Chapter 5
In This Chapter
● Reaching the pinnacle: Templar perks make dangerous enemies
● Getting comfy with heretics
● Laying waste the dream: The arrests, the Inquisition, and the trial by fire
Face it: Of the 20th-century dictators, Stalin had better posters, but Hitler had snappier uniforms. What Mussolini had no one has figured out yet. All of them, at some point in their rise to power, orchestrated lightening coups, against either one-time friends who were now enemies, or outspoken political opponents.
The most famous was known as the Night of the Long Knives. In the early 1930s, Ernst Rohm had been Adolf Hitler’s closest friend. Rohm was the brutal overlord of a three-million-strong band of street thugs called the SA, or the “Brown Shirts.” With his help, Hitler rose from the leader of the Munich street rabble to the newly elected chancellor of Germany. But by then, Rohm was an unpleasant reminder to Hitler of his rude beginnings, and Rohm’s openly flamboyant homosexuality, orgies included, was becoming an embarrassment to the Nazi Party. Rohm had to go.
So, on Saturday, June 30, 1934, after weeks of planning, Hitler had the entire leadership of the SA rounded up — hundreds of them. They were put to death with pitiless efficiency. Rohm was shot in his cell by the SS as he shouted out one last “Heil Hitler!” Hitler had met the dawn tense and uncertain, but he ended the night with a Cheshire grin.
Although many news stories at that time, in the western press, of course, called these ruthless blitzkrieg tactics “unprecedented,” they were wrong. There was nothing new about them at all. More than six centuries before, at dawn on October 13, 1307, Phillip IV of France, tense and uncertain, was waiting for word from his hordes of officers all over France who were, at that moment, arresting every Knight Templar they could lay their hands on. This chapter covers the events of that day, from the jealousy and intrigue that led to it, to the tragedy that followed.
The Seeds of the Fall in the Nature of the Order
Any powerful outfit, from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to the Walt Disney Company, has to stay on its toes insofar as enemies are concerned. Money and power will always draw plots and takeover attempts like a magnet. But the Knights Templar made for a particularly tempting target, for a variety of reasons related to the politics of the Middle Ages and the nature of the powers they had been given.
Though the White Knights, as they were sometimes called, had been born as warrior-monks, the fact was that as time passed, they changed into something entirely different. These Poor Knights were running an enormous and incredibly wealthy organization, one that walked with popes and bargained with kings. Later on in this chapter, in the “Money: The root of all evil” section, we provide a more detailed tally of Templar businesses and assets. For the time being, suffice it to say that, although the Templar mission never changed, the Templar character, as an organization, had changed drastically since its inception in 1119.
Yes, the Templars were still the protectors of the shrines of the Holy Land.
But that purpose, as well as the expense of that purpose, had caused an evolution in the Order as a whole. By the 13th century, it was difficult for many to remember what their original purpose had been, particularly in Europe, where the problems of holding on to the Latin States weren’t exactly staring people in the face day to day. It didn’t occur to most Europeans who were dealing with the Templars as bankers or brokers that they were piling up money here to send over there. Micromanaging their literally thousands of preceptories across Europe was often the face of the Order to the people of the West.
Consequently, when the last of the Latin States of the Holy Land folded, in 1291, there were definitely some hard feelings in Europe. Wasn’t saving the Holy Land the job of the Templars? Isn’t that what they collected all that land and loot for? It didn’t seem to matter that the Templars fought on, virtually alone, battling literally to the last man in their fortresses across the Levant. And it didn’t seem to matter that there was little interest on the part of the kings and prelates of Europe in putting together another Crusade to hang on to the Christian lands. As far as the kings of Europe were concerned, seven trips to the well were more than enough, thank you very much.
Of course, as warriors, the courage of the Templars was never questioned. Templar knights were not allowed to retire from the battlefield, even for the tactical purpose of regrouping forces, unless they were facing at least a 3-to-1 superiority of enemy strength. When captured, they were beheaded by the hundreds before denying their faith. Yes, they were fierce, daring, and courageous fighters. But the truth is, they weren’t always tactical geniuses. And when an angry West went looking for a scapegoat, these tactical errors, as well as errors in judgment or diplomacy, were blown far out of proportion by the enemies of the Order in the Christian community.
A little independence goes a long way
Today, nothing is comparable to the power that the Catholic Church had in the Middle Ages, before the Protestant Reformation. Even the Internal Revenue Service can’t burn you at the stake, although they’d love to if they could.
Up until the Protestant Reformation in the 15th and 16th centuries, popes had weapons that could checkmate any king. They could excommunicate anyone, high or low, and had on many occasions excommunicated kings when they got too far out of line. Popes also had the power to put an entire nation under a papal interdict, meaning no marriages, no baptisms, no funerals, and a very frightened public. Some of the most powerful kings in history bent their knee to the pope, quite literally.
To the unending annoyance of their enemies, the Templars had nothing to fear from any of these papal powers. They were, in effect, the pope’s personal God Squad, and if the pope was the most powerful figure in medieval Europe, then it naturally follows that the Templars were the most powerful organization in Europe. Even after their most humiliating defeats and losses, Pope Innocent III issued several new edicts concerning Templar powers and privileges, going so far as to reissue the papal bull Omne datum optimum (meaning “every best gift”), which had been the most important one in establishing the Templars’ powers to begin with. It seemed a rather pointed thing to do; everyone in Europe and the Holy Land was being told that nothing had altered Templar status. One reason for this is crystal clear.
In the Latin States of the Holy Land, there may well have been four kings and four kingdoms, but the glue holding the whole thing together was the Templars. There were other military orders, the Hospitallers, and even lesser ones like the Teutonic Knights or the Hospital of St. Lazarus. But the Templars were by far the most important to the military stability of Palestine. Without them, the nobles of the Latin States, despite their blue blood, would have been royalty in name only — paper kings and queens, jostling for a place at the head of the line to get on the fastest ship for home.
Money: The root of all evil
One of the papal perks enjoyed by the Templars was the dispensation that allowed them to practice usury, the medieval word for lending money and making a profit off it. The practice had begun for the Templars in a rather sidewise fashion, because they were already charging a fee for accepting the deposits of pilgrims and then letting them make withdrawals on their long journey. They were also helping knights who wanted to go on Crusade by holding mortgages on their property for them. It was a very short step from there to lending money, and the pope allowed them to take it. For the rest of Christian Europe, usury was strictly forbidden by the Church — that’s why most of the moneylenders in Europe were Jews. They were barred from the guilds, and couldn’t work in most of the professions open to Christians. This became a great rationalization for the longstanding European habit of hating the Jews. But as time passed, some of that hatred, for the very self-same reason, fell on the Templars. It was inevitable. After all, does anybody love the bank that holds the mortgage on their house?
