The Tragedy of the Templars (44 page)

Although the Church was granted this brief access to the leading Templars, Philip had still not transferred any Templars to Church control. In February 1308 Pope Clement suspended the Inquisitor William of Paris and the whole French Inquisition. In reply the king's officials tried to force the pope to reopen the trial by marshalling public and theological opinion in France. The chief agent in this was William of Nogaret, who instigated a campaign of libel, slander and physical intimidation against the pope; Clement was threatened with deposition, and menaces were directed against his family. But Clement stood his ground against the king, and to settle their differences they met in May and June at Poitiers. There they agreed that the pope would set up two kinds of inquiry: one by a papal commission to look into the Templars as an institution, the other consisting of a series of provincial councils, each supervised by the bishop of a diocese, to investigate the guilt or innocence of individual Templars. For his part Philip finally consented to release a number of Templars into the physical custody of the Church so that they could be interviewed directly by the pope.

Philip chose seventy-two Templars from among his prisoners in Paris and sent them, chained to one another and under a military escort, by wagon to Poitiers. Most of these were renegades or at best sergeants selected to make a poor impression on the pope, and with them he sent the Grand Master and four other high officers of the Templar order. But suddenly, when the convoy reached the royal castle of Chinon, the seventy-two were sent on to Poitiers; but the leaders were detained, the king claiming they were too ill to undertake the journey. This was an obvious lie, as Chinon lay not far from Poitiers. The king probably feared that if the pope interviewed the Templar leaders he would find them free of heresy and grant them absolution.

The pope ignored Philip's deceit over the Templar leaders held at Chinon. Instead of walking into a destructive confrontation with the king, Clement got on with examining those Templars who had been sent to him. From 28 June to 1 July 1308 the seventy-two Templars were heard at Poitiers by a special commission of cardinals and by the pope himself. On 2 July Clement granted absolution to the Templars, who had confessed and had asked for the forgiveness of the Church. Had the Templars been found guilty, the pope would never have forgiven them; but on the other hand, had they been innocent, he would have acquitted them without requiring any show of repentance.

The Templars were not heretics, Clement had decided. They attended Mass, they went to Holy Communion and confession, and they complied with their liturgical duties. But they also confessed to the pope that at their entrance ceremony they denied Christ and spat on the cross, although they insisted that they had never consented to this in their souls and as soon as possible had confessed to a priest and asked for absolution. The pope found these induction rituals too confused to be taken seriously; at one moment the novice spat on the cross, but then kissed it in adoration; and the novice denied the divinity of Christ saying, ‘You, who are God, I deny', which was no denial at all. If the Templars were heretics, they were the most inconsistent and unconvincing adherents any heresy could have. The Templars had fallen into peculiar ways and needed reform, but that, decided the pope, was all.

Clement's understanding of these strange Templar practices was that they were simply an entrance ritual, a custom that was common, with variations, in every military elite since early antiquity. This was a secret rite of passage after the formal ceremony, a compulsory test to which all new Templar brothers had to submit, a peculiar tradition (
modus ordinis nostri
) which demonstrated to the initiate the violence that the Templars were likely to suffer at the hands of their Muslim captors, and how they would be compelled to deny Christ and to spit on the cross. The aim of the test was to strengthen the souls of recruits, and it took the form of a very realistic performance. To this first part was added another test, that of kissing the master who had received him on the lower spine, on the navel and finally on the mouth; its purpose was to teach the novice that in all circumstances whatsoever he owed absolute obedience to his superiors. This seems to have been the original and true form of the ritual, but the local masters made changes, and in time this secret ritual became quite coarse and sometimes even violent. It could also seem preposterous; occasionally onlookers would ‘erupt in laughter and inform the new Templar that it was a practical joke'.
¹⁰

The explanation for the apparent worship of a head, the one mentioned in his confession by Hugh of Pairaud, and by others too, and which the inquisition called Baphomet, remains something of a mystery, and it is not clear if Clement was ever made aware of its meaning. Recent research by Byzantine scholars at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome has discovered a Templar rite of the Passion of Christ celebrated on the evening of Holy Thursday in commemoration of the Last Supper in which the brothers received communion only in the form of wine – that is, the blood of Christ, the drink of eternal life. The head, which was an unusual image of Christ, played a part in this mysterious cult of the sacred blood which was unknown to the Roman Catholic Church and seems to have been unique to the Templars, who may have adopted it from an ancient Christian ceremony they encountered in Jerusalem.

