seventeen
The Temple Destroyed
Why, in the words of Peter of Bologna, did the members of the most formidable military force in the Western world go to their deaths ‘like sheep to the slaughter’? One of the reasons was undoubtedly the advanced age of most of the Templars living in France. Having served for a time in the East, many had returned to Europe to take up posts in the administration. The younger knights were sent to Cyprus: in 1307, over seventy per cent of the Templar force had been recruited since the start of the century.347 Here they were prepared for military action: they had fought the Saracens for Tortosa and were ready for a Mameluk invasion of the island.
Pope Clement V’s bull ordering the arrest of the Templars throughout Christendom, Pastoralis praeeminentiae, reached Cyprus in November 1307. The de facto ruler at the time was Amaury, the brother of King John, who had been backed by the Templars when he seized power in August 1306. The Pope’s orders put Amaury in an awkward position. He was in debt to the Templars and, like most others on Cyprus, he thought the charges against the Order almost certainly untrue; however, he was also unwilling to defy the Pope or make an enemy of King Philip of France. He therefore ordered his officers to proceed against the Templars under their Marshal, Ayme of Oselier, but they met with some resistance and fighting took place.
Eventually, the Templars surrendered and eighty-three knights and thirty-five sergeants were placed under house arrest on their estates. Their property was sequestered but Amaury’s officers failed to find the bulk of the Templars’ treasure. No trial took place until the following May when two judges appointed by Pope Clement arrived on the island. None of the accused admitted the charges. Depositions were taken from witnesses from outside the Order, among them sixteen knights and the Seneschal of the kingdom, Philip of Ibelin, and the King’s Marshal, Reginald of Soissons. Most had supported King Henry II against Amaury and so might have been expected to show an animus against the Templars, but all their evidence was in their favour. Philip of Ibelin, who was the first witness, thought it was only the secrecy surrounding Templar receptions that led to a suspicion of wrongdoing. Reginald of Soissons confirmed that the Templars did believe in the sacraments and had always conducted their religious ceremonies correctly.
A knight, James of Plany, was outspoken in his defence of the Templars, reminding the court that they had shed their blood for Christ and the Christian faith, and were as good and honest men as one could find in any religious order. Lord Perceval of Mar, a Genoese, described a group of Templars taken prisoner by the Saracens who had chosen to die rather than betray their faith. Lesser witnesses, though they mentioned the secrecy of the Templar receptions and the Order’s avarice, said nothing to implicate them in blasphemy or heresy. A priest, Laurence of Beirut, said that he had heard the confessions of sixty Templars and could say nothing against them. It was clear from further testimony that many Templars confessed to Dominicans, Franciscans and secular priests, and not necessarily to their own chaplains.
The only witness from among the Latins on Cyprus to give evidence against the Templars was Simon of Sarezariis, the Prior of the Hospital of Saint John, but he could produce no solid evidence, merely alluding to conversations he had had with unnamed persons in the past. With this one exception, the noble witnesses all gave evidence in favour of the Templars, despite being partisans of King Henry II.
This result was considered unacceptable by Pope Clement V who ordered a new trial under the Papal Legate in the East, Peter of Plaine-Cassagne, Bishop of Rodez. This took place after the murder of Amaury and the restoration of King Henry in the summer of 1310, and though the records are not extant, it would seem that the Pope’s political imperatives prevailed: the chronicles record that the Templar Marshal, Ayme of Oselier, and many of his fellow Templars died while incarcerated in the fortress of Kerynia.
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In Italy, proceedings against the Templars varied according to the political loyalties of the rulers involved. Charles II of Naples, cousin of King Philip the Fair, so far as is known from the few surviving depositions, secured the requisite confessions, thanks presumably to the use of torture. In the Papal States, torture also produced some confessions of denial of Christ, spitting on the Cross and the worship of idols; but on the whole a perambulatory inquisition conducted by the Bishop of Sutri produced paltry results. In Lombardy, many of the bishops supported the Templars and some were brave enough to say so. The bishops of Ravenna, Rimini and Fano failed to find evidence of guilt in the few Templars who were brought before them. In Florence, after the use of torture, six out of thirteen Templars confessed.
In Germany, Burchard, Archbishop of Magdeburg, moved quickly against the Templars, among them the German Preceptor, Frederick of Alvensleben. At Trier, a provincial Church Council summoned by the archbishop came up with no evidence against the Order. A similar council held at Mainz, presided over by the archbishop, Peter of Aspelt, was interrupted by a contingent of twenty armed Templar knights led by the Preceptor of Grumbach, Hugh of Salm. The cowed archbishop was obliged to listen to their complaint that the members of the Order had not been given a fair chance to defend themselves; and that those who had insisted upon their innocence had been burned. Hugh of Salm also claimed, as miraculous proof of their innocence, that the Templars’ while habits did not burn in the fire.