Money had never been any part of the equation for the founders of the Knights Templar. On the contrary, their first vow was one of poverty. Hugues de Payens, the Order’s founder, had eventually traveled to Europe and received grants of land and money to help fund his work in the Holy Land. That was how the early Templars viewed money — as a gift of the high and the mighty to pay for their holy mission. Beyond that, they had no part of it, any more than they had any part of drink, women, or luxury. But when their holy mission to protect pilgrims became wrapped up with protecting the pilgrims’ money, then money intruded itself upon their spiritual state. The act of transferring money safely from Europe to the East and back again turned the Order into something that Hugues de Payens could never have envisioned. They became a large, influential, multinational corporation.
Even defeats didn’t seem able to touch the Templars. Whenever things went wrong in the Holy Land, it meant another influx of Crusaders, more people who needed the banking services of the Poor Knights. But the Templars were coping with a wide variety of problems through the 13th century that affected this vital aspect of their Order, because the entire period was doing a monetary downhill slide. We won’t go into detail concerning multilateral trade, the doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism, or economic determinism. If you need help falling asleep, rent the film Meet Joe Black. But there is one key thought on economics to take with you from this discussion, and that’s the fact that history is, in general, inflationary.
Money is worth less and less as time passes. Of course, history is turned upside down by disasters like the 1929 stock-market crash, catastrophes that in ancient times were usually brought about by plague, invasion, and war. They drop the bottom out of everything, before the inflationary process starts all over again.
The 13th century was a time of creeping inflation. Money was getting tighter all the time. In order to pay the ever-increasing costs of building and maintaining the enormous commanderies on the frontiers in the East and in Spain, the Templars had to channel their inner Ebenezer Scrooge. Every penny possible had to be squeezed none too gently from every property and every potential donor. For that reason, it was a period in which the Knights Templar gained a reputation for both greed and stinginess, not to mention whorishness, because of their selling away many of the rights of a Templar to anyone who donated enough cash. This included the right to be buried in a Templar cemetery — now there’s a perk! Still, the entire rap was probably undeserved. It’s simply that the average person of that time only saw the money-managing and donation-hunting side of the Order. They really could have no conception of the financial burdens under which the Templars were trying to operate.
Huge tracts of land
Most of the feudal holdings of the Knights Templar in Europe were in France, followed in number by Italy, England, and the northern, Catholic half of Spain. The Templars had a little property in Germany, but the far greater amount of land grants there were given over to the Teutonic Knights.
Without a doubt, their most pervasive presence, as well as their largest number of holdings, was in France, which was home to the largest percentage of the knights. The Paris commandery, with its beautiful tower (see Figure 5-1) and its rich vaults, was definitely their number-one priority. The Templars had nothing less than a city within a city, surrounded by crenellated defensive walls that were 26 feet high. It’s heartbreaking that not a stone of it remains standing today. Because the Templar keep was used during the French Revolution to imprison King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette before their execution, Napoleon had the tower torn down, to insure that it didn’t become some sort of shrine to the persona non grata royal family. Most other Templar buildings suffered the same fate through the centuries. But in its prime, the Templar commandery at Paris was the principal bank, and in time it became the de facto exchequer, for the French crown.
Figure 5-1: The Paris Temple, dominated by its keep, or central tower.
Cracks in the Armor
The botched Second Crusade of 1145 is important to the story of the Templars. After all, nobody wants to take credit for a military debacle. In fact, it’s far more typical of human nature to start shopping around for someone else to blame, particularly where the delicate vanity of generals who are also kings is concerned. There were four general/kings on this trip, the principal ones being Louis VII of France and Conrad III, emperor of Germany. The kings of Poland and Bohemia came along just for the change of scenery. None of these men wanted to hear about the fact that they knew nothing of the terrain, and nothing of the language, customs, or tactics of their Turkish enemies, not to mention their glut of stupidity about their own Byzantine allies. When those allies, as well as the kings and nobles of the Latin States, tried to advise these arrogant gentlemen, they got a sour look and a deaf ear for their trouble. So, when the inevitable happened, and Louis and Conrad suffered major, humiliating defeats at the hands of the Seljuq Turks, everyone started sniffing around for a scapegoat. After all, these were mighty Christian kings, and they no doubt had God on their side. There had to be another reason for this inexplicable failure.
Getting a little too chummy with the heretics
For many, the “other reason” became the cozy relationship of the military orders, principally the Templars, with the “godless infidels” of the East. Both Louis and Conrad had been shocked by the level of placid acceptance with which the kings of the Latin States treated their mostly Islamic subjects. The Frankish knights had grown very comfortable with the diversity of the natives, and so long as the peace was kept and the taxes paid (taxes that had not changed since the overlords were Muslims rather than Christians), they were content to let each man find God in his own way. The major “heretical”
Christian sects were left alone as well.
All the Templar Grand Masters in the East had an officer in their entourage who was a secretary for Saracen affairs, a position of great importance. Some Templar knights began to study Arabic. Many of the one-time mosques that had been captured by Christian knights and turned into churches retained an area where Muslims could continue to come to pray (see Chapter 2). To the Templars, this seemed to be merely a respectful accommodation; to the newly arrived Europeans headed for the Second Crusade, it was appalling. In his book The Knights Templar, Sean Martin relates the story of an ambassador from the Turks who came to Jerusalem to meet with the Templars. The Templars turned over to the ambassador a small chapel in the Al-Aqsa Mosque in which to pray. When a fresh-faced Frankish knight, shocked at this apostasy, tried to stop the ambassador from praying, he was literally dragged away by two exasperated Templars.
From a modern perspective, the actions of these Templar knights seem civilized, polite, and tolerant. To medieval European eyes, it seemed that the Knights Templar had been blown off course, turned from their unblemished Christian faith because of their tolerance for the faith of others. Stories like this one made their way across Europe with the knights returning from the Second Crusade — or at least with those knights who had survived the military incompetence of their leaders. Slowly but inexorably, a general suspicion about the Templars and the purity of their faith was growing in certain influential minds in the West, particularly in France.
