“Now, when you joined the Templars, were you told to spit on a cross?”
“Yes, sir, but I cleverly spat next to it and no one noticed.”
“Were you ordered to stomp on the cross?”
“I sort of remember something like that.”
“Did you stomp on the cross?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Did you stomp and urinate on the cross on Good Friday? Was that the ritual for the day Our Lord died for your sins, you heretic scum?”
“No, my lord, it wasn’t.”
“Ah, then you must have stomped and urinated on another day. What day was it, Holy Thursday? Just when did you desecrate the cross? We know you did. All the other Templars have confessed. Are you saying that you were the only one who didn’t do this?”
And so on. Eventually, the Templar is so cowed and confused that he’s happy to confess to anything and go back to his quiet cell.
Although this scene is the product of my imagination, I have heard that this technique of interrogation—asking the same question several times in various ways—is still being used. Fortunately, I don’t have firsthand knowledge.
Since so many of the charges are almost the same, we can group the 127 charges into more manageable groups:3
A Summary of the Charges
1. That the Templars denied Christ in their reception ceremony or soon after. They also spat and trampled on a cross.
2. That they exchanged kisses on various parts of the body, the navel and base of the spine being favorites.
3. That at the reception they were told they could have sex with other Templars. They were made to swear that they would never leave the order. Also, the receptions were held in secret.
4. That they were not allowed to reveal what happened in the reception to anyone.
5. That they did not believe in the Mass or in other sacraments. Their priests did not say the words of consecration over the Host.
6. That they were told that the masters could absolve their sins, implying that they had no need of a priest.
7. That they venerated an idol, as their God and savior. Well, some of them did. That is, most of them in the chapters did.4 Each province had one, it was said, sometimes with three faces, sometimes one. Sometimes it was a human skull. Anyway, they believed that it could make them rich and also make the flowers bloom and the land be fertile. Each of them wore a cord around their waist that had touched the idol and they even slept in it.
8. That they were only allowed to confess their sins to a priest of the order.
9. That they didn’t give charity as they ought and they believed that it was not a sin to make money and that they were authorized to do so by any means possible, legal or illegal.5
10. That they met at night and in secret.
11. That everyone, well, almost everyone, in the order knew about these things and did nothing to correct them.
12. That many brothers left the order because of the “filth and errors.” 6(But see number 3.)
13. That the whole matter has caused public gossip and scandal throughout Christendom.
14. That the Grand Master and other officials of the order have confessed.
AS the reader will notice, even broken down like this, some of the charges aren’t charges at all but statements. Others are qualified so many times that it seems as if the inquisitors were trying to make various individual confessions make sense.
I address the first five charges in the chapter on the Secret Rite of Initiation. The sixth charge, that they believed the master could absolve their sins, seems to be true. Apparently, some of the brothers were confused between the absolution they received after confession to a priest and the absolution that the master or commander gave them after confessing in the weekly chapter meeting about breaking the rules of the order.
The question of the mysterious Templar idol is covered in my chapter on Baphomet. Since to modern readers it seems to be one of the most fascinating of the charges, I don’t think it hurts to repeat that no idol of any sort was ever found in any of the commanderies. In Paris a search revealed a silver reliquary containing the skull bones of one of the eleven thousand virgins martyred with Saint Ursula in Cologne in the fourth century.7And, even under torture, most of the Templars only appeared confused by the question about an idol.
Templars did have their own priests but many of them were only hired for a certain term. The number of priests of other orders who testified for and against them from information learned in confessions proves that this accusation was false.
On the accusation that the Templars did not give charity, it’s hard to say. Answering that would need more records than we have. However, they seem to have given alms at least three times a week and the Rule had strict guidelines for giving to the poor. Anything might be given as alms except military equipment.8When the Grand Master visited a commandery, five poor people were to be fed the same food as the brothers ate, in his honor.9Also, every day one-tenth of the bread prepared should be given to the almoner to give to the poor.10
The Templars did not set up hospices as the Hospitallers did, but they did spend a great deal to ransom poor prisoners of the Moslems and they had places to give shelter to pilgrims.11 Did they give enough? I don’t know. Do any of us give enough?
The Templars were on thin ice with the charges about money. There are too many cases in charters where they seem to go to great lengths to get all that they legally could and one or two times when they may have taken money that they weren’t entitled to. Please see the section on Templars and Money for a more complete look at this issue.
On the accusation that the Templars met at night, and in secret, that’s one of those no-win accusations. They sometimes met at night in the time after reciting the predawn prayers called matins. According to the Rule, they were first to check up on their horses and gear and then they could go to bed. But this was also a convenient time for holding chapter meetings. The meetings were held in secret in the sense that what happened in them was not to be discussed with outsiders.
The odd thing about the charge is that most religious orders had closed meetings. The purpose of the chapter was to discuss faults and problems. These weren’t things they wanted the public at large to know about. I don’t know why no Templars bothered to mention this. It’s possible that they didn’t know much about the practices of other orders.
The real problem was the secret reception. Most orders had public ceremonies for new members. It was a big day and families looked forward to seeing it. It was stupid for the Templars to welcome new recruits privately. But it does seem to be something that select societies like to do.