At a later hearing, Hugh of Salm’s brother, Frederick, the Preceptor of the Rhine, offered to prove the innocence of the Order through a trial by ordeal. He said that he had served in the East with James of Molay and knew him to be ‘a good Christian, as good as any could be’. Other witnesses attested to the charitable work of the Templars, among them a priest who said that during a famine the preceptory at Maistre had fed a thousand of the poor every day. At the end of the hearing, the archbishop ruled in favour of the Templars who had been brought before him, a decision that displeased the Pope.
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Outside France and Cyprus, the most significant Templar presence was in Spain, in particular in Aragon, where the Order had played a prominent role in the reconquest of lands held by the Moors. The enormous privileges and substantial endowments dating from the heroic days of the Reconquista had for some time now been eroded by the King. Indeed, though the Order still had considerable holdings in Aragon, it had been squeezed by the need to send funds to the Order in Syria and Palestine and by the demands made by the Aragonese kings. Though the Temple still acted as a bank, it was itself in debt.
In the middle of October 1307, King James II had received a letter from King Philip IV of France listing the iniquities of the Templars and advising him to seize their property and persons as Philip had done in France. The Aragonese monarch was incredulous. The Templars, he wrote back to Philip the Fair,
have lived indeed in a praiseworthy manner as religious men up till now in these parts according to common opinion, nor has any accusation of error in belief yet arisen in them here; on the contrary, during our reign they have faithfully given us very great service in whatever we have required of them, in repressing the enemies of the faith.
However, when the news reached Spain that James of Molay had confessed to the alleged crimes, King James II ordered the seizure of the Templars and their holdings in his kingdom. Some Templars refused to surrender their castles: in contrast to France, the Order in Aragon had a number of men under arms and time to prepare for such a defence. The fortress at Pensícola was taken, and the Templar Master in Aragon, Exemen of Lenda, arrested, but Ascó, Cantavieja, Villel, Castellote, Chalamera and Monzón remained in the hands of the Order while Ramón Sa Guardia, the Preceptor of Mas Deu in Roussillon, held out in the fortress of Miravet. From here he wrote to King James II, reminding him of the blood that had been shed by the Templars in the wars against the Moors, most recently against Granada. During a time of famine, twenty thousand had been fed by the Templars at Gardeny and six thousand at Monzón. When the French had invaded Aragon and threatened Barcelona, it had been the Templars who had stood firm. For all these reasons, the King should release the Master and other Templars who are all ‘loyal, Catholic and good Christians’.
However, by now the die was cast – not because King James had been persuaded that the Templars were guilty as charged, but because he wanted to make sure of their assets before they were expropriated by the Church: he even suggested a quid pro quo to Pope Clement whereby two of his nephews would be given land in Aragon if the Pope relinquished his rights to the Temple’s property in Spain.348 Perhaps aware that avarice was now the King’s prime motivation, Ramón Sa Guardia wrote to say how much he pitied him, ‘the King of France, and all Catholics in relation to the harm which arises from all this, more than ourselves who have to endure the evil’. He feared for the King’s soul if he had deluded himself that he was doing the work of God and not of the Devil. Like Peter of Bologna, he asked how, if the charges were true, so many members of the finest families should have joined the Order, some of them for as little as six years, and yet not have denounced the alleged abuses?
On 1 February 1308, King James decided to lay siege to those fortresses still in Templar hands. Unwilling or unable to mount a frontal assault, his tactic was to starve the garrisons into submission. Ramón Sa Guardia, who continued to communicate with the King, warned that they were prepared to die as martyrs unless King James guaranteed to protect them for as long as Pope Clement remained under the influence of the King of France. However, King James felt no need to compromise and by the end of November the Templars of Miravet had been starved into submission. Monzón held out until May 1309 and by the end of July, with the fall of Chalamera, the Order’s resistance had come to an end.
Proceedings against the Aragonese Templars now followed but, since torture was not allowed under Aragonese law, these elicited no confessions. The captives were kept in reasonable comfort on a decent diet. Ramón Sa Guardia was as outspoken before the Inquisitors as he had been in his letters to the King. He said that receptions into the Order had been wholly orthodox, as had been the Templars’ practice of the Catholic religion. The allegations of the denial of Christ were ‘horrible, exceedingly heinous and diabolical’ and ‘any brother committing a sin against nature’ (i.e. sodomy) was punished ‘by the loss of his habit and perpetual imprisonment … with great shackles on the feet and chains on the neck…’ The charges had arisen from ‘a malign and diabolical spirit’, and any who had confessed to them were liars.
