Off the Road (20 page)

In retaliation for France’s new fiscal arrangements, the pope issued a dictum forbidding the taxation of the
clergy.

So the Beautiful closed
French borders to the exportation of gold bullion, cutting off Rome’s transalpine money supply. To rub it in, he arrested the bishop of Pamiers and
charged him with blasphemy, sorcery, and fornication.

So the pope issued a bull
condemning the arrest and revoked some of the Beautiful’s papal privileges.

The Beautiful burned his
copy of the bull in public.

The pope delivered a
stinging sermon filled with ominous warnings that the church was a creature
with one head, not a monster with two.

The Beautiful issued
charges, in absentia, against the pope himself, alleging blasphemy, sorcery,
and sodomy.

The pope excommunicated the
Beautiful. He compared the French to dogs and hinted that they lacked souls.
His nuncios leaked a rumor that the pontiff might well excommunicate the entire
country.

The peasants were stirred by
such a threat, and the Beautiful quickly grasped that revolution was a better
future to them than excommunication. So he acted fast, dispatching an army to
Anagni, where the pope was staying. He placed the eighty-six-year-old pontiff
under house arrest. The locals managed to save him, but a month later Boniface
passed away. Some allege he succumbed to shock at the outrage; other sources
say that he beat his head against a wall until he died.

After a pliable pope assumed
office, the Beautiful returned to his economic problems. His wife died in 1305,
and since he no longer would have to kiss a woman’s lips, he applied for
membership in the Knights Templar. The permanent knights of the Paris temple may have suspected that his intentions were less than pious and did something
almost unspeakable: they blackballed the king.

The following year, the
grand master of the Knights Templar, Jacques de Molay, returned to Europe from
the Mediterranean in a show of luxury. He was accompanied by sixty knights and
a baggage train of mules laden with gold and jewels. Around that time the
Beautiful was more desperate than ever to solve his messy state finances: he
tripled the price of everything in France overnight. Open rebellion broke out
in the streets. Rioters threatened to kill him. He fled to the Parisian temple
and begged the knights for protection. It was all too humiliating.

So in the fall of 1307, the
Beautiful arranged a state action impressive even in these days of data
highways and rapid deployment teams. On September 14 he mass-mailed a set of
sealed orders to every bailiff, seneschal, deputy, and officer in his kingdom.
The functionaries were forbidden under penalty of death to open the papers
before Thursday night, October 12.

The following Friday
morning, alert to their secret instructions, armies of officials slipped out of
their barracks. By sundown nearly all the Knights Templar throughout France were in jails. One estimate puts the arrests at two thousand, another as high as
five thousand. Only twenty escaped. The initial charges were vague, but they
didn’t sound good: “A bitter thing, a lamentable thing, a thing horrible to
think of and terrible to hear, a detestable crime, an execrable evil, an
abominable act, a repulsive disgrace, a thing almost inhuman, indeed alien to
all humanity, has, thanks to the reports of several trustworthy persons,
reached our ear, smiting us grievously and causing us to tremble with the
utmost horror.” What followed was so foul, according to folklore, that Templar
sympathizers cursed the day itself, condemning it as evil—Friday the thirteenth—whose
reputation never recovered.

Soon after the arrests, 127
charges were leveled against the Knights Templar. Nearly the entire indictment
was fiction, but a few of the charges were quite colorful, and word of them
spread quickly. During Templar initiation, the knights kissed each other on the
mouth, then the navel (some interpret this to be the penis), and finally (no
uncertainty here) the anus. Also during initiation, the novitiates had to spit
or piss on the cross. They had to profess worship to a bedizened idol named
Baphomet. Finally, they had to submit to homosexual orgies on demand. According
to the confession of Templar grand dignitary Hugues de Pairaud, “I would tell
[the novitiates] that if they felt any natural heat that pushed them toward incontinence,
they had permission to cool it with the other brothers.”