The Second Crusade limped to a conclusion with an attempt to take the city of Damascus that was an abysmal failure, and a tactical disgrace. Because it was a concerted effort, with forces of Louis, Conrad, and the king of Jerusalem, it does seem a bit of a stretch to blame the Templars for it. But that blame game was becoming part and parcel of an interesting cultural shift that was occurring among the Frankish Christian nobles and military orders who were running the show in Outremer.
As with colonial Americans, who started out as British as Earl Grey tea, and ended up founding their own nation, the Frankish knights of Outremer were beginning to merge, slowly but steadily, with the Islamic culture around them.
Socializing with Saracens
French historians sometimes call this new culture of Outremer (French for “land across the sea”) la nation Franco-Syrienne, and this is as good a name as any. The Frankish knights and nobles who lived in Outremer employed Syrian physicians, cooks, artisans, and servants. When not on the battlefield, they began to wear the comfortable Eastern dress more suited to the climate, and their diet, heavy on the readily-available fruits of the area, became Syrianized, as well. Their homes were designed by Eastern architects, or by Franks who were influenced by them, and featured fountains and mosaic tile floors, high ceilings, open spaces, and glass windows to let in the Mediterranean sunshine.
Even more astonishing to the Westerners of this period, the Franks began to bathe regularly, the full soap-and-water treatment. They indulged as well in other Eastern customs, from dancing girls at dinner parties to professional mourners at funerals, which was a staple of Eastern culture. And, of course, the shared enthusiasm of Islamic and Frankish nobility for hunting, hawking, and horses made for lasting friendships between men of both cultures. It’s little wonder then that, in several later instances, Muslim and Frankish warlords banded together to fight off a common enemy, such as the Mongols.
Intermarriage
There is also no question that, greater than all the influences we list was the intermarriage that was becoming ever more common as time passed. Of course, any woman who married a Christian knight had to become a Christian herself. In those days, in both camps, a woman would always adopt the religion of her husband. But the cultural influence was still there. And as far as many fanatical Catholics were concerned, because it was extremely rare for a Latin knight to “turn Turk” and become a Muslim, the far more dangerous influence on the citizens of Outremer came from the heretical Christians that were dominant in that part of the world, various Gnostic and nonconformist sects that were viewed through the same lens of suspicion as the Muslims by the West. These, too, would have a mind-expanding effect on the citizens of Outremer.
So, where were the Templars in this stewpot of cultural diversity? Why they were out front leading the way, of course, as they had been nearly from the beginning. Needless to say, the chaste Templars couldn’t intermarry with the Syrians, but in every other respect, they were creating a new brand of Templar knight, the Eastern Templar knight, who’d served in the Holy Land his whole life through and knew it like a well-loved book.
Templar bashing: The latest game from the Holy Land
Meanwhile, tales of Templar greed and pride had begun to circulate in the highly-charged atmosphere of the late 12th century. The Second Crusade had been a disaster; the Third Crusade had yet to arrive. Although a heartbreaking number of the histories and chronicles of this period have been lost, there is some surviving Templar griping that we can read today, from what would seem at first an unlikely source.
In 1170, William of Tyre, archdeacon of Jerusalem, complained that, though the Order had begun well enough, as holy men devoted to duty, they were soon, in his words, “neglecting humility.” William was Franco-Syrian through and through, born in the Holy Land, and a very influential figure at the court in Jerusalem. In his chronicle of Outremer, he groused that the Templars had “denied obedience to the Patriarch of Jerusalem,” to whom William claimed they owed their very existence (they owed their existence to the king, not the patriarch), and that, as their possessions began to multiply, their power got out of hand. He crabbed that their “wealth is equal to the treasures of kings.”
Though he didn’t go into detail, he accused them of having gained that wealth, at least in part, by “taking tithes from God’s churches,” as if they’d literally picked his pocket. He summed up that they had “in general made themselves exceedingly troublesome.”
This sort of bellyaching was an ominous sign of things to come, and it highlights a difficult burden that came with the Templars’ high position: Being warriors as well as churchmen, and part of an influential group of men, they made enemies in political, military, and ecclesiastical circles.
Speaking of enemies, in this same period, throughout the last half of the 12th century, relations between Amalric I, the King of Jerusalem, and the Knights Templar were particularly lousy. The Templars had at one time played a major role in most Christian military actions, but they felt that Amalric was using them unwisely. During this period, they began to pull back from full cooperation, at least with the king of Jerusalem. It was not without cause.
Amalric had concocted an especially harebrained scheme to capture Egypt, thinking political chaos there would make his plan a cakewalk. Not only did his own mission fail miserably, but while he was away with the army, his biggest enemy, Nur al-Din, the Sultan of Halab, took the golden opportunity to attack the Christian city of Antioch. Bohemond, prince of Antioch, was in charge of the few forces left. He chose, like Amalric, to ignore the Templars’ sound advice to play a waiting game, and his ill-considered attack cost a substantial number of Templar knights their lives. A year later, Amalric, in a fit of childish rage over the Templar surrender of a very small cave/fort in the Transjordan to the overwhelming forces of Nur al-Din, had the 12 Templars who gave him the news hanged like common criminals.
By that time, it looked like Templar relations with their own king were worse than with the Muslims. So, in 1168, when Amalric was putting together a much larger force to attempt to take Egypt again, the Templars refused point blank to have any part of it.
Playing politics
This brand of independence, an attitude that openly said, “We know the situation, and we’re not going to blindly follow this idiot down the road to ruin,” was bad enough when dealing with the Frankish nobles of Outremer. It was even worse in coping with what the Templars had increasingly begun to perceive as “outsiders.”
Realizing the absolute necessity of keeping an alliance from forming between Damascus and Cairo was something the Templars thoroughly understood. They were extremely adept at the power politics of the various Muslim states. This was often decried by Crusaders fresh off the boat as “arrogance,” which fueled tensions in Europe between knights and Templars. One story about this tension will do, but remember, this isn’t one of a dozen stories — it’s the same story, that could be told a dozen times.
In 1239, as a ten-year treaty for Jerusalem was about to run out, Pope Gregory IX started beating the bushes among the rulers of Europe for another Crusade. They didn’t exactly rush forward to take the Cross. In fact, the only poor dope he got to help out this time was a moderately important French noble named Theobald, Count of Champagne.
