by Michael Haag
During the first three days of the trial the three cardinals examined Raimbald of Caron, the master of Cyprus; Geoffrey of Charney, master of Normandy; Geoffrey of Gonneville, master of Poitou and Aquitaine; and Hugh of Pairaud, the Visitor. On the final day, 20 August, they heard the testimony of the Grand Master, James of Molay. The details varied between the testimonies, but taken all together they amounted to a restatement of the practises previously mentioned in testimony by the seventy-two Templars at Poitiers.
When the cardinals reported back to the Pope, Clement accepted the explanation of James of Molay and the other Templar leaders that the charges against them of sodomy and blasphemy were due to a misunderstanding of the knighthood’s arcane rituals, which had their origins in their struggle against the Muslims in Outremer. Denying Christ and spitting on the cross, as well as kissing other men’s behinds, were understood to simulate the kind of humiliation and torture that a knight might be subjected to by the enemy if captured. They were taught to abuse their own religion ‘in words only, not in spirit’.
Noting that the Templars had asked his pardon, the Pope wrote, ‘We hereby decree that they are absolved by the Church and may again receive Christian sacraments.’ Of James of Molay in particular the Pope recorded that after hearing what he had to say, ‘We concluded to extend the mercy of absolution for these acts to Brother James of Molay, the Grand Master of the order, who denounced in our presence the described heresy and any other heresy, and swore in person on the Lord’s Holy Gospel, and humbly asked for the mercy of absolution, restoring him to unity with the Church and reinstating him to communion of the faithful and sacraments of the Church.’
At this point Clement was still trying to save the Templars as an order; his object was reform, and then probably to combine the Templars with the Hospitallers. But the Pope failed to make the details of his absolution public because the scandal of the Templars had aroused extreme passions; Clement was still trying to avoid either a confrontation with Philip or a schism within the Church.
The Chinon Parchment
Everything written about the trial–and beliefs–of the Knights Templar has become redundant since the discovery of the Chinon Parchment. Uncertain and unexplained circumstances surrounding the fall of the order had led to a variety of theories about their activities and the motives of others involved in their trial. The accepted view of historians, over the centuries, had tended to be that the Templars were not heretics but that they were guilty of something–but of what? Historians also saw Pope Clement V as the pliant and weak creature of Philip IV of France, with whom he was thought to have colluded to destroy the Templars and seize their fortune.
The discovery of the Chinon Parchment has thrown a new and clarifying light on these mysteries and misconceptions. The parchment is a contemporary account of the testimony of James of Molay and other Templar leaders at a secret Papal hearing held at the royal castle of Chinon from 17 to 20 August 1308. The document reveals that the Pope found no heresy among the Templars and granted absolution to its leaders. Indeed, he fought with some determination to protect the Templars against the French king. Fatally, however, the Pope delayed making his absolution public owing to the extreme passions of the time. And so Phillip IV was able to have James of Molay and the other Templar leaders put to death before the Pope’s verdict could be published.
Subsequently the Chinon Parchment was mislabelled and misplaced amid the labyrinthine files of the Secret Archive until Barbara Frale, an Italian researcher at the Vatican School of Paleontology, found it and recognised its significance. She deciphered its tangled and coded writing and published her findings in the Journal of Medieval History in 2004. This was followed in 2007 by a facsimile publication of the parchment by the Vatican itself–no doubt eager to avoid the appearance of yet more conspiracy amid the fallout from their fictional machinations in Dan Brown’s bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code.
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The Papal Examination
The Papal Examination of James of Molay at Chinon castle 20 August 1308 as translated from the Chinon Parchment:
Then on the twentieth day of the month, in our presence, and in the presence of notaries and the same witnesses, brother-knight James of Molay, Grand Master of the Order of Knights Templar, appeared personally and having sworn in the form and manner indicated above, and having been diligently questioned, said it has been forty-two years or thereabouts since he was received as a brother of the said Order by brother-knight Hubert de Pérraud, at the time Visitor of France and Poitou, in Beune, diocese of Autun, in the chapel of the local Templar commandery of that place.
Concerning the way of his initiation into the order, he said that having given him the cloak the receptor showed to him the cross and told him that he should denounce the God whose image was depicted on that cross, and that he should spit on the cross. Which he did, although he did not spit on the cross, but near it, according to his words. He also said that he performed this denunciation in words, not in spirit. Regarding the sin of sodomy, the worshipped head and the practise of illicit kisses, he, diligently questioned, said that he knew nothing of that.
When he was asked whether he had confessed to these things due to a request, reward, gratitude, favour, fear, hatred or persuasion by someone else, or the use of force, or fear of impending torture, he replied that he did not. When he was asked whether he, after being apprehended, was submitted to any questioning or torture, he replied that he was not.
After this, we decided to extend the mercy of absolution for these acts to brother James of Molay, the Grand Master of the said order, who in the form and manner described above had denounced in our presence the described and any other heresy, and swore in person on the Lord’s Holy Gospel, and humbly asked for the mercy of absolution, restoring him to unity with the Church and reinstating him to communion of the faithful and the sacraments of the Church.