The confessions poured out
quickly and voluminously from all the Templars, even Grand Master Jacques de
Molay, because of an innovation in interrogation, the Inquisition. Already the
Dominicans in charge were known by a Latin pun on their cruelty:
Domini
canes,
the “dogs of God.” The rules and regulations governing the use of
torture were recent—Pope Urban IV wrote them in 1262—and they were full of
loopholes. Essentially anything was permissible, as long as it resulted in
neither “mutilation, incurable wounds, violent effusion of blood, nor death.”
The Beautiful tested the outer limits of these porous restrictions. His men
stuffed rags in the mouths of some men and poured water in their nostrils. They
threw knights in pits and left them to starve. They tied them to the rack. The
inquisitors hog-tied the defendants’ limbs and dragged them up and down hills.
They branded them with hot irons. Other knights were submitted to the
strappado, in which the victim had his hands tied behind his back and then
hanged by the wrists with weights attached to his feet or genitals. In other
jails a Templar’s feet were rubbed with animal fat and simply set on fire. At
one trial a knight arrived on stumps that concluded at his shins.

Not surprisingly, the
Templars confessed to everything: homosexuality, pissing on the cross, bum
kissing, idol worshiping. One Templar said that he would have “killed the Lord
if it were asked of him.” When asked why the Templars shrouded their initiation
ceremony in such secrecy, one knight replied sadly, because we “were stupid.”
Which is probably as close to the truth as any answer. The Templars were
largely illiterate. Grand Master Jacques de Molay could not read. The library at
the Commandery of Corbins was found to house sixteen books. The Templar James
of Garrigans stood out as a wonder because he could “write shaped letters well,
and illuminate with gold.”

The pope by this time,
Clement V, was a compromise candidate and therefore politically weak. He
realized he had been outmaneuvered by the Beautiful and sought to reclaim his
authority by ordering the Templars to stand trial.

Initially it looked good for
the pope and his frightened army. Jacques de Molay retracted his confession,
and 597 Templars soon followed his lead. The pope successfully delayed the
trial with papal paper pushing and blue-ribbon commissions until the spring of
1310. And the French king had no physical evidence for the trial.

But the Beautiful was not
one to lie back in defeat. He had insisted that smaller, minor trials of the
Templars be carried out at the local level throughout France. In Paris, one such proceeding was presided over by the brother of the king’s
finance minister and a royal toad. When events began to move in the pope’s
favor, this judge pronounced the Knights Templar before his court guilty and
sentenced them to die—that
afternoon.

By sundown and before anyone
could intervene, 54 men were tied to stakes and set on fire. Observers reported
that many of them shouted their innocence from the flames. Even the peasants in
the audience, not known for their queasiness at such events, grew sick and
scared. More sentences were hastily issued, and some 70 more were immolated. In
the frenzy, some dead Templars were exhumed, their rotting corpses strapped to
stakes and set on fire for good measure.

This tactic had an effect.
The Templars who had retracted their confessions now retracted their
retractions and begged for mercy. The pope was in a terrible bind and moved
swiftly to cut his losses. On March 20, 1312, he dissolved the Templars and
ordered their holdings to be dispersed.

There was still one loose
end for the Beautiful. Grand Master Jacques de Molay and one other high
official refused to confess. On March 18, 1314, the Beautiful set up two stakes
on a small island in the Seine River in Paris. Amid defiant cries of innocence,
the last of the surviving unpenitent Templars were burned.

The Beautiful’s ham-fisted
tactics didn’t serve him well for long. The media of the day turned against
him. In Dante’s
Divine Comedy,
the Beautiful is likened to “the second
Pilate” whose cruelty has grown “so insatiate that without decree / His greedy
sails upon the Temple intrude.” And among the peasants, stories began to be
heard. On the day of the arrests, it was said, de Molay had instructed his
nephew to take the “treasure” hidden in two hollow pillars that adorned the
choir stalls of the Paris temple and flee. And from the flames, de Molay
predicted that the menacing king and the spineless pope would soon join him in
death, which they did. At sundown, the day de Molay burned, a few men saw monks
swim out to the island, paw through the warm ashes, and dog-paddle back to
shore with something— some say bones—clenched in their teeth.

