in the region was so unhealthy that he doubted whether more than a fraction of a crusading army would survive.

What, then, was the solution? James of Molay proposed a passagium generale, a full-scale crusade on the classical model such as that of King Louis IX. The only way to reconquer the Holy Land was by defeating the land forces of Egypt. To do this, the kings of France, England, Germany, Sicily and Spain should raise an army of between 12,000 and 15,000 knights and 5,000 foot-soldiers which the Italian maritime republics would convey on their galleys and transport to Cyprus as a forward base for the reconquest of Palestine.

To all the other pamphleteers, particularly those of a like mind with the King of France, this was an old-fashioned and thoroughly discredited concept of crusade and, taken with his opposition to the merger of the orders, exposed James of Molay as a stubborn, unimaginative and self-interested old man. No doubt aware that his views would be unpopular, James wrote in his memorandum to Celestine V that he would find it easier to express his ideas face to face with the Pope: like most knights at the time, he could neither read nor write.

As a result, Pope Clement V summoned the Grand Masters of both the Temple and the Hospital to confer with him at Poitiers on All Saints’ Day, 1 November 1306. The meeting was postponed because the Pope succumbed to a bout of an endemic gastric illness which often incapacitated him for months at a time. James of Molay reached Europe from Cyprus late in 1306 or early 1307 and was in Poitiers by the end of May. Fulk of Villaret, the Grand Master of the Hospital, was delayed by his Order’s operations on Rhodes but reached Poitiers by the end of August. While in Poitiers, besides discussion of the vexed question of a crusade, James of Molay raised the matter of certain charges that had been made against members of the Temple and asked the Pope to institute an enquiry ‘concerning those things, falsely attributed to them so they say, and to absolve them if they are found innocent, as they assert, or to condemn them, if they are found guilty, which they in no way believe’.

Allegations of gross impropriety appear to have been made by some knights who had been expelled from the Order – Esquin of Floyran, the Prior of Montfaucon; Bernard Pelet, Prior of the Mas-d’Agenais; and a knight from Gisors, Gérard of Byzol. Esquin had first told King James II of Aragon of scandal within the Order and, having failed to persuade him of the truth of his charges, had gone to King Philip of France. Philip IV mentioned the rumours to Pope Clement V at Lyons at the time of his coronation in 1305, and again in May 1307 when the King was in Poitiers. On 24 August 1307, Clement V wrote to King Philip IV about these accusations, saying that though ‘we could scarcely bring our mind to believe what was said at that time’, he had subsequently heard ‘many strange and unheard of things’ about the Temple and so ‘not without great sorrow, anxiety and upset of heart’ had decided to institute an enquiry.333 In the meantime, while he recovered his health, the Pope asked that no precipitate action be taken.

No doubt satisfied that his request for an enquiry had been met, James of Molay travelled from Poitiers to Paris where, on 12 October 1307, he was a pall-bearer at the funeral of King Philip’s sister-in-law, Catherine of Courtenay, the wife of Charles of Valois. The next day, Friday 13 October 1307, he was arrested in the Temple compound outside Paris by William of Nogaret and Reginald Roy.

Three weeks before, King Philip had sent secret orders to his baillis and seneschals throughout France ordering the detention of all members of the Temple for crimes ‘horrible to contemplate, terrible to hear of … an abominable work, a detestable disgrace, a thing almost inhuman, indeed set apart from all humanity’. These were put into effect with remarkable efficiency: around 15,000 knights, sergeants, chaplains, confrères, servants and labourers throughout the territories governed by the King of France were rounded up in a single day. Only around two dozen escaped, among them the Preceptor of France, Gérard of Villiers, and Imbert Blanke, the Preceptor of the Auvergne. One knight, Peter of Boucle, though he shed his habit and shaved off his beard, was recognised and arrested.

As with the Jews and the Lombards some months before, all the property of the Temple was sequestered; but the King’s move against the Temple was different in kind. The Templars were not foreigners like the Lombards or infidels like the Jews. They were members of a proud and powerful corporation that came under ecclesiastical jurisdiction, subject not to the King but to the Pope. King Philip had seized the persons and the property of an exempt order, and, showing that he was only too aware of the dubious legality of his action, his warrants had implied prior consultation ‘with our most holy father in Christ, the Pope’.

In fact, Pope Clement V had not been consulted and sent the King an angry rebuke.

You, our dear son … have, in our absence, violated every rule and laid hands on the persons and properties of the Templars. You have also imprisoned them and, what pains us even more, you have not treated them with due leniency … and have added to the discomfort of imprisonment yet another affliction. You have laid hands on persons and property that are under the direct protection of the Roman Church … Your hasty act is seen by all, and rightly so, as an act of contempt towards ourselves and the Roman Church.334

Clement did not say whether or not he believed the charges made against the Templars; his objection was principally to the usurpation of his prerogative, and the betrayal of trust implicit in the King’s unilateral action; but that other ‘affliction’ which he rebukes Philip for adding to the discomfort of imprisonment was no doubt the torture to which the accused were immediately subjected by another ecclesiastical institution, the Inquisition.