It wasn’t exactly the 25,000-strong army of the First Crusade. It was the sort of small force that would straggle in throughout the life of the Latin States. The count had dropped everything, filled with Christian zeal, to defend the Holy Land from the infidel, with his life, if necessary. That was what he’d expected, in the simplistic view of Europeans — a straightforward conflict of good versus bad, black versus white, Christian versus Muslim. What he got instead was a cold, hard dose of the Byzantine politics of the Near East.
He was, like Louis and Conrad in the Second Crusade, simply incapable of grasping the complex strategies, the realpolitik, of the situation. Encouraged by the Templars, the lords of Outremer had made an alliance with the Muslim ruler of Damascus; they would help him in his war against the Egyptians, and in return he would see to it that certain lands that had been taken from the Franks after the Battle of Hattin, including the Templar fortress of Safad, would be returned to them. The Templars needed the return of Safad if they were to secure Outremer. Theobald couldn’t understand that the Templars were trying to take the most advantage they could from the unraveling situation in the Islamic world. The brother of Saladin, the powerful Egyptian warlord al-Kamil, had just died, and the entire Muslim world was in a mad scramble to grab the biggest chunk from out of the power vacuum. Unfortunately, one of Theobald’s knights, Henry, the Count of Bar, decided he’d play a little power politics with the big boys. Thinking to take advantage of the death of al-Kamil, he decided to attack Egypt himself. The Templars warned him that the forces were far too strong for him to take on. He blithely ignored them, and his entire force was wiped out at Gaza. Of course, the blame in Europe fell, not on the count for his idiocy, but on the military orders, particularly the Templars, who’d failed to support him.
A new and deadly enemy: Saladin
There were others who understood the necessity of alliance between Damascus and Cairo. A new enemy would route the Christians, create a Damascus/Baghdad and Cairo axis, and stand as the greatest adversary the Frankish army ever faced. His name was Salah ad-Din Yusuf Ibn Ayyub (meaning Joseph, Son of Job, Righteous of the Faith) known to us as Saladin (see Figure 5-2).
Figure 5-2: Salah ad-Din Yusuf Ibn Ayyub, better known in the West as Saladin.
The author of The New Concise History of the Crusades, Professor Thomas F. Madden, brings a fresh perspective to many of our society’s myths about the Crusades. He believes that, Western politicians and teachers notwithstanding, the Crusades were a very small blip on the very large radar screen of Arabic and Turkish history. In other words, they hadn’t been stewing about it, working themselves up into a lather over the course of the last 700 years. That attitude began in the late 19th century, when the Western colonial powers brought their Crusader legends with them to the East. After all, the history of Islam is incredibly complex, jammed with wars, treaties, and personalities in conflict. The Crusades were truly a minor footnote, a brief period of Christian colonization that left behind nothing in the way of cultural change when the Franks were finally driven out of the region. The first Arabic-language history of the Crusades wasn’t even published until 1899.
In that same year, when Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II was on a tour of the Middle East, he sought out the tomb of Saladin. What he found shocked him: a neglected, crumbling, and forgotten wooden tomb tucked away in a small outbuilding of a garden beside the Great Mosque of Damascus. The Kaiser had been raised on romantic tales like Sir Walter Scott’s The Talisman, just like most of the young men of his age, and he positively worshipped the figure of Saladin. He paid for a new mausoleum from his own pocket, a beautiful marble tomb in the medieval style with scrollwork that has a Byzantine flourish. On a bronze wreath he inscribed, “From one great emperor to another.” Other sites in Damascus seem to back up the assertion of a Saladin long forgotten by his own people. The most beautiful monument to Saladin in Damascus is a magnificent statue of him on horseback, literally riding his horse over a helplessly and comically splayed-on-the-ground King Guy and Reginald de Chatillon. It wasn’t built until 1992.
Saladin was a popular figure, not in Eastern, but in Western history. He has occupied that place of honor in the West for some time, from the songs of the Provencal bards to the 19th-century Sir Walter Scott bestsellers that paint a noble and sympathetic portrait of both Islam and Saladin, while Richard the Lionheart comes off as something of a brute, albeit an admirable brute. But the most interesting aspect of this argument is the reason for Saladin’s virtual eradication from Arabic histories — the uncomfortable fact that he was a Kurd.
His father, the head of a respected Kurdish family, had been in the service of the warlord Zengi, as well as his uncle, Shirkuh, who was in charge of Zengi’s forces that were conquering Fatimid Egypt. Though Saladin had a deeply spiritual bent of mind, after he was made a soldier, his rise to power was meteoric and brilliant, his skill on the battlefield soon catapulting him to a position second only to his uncle’s. Shirkuh had two principle opponents in the struggle for Egypt, one being Amalric, the king of Jerusalem, the other the vizier and commander for the Fatamid Shiite caliph of Cairo, named Shawar. After the death of his uncle, Saladin ordered the assassination of Shawar, and by the age of 31 found himself the Sultan of Egypt. Technically, he was still a vassal of Nur al-Din. But with his overlord’s death in 1174, Saladin came into his own, leading a small and disciplined force into Syria to take Nur al-Din’s place, while retaining his hold on Egypt. In one of the greatest feats of his reign, he announced to the Shiite Egyptians that from that point on, they would be Sunni Muslims. Shiites were and are incredibly devout Muslims, but over the course of the next few years, a slow and steady course, Saladin replaced their faith with his own, and managed to keep his head in the process, principally through the force of his personality. He was particularly slick with the ideological use of jihad — the first Islamic leader to turn this aspect of the faith into a unifying core of fanatical anti-Christian belief that overcame sectarianism. Saladin was everything and more that every Crusader had ever dreaded in his worst nightmares — a tactical genius who now had both the Shiite and the Sunni nations under his banner, and the Crusader States by the throat.
Understanding Islamic sects
The Templars had a thorough understanding of the various Islamic sects; unfortunately, the kings of Europe arriving for the Crusade didn't want to hear about it. In fairness, the reason for the major split between Sunnis and Shiites is confusing to non-Muslims. It wasn't because they didn't see Mohammed or the Koran the same way. Even today, apart from slight differences in their customs, styles of prayer, and so on, the essentials of their beliefs are the same.
The split started because Mohammed died in 632 without a son or a designated heir. Shiite, in Arabic, means "party of Ali," highlighting that this was, in its beginnings, a political issue. Ali was a cousin of the Prophet's, an orphan who was raised in Mohammed's home, and eventually married Mohammed's daughter Fatima. Shiites cite numerous incidents in the Hadith (Koran commentary with sayings and stories of Mohammed) that they say make it clear that Mohammed wanted Ali to follow him as caliph (the spiritual and temporal leader of the faithful).
