Hassan Sabbah had found an ingenious means of becoming the foremost individual in the Orient—that of levying taxes and governing sovereigns thereby. Anyone who resisted his will was assassinated by one of his emissaries. If one of his emissaries was captured before carrying out the murder, he sent another, and then another; and Hassan’s disciples stopped at nothing. They converted to Christianity if it was necessary to kill a Christian. There were some who adopted the appearance of ravishing women and had themselves sold as slaves in order to get close to a suspicious and lustful emir and stab him in the hour of caresses.
To fanaticize his disciples and obtain from them the sacrifice of their lives, Hassan possessed a personal method that he bequeathed to his successors. Like his father Ali Sabbah, who was already nicknamed “the skeptic” and “the atheist,” and whose knowledge he revered, he had studied plants in his childhood. He had found a manner of preparing hashish and mixing it with henbane that gave a self-confidence that provoked an unshakable mental firmness. Those he sent carried with them, in addition to a short triangular dagger, the absolute certainty of success. Perhaps, as related by Marco Polo—all of whose other stories have been confirmed—Hassan gave his disciples another mixture of hashish that procured them, in the gardens of Alamut and amid their fountains, delightfully blissful dreams and made them believe that he had sent them to paradise by virtue of his divine power.49 Obedience was easy to obtain for someone who disposed of such a recompense. It was from there that the members of the sect took the name of Assassins, or hashishins, eaters of herbs. The Old Man of the Mountain was called the possessor of Hashisha.50
At the moment when Hugues des Payens and Geoffroy de Saint-Adhémar were dreaming of a power conquered in imitation of Oriental intellectuals, Hassan Sabbah died. But his sect lost nothing of its strength, thanks to the mechanisms of its organization. The two Frenchmen would have had no difficulty in seeing that, even more than the daggers obscurely raised above heads, what made its power were the castles that it had methodically acquired and fortified, the impregnable castles guarded by small contingents of well-disciplined troops.
And the dream became precise. It would be possible to master Europe if one disposed of castles distributed throughout its kingdoms. In order to have those castles it was necessary to be rich, but religion led to everything, especially wealth. How many men had renounced their fortunes on joining the Crusade, exchanging wealth for the pardon of the Church! The knights of Christ would drain the gold of Christianity. As for the terror, the power of assassination that had been Hassan’s first lever, that would rediscover in a religious word of command a virtue given by faith.
That word of command was brought to them by the Oriental initiation that they received from Theoclet, the patriarch of the Gnostic sect of Johannites.51 That sect was attached to the evangelist John and claimed that he was the founder of the true Church. The Church of Rome as not the legitimate Church. The missionaries of Peter had altered the thought of Jesus in going to preach it among barbarian peoples. According to the Johannites, it was a blasphemy to say that Jesus had been put on the cross, for the son of God could not be crucified. Since John, the Johannite patriarchs had succeeded one another without interruption. The latest was Theoclet. He wandered obscurely in Palestine, but if he found defenders, his Church would triumph over the false churches and his successor would be the most powerful man in Christendom.
Hugues des Payens gathered around him seven knights, and founded an Order of Chivalry whose apparent objective was to protect the pilgrims coming to the Holy Land. He called it the Order of the Temple because his mystical and secret goal was the reconstitution of the Temple of Solomon, a symbol of perfection. That symbol had been buried in the geometry of stones; it was the pursuit of divine wisdom and its realization by order and harmony under the hierarchical direction of the initiates. Material power would be the means to elevate the Temple.
The material power in question was acquired with a rapidity that surpassed all the dreams of the founders.
In 1128, Hugues des Payens came to France and had the rules of his new Order approved by Saint Bernard. It was ascetic and military. If it bore a strange resemblance to the rules of the secret societies of the Orient. no one knew it. The Templars were divided into three grades: the knights, armed servants and affiliates. They obeyed the Grand Master but they had an interior order composed of seven members who remained unknown and who perpetuated the primitive tradition.
Their costume was a white robe with a red cross on the left side. They were exempt from taxes and military service to kings. They could only be judged by the Pope. The number three played a particular role in their rites. When a candidate wanted to be admitted as a knight he knocked three times at the door of the church where the ceremony was held and was asked three times what he wanted. Each knight had to have three horses, make three long fasts and take communion three times a year. Those who had committed a sun were flagellated three times. They made three vows.
Only a few years went by before they had immense wealth and formed an ever-growing force in the midst of the European nations and in the Orient. That chivalric strength was accrued from their financial operations.
During the hundred and eighty-four years that the Order existed the goal was never lost to sight and it was pursued with an obstinate determination. They had castles everywhere, numbering as many as nine thousand. They made incessant progress. In fighting the Egyptians, the Syrians and the Order of Assassins they learned about their mores, their military organization and their doctrines. When they built fortresses, they were modeled on Saracen fortresses, and could thus be distinguished easily from those the Hospitallers, their rivals.