Having met the seventy-two Templars at Poitiers, Clement decided that they were not heretics but nor were they innocent, for they had actually denied the divinity of Christ even if it was all a pretence. Apostasy could be forgiven, but sinners had to repent and submit to harsh penance. But he could not do the same for the leaders without seeing them, and although he issued a formal summons for the appearance of Jacques de Molay and the other leading Templars, this was refused by the king with the repeated claim that they were ill.

In the summer of 1308 the pope absolved Jacques de Molay and the other Templar leaders held prisoner at Chinon. Seemingly no proper report of this hearing had survived, and until recently it was doubted that any such event had taken place – that is, until the discovery of the Chinon Parchment in the Vatican Secret Archives in 2001 and its publication by the Vatican in 2007.
¹¹
This showed unequivocally that, despite the chief Templars being held prisoner by the king, a hearing had somehow been arranged within the royal castle at Chinon.

This was set in motion on 14 August 1308, when three cardinals left the papal court at Poitiers for an unknown destination. They were Etienne of Suisy, Landolfo Brancacci and Bérenger Frédol, the last being one of the outstanding canon lawyers of his time and a nephew of the pope; secretly they formed a special apostolic commission of inquiry with Clement's full authority. Two or three days later the cardinals arrived at Chinon, where, in addition to the royal jailer, there were two important royal officials, identified in French records only by their initials, but who are thought to have been William of Nogaret and a lawyer who acted on his behalf called William of Plaisians.

If there were any hidden negotiations between the parties at Chinon, the fact is unknown. Instead, what followed seems to have taken place under the noses of the king's officials but without their knowledge. According to the Chinon Parchment, no royal officials attended the hearings that took place at Chinon from 17 to 20 August; they were held quickly and presumably in all secrecy to avoid the intervention of the royal officers. Apart from the three cardinals and the Templars they examined, the others at the hearing were a handful of witnesses, all clerks and humble people, none of them closely linked to King Philip. This at last was the papal trial of the Templar leaders; it was entirely a Church affair.

During the first three days of the trial the three cardinals examined Raimbald of Caron, the master of Cyprus; Geoffrey of Charney, preceptor of Normandy; Geoffrey of Gonneville, preceptor of Poitou and Aquitaine; and Hugh of Pairaud, the Visitor. On the final day, 20 August, they heard the testimony of the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay. The details varied between the testimonies, but taken all together they amounted to a restatement of the practices previously mentioned in testimony by the seventy-two Templars at Poitiers.

In essence Jacques de Molay repeated his confession of October 1307, including the assertion that he had not been tortured, although this contradicted his claim in December that year that he had been tortured. Possibly he and the other leaders had been advised that a freely given confession, one not made under duress, would be the easiest way out of their situation; and in any case it may be that what they confessed to was true.

The following is a rough translation from the Latin of Jacques de Molay's confession at Chinon:

When the cardinals reported back to the pope, Clement accepted the explanation of Jacques de 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 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'.

The same confessions used by William of Nogaret to condemn the Templars were now accepted in context by the pope, who, noting that they had asked for pardon, gave them absolution. ‘We hereby decree that they are absolved by the Church and may again receive Christian sacraments.' Of Jacques de Molay in particular the pope recorded that, after hearing what he had to say,

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.

I
N MARCH
1309
THE PAPACY
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. Its concern was with the state of the order, not individual Templars, and Jacques de Molay was invited to speak. Describing himself as ‘an impoverished knight who knew no Latin', he haltingly offered a defence. The Templars had the finest churches with the exception of cathedral churches, he said, and no one distributed more alms than the Templars. Most proudly he said that ‘he knew of no other order or other people more prepared to expose their bodies to death in defence of the Christian faith against its enemies, nor who had shed so much blood and were more feared by the enemies of the Catholic faith'. But Jacques de Molay's defence was slapped down by a member of the commission who remarked ‘that what he had said was no help for the salvation of souls'. As the Grand Master was offering this defence, the king's minister William of Nogaret strode in and told Jacques de Molay that in the chronicles at Saint-Denis it was written that Saladin, ‘on hearing of the heavy defeat the Templars had just suffered, had publicly declared that the said Templars had suffered the said defeat because they were labouring under the vice of sodomy and had violated their religion and their statutes'.
¹
The chronicles said no such thing; in maintaining his slander campaign against the Templars, William of Nogaret had made it up.

Jacques de Molay was not alone in defending the order. By early May 1310 nearly six hundred Templars had spoken in support of their order before the papal commission, 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 that 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 practices 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 burned at the stake. Yet even after these burnings not all the remaining Templars were cowed, nor was their morale completely crushed, although this intimidation by burning did have its effect, and many Templars fell silent or returned to their confessions.