The accusation that everyone in the order knew these things were going on is classic distortion. It assumes all the other charges to be true.
I love the charge that brothers had left the order because they were disgusted with the heretical behavior. First of all, the inquisitors already accused the Templars of forbidding members to leave. Of course, men could have left without permission and some did. But the number who left legally for various reasons was far too many for the order to have a policy of silencing those who wanted out.
One of the men who testified against the order in Paris was a priest named Jean de Folliaco. He stated that he had been forced to do all the nasty things at his reception and that he had complained to the king’s provost in Paris in 1304. He told the pope that he had a letter proving his complaints were true, but it was missing. Eventually, he admitted that his main objection to remaining in the order was that the life was too hard and he was afraid of being sent overseas where the fighting was.12
One interesting case, however, concerns a Spanish brother, Pons of Guisans, who became a Templar when he fell ill on his way to the East. He thought he was dying and assumed he’d get a shorter time in purgatory if he died a Templar. But he didn’t die. Instead, he became a full member of the order and had a position of responsibility in Jerusalem. Then he met this woman. He left th
e order to marry her. After her death, he decided that he wanted to come back. He had to do penance for a year for leaving, but they let him back in.13 Obviously Pons was not put off by “filth and error.”
Finally, the last two charges aren’t charges at all. They are simply excuses. The final reason for the dissolution of the Templars at the Council of Vienne was that the scandal was so great that no one would take the order seriously again. It may seem odd to people today but a fear of creating scandal was something that medieval organizations and individuals dreaded. They knew the power of a well-placed rumor. Even if one were innocent of all charges, the shame of being accused was enough to ruin a person’s life, as the Templars found out to their sorrow.
1Georges Lizerand, Le Dossier de l’Affaire des Templiers (Paris, 1923) pp. 33-37.
2Jules Michelet, Le Procès des Templiers Vol. I (Paris, rpt. 1987) pp. 90-91. These charges are all translated in Malcolm Barber, The Trial of the Templars (Cambridge, 1978) pp. 248-52S.
3The following is taken from Helen Nicholson, The Knights Templar (Sutton, 2001) p. 206. Her organization is slightly different from mine but it was a handy starting point.
4Michelet, p. 92. “Item, quod aliqui eorum. Item quod major pars illorum qui errant in capitulis.” I’m not making this up.
5Ibid., p. 94, “dicti ordinus quibuscumque modis possent per fas aut nephas procurare.”
6Ibid., p. 96, “multi fraters de dicto ordine propter feditates et errors ejusdem ordinis exierunt.” Translation in Barber, p. 251.
7Paul Guéron, Vie des Saints Vol. XII (Paris: Bollandistes, 1880) pp. 496-97.
8Laurent Dailliez ed., Règle et Statuts de l’Ordre du Temple (Paris, 1972) p. 126. Rule no. 82.
9Ibid., p. 129. Rule no. 92.
10Ibid., p. 27. Rule no. 27.
11Desmond Seward, Knights of the Cloister: Templars and Hospitallers in Central-Southern Occitania c. 1100-300 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1999) pp. 111-15.
12Barber, p. 99.
13Seward, p. 122. The case is from the Barcelona Rule of the Temple.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Guillaume de Nogaret
Of all the people involved in the arrest and trials of the Templars , Guillaume de Nogaret has been considered the most sinister, the man who was the mastermind behind everything that happened. This servant of the king had cut his teeth on the struggle with Pope Boniface VIII in 1303 and was ready once again to prove himself to his master, King Philip IV, by destroying the Templars as well. Many have considered him the evil genius behind the trial of the Templars as well as the campaign against Boniface.
Who was this man? Was he pulling the strings to make King Philip dance to his tune or was it Guillaume who was the puppet, taking the fall for the king?
Guillaume de Nogaret was born in the town of Sant-Félix de Caraman in southwestern France. The date isn’t certain, perhaps around 1260. Nogaret is not the name of a place but is a variation on the Occitan word nogarède, or “walnut grower.”1
Unlike many of the officers of the government of Philip the Fair, Guillaume was not nobly born. It was said that his grandfather had been burned as a Patarine heretic.2 It’s not clear if this is true or not. However, it was a charge that was thrown back at him more than once over his life, and it must have affected him strongly. Since it was he who wrote most of the broadsides condemning the Templars as heretics, his background in this is important. Did he actually believe that the Templars were bad Christians or had he simply trained himself to see heresy everywhere he looked, to prove that his religion was orthodox?
Despite their suspect origins, Guillaume’s family had enough money to educate him. He may have studied for a time at Toulouse before going to the town of Montpellier to study law. By 1293 he was a “doctor of law.”3
Sometime around 1296, Nogaret received a call from Paris. He’d made the big time, legal counsel to the king!4 Over the next few years he successfully handled several negotiations for Philip. In 1299, he was rewarded by being promoted to the nobility. After that, he was entitled to call himself “knight.”5 This was another of the innovations of the king. The ennobling of nonmilitary men led to what was called the “noblesse de robe.” These nobles were dependent upon the king who created them for their livelihood rather than having inherited lands to fall back on.