Narrow relationships, in the form of alliances made and then broken, often united Templars and Saracens. They betrayed Frederick II for the Sultan of Babylon. Another time, they refused to fight the infidels to the profit of Leon, King of Armenia. After taking Damiette, Imbert, a Maréchal of the Temple and confidant of the papal legate, Cardinal Pelage, who was in command of the Christian army, abruptly quit that army, bogged down in the Nile floods and went over to the Muslims. If it was a Knight of the Temple who prevented the Grandmaster of the Assassins from converting to Christianity and killed his ambassador, as was said, it was doubtless because he did not believe in that improbable conversion and only saw it as a strategic ruse.
All of that proves how many affinities the Knights of the Temple had with the enemies they were fighting. They did not hesitate to betray Christianity if it was in there interest, and when they took Muslim prisoners they were only seen to accord them mercy, or to release them without ransom. That was because, for them, the only verity was the increase in their strength.
Over the years the grandmasters became more powerful and were all the more ambitious for it. Under Thomas Béraut they made war against the Hospitallers with at least as much ardor as they had against the infidels. But human life did not count in their eyes; one cannot realize a great material project without killing one’s friends and enemies indifferently. Nothing counted, not the authority of the Pope, from whom they were liberating themselves further every day, nor moral laws, nor chivalric laws. We will give a significant example.
The Christians had been expelled almost everywhere from the Orient, where for more than three centuries they had been destroying the monuments of Arab art, burning libraries—notably that of Tripoli, which contained more than a hundred thousand volumes—and spreading a desolation that can only be compared to that inflicted by the Mongols.52
Sultan Khalil had laid siege to Saint-Jean-d’Acre, whose defense had been confided to the Grand Master of the Temple, Guillaume de Beaujeu. After several months of conflict, he was killed on the ramparts, and as the besieged city contained the number of senior priors necessary for an election, his successor, the monk Gaudini, was proclaimed immediately. He was an intellectual and a philosopher rather than a warrior. He hastened to negotiate, but too late; the city was pillaged.
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The wives and daughters of the nobles of the city, numbering three hundred, had taken refuge in the Templars’ fortress, the towers of which were beaten by the sea, and still permitted resistance. Night stopped the fighting and pillages. The Knights of the Temple, summoned to surrender, would only consent to do so if they were given the liberty to withdraw the next day safe and sound, with the women what had taken refuge behind their walls.
The sultan consented to that, but it was agreed that a few hundred Muslim soldiers would occupy one of the towers to make sure that the articles of the capitulation were observed. Unfortunately, that tower was the one in which the Christian noblewomen were accumulated. The Muslim soldiers, intoxicated by the victory, were unable to resist the sight of the women; they dragged them all to the church of the Order and raped them.
The knights, alerted by the screams, ran to warn Grand Master Gaudini of the treason, the evil that was being accomplished and the vengeance that it was necessary to take. The latter shrugged his shoulders and replied: “Well, Messieurs, I’m no less afflicted than you, but what can one do in such sad circumstances?”53 And he hastened to embark with the archives of the Temple and a dozen of the senior officers of the Order on a boat that was able to escape by favor of the darkness and reach Cyprus. What, indeed, did the rape of three hundred women matter, as long as the few men who had in their hands the conquest and organization of Europe were saved?
The Templars who remained massacred Khalil’s lustful soldiers, but perished the following day along with the dishonored Christian women; the tower of the Temple where they were defending themselves collapsed at the moment of the attack, burying the victors and the vanquished alike.
A few years later, under the mastery of Jacques de Molay, all the proud towers of the Temple erected at the crossroads of Europe crumbled at the same time.
THE DENIAL OF JESUS,
SODOMY AND THE BAPHOMET
It was the time when Philippe le Bel had just depreciated French coinage to his advantage. In spite of those depreciations he remained needy. He received a letter from the governor of a château in the Languedoc near Béziers. The governor told him that a bourgeois of the city named Squint de Florian, who had been condemned to death, had asked to speak to the King before being subjected to the penalty, assuring him that he had a secret of unusual importance to reveal to him. The governor had postponed the execution.
Impelled by curiosity, the King had Florian brought to Paris. Florian threw himself at his feet and asked for his life in exchange for the secret, which was granted to him. This is what he revealed.
Florian had spent his days in prison in the company of a Templar apostate similarly condemned to death. The Templar, on the point of being executed and unable to obtain a priest, had confessed to his companion. He revealed to him that when he was supposedly an honest man and a member of the Order of the Temple he had committed crimes much greater than that were presently sending him to his death. Those crimes were also committed by the elite of French chivalry.
The Templars denied Jesus Christ and spat three times on the cross at the moment of their reception into the Order. They practiced sodomy, not for occasional pleasure, but with an official permission and as a praiseworthy and recommended action. Finally, they consecrated themselves, by a magical rite that involved a rope wound around their loins, to a strange bearded idol named Baphomet.