Founded to root out heresy in Languedoc, and staffed by the friars of the Order of Preachers founded by Dominic Guzman, since 1234 a canonised saint, the Inquisition in France had become an instrument of coercion in the hands of the state. The chief Inquisitor, William of Paris, was King Philip’s confessor and, given the King’s piety, was no doubt privy to his plans. On the Sunday after the Templars’ arrest, it was Dominican preachers who first explained the reasons for the arrests at a public meeting in the King’s gardens, appearing alongside the officers of the King.335

To assist the Inquisitors’ interrogation, torture had been authorised half a century earlier by Pope Innocent IV. It was to stop short of spilling blood or breaking limbs: favoured methods at the time were the rack, which stretched a man’s limbs to the point of dislocating his joints; and the strapedo whereby a man was raised over a beam by a rope tied to his wrists that had been bound behind his back. A third technique was to rub fat into the soles of the feet and place the feet before a fire. Occasionally, the torturers miscalculated: the feet of Bernard of Vado, a Templar priest from Albi, were so badly burned that his bones fell out. A Templar knight, James of Soci, claimed to know of twenty-five fellow Templars who had died ‘on account of tortures and suffering’: an anonymous letter in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, put the number at thirty-four.

Besides such specific measures to produce pain, suspects were placed in irons, fed only bread and water, and denied sleep. Given that a large number of those arrested were not battle-hardened warriors, but ploughmen, shepherds, millers, blacksmiths, carpenters and stewards, the shock and disorientation, combined with the mere threat of torture, quickly led many to admit whatever the King’s officers and the Inquisitors suggested. By January 1308, 134 of the 138 Templars arrested in Paris had admitted some or all of the charges brought against them and it was the Grand Master himself, James of Molay, who within ten days of his arrest led the way.

What were the ‘strange and unheard of things’ that they were accused of, the crimes ‘horrible to contemplate, terrible to hear of … an abominable work, a detestable disgrace, a thing almost inhuman, indeed set apart from all humanity’? According to the Capetian prosecutors, the Order of the Temple was given over to the worship and service of the Devil. Each new recruit, at his initiation, was told that Jesus Christ was a false prophet who had been crucified not to redeem the sins of mankind but as a punishment for his own. The postulant was ordered to deny Christ, and to spit, trample or urinate on an image of Christ on the Cross, and then kiss the Templar who received him on the mouth, the navel, the buttocks, the base of the spine, ‘and sometimes on the penis’. He was told that he could have ‘carnal relations’ with other brothers; that this was not only licit ‘but they ought to do and submit to this mutually’ and it was ‘no sin for them to do this’.

To mark their rejection of Christ, Templar priests were said to have omitted the words of consecration during Mass. At secret ceremonies, they worshipped a demon called Baphomet who appeared in the form of a cat, or a skull, or a head with three faces. Cords which had touched this head were tied around the waists of the Templars ‘in veneration’ of the idol. This was done everywhere and ‘by the majority’: those that refused were either killed or imprisoned.

Added to these gross iniquities were lesser crimes that confirmed existing public suspicions. The chapter meetings of the Temple were held in secret, at night, and under heavy guard. The Grand Master and other senior officers had heard the confessions and absolved the sins of their fellow Templars even though they were not ordained priests. They were covetous and avaricious: ‘they did not reckon it a sin … to acquire properties belonging to another by legal or illegal means’ and sought ‘to procure increase and profit to the said Order in whatever way they could…’ A later charge accused them of treachery: it was their secret negotiations with the Muslims that had led to the loss of the Holy Land.

Clearly, when Pope Clement V and King James II of Aragon had first heard these charges, they had found them impossible to believe. Heresy and sodomy were invariably combined by the black propagandists of the time – by the Catholics in describing the Cathars, for example, or by William of Nogaret and William of Plaisans in their attack on Pope Boniface VIII. However, here the stock-in-trade charges were not only combined with the failings that had been ascribed to the Order by its critics; they also exploited a powerful public anxiety about sorcery and the power of demons that was to explode in the witch-hunts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

The scepticism of the Pope, together with the widespread acceptance of his sovereign rights over the Temple, might have hampered, if it was unable to frustrate, King Philip’s assault on the Order had it not been for the admission by James of Molay that he had indeed denied Jesus Christ and spat on Christ’s image at the time of his reception in Beaune. The only charge the Grand Master had rejected was that he had indulged in homosexual acts. However, blasphemy was more than enough to satisfy William of Nogaret.

