THE RULERS OF the kingdoms on the Iberian Peninsula had been angered by the attempts of Philip of France to wipe out the Templar order. Their primary concern was their land wars against the Muslims, who had lived there for five hundred years. They were not about to let Philip IV or anyone else deprive them of the military support of the fighting Knights Templar, who had been helping them to drive the Muslim enemy off the continent of Europe.
In Portugal, King Denis I took both men and properties of the Templars into a new secular order called the Militia of Jesus Christ (or, more popularly, the Knights of Christ) responsible directly to the king. In 1319 the order received the papal blessing of John XXII, who recognized it as a revival of the Knights Templar. Its most famous members were Prince Henry the Navigator and Vasco da Gama. The Knights of Christ used the distinctive red cross patée worn by the Templars, the same cross that artists used to decorate the sails of Columbus’s ships, the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa Maria.
The king of Aragon converted his local Templars into a new military order called the Order of Montesa, in honor of Our Lady of Montesa. Before the century was over, it was combined with an older group called the Order of St. George of Alfama. Elsewhere within the Spanish kingdoms the dispossessed Templars, all of whom had been found innocent by the local archbishops, could join the Order of Calatrava in Castile or the Military Order of Alcantara in Leon and Galicia, where membership in the Military Order of Santiago (St. James) could also be sought. This last order had certainly been inspired by the original Templar purpose when it was formed in 1175 to protect the pilgrim roads to the most popular shrine in Europe, that of Santiago de Compostella. Tradition said that this shrine held the body of the Apostle James, which had been brought here after his head was cut off by King Herod Agrippa.
The Templars in Germany could join the Teutonic Knights, and ex-Templars everywhere could seek membership in the Knights Hospitaller of St. John. That order still exists today, although under a different name.
The present ponderous designation of the Hospitallers reflects their long history of survival: The Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St. John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes, and of Malta. The Hospitallers completed their conquest of the island of Rhodes in 1310, while the Knights Templar still languished in prison. They continued to provide help in holding the Muslims in check, but more and more as a naval force, rather than as a land army of mounted knights. In 1522 the Hospitallers were driven off Rhodes by the Turks, prompting them to seek another sea base in order to maintain their position as a naval power. In 1530 their search was rewarded when the emperor Charles V granted them the island of Malta. From their new base the Hospitallers acted as a buffer between Christian Europe and Muslim North Africa, earning the popular new name of the Knights of Malta. In 1798 the order lost Malta to Napoleon Bonaparte, who in turn lost it to the British. In 1834 the Knights of Malta established their present headquarters in Rome, where they are regarded by the Vatican as a sovereign power. Since the Hospitallers managed to operate for over five hundred years from their island bases of Rhodes and Malta, it is difficult to avoid speculating on the possible fate of the Templars, had they established a sovereign state by holding on to the island of Cyprus. That property comprised a larger area, and yielded greater revenues, than the two Hospitaller islands combined.
All of the honorable alternatives available to the Knights Templar were, of course, limited to those members who had been found innocent, or who had confessed and then served their prison terms, if any, and had performed the penances prescribed for them by their ecclesiastic judges. The fates of those Templars who had escaped from their prisons, or those who had eluded arrest, were shrouded in mystery. What happened to the Templars who had gathered in the forest near Lyons during the Council of Vienne? Where were the Templar ships that had not been taken, and the Templar knights who commanded them? Where were the English Templars who had used their three-month warning period to go underground? All of those men who escaped arrest were excommunicated and, once the time for turning themselves in expired, were also judged guilty of heresy and doomed to die at the stake if discovered. But they weren’t found. Were they just hiding, far from home and under assumed names? Did each fugitive Templar exist isolated from his brothers, or were secret bands formed, who kept in touch with each other for the purpose of mutual protection? Is there any truth behind the legend that in 1314 fugitive Knights Templar fought alongside Scotland’s Robert Bruce at the Battle of Bannock Burn? The mystery provided ideal fodder for fantasy and legend, as did the drama surrounding the most memorable event of the Templar suppression, the murder of the last grand master.