In March 1311, the Pope ordered the Archbishop of Tarragona and the Bishop of Valencia to use torture to extract confessions but the methods that had proved so successful in France failed in Spain. Eight Templars tortured in Barcelona persisted with their protestations of innocence; a local Church Council in Tarragona, on 4 November 1312, found the Templars innocent ‘although they were put to the torture towards the confession of their crimes’.
As in Aragon, so in the kingdoms of Castile-Leon and Portugal. Templars were arrested and arraigned before episcopal commissions but none could find evidence to substantiate the charges. Throughout the Iberian peninsula, it was only in Navarre that the predominant French influence led to some success in extracting confessions from Templars to the alleged crimes.
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Like King James II of Aragon, King Edward II of England had received a letter from King Philip the Fair in mid-October, 1307, describing how he had uncovered the cesspit of corruption in the Temple and advising his son-in-law to proceed as he had done with the arrest of the miscreants and the expropriation of their assets. Like King James of Aragon, King Edward was at first incredulous. Though the Temple’s presence was not as considerable as it was in the Kingdom of France, with between 144 and 230 knights in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, it had nevertheless played an important role in the royal government since the first Grand Master, Hugh of Payns, had come to London in 1129. It had served as banker to the Angevin monarchs; it had been trusted with the fines paid by the murderers of Thomas à Becket, and acted as an intermediary in disputes between the kings of England and France, holding fortresses in Normandy that were the dowry of Princess Marguerite of France until her husband, the son and heir of King Henry II of England, came of age.
The trust placed in the order by King Richard the Lionheart has already been recorded; the Templar Grand Master, Robert of Sablé, had been both his vassal and trusted friend. The Temple in London was a safe depository for royal revenues; and the Order was a substantial presence in the commercial life of the kingdoms, exploiting the many privileges and exemptions granted by kings and popes. Though the Temple’s wealth had led to some envy, their annual income from landed property did not exceed 4,800 livres, not enough to inspire ‘strong feelings of jealousy’ or ‘a general dislike’.349 James of Molay had been warmly received by King Edward I when he visited England in 1294 and William of La More, the English Master, had been the old King’s trusted adviser. Edward II, who had only ascended the throne three months before, found the charges made against the Order implausible and wrote to the kings of France, Aragon, Castile, Portugal and Naples to say so. The Order had an honourable record of service in the Holy Land and ‘shines bright in religion’. He also wrote to Pope Clement insisting that the Templars had been ‘constant in the purity of the faith’ while those who made such vile accusations were criminals and liars.
This letter, dispatched on 10 December, crossed with the papal bull, Pastoralis praeeminentiae, ordering the arrest of all the Templars in Christendom, which King Edward received four days later. This left the young King with no choice and so on 26 December he ordered the detention of the English Templars in ‘the quickest and best way’. By this time the news of James of Molay’s confession had reached England, and Edward, like King James II of Aragon, may also have seen the advantages of taking control of the Templars’ assets before they fell into other hands.
However, suspicions remained of King Philip and his influence on Pope Clement; and the treatment accorded to the Templars hardly suggests that the charges were believed. The English Master, William of La More, who was arrested on 9 January, was imprisoned in Canterbury but two Templar brothers were permitted to go with him, and he was allowed furniture, clothes, bed-linen and his personal possessions as well as a per diem allowance of two shillings and sixpence. Many of the preceptors were allowed to stay in their preceptories until summoned to appear before the Inquisitors almost two years later.
At the time of their arrest, an inventory was made of the Templars’ possessions which gives a snapshot of their lifestyle and belies their critics’ charges that they were living well off the fat of the land. In Yorkshire, the inventories show that church vestments, livestock and agricultural implements were the only assets of any value. There were no arms, very little money, and the furniture was meagre and poor. Some stores of salted mutton, bacon, salt fish, herrings, stockfish, cheese and a little salt beef were found, but almost no wine.350
On 13 September 1309, the two Inquisitors appointed by the Pope arrived in England – Dieudonné, Abbot of Lagny, and Sicard of Vaur, a canon of Narbonne whose archbishop was Gilles Aicelin, the president of the papal commission examining the Order in Paris. This was the first appearance of Inquisitors in England: unlike France, where the Inquisition had been accepted and used as a tool of the monarchy, it had no standing in English law. Moreover, trials were normally held before jurors and torture was not allowed. As a result, the interrogation of the English Templars that took place between 20 October and 18 November before the two Inquisitors and the Bishop of London yielded no results. None admitted to any wrongdoing. Imbert Blanke, the Preceptor of Auvergne, who had fled to England at the time of the arrests in France, said that the secrecy surrounding Templar receptions had been ‘because of foolishness’ and nothing untoward had taken place.