Nogaret seems to have been Philip’s main counselor during the king’s battle with Pope Boniface. The reasons behind the dispute are rooted in the ongoing struggle between the rulers of Europe and the church for power. On one side, the popes felt that kings should not be allowed to appoint their friends and family to bishoprics and other high church offices. On the other side, the kings wanted the clergy of the realm to be subject to the same laws as everyone else.
Throughout the Middle Ages, clerics were tried in a church court. If they were judged guilty, they might either be sentenced to hard time in a strict monastery or, if the crime warranted it, turned over to the state for execution.6
In Philip’s confrontation with the pope, Nogaret was apparently the guiding hand and also the one who physically led the attack on the pope in his retreat at Anagni in 1303.
Two precedents were set in this episode. The first was that Philip established, in his own mind at least, that if the pope was corrupt, then it was up to secular powers to overthrow him. No one could be above God’s law.7 The second was the use of the media to convict Boniface in public opinion even before he was arrested by Philip’s men.
In this, Nogaret was a master. According to Nogaret’s defense of the king’s actions, Boniface was a heretic, idolater, murderer, and sodomite. He also practiced usury, bribed his way into his position, and made trouble wherever he went.8 These charges were never proved but they convinced many. They also gave Guillaume de Nogaret good material for his diatribe against the Templars four years later.
After the death of the pope, Nogaret wrote to the College of Cardinals justifying his actions. “If some antichrist were to invade the Holy See, we must oppose him; there is no insult to the Church in such opposition. . . . If, in the cause of right, violence is committed, we are not responsible.”9
Whether Nogaret was responsible for the violence at Anagni or not, he was seen as being the ringleader. The next pope, Benedict XI, had witnessed the attack on Boniface. When, as part of a deal, he issued absolution for the deed to King Philip and other instigators, Nogaret was not among them. Actually, he was at the top of the naughty list, the head of the “sons of perdition, of the first-born of Satan.”10Benedict was about to convene a tribunal to excommunicate Nogaret and twelve others when he suddenly died on July 7, 1304.
It was popularly believed that Nogaret had arranged to have him poisoned. There was no proof of this, either, but that didn’t stop the rumors.
He had also earned the enmity of a much better writer than he. In the Divine Comedy Dante compared Nogaret to Pontius Pilate.11
Nogaret not only instigated the arrest of the Templars, he also did his best to guide the interrogations. In 1309, when Jacques de Molay was being questioned for the third time, the inquisitors were interrupted by Nogaret, “who arrived unexpectedly.” He confronted the master and told him that the chronicles of the abbey of St. Denis said that at the time of Saladin, the Templars had paid homage to the sultan and that at that time, Saladin had said publicly that the Templars had done this because they “worked at the vice of sodomy and because of this they had lost all their faith and their law.”12
The twentieth-century editor of the deposition adds in a footnote, “This accusation . . . is not found in the text of the chronicles of St. Denis that we have.”13 One wonders how many of the inquisitors or the people of France who heard Nogaret’s accusation ever bothered to check the library of St. Denis to find out if it was true.
At the Council of Vienne, Nogaret was again eager to prove that all he and Philip had done was for the good of Christendom. To finance a projected crusade to regain the Holy Land, he suggested that they use “not only all the wealt
h of the Templars but that of the whole ecclesiastical Order: the clergy would, therefore, be left with only those funds necessary for its daily subsistence.”14
That must have gone over well with the cardinals and bishops.
After the Templars had been arrested, Nogaret should have felt he’d accomplished all his goals. However, one problem remained. He was still excommunicated. Nogaret was terrified that he would die still under sentence from the pope.
One reason that Nogaret fought so hard to have his excommunication lifted was to ensure that his family would be taken care of. He had a wife, Beatrix, and three children, Raymond, Guillaume, and Guillemette.15Beatrix seems to have come from a noble family of Languedoc so the new man, born into a family of walnut growers, had come far. But it would be for nothing if his property was confiscated at his death.
Nogaret went to the king’s brother, Charles de Valois, to put pressure on Clement V. He even wrote a bull for the pope to sign that explained how he had acted only for the good of the church.16 It was rumored that money changed hands. Finally in April 1311, Clement signed the decree stating that all those involved in the attack on Boniface VIII were reconciled with the church. A penance was assigned to Guillaume. He had to go on a pilgrimage to Compostela in Spain and then take a party of soldiers to fight in the Holy Land, an ironic twist.17
He never did either.
Guilluame de Nogaret died in November 1314. He was probably buried, as he had requested, at the monastery of the Dominicans near Nimes.
Outside of France, where he did his best to see that the history books would justify his actions, Nogaret was totally reviled. Dante had no doubt who was pulling the strings of King Philip. I don’t believe that Nogaret’s actions can be justified, but they deserve to be looked at objectively in the light of the times. There are those who might say that, by arresting a pope and by destroying the Templars, neither of whom were all that innocent, Nogaret also struck a blow at the unfair dominance of the papacy and those it protected.
The Real History Behind the Templars Page 29