But the Sunnis felt that Abu Bakr, the powerful uncle of Mohammed as well as his second convert, was far more suited to rule. The Bakr side won. Essentially, this is the argument behind the split, though other differences have grown up over the centuries. Sunnis thought the best man should rule, while Shiites fervently believed, and still believe, that only the holy bloodline of Mohammed has the right to rule over Islam. Sunnis offered up a concession to Shiite feelings and, in both sects, the descendants of Mohammed are known respectfully as either sayyids or sharifs. But it's interesting to think that, if seventh-century Muslims had just been a little less chauvinistic in their thinking, then the rightful heir would have been Fatima, Mohammed's daughter, and none of this mess would ever have happened.
After the death of Abu Bakr, Fatima's husband Ali became caliph, the fourth caliph of Islam. But when he was murdered in 661 by a rival who took the caliphate for himself, a fervent party of followers rallied to Ali's son, Husayn. Husayn and his small army were annihilated by their opposition at the Battle of Karbala in 680. Karbala, in Iraq, is a place of pilgrimage for Shiites, and one of their holiest times of worship is called Ashura, which commemorates Husayn's death. Before the establishment of the month-long daily fast of Ramadan, all Muslims observed the fast of Ashura. Most of the holy days of the Islamic calendar are shared by both sects, but Ashura has become a special time for Shiites, usually lasting ten days. Two aspects of this fast drive Sunnis nuts:
● During Ashura, Shiites defy Mohammed's law against any graven or painted image, and they include representations of the Battle of Karbala in their worship (not to mention the fact that Shiites often display images of Ali in their mosques and homes, even on bumper stickers or hanging from rearview mirrors).
● Shiites observe Ashura with extreme emotionalism. First-aid stations have to stand by, because Muslim men, apart from pulling at their hair and beating on their breasts in grief, also go so far as to practice ritual selfabuse, cutting at themselves with razors, whipping themselves, and so on.
The great majority of Muslims are Sunnis; it's sometimes called Orthodox Islam. Shiites are considered the breakaway sect. In very general terms, Sunnis look on Shiites as pain-in-the-neck heretics, and Shiites look on Sunnis as oppressors. Shiites have picked up dualist, Gnostic, and mystical elements over the years, particularly in small and even more mystical sects such as the Isma'ilis, the Sufis, and the Druze, that sprung from the Shiite movement. (For an explanation of Gnosticism, see Chapter 7.) Islam has had its own "Spanish Inquisitions" over the centuries, and Shiites have often been murderously suppressed. In Sunni-dominated countries, Shiites pay an additional (and substantial) tax as part of their dhimmitude, their defiant status as "heretics."
Islam has no priesthood as the West understands the concept, but the imams are the closest thing to it. Another major difference between the sects is in the power and position of the imams. For Sunnis, the imam is the respected and wise prayer leader. For Shiites, he is infallible, without sin, all-knowing in the hidden meanings of the Koran, and with a mystical connection to God. Shiites also have a "messiah" belief, that one day an imam above all others will come, the Mahdi who will bring the world justice and salvation.
If you talk to Sunni Muslims, particularly of the middle and upper classes, you will often get a glimpse of their attitude about the mysticism and emotionalism of Shiites. It's the attitude a Madison Avenue-type New Yorker may have for a fundamentalist Christian in the Smoky Mountains who wrestles snakes or speaks in tongues. It's not fair, of course, but there it is — one more cultural difference that seems to be growing worse in the Middle East. Even Americans often equate Shiite with terrorist. Although it's true that both the radical Hezbollah and Hamas movements are made up of Shiites, Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, for example, are Sunni. Radical Islamic fundamentalism doesn't glue itself only to one sect.
The majority of stable governments in the Middle East are Sunni — Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Kuwait, for example. All these nations have a Sunni majority in their population, as high as 95 percent. All are fearful of fundamentalists in their midst who want to bring down the Sunni regime. For example, President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt is virtually at war with Shiite fundamentalists, a silent but very bloody war, as he tries to stabilize the country and save its $7-billion-a-year tourist industry. All these Sunni presidents and kings fear and distrust the single nation in the region that is controlled by radical Shiites — Iran. Iran is the only Shiite nation in the region and has been since the 16th century. The U.S. State Department will tell you, in its diplomatic nomenclature, that Iran is a far more "destabilizing influence" than Iraq. In other words, Iran has been exporting radicalism and violence for years. Their president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (elected in 2005), routinely delivers speeches laced with antiSemitism, anti-Americanism, and open calls to violence.
Confused Westerners now find themselves trying to sort out the mess. For many years, Iraq had been a country with a large Shiite population ruled over by a Sunni government. After the fall of Iraq's Sunni dictator, Saddam Hussein, in 2003, the Shiite majority came to power, and an all-out civil war quickly broke out. When the new Iraqi government hanged Saddam Hussein on December 30, 2006, the first day of the Eid ul-Adha, a holy day of sacrifice and atonement, much was made of this in the Western press, with assertions that President George W. Bush had chosen the date as a deliberate slight to
Muslims. But in Iraq, everyone knew who was jabbing whom. The date was chosen by the new Shiite-dominated government because their celebration of Eid ul-Adha on their calendar did not begin until the day after. This was only one of a string of dismal and violent tit-for-tat incidents that have grown ever more bloody, and it's doubtful that the strife in Iraq between the two sects will end anytime soon. (For a detailed but clear and easy-to-read outline of the various sects of Islam and their history, see Islam For Dummies by Malcolm Clark [Wiley].)
Saladin was a man of a deep and thoughtful nature, pious and clean living, generous to friends, ruthless to enemies, courteous and kind to the helpless, and without doubt the most brilliant military tactician of the 12th century. For this reason alone, his showdown with Richard the Lionheart and the crusader kings of the West was the stuff of legend. It remains so to the present day.
Despite being Islamic, the Kurds have their own language, their own dress, and their own culture. For centuries, the Turks, Iranians, and Iraqis (both Sunni and Shiite Muslims) have oppressed the Kurds and pressured them to assimilate. Because of this unceasing, centuries-old hatred of the Kurdish people, it does seem to make sense that Saladin would be tossed into the ashcan of Islamic history, until he was rediscovered, along with the Crusades, by early-20th-century Arabs eager to use the Crusades as a metaphor for all “Western imperialism.”