Frustrated by their failure to elicit any confessions, the Inquisitors persuaded the provincial Council of Canterbury that met in London on 24 November to ask King Edward II for permission to use torture: the request was couched euphemistically as proceeding ‘according to ecclesiastical constitutions’. Permission was granted, but torture failed to produce the desired results. The only irregularity that emerged was the widespread assumption among the Templars that forgiveness for transgressions by the Master in Chapter amounted to sacramental absolution.
An additional frustration for the two Inquisitors, which they relayed in their report to the Pope, was King Edward’s reluctance to give any assurances about the transfer of the Templars’ property to the Church. He said that he could not act without consulting the earls and barons of the kingdom, a position that was not merely procrastination: for while the Pope could legitimately point out that the original endowments had been made for the Templars’ mission in the Holy Land, the King could equally well maintain that they had come from the English nobility who, if the Order was to be dissolved, were entitled to have them back. This position was vigorously supported by his barons.
Exasperated by the lack of results from England, Pope Clement V urged the archbishops of Canterbury and York to pursue the case against the Templars with greater zeal. Pressure came from other quarters: William of Greenfield, the Archbishop of York, had received a letter from King Philip IV urging his co-operation. The Church authorities did what they could, but as William of Greenfield told the provincial Council that he had convened in May of 1310, ‘torture had never been heard of within the realm of England’. The best he could come up with was hearsay evidence from witnesses outside the Order: John of Nassington had been told that the Templars at Temple Hirst had worshipped a calf. A knight, John of Ure, said that the Preceptor of Westerdale had shown his wife a book which stated that Christ had not been born of a virgin, but was the son of Joseph. The only evidence of sodomy came from a friar, Adam of Heton, who said that when he was a child, boys used to say: ‘Beware the kiss of the Templars’. Another friar knew of a woman who had found a Templar’s drawers in a latrine and saw that the sign of the Cross had been sewn into the seat.351
Pope Clement clearly suspected that the English were being dilatory in their enquiries, and wrote to King Edward offering him a plenary indulgence if he would transfer the Templars under his jurisdiction to France. He also put pressure on the English ecclesiastics by declaring in his bull Faciens misericordiam that the Templars’ guilt was established and that anyone who now tried to protect them was guilty by association with their sins. The provincial Council in York, feeling unable either to convict or acquit, authorised their archbishop to refer the whole matter to the Papal Court at the Council to be held at Vienne. In the meantime, they came up with a very English formula whereby each Templar should state in public as follows: ‘I acknowledge that I am gravely defamed by the articles contained in the Bull of our Lord the Pope, and inasmuch as I am not able to purge myself I submit to the Divine Grace and to the decision of the Council.’ Having made this statement outside York Minster, each was reconciled to the Church and sent to live in a number of monastic foundations – William of Grafton to Selby, Richard of Keswick to Kirkham, John of Walpole to Byland, Thomas of Stanford to Fountains, and Henry of Kirby to Rievaulx. The bad behaviour of Thomas of Stanford and Henry of Kirby led to complaints by the Cistercian abbots to the Archbishop of York.
Proceedings against the Templars in Scotland and Ireland were no more successful in meeting the expectations of Pope Clement and the King of France. The only worthwhile confessions were made in England by two fugitive Templars, Stephen of Stapelbrugge and Thomas of Thoroldeby, who were retaken in June 1311 and subsequently described blasphemies at the time of their reception. Both had probably been tortured. In July, a Templar priest called John of Stoke also confessed that a year after his reception he had been told by James of Molay to deny Christ. When all had expressed penitence, they were absolved and reconciled with the Church. So too were a further fifty-two Templars who accepted the formula arrived at by the Council of York. However, the two most prominent Templars in England, the Master, William of La More, and the Preceptor of the Auvergne, Imbert Blanke, continued to insist upon their innocence and that of their Order: William even denied using the words of absolution when forgiving errant Templars for their transgression of the Rule. He was sent to the Tower of London to await the Pope’s mercy and died there in February 1313. Imbert Blanke was sentenced to ‘be shut up in the most vile prison bound in double irons, and there be kept until it was otherwise ordained, and meanwhile to be visited for the purpose of seeing if he wished to confess to anything further’.352 He too died in prison.