One can hardly believe that Philippe le Bel, so little respectful of the Pope of the Church to which he had recently delivered a slap by the intermediary of Nogaret, was indignant about the heresy and the adoration of Baphomet, or against the practice of sodomy, so current in those times and in all times. It is probable that something was revealed to him of the Templars’ ambitious ideal of conquest.
That ideal, known only to the interior group of senior priors, must have filtered out, whispered as an uncertain legend, and did not have enough reality to figure in the accusations of the trial. But his knowledge must have made Philippe le Bel reflect on the extraordinary power that was constituted in his kingdom and over which he had no authority. He must suddenly have understood that an immense danger might be looming up before him, and told himself that if he destroyed that danger abruptly by means of an audacious coup, he could simultaneously enrich himself with the immense fortune of the Order of the Temple.
That dread, which was only supported on vague testimony, of which there was no formal proof, is the sole excuse for the greatest crime, after the massacre of the Albigensians, that the Pope and the King of France committed in collaboration.
For the great realization of the Order, the time had perhaps come. The Muslims had expelled the Christians from Palestine and Egypt. With what would the formidable activity of those warriors, for whom combat was a vital necessity, be employed? The maintenance of forts and Oriental possessions devoured almost all of the Order’s revenues. With the cessation of the war against the infidels, enormous sums were about to become available.
A Templar named Roger de Flor had thought that the moment had come. He had just been expelled from the Order for having stolen a part of its treasure at the time of the fall of Saint-Jean-d’Acre, and for having abused Christian women who had taken refuge in his galley. Alone, at the head of Spanish adventurers, he had attempted the foundation of a Mediterranean kingdom. He escaped the pursuits of the Pope and the Order, gained an immense fortune and obtained from the Emperor of Constantinople the hand of his niece Marie and the title of Caesar.
But Jacques de Molay did not have the scope that would have been necessary. Everything found him sympathetic. Honesty and mild qualities were dominant in him. That did not take him very far. One sole clue can permit the supposition that the Temple judged that the moment had come to play a major role in Europe. When the Pope, in accord with Philippe le Bel, summoned Jacques de Molay to meet him in Poitiers he instructed him to come incognito, almost alone. Jacques de Molay left Cyprus, where he was, accompanied by an immense retinue, the elite of the Knights and the treasure of the Temple. That might well indicate that he judged that the Order’s field of action was henceforth to be in Europe and that he was about to have need of all his combatants there.
With skill and hypocrisy, Philippe le Bel showered Jacques de Molay and the Templars with all sorts of marks of amity and favors. On the other hand, Clement V could refuse him nothing. He had been elected Pope thanks to the King of France. Public opinion was forceful, and for the first time, the university and the people had to be asked to approve a royal decision. But the very character of the accusations was calculated to render the coup popular. Rumors had been circulating for a long time about disappearances and the mysterious deaths of people who had imprudently witnessed a secret ceremony of the Temple.
The Templars were hated very widely. “They were, it was said, notoriously in rapport with the Assassins of Syria. The people remarked with alarm the similarity of their costume with that of the followers of the Old Man of the Mountain. They had welcomed the Sudan in their houses, permitted the Muslim cult. In their furious rivalry against the Hospitallers they had gone so far as to launch arrows against the Holy Sepulcher.”54
It was thought scandalous that the Grand Master’s court was more numerous and more beautiful than those of kings. The occult character of initiations to the Order was criticized. People spoke in low voices about magic and the ritual murder of children. Philippe le Bel was to find auxiliaries in the indignation and hatred caused to the people by everything that they do not understand.
On the night of 13 October 1306, Jacques de Molay was arrested with the Knights that were in Paris. Orders had been given in advance to the provinces for all the Templars in France to be imprisoned simultaneously. Torture rapidly obtained more than a hundred and forty confessions. On searching the house of the Temple, however, the archives of the Order were not found, nor its true and primitive rule, not the rote of initiation. Jacques de Molay, motivated by rumors that had run around a few days before regarding a danger that thr
eatened the Order, had had then removed from the Temple and hidden in a safe place. They were never found.
The Templars were accused of renouncing Jesus Christ and spitting on the cross three times at the moment when they made the oath of fidelity. That accusation has been discussed endlessly, and various explanations have been found for it. The one to which many sensate minds rallied, notably Michelet,55 is that that form of reception as borrowed from ancient mysteries. In order to make the perfect purity of the initiate more obvious after initiation, the initiate had to demonstrate that he had attained the ultimate degree of irreligion. He denied Jesus. The Order rehabilitated him all the more because is fall had been more profound. At the time of the Templars’ trial the rite was practiced but its symbolic meaning had been lost.
That explanation is a trifle infantile. How could an action that must have appeared monstrous have been asked of them without giving them a reason, since that reason was so simple? The question must have been asked incessantly, for the anguish of the pious knight admitted to the Order and invited to spit on what he had learned to worship must have been profound. His conscience could easily have been calmed and a response so easily obtained would not have been forgotten.
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