The Treacherous Kingdom of Jerusalem
The East, both the Christian Byzantine East and the Islamic East (all of which would one day become the Ottoman Empire), has always had a reputation for assassination politics. It seems to have been an unfortunate backlash to this process of Syrianizing the Latin States that the Franks picked up on this as well, and pretty quickly, too.
Ethics by Borgia, politics by Shakespeare
By the last half of the 12th century, the Kingdom of Jerusalem was a land of epic bloodletting over politics, with noble families warring one another. In fact, it’s amazing that Shakespeare passed it by. If he’d lived another ten years, he could’ve gotten a half-dozen more plays out of it. Talk about Lady
Macbeth! There were at least three of them to every noble family of Outremer. It was a “pellet with the poison’s in the vessel with the pestle” kind of place, a land of secret decoder rings, bedroom alliances, and political rivals lured to a bloody death down a darkened alleyway.
It’s strange to think that all this drama was founded after the First Crusade by Godfrey de Boullion, a man so pure he was absolutely no fun to party with. If Godfrey could have seen what he’d spawned out of a simple desire to bring a little order to the shattered city of Jerusalem, he’d probably have packed up bag and baggage for home. His progeny, great-grandnieces and great-grandnephews, were all stock characters from some dark melodrama.
There was the pathetic Baldwin IV, the Leper King, who died at the age of 24, and spent the last ten years of his life surrounded by a pack of wolves waiting for him to drop. Desperate for some family feeling, he asked his mother, the Dowager Queen Agnes, to return to the court. After giving her husband Amalric three children, she’d been annulled by him for a variety of reasons, including her legendary inability to keep her knees together. She took her lovers by the gaggle, and when she was through with them she maneuvered them into positions of power to back up her party at court. Should anyone cross one of her former lovers, he was usually poisoned, or mysteriously slipped a knife between the ribs on a deserted back street.
Agnes’s daughter Sibylla learned her own double-dealing at mama’s knee. She’d already been widowed and was engaged to another lord, when she fell in lust with the handsomest and most worthless man at court, a petty noble named Guy of Lusignan. After her brother Baldwin’s death, she plotted a palace coup against the regent, Raymond of Tripoli, who had a party of his own, naturally, and bargained her way to the throne with the skill of a Borgia pope. In a slippery scheme worthy of a carnival midway bunko artist, she soothed the ruffled feathers of the nobles at court, who had no objection to her as queen, so long as her husband was not king — they had no intention of bending a knee to a boob whose greatest assets were his blonde hair and square chin. At their insistence, Sibylla divorced her husband, asking for a single concession in return: that she could choose her next husband herself. Her request was granted, grudgingly. Imagine their delight on the day of her coronation, when these duped nobles were presented with her choice for a husband. Surprise! It was her ex-husband, Guy of Lusignan! She had, indeed, drunk duplicity in her mother’s milk.
Historians sometimes go looking for a good guy in all this sewer diplomacy. Raymond of Tripoli often gets the nod. (In the film Kingdom of Heaven, Jeremy Irons plays a thinly veiled Raymond.) Yet, despite his wisdom and his courage, Raymond in all likelihood had his chief rival for the position of regent assassinated. It was the spirit of the age. These guys were not above using the notorious Assassins, a sect of murderous Islamic mystics, to do their dirty work for them. Raymond’s own father of the same name was taken out by the Assassins in 1150.
As far as the military orders were concerned, there were only two things that were always a certainty:
● That they would be backing a political party
● That whoever the Templars were backing, the Hospitallers would be on the other side
But the biggest mistake the Templars made was in getting involved with any of this treachery and gutter depravity to begin with. Of course, that ideal makes no concession to human nature. The Frankish nobles of Jerusalem were a little island unto themselves, months away from the capitals of Europe. Like people on a desert island after a shipwreck, they’re going to get involved with one another. Besides, being Grand Master of the Templars was a position of great temporal as well as spiritual power. It was inevitable that that power wasn’t going to lie about unused.
Unfortunately for the Templars, their greatest defeat, from which they never really recovered, was brought about, at least in part, by their danse macabre with the slimy politics of the noble families of Outremer.
The horns of Hattin
The Battle of Hattin was fought on July 4, 1187. It was a blow to Templar pride from which they would never recover, the catalyst to a chain of events that would lose the city of Jerusalem for the Christians. And every step along the way was led by Gerard de Ridefort, Templar Grand Master.
In the preceding section, we say that historians tend to look for “good guy, bad guy” labels for figures of history. If there was a bad guy in all this, unfortunately, it was Gerard de Ridefort, Grand Master of the Knights Templar. With all the past Grand Masters who had spoken Arabic, been smooth negotiators, and been expert diplomats, it’s sad to think that he was in charge at the most crucial moment of Templar history. He was a furious and impatient warrior, hawkish, arrogant, with a personal hatred for Raymond of Tripoli that blinded him to what was best for the Frankish army. Politically, he was backing King Guy and Queen Sibylla. And unfortunately, not only did he have great influence on the young King Guy, but de Ridefort’s closest ally was a murderous and dishonorable liar named Reynald of Chatillon.
Reynald of Chatillon (confusingly referred to as Reginald in some books) was something of a maniac, and he screwed up everything he touched. He was no fit company for the king or de Ridefort. On a lighter note, he’d been imprisoned for ransom once by the Muslims, a common practice with a captured lord. After 16 years, no one liked him well enough to put together the ransom money, and so the exasperated Muslims let him go. Afterward, he ran around from then until his death, starting wars everywhere he went, breaking treaties, killing Muslim pilgrims, pillaging caravans that were traveling under a pass from both Saladin and the king of Jerusalem, and in general single-handedly making an all-out war with Saladin inevitable.
It was a war that Saladin was more than ready to fight. He had the power of both Damascus and Cairo behind him, an Islamic first, and he possessed an army of about 25,000. In this summer of 1187, he was moving south, victory after victory under his belt, obviously headed for Jerusalem. On the Sea of Galilee, he took the city of Tiberius, the property of Raymond of Tripoli, who at that time was in Acre at a council of war. Word arrived in Acre that Raymond’s wife, Eschiva, was leading the defense of the city with the small force of knights at her disposal. Even so, Raymond pleaded for caution. The king ignored him, taking instead the advice of his friend Gerard de Ridefort, who said they should march at once.