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On Saturday 16 October 1311, after a year’s delay, an ecumenical Council of the Catholic Church assembled at Vienne. This city on the Rhône, only twenty kilometres or so south of Lyons, had been built among the ruins of its Roman past. The Roman amphitheatre on the slopes of Mount Pipet could seat more than 13,000 spectators and the Temple dedicated to the Emperor Augustus was now used as a church. It was to Vienne that the Emperor Augustus had exiled Archelaus, the son of King Herod; and here that the unlovely Blandina had died a martyr for Christ – ‘after the whips, after the beasts, after the griddle, she was finally dropped into a basket and thrown to a bull’. Another martyr of the time, a Roman officer called Maurice, had been executed upstream at Augaune in Switzerland for refusing to sacrifice to pagan gods. It was in the great cathedral on the banks of the Rhône, dedicated to this saint, that Pope Clement V welcomed the fathers from all over Christendom and opened the first session of the Council.
The turnout was disappointing. Pope Clement had summoned bishops and princes from throughout Christendom, including the four patriarchs of the Eastern Church, but of the 161 prelates invited more than a third had made their excuses, sending delegates in their stead. Those bishops who attended did so with little enthusiasm: the town was overcrowded, decent lodging consequently hard to find, and at that time of year, as the Bishop of Valencia complained to King James II of Aragon, ‘the land is cold beyond measure’.
No kings appeared for the first six months of its deliberations even though the recovery of the Holy Land, one of the three items on the Council’s agenda, was very much their concern. The second item, the reform of the Church, was there almost as a matter of course but the zeal for cleansing the Church of corruption that had animated earlier councils was hard to sustain with a pope who had appointed four of his relatives to the College of Cardinals and used every possible device to squeeze money out of the faithful. Cynicism was the prevailing sentiment among those who attended the Council: a French chronicler, Jean of Saint-Victor, wrote that ‘it was said by many that the council was created for the purpose of extracting money’.353
The third item on the Council’s agenda was the Order of the Temple. To Pope Clement, it was imperative that the Council should decide upon dissolution and to this end he had been gathering all the evidence from the enquiries in different countries, urging the use of torture where they did not elicit the requisite confessions from the accused. This had taken much longer than he had anticipated, and had been the reason for the postponement of the Council for a year. As late as the summer of 1311, many of the reports were not yet in. When they did arrive, and were studied by the Pope and his advisers in the Priory of Grazean, they were far from satisfactory. Only those from France contained credible confessions; those from outside France, in particular from England, Aragon and Cyprus, could only come up with hearsay evidence from non-Templars to give substance to the accusations.
In addition to preparing summaries of these reports to present to the Council, Pope Clement asked two of his cardinals to write opinions as to what should be done about the Temple: one was James Duèze, a fellow Gascon, now Bishop of Avignon, and the other William Le Maire, the Bishop of Angers. Both judged that the Order’s guilt was proven and that it should therefore be suppressed, not by a vote in the Council but by the Pope in his capacity as head of the Church – de plenitudine potestatis. They rejected the objections ‘that the Order ought to be given a defence, nor should so noble a member of the Church be cut off from its body without the rigour of justice and great discussion’; but such views were clearly prevalent outside the Papal Curia and the circles loyal to the King of France. King James II of Aragon was told by his representative at the Council that ‘on the basis of what we have heard from cardinals and clergymen, it is not possible to condemn the Order as a whole, since there is no evidence of guilt on the part of the Order’. The Cistercian abbot, James of Thérines, wondered whether men of noble birth who had risked their lives to defend the Holy Land could really be heretics, and he drew attention to many inconsistencies in the inquisitorial proceedings. Walter of Guisborough, an English cleric, wrote that ‘most of the prelates stood by the Templars, except for the prelates from France who, it would seem, did not dare to act otherwise for fear of the king, the source of all this scandal’.354
Clement was in a difficult position. He had formally invited the Templars to come to Vienne to defend the Order but clearly did not expect them to do so. However, late in October, to his astonishment, seven Templars presented themselves before the Council saying that they were there to defend the Order and that between 1,500 and 2,000 of their fellow Templars were in the vicinity ready to support them.
Pope Clement ordered that they be detained, and asked the Council to form a committee of fifty to decide whether or not the Templars should be allowed to defend the Order; if so, whether it was only those who had appeared before the Council or whether the Templars from all over Christendom should choose a proctor? And, if that proved too difficult, whether the Pope should nominate one to act for them? The conclusion of this commission was, by a large majority, that the Templars should be allowed to mount a defence. Only the French bishops close to King Philip, those of Rheims, Sens and Rouen, dissented.
This decision was all the more extraordinary in that conditions in Vienne were deteriorating, with a scarcity of food leading to high prices and the spread of disease to the deaths of a number of the Council fathers. The stubbornness of the commission in such circumstances exasperated Pope Clement V and enraged King Philip of France. To exert pressure on the Council, Philip resorted to the tactic he had used four years earlier by summoning the French Estates to meet in February – not at Tours but at Lyons, merely twenty kilometres up river.