A deathbed confession held the highest level of credibility, so the final suicidal words wrung from Jacques de Molay stood not just as a last-minute protestation, but to many were clear proof of the innocence of the whole order. That conclusion was supported by the news that the Knights Templar had been found innocent in Germany, Cyprus, Spain, and Portugal, and in England had been given what, for the time, was a mere slap on the wrist. The grotesque brutality of the Inquisition had been concentrated in France and in the French and papal lands in Italy. To those who believed in the Templars’ innocence, Philip IV and Clement V were guilty villains. That great surge of popular speculation caused Church historians of the day to adopt a position that they have never abandoned. King Philip alone, they recorded, was the guilty party, and such cooperation as he received from Pope Clement was exacted through his unceasing pressure upon the pontiff, combined with constant threats. French chroniclers, in response, defended their king by emphasizing that the Templars were unquestionably guilty, arguing that the devout sovereign of France had performed an outstanding service to Christendom in general and to the papacy in particular.
Persistent tales of missing Templar treasure, the disappearance of the ships from the Templar naval base at La Rochelle, the speculations about the activities of Templar fugitives, the whispered revelations of hideous tortures in dank dungeons all worked together to excite men’s myth-making propensities. There are many who believe, with no concrete evidence, that one item of Templar treasure that avoided confiscation was the Shroud of Turin. There was magic to be considered, too, in the accusations of the idolatrous worship of heads and cats. The alleged desecrations of the cross may well have led to later stories of trampling, spitting, and urinating on the cross as part of a satanic ritual called the Black Mass.
Then there was the exhilarating prospect of revenge, the first love of storytellers throughout history. Kings, popes, and even gods were known to seek the revenge that to them was the only acceptable form of justice. In the case of the Templars, the first recorded mention of vengeance may have come from the contemporary Italian poet, Dante Alighieri. In his Purgatorio, the poet pointed to the sins of Philip IV. Calling the French king “the new Pilate,” Dante sought divine retribution for Philip’s crimes against Pope Boniface VIII and the Knights of the Temple:
“. . . I see the fleur-de-lis [of France] enter Anagni and Christ’s Vicar made captive . . . I see the new Pilate so ruthless that this does not sate him, but without law he bears into the Temple with his greedy sails. O my lord, when shall I rejoice to see the vengeance which, hid in thy secret council, makes sweet thy wrath?”
The first act of Templar vengeance, in the minds of many, came with the death of King Philip IV, less than a year after the burning of Jacques de Molay and well within the time frame of the grand master’s legendary curse. Philip was out with a hunting party on November 29, 1314, when he was gripped by a sudden seizure. He was carried back to his palace to die, after which his heart was cut out of his body and sent with a holy relic to a monastery near Paris. The relic was a splinter of the True Cross, encased in gold and jewels, which Philip had stolen from the Knights Templar. Common gossip had no problem deciding that the undiagnosed seizure was in fact the result of poison administered to the king in an act of Templar vengeance. Another legend claims that centuries later, during the French Revolution, when the guillotine cut the head off King Louis XVI, a man leapt onto the platform. Plunging his hands into the dead king’s blood, the man then flicked the blood out over the crowd, shouting, “Jacques de Molay, thou art avenged!”
Generations of writers have enriched the body of Templar legend, beginning with the crusading minnesinger Wolfram von Eschenbach. In his epic Parsifal, Eschenbach portrayed the Templars as part of the Grail family and guardians of the Grail Castle. Sir Walter Scott made Knights Templar the villains of his novels Ivanhoe and The Talisman. In our own time, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, a book published in London in 1982, speculated on a secret role for the original Templars as guardians of a holy royal bloodline emanating from the alleged marriage of Jesus Christ to Mary Magdalene. In 1988 Umberto Eco published his novel, Foucault’s Pendulum, which had as its central theme the progress of a plot to rule the world, formed six hundred years earlier by a secret society of fugitive Knights Templar.
It is not just in words and whispers that the Templars have lived on, but in formal organizations as well. One historian claims to have identified eighteen different groups that call themselves Templars, although none of them has gained recognition by the Church. Several claim a legitimate descendancy, and at least one modern Templar order claims to have been founded when Jacques de Molay, from his dungeon, dictated a letter naming a secret successor as grand master, establishing a line that remains unbroken to this day. In World War II, the young men appointed by General “Wild Bill” Donovan’s to his staff in the new Office of Strategic Services, feeling like Crusaders, were pleased to refer to their group as the Knights Templar.
It is safe to state that nowhere is the memory of the Knights Templar kept alive with more zeal than in the worldwide order of Free and Accepted Masons, the oldest and largest fraternal society in the world. Freemasonry is the only organization, other than the Templars themselves, to find its principal identity in the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. As revealed in London in 1717 and revised during its early years, Freemasonry had just three basic degrees, the highest of which makes a member a Master Mason.
Today, having achieved that status, he can follow a number of paths, of which the most popular in the United States are the two “appendant” systems commonly referred to as York Rite and Scottish Rite.