The confessions of other high Templars followed: Geoffrey of Charney, Preceptor in Normandy; John of La Tour, Treasurer of the Temple in Paris, hitherto a close financial adviser to King Philip; and Hugh of Pairaud, the Templar Visitor of France, who, having received many of the French Templars, was named by others as the instigator of their corruption. Hugh’s confession, made on 9 November, embraced all the charges, including an admission that ‘he said to those whom he was receiving that if any heat of nature urged them to incontinence, he gave them licence to cool off with other brothers’. Refusing at first to incriminate others, he was taken away by his guards and ‘afterwards on the same day’ admitted to the Inquisitors that the practice was ubiquitous. ‘Clearly threats or torture had been used to force the issue.’336

How had such diabolical practices started? Geoffrey of Gonneville, the Temple’s Preceptor in Aquitaine and Poitou, claimed that ‘a certain evil Master … was in the prison of a certain sultan, and could not escape unless he swore that if he were released, he would introduce that custom into our Order, that all who were received henceforth should deny Jesus Christ…’: possibly Bertrand of Blanquefort or William of Beaujeu was intended. Geoffrey had refused to deny Christ and had been excused by the Preceptor, perhaps because his uncle was an influential figure in the government of the King of England. But he had to swear on the Gospel that he would not reveal that he had been let off.

Only four Templars denied the charges outright – John of Châteauvillars, Henry of Herçigny, John of Paris and Lambert of Toysi – a proportion so small that they could be disregarded. Philip’s coup against the Order appeared to be justified and while suspicions of his motives remained, especially outside France, Pope Clement V felt that he had no alternative but to accept the King’s action as a fait accompli and attempt to recover the initiative himself. On 22 November 1307, less than a month after James of Molay’s confession, Clement V sent a letter entitled Pastoralis praeeminentiae to all the kings and princes of Christendom asking them ‘prudently, discreetly, and secretly’ to arrest all Templars and hold their property in safe-keeping for the Church. He praised the good faith and religious zeal of Philip IV but insisted that he, the Pope, was now in control.

The first to be convinced that this was the case was James of Molay who, when brought face to face with three cardinals sent by Clement V from Poitiers to Paris, revoked his confession. According to one account, he tore open his shirt to the show the marks of torture on his body, at which the cardinals ‘wept bitterly and were unable to speak’.337 Other retractions followed and it seems probable that the cardinals were not altogether surprised: the ten members of the sacred college appointed by Pope Clement in his first consistory were said to have threatened to resign because of the Pope’s pusillanimous attitude towards the King of France. There was undoubtedly discontent within the Papal Curia, and lobbying by the friends of the Temple such as James of Molay’s brother, the Dean of Langres. Moreover, many of the leading Templars were well known to the three cardinals sent to Paris, two of whom were Frenchmen: it was while he was dining with them that Hugh of Pairaud revoked his confession.

Considerable risks were attached to this course of action because, under the statutes of the Inquisition, relapsed heretics were handed over to the secular arm to be burned. James of Molay no doubt felt confident that he would receive justice from the Pope and at first this confidence seemed vindicated. When King Philip, en route for Poitiers, heard that the cardinals had refused to confirm the condemnation of the Templars, he rushed back to Paris and wrote to Clement V, threatening to charge the Pope with the same sins; but Clement V kept his nerve, replying that he would rather die than condemn innocent men; and in February 1308, he ordered the Inquisition to suspend its proceedings against the Templars.

However, while the law may have given the Pope control over the fate of the Templars, they were held in the prisons of Philip the Fair. Oliver of Penne, the Preceptor of Lombardy, was the only Templar of any standing whom Pope Clement held in Poitiers under house arrest but he absconded on the night of 13 February: a reward of 10,000 florins was put on his head. Moreover, the extensive properties of the Temple were also in the hands of royal officials and the Pope had no battalions at his command. Poitiers was nearer to Paris than Anagni, and the de jure powers of the Pope were paltry compared to the de facto powers of the King.

All the same, King Philip had to be mindful of public opinion and once Pope Clement had failed to respond to his initial threats, the King’s propagandists went to work to stigmatise anyone who might appear to support the Templars. Anonymous pamphlets were printed attacking the Pope, purporting to express the outraged feelings of the people of France. One, probably written by the Norman lawyer Pierre Dubois, said that Pope Clement’s nepotism had proved beyond doubt that he was corrupt and therefore incapable of dispensing justice. Only bribery could explain why he had not condemned the Templars after so many had confessed their guilt.

The two great corporations of the kingdom were enlisted to support and disseminate this royal propaganda – the University of Paris and the Estates General. In late February, 1308, King Philip IV asked the doctors of theology in Paris how he should proceed in the case of the Templars. Would he be justified in putting them on trial without reference to the Pope? And should they be found guilty, what should be done with their property? Their response was not what he wanted: while praising the King for his Catholic zeal, they confirmed that the Temple came under the papal jurisdiction, and reminded him that the King’s rights did not supersede, or justify the usurpation of, the rights of others. Nor could the King take action against heretics except at the request of the Church.

Frustrated by the theologians, King Philip summoned the Estates General, representing the nobility, the clergy and the burghers – to meet at Tours three weeks after Easter to support their king in his struggle against the heretical Templars. Royal officials were told to make sure that every town with a market sent a representative, while the King’s vassals and the higher clergy were invited by a personal letter from their sovereign. No record survives of the proceedings, but almost certainly the assembly at Tours was harangued by royal ministers such as William of Nogaret on the iniquities of the Temple and Clement V’s predecessor, Boniface VIII.

