that into the accusations against individual Templars. The papal commission in Paris began its sessions on the 9th of August 1309; on the 12th, citations were issued to those Templars who “of their own free will” were prepared to come and defend the order. There was much confusion and delay, however, and the actual public trial' did not begin till the 11th of April 1310.[1] Many Templars, trusting in the assurance implied in their citation, had volunteered to defend the order and withdrew their previous confessions. They were soon undeceived; the commission, presided over by the garde des sceaux of the king, the archbishop of Narbonne, was packed with creatures of the crown. The evidence given in Paris for or against the order was, it was soon found, used against the individual Templars on their return to the provinces; the retractation of a confession, under the rules set up for the diocesan inquisition, was punished with death by fire; On Tuesday The trial. the 12th of May, fifty-four Templars who had retracted their confessions before the commission were burnt in Paris by order of the archbishop of Sens;[2] a few days later four were burnt at Senlis, and towards the end of May nine more, by order of the archbishop of Reims. Forty-six Templars now withdrew their defence, and the commissioners in Paris decided (30th May) to adjourn till November. The second examination lasted from the 17th of December 1310 to the 16th of May 1311. Meanwhile (c. April 1311) Clement and Philip had come to terms. The pope condemned the Templars. The council of Vienne met in October 1311. A discussion arose as to whether the Templars should be heard in their own defence. Clement, it is said, broke up the session to avoid compliance; and when seven Templars offered themselves as deputies for the defence he had them cast into prison. Towards the beginning of March Philip came to Vienne, and he was seated at the pope’s right hand when that pontiff delivered his sermon against the Templars (3rd April 1312), whose order had just been abolished, not at the general council, but in private consistory (22nd March). On 2nd May 1312 he published the bull Ad Providam, transferring the goods of the society, except for the kingdoms of Castile, Aragon, Portugal and Majorca, to the Knights of St John. The order was never formally pronounced guilty of the crimes laid to its charge; its abolition was distinctly, in the terms of Clement’s bull Consideranics Dudum, “non per modum definitive sentential, cum eam super hoc secundum inquisition es et process us super his habitos non possemus ferre de jure sed per viam provision is et ordination is apostolicae” (6th May 1312).
The final act of the stupendous tragedy came early in 1314. Jacques de Molay, the grand master, had not hitherto risen to the height of his great position; the fear of torture alone had been enough to make him confess, and this confession had been used to extract avowals from his brethren, subject as they were to unspeakable sufferings and accustomed to yield to the military chief. Humiliation on humiliation had been heaped on the wretched man, public recantations, reiterated confessions. Before the papal commission he had flamed into anger, protested, equivocated—only in the end to repeat his confession once more. The same had happened before the commission of cardinals at Chinon; the audience with the pope, which he demanded, he had never obtained. On the 6th of May 1312 Pope Clement issued his final decision as to the fate of the Templars in general; that of the five great offices of the order he reserved in his own hand: With this a silence falls over the history of the Templars;[3] the fate of the order had been decided, that of the individuals still under trial was of little interest to contemporary chroniclers. Then the veil is suddenly lifted. Jacques de Molay has found his wonted courage at last, and with him Gaufrid de Charney, the preceptor of Normandy; on the 14th of March 1314 they were brought out on to a scaffold erected in front of Notre Dame, there in the presence of the papal legates and of the people to repeat their confessions and to receive their sentence of perpetual imprisonment. Instead, they seized the opportunity to withdraw their confessions and to protest to the assembled thousands the innocence of the order. King Philip the Fair did not wait to consult the Church as to what he should do; he had them burnt “in the little island” of the Seine “between the Augustinians and the royal garden”; with them perished Guy (the Guido Delphini of the trials), the youthful son of the dauphin of Auvergne. After the deaths of the pope and king, which followed shortly, the people remembered that the grand master had summoned them with his dying breath before the judgment seat of God; but the sole recorded contemporary protest is that of the Augustiniains against the trespass committed by the royal officers on their land!