The York Rite Mason progresses through a series of degrees that culminate in his being made a Masonic Knight Templar. The York Rite Templar commanderies in the United States alone claim over a quarter of a million members. They maintain a national foundation for research into eye diseases of children; and fund cataract surgery for the financially disabled. Scottish Rite Masonry has almost a million members in America, in a system that awards degrees numbered from four through thirty-two. (Explaining why one occasionally hears a man being identified as a “thirty-second degree Mason”.) A thirty-third degree does exist; it is not earned automatically but is awarded solely in recognition of meritorious service. In one jurisdiction, the Scottish Rite Mason is made a “Knight Kadosh.” Kadosh is direct from the Hebrew, and means “holy.” The “Holy Knight” of this degree is the Knight Templar. The story of the final days of Grand Master Jacques de Molay, along with a brief history of the Templar order, is recounted to the candidate for the degree. The spirit of the degree is to call upon the initiate to be aware of, and to resolutely oppose, all forms of personal and religious injustice.
An interesting aftermath to the attainment of the level of the Knight Templar in York Rite or the thirty-second degree in Scottish Rite is that the Mason is then eligible to seek membership in the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, to become a Shriner. The Shriners divide their time between fun and charity (such as their twenty-two free hospitals for burned and crippled children), but they do so in an Arab-Egyptian atmosphere that makes frequent allusions to the Crusades.
The Freemasons also sponsor an organization for tens of thousands of young men between thirteen and twenty-one years old, which memorializes the fallen grand master in its name, the Order of de Molay. Stories recalling the condemnation of the Templar officers and the burning of the last grand master are part of the de Molay ceremonies.
No Masonic body claims direct descent from the original Knights Templar; they usually claim instead to have originated in medieval guilds of cathedral and castle builders. The persistence of legend, however, and the frequent references to the crusading order in Masonic ritual, sent me off into several years of separate research. Although not a Freemason, I became fascinated by the unfolding revelations of Templar roots for Masonic ritual, particularly in regard to Masonic symbols and terminology so ancient that their origins and meanings had been lost to the Freemasons themselves. (The results of that research were published in 1990 in a book titled Born in Blood: The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry.)
No book about the Knights Templar should close without citing what is probably the most thoughtful gesture ever made to honor their memory. It was staged by the barristers of the Temple in London, whose connections with the Templars are an interesting bit of history in themselves.
The most valuable property in England awarded to the Hospitallers by Clement V after the suppression of the Knights Templar was the Templar headquarters in London, between Fleet Street and the Thames River, an area still known simply as the Temple. The only surviving Templar structure on the property is the Temple Church. Built of beautiful stone brought from Normandy as ship’s ballast, the church was consecrated by Heraclius, the patriarch of Jerusalem, in 1185. The original church is circular, with a larger retangular choir added in 1240.
The Hospitallers already had a London headquarters at Clerkenwell, so they had no real need for the Templar base. They leased it for inns that provided rooms and offices for the trial lawyers who practiced law at the King’s Court, just a few yards away through the gate between London and the royal city of Westminster. Its location gave the gate the name of the Barrière du Temple, later anglicized to the Temple Bar. Those trial lawyers passing back and forth through the “Bar” became known as “barristers.”
In 1534 the Hospitallers lost the property to the crown in the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII, who honored the tenancy of the barristers. In 1608, the “Benchers,” the senior barristers of the Temple, purchased the property from King James I, in an agreement under which they promised to assume responsibility for the maintenance of the Temple Church. Seldom has a trust been so conscientiously honored. Not only is the church meticulously maintained, but it was carefully rebuilt after the severe damage inflicted by the Luftwaffe during the London blitz in May 1941.
Holding a unique status, the Temple Church is not a part of any diocese. Its Anglican canon, who bears the title of Master of the Temple, reports directly to the crown. The church is frequently open to visitors, including the penitential cell built into the walls, where the Templar marshal for Ireland was confined in punishment until he starved to death. There is a tomb thought to be that of the patriarch Heraclius, and effigies from the tombs of medieval knights that serve to demonstrate that the barristers of the Inner and Middle Temple are acutely aware of the history of their church.
When General Edmund Allenby led a column of British troops through the gates of Jerusalem in 1917, where no Christian army had set foot since 1244, the barristers of the Temple held a special service. Its highlight was a chivalrous gesture that took place as the barristers processed into the round church of the Templars and placed laurel wreaths of victory on the effigies of the knights, to convey the silent message, “You are not forgotten.” And they are not.
Nor will they be.