The Pope, still dreading that Philip might return to the attack against Pope Boniface VIII, and desperate to get a new crusade under way, was in constant correspondence with the King and on 17 February received a secret and high-powered delegation consisting of Philip’s son, Louis of Navarre, the counts of Boulogne and Saint-Pol, and his principal ministers – Enguerrand of Marigny, William of Plaisans and William of Nogaret. Together with the inner circle of curial cardinals, they conferred with the Pope on how to proceed.
Pressure was applied for a quick resolution from another source: King James II of Aragon was emphatic that the Order of the Temple must be dissolved and its properties in his kingdom be made over to the Spanish Order of Calatrava. The disposal of the Temple’s wealth seems to have been a sticking point in the negotiations between the Pope and the French King: Philip, still holding out for the same kind of deal as King James II, wrote to the Pope from Mâcon, merely sixty miles north on the River Saône, ‘burning with zeal for the orthodox faith and in case so great an injury done to Christ should remain unpunished, we affectionately, devotedly and humbly ask Your Holiness that you should suppress the aforesaid Order and wish to create anew another Military Order, on which be conferred the goods of the above-mentioned Order with its rights, honours and responsibilities’.
Knowing that King Philip had one of his own sons in mind as Grand Master for such a new order, Pope Clement remained surprisingly firm on the question, insisting that if the Temple was to be dissolved, its possessions should pass to the Hospital. To have done with the whole matter, King Philip decided to compromise, promising to accept whatever the Pope decided, reserving only ‘whatever rights remain to us, the prelates, barons, nobles and various others in our kingdom’.
Still Pope Clement dithered but on 20 March his mind was made up for him by the arrival in Vienne of King Philip himself, accompanied by his two brothers, three sons and a strong force of armed men. Two days later, Clement held a secret consistory in which his special commission on the Order of the Temple was asked to revise its ruling. Seeing that the game was up, and possibly bribed or brow-beaten by the French, a majority of the prelates voted for the Order’s suppression – a decision, in the opinion of one of the few dissenters, the Bishop of Valencia, ‘against reason and justice’.
On 3 April, the Council fathers assembled in the cathedral of Saint-Maurice to listen to a homily preached by Pope Clement on Psalm 1, verse 5: ‘The wicked will not stand firm when Judgement comes, nor sinners when the virtuous assemble.’ The supreme pontiff sat enthroned with, on one side on a slightly lower pedestal, King Philip of France, and on the other King Philip’s son, the King of Navarre. After the homily, and before the proceedings commenced, the convenor of the session announced that, under pain of excommunication, no one was permitted to speak at this session except with the permission of, or at the request of, the Pope.
Pope Clement now read out the bull, Vox in excelso, abolishing the Order of the Temple. The bull was carefully worded to avoid an outright condemnation of the Order as such: it was suppressed ‘not by way of a judicial sentence, but by way of provision or apostolic ordinance’ because of the ‘infamy, suspicion, noisy insinuation and other things above which have been brought against the Order’. It mentioned certain incontestable facts – ‘the secret and clandestine reception of the brothers of this order, and the difference of many of these brothers from the general custom, life and habits of others of Christ’s faithful’; but also accepted as established the ‘many horrible things’ that had been done ‘by very many brothers of this Order … who have lapsed into the sin of wicked apostasy against the Lord Jesus Christ himself, the crime of detestable idolatry, the execrable outrage of the Sodomites…’
The text was self-justificatory, reminding the faithful that ‘the Roman Church had sometimes caused other illustrious Orders to be suppressed from causes incomparably less than those mentioned above, even without blame being attached to the brothers’. It was even apologetic: the Pope’s decision had been reached ‘not without bitterness and sadness of heart’. However, the Council fathers were not asked to agree or disagree with the Pope’s ruling: the Order of the Temple was abolished
by an irrevocable and perpetually valid decree, and we subject it to perpetual prohibition with the approval of the Holy council, strictly forbidding anyone to presume to enter the said Order in the future, or to receive or wear its habit, or to act as a Templar. Which if anyone acts against this, he will incur the sentence of excommunication ipso facto.
By a subsequent bull, Ad providam, published on 2 May, the Templars’ property was transferred to the Hospitallers, ‘who are ever placing their lives in jeopardy beyond the seas’. An exception was made of the Templars’ holdings in Aragon, Castile, Portugal and Mallorca whose disposal was to be decided at a later date.
In the event, the three kings principally concerned – Edward II of England, James II of Aragon, and above all Philip IV of France – though they publicly agreed to the Pope’s plans for the Temple’s riches, all ensured that a proportion remained in their hands or the hands of their vassals. Edward II had already farmed out some of the Templar’s properties and warned the Hospital not to take advantage of Ad providam to ‘usurp’ Templar holdings. Litigation by the Hospital and papal legates continued until 1336. The London Temple was eventually given over to the use of lawyers: the Temple church remains standing to this day.