On the question of the guilt or innocence of the Templars in respect of the specific charges on which the order was condemned opinion has long been divided. Their innocence was maintained by the greatest of all their contemporaries, Dante,[4] and among others by the historian Villani and by the sainted Antoninus, archbishop of Padua. In more recent times a certain heat was introduced into the discussion of the question owing to its having been for centuries brought into the arena of party controversy, between Protestants and Catholics, Gallicans and Ultramontanes, Freemasons and the Church. Thus in 1654 Pierre Du Puy, librarian of the Bibliothèque Royale, published his work on the Templars to confute those who sought to establish their innocence in order to discredit a king of France. On the other hand, Nicolas Gurtler published his Historia Templariorum (Amsterdam, 1691, 2nd ed. 1703) to show, as a good Protestant, that the Templars had the usual vices of Roman Catholics, while, according to Loiseleur, the later editors of Du Puy (especially of the 1751 edition,[5] ostensibly printed at Brussels) were Freemasons who, under false names, garbled the old material and inserted new in the interests of the supposed origin of their own order in that of the Templars.[6] Several Roman Catholic champions of the order now entered the field, e.g. the Benedictine historian of Languedoc, Dom Dominique Joseph Vaissète, and notably the Premonstratensian canon R. P. M. Jeune, prior of Etival, who in 1789 published at Paris his Histoire critique et apologétique de l’ordre des chevaliers . . . dits Templiers, a valuable work directed specifically against Gurtler and Du Puy. In the 19th century a fresh impetus was given to the discussion by the publication in 1813 of Raynouard’s brilliant defence of the
- ↑ This was, of course, only one of some twenty-five separate commissions in different countries. It was, however, the most important and is the best known.
- ↑ Philippe de Marigny, brother of Enguerrand de Marigny, the king’s minister, had been appointed archbishop of Sens at Phiiip IV.’s instance in April, and was naturally full of zeal for the royal cause. The condemned Templars appealed to the papal commission, which was sympathetic, but replied that it had no authority to interfere with the archbishop’s ordinary jurisdiction. (Raynouard, p. 92.)
- ↑ Finke devotes an interesting chapter to tracing what became of the property of the order and of the individual Templars: The property was nominally handed over to the Hospitallers, but most of it actually remained in the hands of the sovereigns or their followers (Philip, e.g., claimed a vast sum for the expenses incurred in suppressing the order and torturing its members). In the Spanish peninsula the Temple castles and estates were in some cases handed over to other military orders; in Portugal to the new order of Christ, 1319; in Castile to those of Ucles and Calatrava; in Aragon one frontier castle with its domain, Montasia, was given to the knights of Calatrava; the rest—so far as they had not been annexed by the king and the ricos hombres—to the Hospitallers. As to the Templars: the were granted in most cases generous pensions; some continued to live in groups, though without organization, on their old property; others joined various orders; many married, on the plea that the suppression of the order had released them from their vows; while others, again, took service with the Moors in Africa. (Finke, i. cap. x.)
- ↑
Veggio il nuovo, Pilato si crudele,
Che cio nol sazia, ma, senza decreto,
Porta nel tempio le Cupide vele.—(Purg. xx. 92.) - ↑ Histoire de l'ordre militaire des templiers, &c. The titles of the various editions differ.
- ↑ There is, of course, no foundation whatever for this claim. It is examined and refuted, inter alios, by Wilcke, iii. 383 seq. A delightfully absurd attempt to assert the continuity of the modern Order of Knights Templars, which still has a considerable organization in the United States, with the suppressed order, is made by Jeremy L. Cross in The Templars’ Chart (New York, 1845); he actually gives a complete list of grand masters from Hugues de Payns to Sir Sidney Smith (1838), and asserts that “the Encampment of Baldwin which was established at Bristol by the Templars who returned with Richard I. from Palestine, still continues to hold its regular meetings, and is believed to have preserved the ancient costume and ceremonies of the order.”