While their colleagues returned home to spread the word about the Templars, a number of the delegates to the Estates General remained to accompany King Philip to Poitiers. There, in the company of a powerful, even intimidating, entourage that included Philip’s brother, Charles of Valois, his sons and the grandees from the Estates General, the King prostrated himself before Pope Clement who in turn raised him with every outward sign of respect and affection. On 29 May, at a public consistory held before a large assembly of cardinals, bishops, nobles and burghers, the King’s minister, William of Plaisans, laid out the case against the Templars. They were not only guilty of heresy and sorcery but were responsible for the loss of the Holy Land. It was only thanks to the religious zeal of King Philip and the people of France that they had been exposed. They had done the Pope’s work for him and, if he did not immediately acknowledge that the Templars were guilty, the people of France, as ‘the most zealous champions of the Christian faith’, would themselves exercise the judgement of God.

Pope Clement was not to be brow-beaten into precipitate action. Although William of Plaisans had specifically denied that King Philip had his eye on the Templars’ property, the Pope said that he would not pass judgement until both the property and the persons of the Temple were in his hands. On the face of it, the positions were irreconcilable but it seems likely that a compromise was reached behind the scenes.

Going some way towards meeting the Pope’s demands, King Philip sent seventy-two Templars to repeat their confessions before Clement at Poitiers. Although this was no doubt presented as an acknowledgement by the King of France of the Pope’s jurisdiction, it could equally well have been a measure to give Clement the appearance of hearing both sides of the case. Inevitably, the seventy-two Templars had been carefully chosen, and the first to give evidence before the Papal Curia was the priest, John of Folliaco, who claimed to have alerted the authorities to the Temple’s corruption prior to the time of the arrests. So too had Stephen of Troyes, a Templar sergeant, who gave a vivid description of the head that was brought in at the Temple’s chapter by a priest ‘preceded by two brothers with two large wax candles upon a silver candelabra’.338 He also maintained that he had been beaten up for rejecting the homosexual advances of a Templar brother, and that when he had complained of this to Hugh of Pairaud, he was told that he should not have refused. A Templar sergeant, John of Châlons, claimed that Gérard of Villiers, the Preceptor in France, had placed recalcitrant Templars in a pit in which nine of the brothers had died. He also said that the Preceptor had been warned that he would be arrested and so had fled with fifty horses and escaped on eighteen galleys with the treasure of Hugh of Pairaud.

Forty of the extant depositions admit to one or another of the charges made at the time of the original arrests. Descriptions of the idol were inconsistent, one saying it was ‘a foul and black idol’, another that it ‘seemed white, with a beard’ while two insisted that it had three faces. An analysis of the depositions shows that sixty per cent were made by Templars who were either apostates from the Order or had been coerced through torture. None was a high official: the Pope was told that these were all too ill to come to Poitiers but were held at his disposal in prison at Chinon. However, the selection served the purpose of both the Pope and the King. Without loss of face, Clement was now able to authorise the Inquisition to proceed with its investigations, and in return King Philip officially remitted the Order’s property to special curators, and acknowledged that he only held the Templars ‘at the request of the Church’.

In a number of bulls issued from Poitiers in July and August 1308, in particular Faciens misericordiam, Pope Clement V endorsed King Philip’s version of events, and accepted that he had acted ‘not from avarice’ but ‘with the fervour of the orthodox faith, following the clear footsteps of his ancestors’. Clement authorised each bishop in his diocese to appoint provincial councils to try the miscreant Templars under their jurisdiction. These were to be composed of two Dominicans, two Franciscans and two canons of the cathedral. The Order as a whole was to be investigated by eight papal commissioners, and three cardinals were dispatched to Chinon to interview its leaders. Finally, Clement summoned a general Council of the Church to meet in Vienne in 1310 to discuss the Templars, the crusade and Church reform.

What brought about this apparent change in Clement’s attitude towards the Templars? It is possible, but unlikely, that he had been persuaded by the confessions of those Templars brought to Poitiers: he knew both the Templars and King Philip’s methods too well. It seems more probable that Clement decided that the Templars must be sacrificed for the sake of the Church. The phrase used in his encyclical about King Philip ‘following in the footsteps of his ancestors’ is revealing. Not only in his own mind, but in the mind of his subjects, Philip had inherited the prestige and the authority of his grandfather, Saint Louis, and so, unlike the Emperor Frederick II in his titanic struggle with the Papacy, could threaten to usurp not just the pontiff’s temporal power but his spiritual power as well. Despite the judgement of the Parisian divines that heresy was a matter for the Church and the Church alone, the royal propaganda against the Templars indicted as equally culpable the fautores, those who aided and abetted their iniquity, if only through neglect.