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In Aragon, King James insisted that the security of his kingdom depended upon royal possession of the Templar holdings: the Templars’ resistance to arrest in 1308 had demonstrated the dangers of an armed force that did not owe its first loyalty to the King. Here again, it was only after several years of negotiation that a settlement was reached. A new military order was created based on Montesa in Valencia which was to be subject to the Master of Calatrava in conjunction with the Cistercian Abbot of Stas. In the rest of Aragon, Templar properties were to go to the Hospital but, before taking office, the Hospitaller Castellan of Amposta was to do homage to the King. The Templars themselves who were reconciled with the Church continued to live in the Order’s preceptories, or went to other convents and monasteries, where they lived on pensions paid out of the Temple’s resources. The dissolution of the Order did not mean that they were dispensed from their vows.
As in Yorkshire, however, the former Templars in Aragon found it difficult to switch from a military to a monastic routine. Some absconded from the monasteries, abandoned their habit and returned to the secular world. Whether disillusioned by what had occurred, or simply liberated from the strict discipline of the Order, some ex-Templars turned mercenary and took wives. In some instances it was suggested that the pensions paid were too large, enabling them to lead indolent lives. One former Templar, Berenguer of Bellvís, kept a mistress; another was charged with rape but, significantly, no charges of sodomy are extant.
Complaints against former Templars led Pope Clement V’s successor, Pope John XXII, to make repeated attempts to persuade former Templars to return to the religious life. In a letter to the Archbishop of Tarragona, the Pope asked him to ensure that they ‘did not involve themselves in wars or secular business’ or wear luxurious clothes. Care should be taken that there should never be more than two former Templars in any one monastery and, if they should refuse to return to the enclosed life, then they should be deprived of their pension. There were some cases where this sanction was put into effect, but overall ‘the survivors were not beset by financial hardship, even if some were leading a frustrating existence; and as their numbers dwindled probably the Church’s concern over them grew less and they were left to end their days with little interference’.355
In Portugal, King Diniz was permitted to found a new military order, the Order of Christ, and endow it with the Templar possessions: the magnificent headquarters at Tomar with its rotunda remains standing today. King Sancho of Mallorca reached a compromise with the Curia, transferring Templar property to the Hospital in exchange for an annual rent. In Castile, some of the Templar holdings were seized by the King, others by barons, and some by the military orders of Ucles and Calatrava: the King’s failure to ensure the transfer to the Hospital provoked a protest from the Papacy as late as 1366. A similar pattern is seen in Italy, Germany and Bohemia where local rulers seized a proportion of the Templar holdings, leaving to the Hospital what remained. In Hildesheim the Templars resisted and were ejected by force. The Dominican Order of Preachers, which ran the Inquisition, was given the Templar houses in Vienna, Strasbourg, Esslingen and Worms. In the Kingdom of Naples and Provence it was five years before King Charles disgorged the Templars’ property. Only in Cyprus was the transfer swift and unproblematic, no doubt because of its position on the front line.
In France King Philip IV had been persuaded by his brother, Charles of Valois, and his chief minister, Enguerrand of Marigny, that capitulating to Pope Clement on the question of the Temple’s property was a price worth paying to secure the definitive dissolution of the Order. However, the King fought a rearguard action, writing to the Pope that he agreed to the transfer to the Hospital on condition that the Pope re-formed the Order, and it would be made only ‘after the deduction of necessary expenses for the custody and administration of these goods’. Like his son-in-law, King Edward II, he also reserved the rights ‘of the king, the prelates, barons, nobles, and all other persons of the kingdom who had a share in the aforesaid property’. In the event, the Hospital had to pay for its rights: 200,000 livres tournois were transferred to the royal treasury in Paris by the Prior of the Hospital in Venice, supposedly to indemnify the Crown for the loss of treasure that had been deposited with the Temple in Paris. Even after this sweetener, a complete transfer did not take place; a further 60,000 livres tournois were advanced by the Hospitaller Prior in Venice in 1316 to cover the Crown’s expenses in bringing the Templars to trial; and in 1318 another 50,000 in final settlement, leaving the Hospital, in the short term, worse off than before.