When I return to the church
rectory in Ponferrada—a catacomb of sleeping rooms—I sidle along the narrow
pilgrim’s corridor in search of a bed. The place is buzzing with secret
conversations to which I am not invited. The doors are built with thin light
plywood so that my inquiries begin with a sudden
whoosh.
A naked German
man is hopping about on one leg, confounded by the second hole in his
underpants. I apologize, and the door slam shuts—
blam
—like a rifle shot.

Whoosh:
Paolo looks up from a lumpy
mattress, disturbed from a nap.
Blam.

Whoosh:
Javier is explaining Marcus
Aurelius to another pilgrim.
Blam.

Whoosh.
Ah! The bathroom, and no
lock on the door. An unfamiliar old woman undressed from the waist up except
for a sturdy bra washes herself at the sink. A hurried apology.
Blam.

Whoosh.
Willem is writing his daily
missive beside an empty mattress.

Pilgrim decorum requires
that he offer me the available bed, which he does plaintively. I drop my bag.
Willem’s unease at my arrival causes him to overcompensate by spilling the
afternoon’s secret. Louis and some select pilgrims will be eating dinner
tonight at a special restaurant, a place recommended by one of Louis’s many
friends on the road.

The evening sky is a gray
cast-iron dome. Streaked clouds have backed off high enough to nuzzle among
blinking stars. A huge dump at the edge of town is the resting spot of hundreds
of storks. At the blast of a truck’s horn or a factory whistle, they panic into
swirls of flight and swoop over the town. En route to Louis’s restaurant, our
small band crosses the river beside the fortress. A pacified covey of storks
circles slowly before turning on bended wing back to the dump in search of
frogs. Willem notes the beauty of their bucket jaws dangling in silhouette. “A
hundred babies are being born tonight,” he says.

The restaurant is not fancy,
rather a workingman’s joint with huge platters of meat, a vegetable or two, and
cheap prices. The other diners are all farmers or laborers who have come here
for the same reason we have. They check us out as if we are new workers freshly
arrived in town. We wear their faces and the same worn-out togs. At times we
sit at the table in the same exhausted silence, elbows on the table, eyes
gazing nowhere, a single fork standing disconsolately in the air.

A bottle of wine or two and
our spirits are lubricated enough to resume conversation. Louis is in command.
He knows the people, the owner of the restaurant, and the lay of the land. By
the end of the evening, Louis is explaining the mystery of the Knights Templar
and the significance of the giant castle.

After the destruction of the
Templars, legend has it that they brought some great mystery, some object, to
be housed here in one of the most sacred and largest of their temples, Ponferrada.
Louis states that this particular fortress is unique in that it is the only one
that seems deliberately to resist the geometrically ordered plan of most
Templar constructions. Each turret, with its curving shape or peculiar corners,
perfectly mimics a constellation in the sky. Two rounded turrets connected by a
small stone bridge, still intact, is obviously the zodiacal sign of Gemini, the
twins. Louis says that on specific days of the year, the towers align with the
constellations in the sky. Some say that on those special nights when the
mystery of the castle on earth matches the mystery of the stars in heaven,
something is revealed.

One theory holds that
splendid shafts of light penetrate an oddly arranged set of windows in one of
the rooms, pointing to a sacred spot. There, perhaps, lies whatever it is that
the Tern-plars kept hidden. One source suggests that the mystery is the store
of knowledge the Templars inherited during their time in the Holy Land, the
esoteric secrets of the Pyramid builders. Others say that it is the Holy Grail
or the Ark of the Covenant. Even others declare that secreted away, somewhere
among the stones of Ponferrada, is the very knowledge learned by Adam when he
sank his teeth into the apple.

The wine has rendered us all
helpless in the wake of Louis’s stories. We are pilgrims, anxious to make sense
of the mystery of why we put ourselves on this road. A night of mysticism
dampens the earlier jokes and observations. The forks resume their abstracted
position, wagging in the air, pointing to the heavens. The walk back across the
bridge is made in silence. The center of town is occupied by the great
meandering castle, a field of darkness ringed by the pale streetlights of the
city.