The Capetian propagandists also played on public anxieties by associating the Templars with the other marginalised groups in European society – lepers, Jews and Muslims: it was at this moment that King Philip’s cousin, King Charles II, who ruled southern Italy from Naples, chose to evict from his domain the Muslim community that the Emperor Frederick II had settled at Lucera. The success of this propaganda can be gauged by a letter sent by the Court of Foix to King James II of Aragon, asking if it was true that the Templars had converted to Islam and planned to form an alliance with the Jews and the Muslims of Granada. It was also said that some fugitive Templars had sought asylum with the Saracens, and indeed, as with all successful propaganda, it contained a germ of truth: in September 1313, the former Preceptor of Corberis, Bernard of Fontibus, was sent as ambassador by the Sultan of Tunis to the court of King James II in Barcelona.

Even more effective was the association of these marginalised groups with the forces of darkness. The charges of sorcery and devil-worship had a potent effect on the medieval mind. Images of demons were ever-present in the carvings and frescoes of cathedrals and churches: and it was not only uneducated peasants who lived in fear of their powers. James Duèze, a fellow Gascon who received a cardinal’s hat from Clement V and was to succeed him as Pope John XXII, though the son of a rich merchant from Cahors and a graduate in law from Montpellier University, was terrified of being killed through sorcery and, when pope, ordered his inquisitors to expose those who had made ‘a pact with hell’. He was ‘convinced that there were persons, masquerading as Christians, who were joined to the devil by a secret alliance’.339

Could the Pope himself have been suborned by Satan? The idea was not too far-fetched for those like William of Nogaret and William of Plaisans who had the ear of King Philip the Fair: indeed, it seemed to be the only plausible way to explain the actions of those who thwarted the ‘most Christian’ King. Had not the servants of the Bishop of Béziers, who had called Philip as silent and stupid as an owl, admitted under torture that he communed with evil spirits? And, most significant of all, had not Philip’s arch-enemy, Pope Boniface VIII, been a heretic, a sodomite and in league with the Devil?

The spiritual standing of the late Pope was of more than academic interest because, besides pressing for the condemnation of the Templars, King Philip IV was also insisting upon a posthumous trial of Pope Boniface VIII on a charge of heresy. There was a provision in canon law for such a process, and precedents such as the exhumation and trial of Pope Formosus in 897. To Philip, a conviction would justify ex post facto the outrage at Anagni, nullify the excommunication of William of Nogaret, and establish the King’s right not just to judge, ‘but also to seize and punish a heretical pope’.340

As part of his campaign of vilification against the dead pontiff, Philip the Fair was also pressing for the canonisation of Pietro del Morrone, the hermit Pope, Celestine V, who according to the French deposition had been forced to abdicate, subsequently imprisoned and finally murdered by his successor, Boniface VIII. To pronounce infallibly that Celestine was in Heaven would, in Philip’s thinking, prove that Boniface was in Hell; and the case for Celestine was enhanced by reputed miracles and widespread popular devotion.

Under intense pressure from the powerful French monarch who regarded himself as answerable only to God, and wholly vulnerable to the forces of coercion at his command, Clement V resorted to his favoured tactic of procrastination, and at the same time edged away from King Philip’s sphere of control. The political chaos in Italy made it impossible for him to return to the Papal States; but the Papacy had acquired an enclave on the edge of Provence, the country of Venaissin, and, suitably placed on the River Rhône, the city of Avignon. In August 1308, Pope Clement announced that the Papal Curia would leave Poitiers and establish itself at Avignon. It was considered a temporary measure, but the popes were to remain there for the next seventy years.

The move to Avignon, which was not completed until March 1309, did not relieve the pressure on the Pope from Philip the Fair. Already, before leaving Poitiers, Clement had agreed to a posthumous trial of Boniface VIII. He did so reluctantly, and with considerable anguish, because he understood how damaging to the authority of the Papacy it would be if Pope Boniface VIII should be condemned as a heretic. News of the trial scandalised opinion outside France, and confirmed the impression that Clement V was a pawn in the hands of Philip IV. King James II of Aragon wrote to the Pope to express his disquiet.

However, when the trial eventually opened Clement himself defended the record of Boniface VIII before the advocates of the French King, recalling his piety, his service to the Church and the many manifestations of his orthodox faith. After this, he allowed the trial to continue but, thanks to his knowledge of Roman law, was able to spin things out, either by calling for written depositions or, in December 1310, by suspending the proceedings on the grounds that he was suffering from one of the recurring bouts of his illness.

Negotiations continued out of court during his recuperation, resulting in a compromise: the Pope recognised that King Philip and his servants had acted in good faith at Anagni, intending simply to deliver a summons for Pope Boniface VIII to attend a General Council. Any violence against the person of the Pope had been the result of a personal vendetta pursued by his enemies in the Papal States. Philip was praised as ‘a fighter for the faith’ and ‘defender of the Church’, and Clement V withdrew any papal bulls detrimental to Philip or the Kingdom of France. William of Nogaret was absolved in return for a commitment to go on crusade, and to visit a number of shrines in France and Spain. In return for these concessions, King Philip IV declared his full submission to any decision that Pope Clement V should make on the question of the orthodoxy of Pope Boniface VIII.