King Guy, he of the Brad Pitt looks, had had several golden opportunities in the previous two months to take on Saladin when their numbers were roughly equal, and he’d blown them all, dancing around the enemy instead of engaging them. He was already getting a reputation as a coward, which was totally unfounded. He wasn’t a coward; he was an incompetent. He had a tendency to believe with absolute faith in the last person who’d talked to him. The man had a hard time deciding what to have for breakfast, much less when and where to engage an enemy as dangerous as Saladin.
But now, on the long, dry march to meet Saladin and relieve the Countess Eschiva, decisiveness was an absolute necessity. It was Raymond himself, once again, who pleaded with King Guy to be cautious, to find water and supplies before attacking. His wife could handle the Saracens for the time being, of that he was confident. But the temperamental Gerard de Ridefort argued relentlessly that the time was now and the place Tiberius. Raymond pleaded at least for a night attack, when the broiling July heat would not have the opportunity to steam-cook his knights. This advice, too, was ignored.
Throughout their march, each day they were harassed by the skillful archers of Saladin. They’d been out of water for two days when they met the forces of Saladin at Hattin, a small village near a dormant volcano, whose sunken center left two peaks on either side like the horns on a bull. They had the high ground, and the road to Tiberius was before them, as was the glistening and potable water of the Sea of Galilee. But standing between the two was the army of Saladin, blocking the way to all that blue, clear water. It was nearing dark and the Franks camped, while Saladin’s men began a slow process of ringing them in, starting a series of brushfires below that drifted up to choke the Franks, making them even more miserable. By dawn, when the charge began, it’s said that many small groups of knights were bearing down on the Muslims like madmen, headed not for the enemy, but for the water.
When the battle was done, and the Christian defeat humiliatingly complete, Saladin ordered every Templar and Hospitaller knight to be killed, forcing
Gerard de Ridefort to watch. It’s also said that he had a party of Sufis with him, peace-loving Islamic mystics who’d never handled a sword. Saladin ordered them to kill the knights, and the Sufis, too frightened to defy him, did their best, hacking at the knights who were on their knees on the ground, taking six and seven agonizing blows to behead them.
Saladin captured both Guy of Lusignan and, to his delight, Reynald of Chatillon. They were both brought into Saladin’s tent by their guards. There is an old Islamic custom for the conquered: If the lord intends to let you live, he will offer food and drink; if not, he will kill you. Saladin smoothly offered King Guy a drink of water. When Guy politely turned to give a drink to Reynald, Saladin demurred, saying succinctly, “I did not offer the water to him.” And then he beheaded Reynald himself, with his razor-sharp scimitar, to the horror of the king. Saladin then turned, still completely calm, and told King Guy to finish his water.
In October of 1187, a victorious and virtually unopposed Saladin took the city of Jerusalem. Europe was shocked and appalled by the loss of the holy city, although you may wonder why they should have been. Surely, enough deputations from the Latin States pleading for help in the previous three decades had warned them of this dire possibility. But it did galvanize them enough to send along the Third Crusade, which was the last Crusade in many respects — the last to have any success, as well as the last to involve all of Europe. Saladin and Richard the Lionheart would spend those years of 1188 to 1192 in a sort of lovers’ waltz, neither gaining any permanent tactical advantage. When Richard finally left, Outremer was relatively secure. But Jerusalem remained Saladin’s possession, with treaty rights to pilgrimage given to Christians. Oddly enough, neither man lived long once the Crusade was over. It was as if, without one another, they’d lost their identity and their will to survive. War was just no fun anymore.
The final curtain
Outremer settled down after the treaty with Saladin, but there would only be a few decades of relative peace. By the middle of the 13th century, matters were going from bad to worse; by the end of the century, everything was crumbling around them. That absolute necessity of keeping the northeast and the southwest from attacking together was never a possibility again. Turks and Mongols poured in from above, ruthless Mamluk warriors from below, using Outremer for a battleground. The Turks overran Jerusalem in 1244, and proceeded to decimate any Christian relics they could find. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was burned to the ground, one more time.
By 1268, Antioch fell, and the Templars reluctantly withdrew from the Amanus March, a large area to the north of the city that they’d held since the 1130s. Prince Edward of England arrived and brokered a ten-year truce with the Mamluks, but the attempts to put together a Crusade during this breathing space were a mess, mostly due to — you guessed it — more dynastic squabbling over the throne of Jerusalem. By the early 1280s, there was civil war in Tripoli as well as the kingdom of Jerusalem, which looked a lot like fighting over the last martini at the bar while the Titanic is going down. An embattled Tripoli fell to the Mamluks in 1289.
The pope scraped together a “Crusader” force that arrived in 1290; it was a collection of thieves, brigands, and opportunists, of the sort that the Templars had been formed to protect pilgrims from to begin with. Ten minutes after they got off the boats at Acre, they caused a bloody street riot over a dispute with some Muslim traders, which gave the Mamluks an excuse to put the city to siege. Since the loss of Jerusalem, Acre was the heart of the Templar universe. The Templar Grand Master, Guillaume de Beaujeu, fought with skill and suicidal courage for two months, until the Mamluks broke through a wall on May 18. De Beaujeu ran toward the fighting, not wearing his armor, and was killed in the melee. In the harbor, ships were already carrying refugees to the Templar holdings on the island of Cyprus. The Mamluks offered the marshal of the Templars a truce to evacuate his forces, but it was only a ruse. They fell on the Templars who were attempting to leave and slaughtered them. Late on the night of May 25, the Templar commander of Acre sailed for Cyprus with the Templar treasury. The rest fought on, to the last man.
Soon, it would seem that the Templars were going through Grand Masters as if they were Kleenex. After the death of de Perigord in Gaza and de Beaujeu at Acre, the commander of Acre who’d rescued the treasure, Theobald Gaudin, was elected Grand Master by the Templars remaining in their Levantine stronghold at Sidon. They had hoped for fresh reinforcements from Cyprus, but instead they were told to evacuate the entire coast. By then it was a game of dominoes; Sidon fell, then Haifa, then Tortosa, and finally the legendarily impregnable Atlit, which fell on August 14. The new Grand Master, Theobald Gaudin, did not survive another year.
The last Crusader
At a chapter meeting on Cyprus, the new Templar headquarters, Jacques de Molay (see Figure 5-3), at the age of 50, was elected Grand Master of the Knights Templar. This may seem the very definition of living in a fool’s paradise, a small group of tattered survivors electing a new Grand Master, after having lost the entirety of the Holy Land. But keep in mind two things:
Hope, for them, was anything but dead. They’d suffered their worst defeat, but there’s no doubt that visions of another massive Crusade danced in their heads as the next obvious objective.