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The Templars Rally
In March 1309 the Papal court established itself at Avignon, which in those days was not within the kingdom of France and had the added benefit of offering the Pope a quick escape over the Italian border. In November 1309 the Papal commission into the order of the Templars began its sittings; this was the inquiry that Clement had agreed to establish after his meeting with Philip at Poitiers the previous year.
Slowly the accused Templars rallied, and instead of confessing they began mounting a defence. By early May 1310 nearly six hundred Templars were defending their order, and they denied their previous confessions. In contrast to the Cathars, who truly were heretics and went to their deaths for what they believed, not one Templar was prepared to be martyred for the heresies which members of the order were supposed to have guarded so fiercely for so long, quite simply because there was no heresy, only the malignant interpretation put on their practises by a malignant king.
Deeply worried by this growing confidence among the Templars, Philip took drastic action and had the Archbishop of Sens, a royal nominee, reopen his episcopal inquiry against individual Templars in his diocese. Obedient to his king, the archbishop found fifty-four Templars guilty as relapsed heretics–in other words guilty of having revoked their earlier confessions–and handed them over to the secular authorities. On 12 May 1310 in a field outside Paris the fifty-four Templars were burnt at the stake. Yet even after these burnings not all the remaining Templars were cowed nor was their morale completely crushed, though this intimidation by burning did have its effect, and many Templars fell silent or returned to their confessions.
The Suppression of the Templars
Since 1308 Pope Clement had been intending to hold an ecumenical council at Vienne in the Rhone-Alps region of France to consider three great matters: the Templars, the Holy Land and the reform of the Church. Originally scheduled for October 1310, it had to be postponed a year because the Pope’s contest with the king of France over the Templars was dragging on. Now in the summer of 1311 Clement had gathered information about the Templars
from investigations all round France and abroad to present at the council. What he found was that only in France and in regions under French domination or influence were there substantial confessions from Templars–that is areas where the French authorities and their collaborators had applied ferocious tortures to their victims, or where their testimony was deliberately distorted to turn admitted irregularities into heresy. Clement was becoming eager to wind up the Templar matter before its controversies caused wider and deeper troubles for the Church.
Clement had senior advisors who argued that no time should be wasted on discussion or defence, and that the Pope should use his executive powers to abolish the Templars forthwith. One said that the Templars had ‘already caused the Christian name to smell among unbelievers and infidels and have shaken some of the faithful in the stability of their faith’. He added that suppression of the order should take place without delay in case ‘the capricious spark of this error ignites in flames, which could burn the whole world’. But then in late October a dramatic event occurred which did much to counter the arguments of those in favour of swift abolition–seven Templars appeared at the council to argue for the defence of the order. The Pope reacted swiftly and had them locked up.
But this was not a matter that the overwhelming majority of the clergy attending the council was prepared to overlook. As Henry Ffykeis, an Englishman attending the council, wrote home to the bishop of Norwich on 27 December 1311: ‘Concerning the matter of the Templars there is great debate as to whether they ought in law to be admitted to the defence. The larger part of the prelates, indeed all of them, excepting five or six from the council of the King of France, stand on their behalf. On account of this the Pope is strongly moved against the prelates. The King of France more so; and he is coming in a rage with a great following’. Indeed Philip was soon demonstrating his usual technique of intimidation by appearing at various places upriver from Vienne, creating the powerful sensation in the Pope that the king was about to descend upon him. On 2 March 1312 the king sent a thinly veiled ultimatum to the Pope, reminding him of the crimes and heresies of the Templars, ‘Which is why, 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’. Just in case Clement did not get the message, on 20 March the king with his brothers, sons and a considerable armed force arrived at Vienne.
On 3 April, having silenced the members of the council on pain of excommunication, and with the King of France sitting at his side, the Pope made public his decision, already committed to writing twelve days earlier in the form of a bull, Vox in Excelso, dated 22 March 1312, that the Templars, though not condemned, were suppressed on the grounds that the order was too defamed to carry on. Under the circumstances it was probably the best that Clement could do. Another bull, Ad Providam, dated 2 May, granted the Templars’ property to the Knights Hospitaller. Soon after, Philip extracted a huge sum of money from the Hospitallers in compensation for his costs in bringing the Templars to trial.
The Burning of James of Molay
The Church had now washed its hands of the Templars. In accordance with Church practise, once it had decided on a defendant’s fate he was handed over to the secular authorities for punishment. In this case almost all the Templars in France had been in royal hands all along, and the dispensal of their fates did not require the transfer of their persons. The treatment meted out by the royal authorities to individual Templars varied. Those who had confessed were subjected to penances, and these were sometimes heavy, including lengthy imprisonment. Others who had confessed to nothing or were otherwise of little account were sent to monasteries for the rest of their lives.