This compromise had a bad press outside France. Dante Alighieri thought it a further instance of the prostitution of the Papal Curia to King Philip IV. The ambassador of Aragon to the Curia wrote to his sovereign that Philip was now ‘king, and pope, and emperor!’ There was a widespread belief that William of Nogaret’s absolution had cost Philip 100,000 florins. However, to a modern historian this criticism of Clement’s policy during the trial of Boniface ‘is not supported in historical research’ but rather makes it clear ‘that Clement won an irrefutable victory. The only compromise he was forced to make involved his generous praise of Philip’s behaviour – but this was a theoretical concession that the Pope often found very easy to make.’341 The same was true in the case of the hermit Pope, whom Clement V canonised in 1313, not under his papal name, Celestine, but as Saint Pietro del Morrone; and not as a martyr as King Philip had wanted, but as a confessor.

In this way, with the weapons of patience and procrastination, Pope Clement V preserved the authority and autonomy of the Church. Unlike his great predecessors such as Pope Gregory VII and Innocent III, who had fought titanic battles against the German emperors, Clement had found himself virtually powerless in a petty wrangle with a fanatic and vengeful king. On the question of Pope Boniface VIII and his predecessor, Celestine V, he had fought a successful rearguard action, compromising only on inessentials. But was the Temple an inessential? Pope Clement seemed unable to decide.

*   *   *

When Pope Clement V left Poitiers in August 1308, King Philip IV certainly assumed that the means were in place to settle the fate of the Order in a relatively short space of time. The Templars remained in the hands of the royal gaolers, and further confessions by the imprisoned members of the military Order could be expected now that he had authorised the Inquisition to proceed with its interrogation. The Templar leaders interviewed by the four cardinals at Chinon had all retracted their retractions and confirmed their crimes. None of them owned up to all the charges, but the combined confessions covered them all. All repented of what they had done and asked to be received back into the Church.

The presence at Chinon of William of Nogaret and William of Plaisans may well have had a bearing on what the veteran Templars chose to say. There was every incentive for the accused to admit the charges because if he continued to protest his innocence he risked further torture and life imprisonment. If he escaped, he had nowhere to hide: Clement had again written to all the kings of Christendom asking them to detain all fugitive Templars in the lands they controlled and hand them over to the episcopal commissions. Many of the bishops, particularly those in northern France, were Philip’s appointees; moreover, the Pope had warned all the clergy that helping the Templars would make them guilty of heresy by association.

King Philip could also feel confident of the outcome of the papal commission of enquiry into the Order. He himself had sent a list of suitable candidates to Pope Clement V and among the eight members were a number of supporters of the King. The president of the commission was Gilles Aicelin, Archbishop of Narbonne, who had spoken against the Templars in Poitiers in 1308. The bishops of Mende and Bayeux were also the King’s men, the latter often employed by Philip on royal business. Four of the commissioners were not French but one, the Archdeacon of Trent, had worked with one of the Colonna cardinals and another, the Prévost of Aix, had been employed as a diplomat by King Philip’s cousin, King Charles II of Naples.

However, the complex procedures which had been laid down by Pope Clement V, and the difficulty of bringing eight such eminent churchmen together, meant that the commission only held its first session a year after it had been formed. On 8 August 1309, at the monastery of Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, it issued a summons to all who would like to give evidence to appear before it in November; and the commission finally convened, after last-minute delays, on 22 November in the episcopal hall of the Bishop of Paris.

Among the first witnesses was Hugh of Pairaud, the Templar Visitor in France, who said nothing in defence of the Order. When James of Molay gave evidence on 26 November, he said that he would like to defend the Order because it was inconceivable that the Church should now want to destroy it, but he doubted his ability to do so without help. However, he would ‘regard himself as vile and miserable and would be so regarded by others if he did not defend the Order, from which he had received so many advantages and honours’.

It was not just that James of Molay was illiterate, as he had attested at the time of his arrest; it was that the Temple under his rule had failed to adapt to the increasing legalism of the period. Other corporate bodies such as the Hospitallers and the monastic orders engaged the services of legal counsel but the Knights Templar ‘seem to have made little effort either to recruit lawyers or to raise up legal experts from within their own ranks’ despite the vigilance with which they had protected their rights and immunities.342 Emotional, confused, a Don Quixote in his own eyes as well as in the perception of others, James of Molay no doubt regretted the omission. When an account of his confession before the cardinals in Chinon was read out to him, he became agitated, crossed himself twice and issued what the commission took to be a challenge to trial by combat to ‘certain persons’ – presumably the cardinals who had taken his deposition. Rebuked by the commission, James said that he had not intended such a challenge, but that if it should please God they should follow the practice of the Tartars and Saracens who ‘cut off the heads of such evil-doers … or split them down the middle’.343

The commissioners were unimpressed by this belligerent bluster but agreed to a recess to enable him to prepare the defence of his Order. King Philip’s minister, William of Plaisans, who was present at the sitting, and to whom, ironically, James of Molay had appealed for help, was disconcerted by the spectacle of this loose cannon: after two years of torture and imprisonment, the Grand Master seemed confused about what he had confessed, what he had revoked, and whether or not he was expected to defend the Order. William warned him to take care not to ‘perish by a noose of his own making’.