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This was not the only profit to accrue to the King of France as a result of the Council of Vienne. On 3 April 1312, less than two weeks after he had dissolved the Order of the Temple, Pope Clement V consummated the ambition that had been the objective of his tortuous policies since his pontificate began. Preaching before the assembled prelates of Christendom in the cathedral of Saint-Maurice, and taking as his text a verse from the Book of Proverbs, ‘the desire of the righteous shall be granted’, the Supreme Pontiff proclaimed a new crusade. It was not to be a passagium particulare as most had counselled, but the passagium generale whose sole proponent had been the former Grand Master of the Temple, James of Molay, now languishing in chains. It was to be led by King Philip of France but paid for by the Church through a ten-per-cent tax on all ecclesiastical income over the next six years.
In the following year, at a ceremony of great solemnity held in Paris, King Philip the Fair took the Cross. He received it from the hands of the Papal Nuncio, Cardinal Nicholas of Fréauville, and was followed by his three sons, his son-in-law, King Edward II of England, and many of the nobility of both kingdoms. Their differences behind them, the grandson of Saint Louis and the Gascon Pope were at last united in the quest to recover the Holy Land from the infidel. The two rivers of piety and chivalry converged to form an irresistible torrent; and to celebrate this great occasion, the city of Paris was bedecked with bright banners, the air was filled with the sound of music and gaiety, and festivities of an unprecedented splendour continued for more than a week.
There was only one piece of unfinished business; a short distance from the revels, the senior officers of the former Order of the Temple waited in the King’s dungeons for the judgement of Pope Clement V. The former Grand Master, James of Molay, had persistently refused to give a final account of himself to anyone but the Pope, and seemed convinced that when he came face to face with the only authority that the Church had put over him, he would surely vindicate his own honour and that of his Order.
Such a personal encounter was never to take place. Towards the end of December 1313, Pope Clement appointed a commission of three cardinals to decide on the fate of the Templar leaders – the Legate, Nicholas of Fréauville, Arnaud of Auch and Arnaud Nouvel. On 18 March 1314, these three cardinals called a council of doctors of theology and canon law to meet at Paris in the presence of Philip of Marigny, the Archbishop of Sens. Before this council were arraigned James of Molay, Hugh of Pairaud, Geoffrey of Gonneville and Geoffrey of Charney. Judgement was then given that ‘since these four, without any exception, had publicly and openly confessed the crimes which had been imputed to them and had persisted in these confessions and seemed finally to persist in them … they were adjudged to be thrust into harsh and perpetual imprisonment’.356
Two of the accused, Hugh of Pairaud and Geoffrey of Gonneville, submitted to this judgement without protest; but the severity of the sentence, coming at the end of seven years of incarceration, was finally too much for James of Molay. Now an old man, well into his seventies, what profit was there in submission if the reward was a lingering death? The Pope had betrayed him; all he could hope for now was justice from God. Therefore, just when the three cardinals felt that the case of the Temple was finally settled, James of Molay, together with the Preceptor of Normandy, Geoffrey of Charney, stood finally to retract their confessions and insist that both they and their Order were wholly innocent of all the charges.
This turn of events dumbfounded the cardinals, and threw the carefully choreographed finale into confusion. The two recalcitrant knights were taken away by the royal marshal while news of what had happened was hurried to the King. No sooner had it reached him than King Philip summoned the lay members of his Council where it was decided that the two knights, as relapsed heretics, must suffer the prescribed fate. That very evening, ‘around the hour of vespers’, James of Molay and Geoffrey of Charney were taken to a small island in the River Seine called the Ile-des-Javiaux to be burned at the stake.
Before they died, it was later said, James of Molay made one last demand of Pope Clement and King Philip: he summoned them to appear before the year was out before the tribunal of God. It was also reported that ‘they were seen to be prepared to sustain the fire with easy mind’ which ‘brought from all who saw them much admiration and surprise for the constancy of their death and final denial’. The two old men were then tied to the stake and burned to death. Later, under cover of dark, friars of the Augustinian monastery on the bank of the river and other pious people came to collect the charred bones of the dead Templars as relics of saints.
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As the cynics at the Council of Vienne had predicted, Pope Clement V’s projected crusade never took place. Pope Clement died on 20 April 1314, a little over a month after the death of James of Molay. The inventory of the few possessions found in his bedchamber included ‘two small books in the “romance” language, covered with tanned leather with an iron lock … containing the Rule of the Templars’.357 King Philip the Fair followed him to the grave on 29 November of the same year after an accident out hunting. The large sums of money that had been raised to pay for a crusade were either swallowed up by the French exchequer or used for the private purposes of the deceased Pope. In his will, Pope Clement V left 300,000 florins to his nephew, Betrand of Got, Viscount of Lomagne, in return for a vow to go on crusade, a vow never fulfilled. As an anonymous chronicler put it at the time, ‘the pope guarded the money, and his cousin, the marquis, had his share; and the king and all who had accepted the Cross remained here; and the Saracens live in peace there, and I believe they can continue to sleep in security’.