The leading Templars, including the Grand Master, had to wait until 18 March 1314 before their cases were disposed of. They might well have expected that their cases had been disposed of long before at Chinon when they received Papal absolution, and almost certainly they would now have been expecting to be treated accordingly. But the hearings at Chinon still remained secret, and instead Hugh of Pairaud, Geoffrey of Gonneville, Geoffrey of Charney and James of Molay were brought for final judgement before a small commission of French cardinals and ecclesiastics at Paris, among them that same archbishop of Sens who had so happily for the king burned fifty-four Templars in May 1310.
The sentence was handed down. On the basis of their earlier confessions, as twisted by the crown, all four men were condemned to harsh and perpetual punishment–in effect to starve and rot in prison until they were released by a lingering death. Hugh of Pairaud and Geoffrey of Gonneville accepted their fate in silence. ‘But lo’, wrote a chronicler of the time, ‘when the cardinals believed that they had imposed an end to the affair, immediately and unexpectedly two of them, namely the Grand Master and the master of Normandy, defending themselves obstinately against the cardinal who had preached the sermon and against the archbishop of Sens, returned to the denial both of the confession as well as everything which they had confessed.’
James of Molay was in his seventies; he and Geoffrey of Charney, the master of Normandy, had been in the king’s dungeons for the last seven years. For six of those years they had lived under the expectation that their absolution by the Pope would free them from their nightmare, that they would live again in sunlight among those loved by the Church and Christ. But now in the midst of betrayal and despair they refused to give themselves into perpetual incarceration in a living hell. Loudly protesting their innocence and asserting that the order of the Templars was pure and holy, James of Molay and Geoffrey of Charney put themselves into the hands of God.
At once the king ordered that they be condemned as relapsed heretics, and on that same evening, at Vespers, they were taken to the Ile des Javiaux, a small island in the Seine east of Notre Dame, and bound to the stake. The chronicler described their last moments: ‘They were seen to be so prepared to sustain the fire with easy mind and will that they brought from all those who saw them much admiration and surprise for the constance of their death and final denial.’ The last of the Templars went to their deaths with courage, in the tradition of their order.
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Vatican Backs Templar Link with the Turin Shroud
The Turin Shroud is claimed to be the linen cloth that covered the body of Jesus after the Crucifixion. A relic answering to its description was among the treasures that were taken from Constantinople when the city was sacked by the Fourth Crusade in 1204. In a letter sent the following year to Pope Innocent III, a Byzantine aristocrat complained that ‘the Venetians partitioned the treasures of gold, silver and ivory while the French did the same with the relics of the saints and the most sacred of all, the linen in which our Lord Jesus Christ was wrapped after his death and before the resurrection’. But the certain provenance of the Shroud can only be traced back to 1357 when it was displayed in the church at Lirey in the diocese of Troyes by the widow of a French knight called Geoffrey of Charney who, it is said, was the nephew of that same Geoffrey of Charney burnt at the stake with James of Molay. This has led some historians to believe that after the sack of Constantinople the linen relic passed into the hands of the Templars who took it to France, where it formed part of their famous treasure. But is this true?
Remarkably, in April 2009 support came from the Vatican itself, where Barbara Frale, the scholar who discovered the Chinon Parchment, found a further document, this one the testimony of Arnaut Sabbatier, a young Frenchman who entered the order in 1287. As part of his initiation, he said, he was taken to ‘a secret place to which only the brothers of the Temple had access’, where he was shown ‘a long linen cloth on which was impressed the figure of a man’ and was told to venerate the image by kissing its feet three times. The Templars had rescued the Shroud to ensure that it did not fall into the hands of heretics such as the Cathars, who claimed that Jesus did not have a true human body but only the appearance of a man and neither died on the C
ross nor was resurrected. For their pains they were burnt at the stake.
Not that this discovery has any bearing on the authenticity of the Shroud. The Vatican leaves the question of whether or not the Shroud is a medieval forgery to the faith of believers. But it does suggest that the cloth today known as the Turin Shroud, fake or not, was in the possession of the Templars, that they believed it to be real, and that for a century it played a central part in their initiation ceremonies.
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Part 5
The Aftermath
Survivals
The New Orders
A German pilgrim visiting the Holy Land in 1340 came upon two elderly men in the mountains overlooking the shores of the Dead Sea. They told him they had been Templars, and they recalled for him their last memories of their order, of their fellow knights being slaughtered during the desperate fighting at the fall of Acre in 1291. The two men had been taken captive, and for nearly fifty years they had eked out their lives as woodcutters, entirely cut off from news of Western Christendom. Now, with the help of the pilgrim, they were repatriated to France where they learnt that the order of the Templars was no more, and that the last Grand Master had been burnt at the stake as a heretic. Despite this the two old men were respectfully received at the Papal court at Avignon and were given the means to live out their days in peace.
Few Templars could still have been alive by that time. Some might have been grimly hanging on to life in the royal dungeons of France, others left to live quietly in monasteries on pensions, while some are known to have turned mercenary and to have taken wives. The lifespan of the Order of the Knights Templar coincided almost exactly with the claim of the Papacy to universal spiritual and temporal dominion, but Europe was now entering into a new world of rising nation states. By the time the two old Templars returned to France from the shores of the Dead Sea, their order and the world it had bestrode for two hundred years had become old news.