When James of Molay came back before the commission on Friday 28 November he repeated that he felt unable to mount a defence of his Order because ‘he was a knight, unlettered and poor’, and that because he had read in one of the apostolic letters that Pope Clement had reserved judgement in his case to himself, he had decided to remain silent until he was brought before the Pope. To the commission, he would say only three things: first, that the liturgy in the Templar churches was more beautiful than in any churches other than cathedrals; second, that the Order had been lavish in its charitable donations; and third, that no Order ‘had shed its blood so readily in defence of the Christian faith’ or was more highly esteemed by the Saracen enemy. Had not the Count of Artois placed the Templars in the advance guard of Saint Louis’s army on the Nile? And would he not have lived if he had listened to the advice of the Grand Master?

When the commissioners drily replied that all this was worthless if faith was absent, James of Molay agreed but insisted that he did believe ‘in one God and in a Trinity of Persons and in other things appertaining to the Catholic faith … and when the soul was separated from the body, then it would be apparent who was good and who was bad and each of us would know the truth of these things which were being done at present’.

On 28 November, the commission suspended its first sitting and did not reconvene until 3 February 1310. In the interim, the defeatism that had overwhelmed most of the Templars after their first arrest had been replaced by a spirit of resolve. At the first session, the Preceptor of Payns, Ponsard of Gizy, had told the commission that all the charges made against the Order were false; that the confessions had been made ‘on account of danger and fear’; and, after describing how he had been tortured, he said that if threatened with similar torments, he would admit to anything that was put to him. Between 7 and 27 February, 532 Templars from throughout France followed his example.

On 14 March, a full list of the 127 charges made against the Order was drawn up and read out before ninety of the Templars who had volunteered to defend the Order. By the end of the month, the figure had risen to 597 Templars, among them a priest, John Robert, who said that he had heard innumerable Templar confessions, none of which mentioned any of the sins imputed to the Order. Faced with such a large number, the commission asked the accused to select a manageable number as procurators and in due course two priests were chosen, Reginald of Provins, Preceptor of Orléans, and Peter of Bologna, Procurator of the Temple at the Papal Curia in Rome. Peter of Bologna was an ordained priest, aged forty-four, and had been a member of the Temple for twenty-five years. He was presumably a Lombard and had been received at Bologna where he may have studied law under the Preceptor of Lombardy, William of Noris. His appointment as the Temple’s Procurator at the Papal Curia suggests an intellectual aptitude rarely found in the military Order. After his arrest in November 1307, he had confessed to denying Christ and spitting on the Cross. He had denied sodomy but admitted that it had been allowed.

Reginald of Provins was also a priest, about eight years younger than Peter of Bologna. The fact that he had thought of joining the Dominicans rather than the Templars also suggests an advanced education, and the manner in which he had avoided an overt confession when first interrogated demonstrates a nimble mind. He had been received into the Order at Brie fifteen years before.

The first submission of these two Templar priests was a protest at the conditions in which they were being held – denial of the sacraments, the confiscation of their property and religious habits, the poor food and iron fetters, and the way that those who had died in prison had been refused burial in consecrated ground. Later, when interviewed by the commission’s notaries in the Paris Temple where he was incarcerated, Peter of Bologna denounced the charges as ‘shameful, most wicked and unreasonable and detestable things … fabricated, invented and made from new, by witnesses and rivals and lying enemies’. He insisted ‘that the Order of the Temple was clean and immaculate, and always was, from all the articles, vices and sins’. Any confessions were clearly false, made either as a consequence of torture or to avoid it.

On Wednesday 1 April, Peter of Bologna and Reginald of Provins, together with two knights with a record of service in Outremer, William of Chambonnet, Preceptor of Blaudeix in the Auvergne, and Bertrand of Sartiges, Preceptor of Carlat in Rouergue, appeared before the papal commission: both knights had served in the Holy Land and neither had confessed to any of the charges when first questioned by the Bishop of Clermont.

At once Reginald of Provins put the commission itself on the defensive, first by insisting that only the Grand Master and chapter of the Order were authorised to appoint procurators for the defence of the Temple; second, that the initial procedures against the Order on charges of heresy had been irregular and therefore of doubtful legality. Clearly, it was a prerequisite of a proper defence that those accused be granted money to hire advocates and placed in the custody of the Church, not the King. For the first time since the Templars’ arrest in October 1307, they were mounting a cogent defence.

Even after almost seven hundred years, the words of Peter of Bologna suggest not just a skilful advocate but a timeless apologist for the rights of the accused. The initial proceedings against the Templars, he told the commission, had been pursued ‘with a destructive fury’, the brothers ‘led like sheep to the slaughter’ and driven ‘by diverse and various kinds of tortures, from which many had died, many were for ever disabled, and many at that time driven to lie against themselves and the Order’. Torture, he argued, removed any ‘freedom of mind, which is what every good man ought to have’. It deprived him of ‘knowledge, memory and understanding’ and therefore anything said under torture should be discounted. He also disclosed that Templar brothers had been shown letters with the seal of King Philip that had promised that they would not only be spared torture but that ‘good provision and great revenues would be given annually during their lifetime, always saying first to them that the Order of the Temple was altogether condemned’.344

Thus, all the evidence against the Order was tainted and, moreover, defied common sense. Was it credible that so many a noble, distinguished and powerful man was ‘so foolish and mad’ that ‘to the loss of his soul, [he] would enter and persevere in the Order’? Surely knights of this calibre, if they had discovered such iniquities in the Temple, in particular the blasphemies against Jesus Christ, ‘would all have shouted out, and have divulged all these matters to the whole world’?

This robust defence of the Temple and the never-ending deliberations of the papal commission exasperated King Philip IV. The Church Council called to meet at Vienne in October 1310, finally to dissolve the Temple, had had to be postponed for a year because the commission had not submitted its report. The King therefore decided to expedite matters through the agency of Philip of Marigny, the Archbishop of Sens. The Archbishop had recently been promoted from the see of Cambrai thanks to the influence of his brother, Enguerrand of Marigny, who was in the process of displacing William of Nogaret as the principal minister of the King. It was at Enguerrand’s request that King Philip had obtained Philip’s appointment to the see of Sens from the Pope; he was therefore in debt to both the King and his brother and in the spring of 1311 was in a position to repay it.

By reason of ecclesiastical demarcations dating back to the days of the Roman Empire, the diocese of Paris lay in the province of Sens. It was therefore the Archbishop of Sens who had the power to judge the cases of the individual Templars within his jurisdiction. On Sunday 10 May, when the papal commission was in recess, he convened a council in Paris to proceed against them. Peter of Bologna realised at once what was intended and immediately appealed to the commission to protect those Templars ‘who had brought themselves to the defence of the said Order’. He asked the commission to order the Archbishop of Sens not to proceed against them.

The president of the commission, Gilles Aicelin, Archbishop of Narbonne, at once removed himself from considering this petition on the grounds that ‘he had to celebrate or hear Mass’. It was left to the remaining commissioners to decide that, while they felt considerable sympathy for the Templar petitioners, the proceedings of the papal commission and council appointed by the Archbishop of Sens were ‘completely different and mutually separate’. Since the Archbishop received his powers directly from the Holy See, it was not within the commission’s competence to interfere.

On Monday 11 May, the commission reconvened to take the testimony of any Templar who wished to defend the Order in the absence of its president, the Archbishop of Narbonne. In a break in the proceedings, it was announced that fifty-four Templars who had retracted their confessions to defend the Order were to be burned as relapsed heretics that very day. The commission immediately sent the Archdeacon of Orléans and one of the Templars’ gaolers, Philip of Voet, to ask the Archbishop to postpone the execution: Voet had told them how many Templars who had died in prison had sworn, on the brink of eternity, that the charges against the Order were false.

Their intervention was ignored. The fifty-four Templars were herded on to carts and taken to a field by the convent of Saint-Antoine outside the city. There they were burned to death. All of them, without exception, denied ‘the crimes imputed to them, but constantly persisted in the general denial, saying always that they were being put to death without cause and unjustly: which indeed many of the people were able to observe by no means without great admiration and immense surprise’.345 Those who had never admitted to the alleged crimes could not be judged to be relapsed heretics and so were sentenced to lifelong imprisonment. Only those who confirmed their confession and repented were absolved of their sins and set free.

Four days later, four more Templars were handed over by the Archbishop of Sens to be burned as relapsed heretics, and the body of the former Treasurer of the Paris Temple, John of La Tour, was exhumed so that it too could be consumed in the conflagration. The effect of these actions was apparent in the witnesses now called before the commission: a Templar from the diocese of Langres, called Aimery of Villiers-le-Duc, insisted that all the errors ascribed to the Order were false but begged the commissioners not to reveal this to the King’s officers because he did not want to be burned. The commissioners were only provoked into a protest when one of the two procurators, Reginald of Provins, disappeared from prison.

The protest was effective: Reginald of Provins was returned together with the two knights, William of Chambonnet and Bertrand of Sartiges: but now it was Peter of Bologna who had gone missing and, despite the dispatch of three canons to fetch him, he was not found. After this, the proceedings of the commission limped on with many of its members absenting themselves with a variety of excuses. On 17 December, when William of Chambonnet and Bertrand of Sartiges said that they could not proceed with the defence of the Order without Reginald of Provins and Peter of Bologna because they were ‘illiterate laymen’, they were told that both Templar priests had renounced their defence of the Order and returned to their original confessions. Reginald of Provins had been dismissed from the priesthood by the Council of Sens, and Peter of Bologna had escaped from prison. More probably, he had been murdered by his gaolers: but, whatever the fate of the two Templar priests, the two knights felt unable to proceed without them and so ‘left the presence of the commissioners’.346