With all the controversy and all the infighting, the Templar knights were still enormously respected and trusted figures. And they were still men who lived an incredibly joyless existence, stripped of all life’s pleasures, in order to serve God.
Figure 5-3: Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar.
Dark Clouds Converge over France
After the evacuation of the last of the Templars to Cyprus, Jacques de Molay took a ship for France, to meet with the pope and various nobles, in an attempt to put together another Crusade. His first meeting would be with Clement V, the new pope, and he had high hopes for success, especially because they were countrymen. He couldn’t, at this point, have known of the dark forces that were assembling against him behind the scenes.
King Phillip “The Fair”
King Phillip IV of France was one of the most remarkable figures of the period, a king so forward-looking and modernistic that he seemed to have been born out of his time and place. Chicago in the 1930s should have been his time and place. The only difference between this guy and Al Capone was the cheap pinstriped suit.
Most French kings had nicknames, and some don’t translate very well. Everything sounds better in French (always remember that pate de fois gras in English means “smashed liver fat”), so maybe they sound odder to our hopelessly Anglo-Saxon ears — Chlodion the Hairy, Childeric the Lazy, Pepin the Short, Charles the Simple (not to be confused with Charles the Fat or Charles the Mad). On and on it goes, from the Bald to the Stammerer to the Do-Nothing. So you’d figure Phillip the Fair must have been a pretty good guy. However, and you can take this to the bank, Phillip the Fair was nicknamed for his good looks, not his ethics.
Kingship was the ultimate power trip in the Middle Ages, and all kings have had their little eccentricities. Phillip the Fair’s eccentricity — in fact, his obsession — was money. In the course of his reign, one lousy decision after another was brought about by his mania for gold, and his belief that enough of it would make of him a great king, and of France a great nation. Phillip’s monumental avarice knew no bounds of decency or fear of consequence.
It’s true that he left the nation larger than he found it, but this wasn’t through the usual route of conquest; he bought new towns and counties (Quercy, Beaugency, and Montpellier). Like some sort of spend-happy trophy wife of an overage millionaire, he seemed to believe there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that money couldn’t buy. And, in a dark portent of things to come, what he couldn’t buy, like the town of Mortagne in Normandy, or Tournai in Flanders, he simply stole, after trumping up phony charges against the rightful owners. It was a tactic he would use again and again.
One of his most notorious schemes left the nation on very shaky economic ground. He cooked up a plot to recall all the coinage in France, melt it down, and then reissue it with the same printed value, skimming off a substantial portion of gold for himself. As any high school student of economics could have predicted, it caused a disastrous devaluation of the currency, which led to hunger, unemployment, and rioting in the streets. Which is not to say that he didn’t do it again, because he did.
Phillip entered into one nasty intrigue after another to get his hands on someone else’s money. An honest robber would have used a gun. Instead, Phillip hid behind the skirt of the power of his royal position to trump up charges against any group in the land that seemed to have a little bit of green. It began with the Lombards.
The Lombards were Italian bankers living in France to do business there. The word was that Phillip had borrowed from them, heavily. Suddenly, the wealthiest among them had various charges brought against them that had them expelled from France. The king, of course, kept their goods and money. Finally, tiring of shooting ducks one at a time, he had all the remaining Lombards expelled, and swooped in to gather up their money, too.
Next, in 1306, he turned his sights on France’s Jews, a group that few Christians were willing to risk their own lives to defend. Many of the Jewish moneylenders of France had done fairly well in the previous two centuries, and, of course, as with the Lombards, it was rumored that Phillip was personally in hock to them. Charging that they “dishonored Christian custom and behavior,” he expelled them from France, stealing their money and belongings, without letting a penny between the floorboards escape him.
Looking back, it seems obvious that Phillip’s actions against the Lombards and the Jews were practice runs, simply to see if he could pull it off. Because by that time, he clearly had another organization in his sights, one with fabled wealth. Enough gold, Phillip thought, to make even him feel secure.
Pope Clement V
Unfortunately for the Templars, a papal disaster was brewing, a political and religious mess that no one could ever have foreseen. It would be the final blow, the one from which they would not recover. Catholics often refer to it as the Babylonian Captivity. Nowadays, it’s usually called the Avignon Papacy or the Great Schism. Either way, an atom bomb by any other name still blows everything to bits.
Phillip and his personal henchman Guillaume de Nogaret had been in severe conflict with the then-reigning pope, Boniface VIII. The pope had declared that the king of France had no right to tax Church property, and the king had, obviously, disagreed. De Nogaret kidnapped an important French bishop, and the pope had come out swinging over it. He issued a papal bull proclaiming that kings must be subordinate to the Church, and that popes held ultimate authority over both spiritual and temporal matters on earth. To make sure they got the message, Boniface excommunicated Phillip and de Nogaret. Phillip answered his challenge by sending the brutal, devious, and bad-tempered de Nogaret at the head of an army to meet up with Italian allies and capture the pope. Boniface was, indeed, kidnapped and held for three days. After being beaten to a pulp, he was released; a month later, he died. The French king had proved just who was subordinate to whom, and he didn’t mind a little papal blood on his hands. Pope Boniface’s successor, Pope Benedict XI, lasted only a year in office, poisoned, it was said, by de Nogaret.
But there had been diplomatic difficulties to suffer for killing two popes. Consequently, King Phillip decided it would be easier to just buy one. He began procuring cardinals, pulling strings behind the scenes until the number of French cardinals in the Vatican’s College of Cardinals was equal to the Italian ones. They then obligingly elected his handpicked candidate, Bertrand de Goth, making him Pope Clement V. The city of Rome was in turmoil, and the safety of the Vatican was in question. So, it didn’t take much to convince the new French pope that his life would be in serious danger by living there. Clement obliged by staying in France, having his ceremony of investiture in Lyons. He remained in France, and in 1309 moved the Holy See to the city of Avignon (which was actually owned by the king of Sicily at the time), right on Phillip’s back doorstep, where he built a new papal palace.
Two miters aren't better than one
Phillip's tactic, buying a pope and then virtually holding him prisoner if he tried to get out of line, would cause the worst breakdown the Catholic Church ever endured. After Clement's death, seven popes would reign from Avignon, antipopes according to the College of Cardinals at Rome that was off electing its own popes the whole time. Confusion and chaos ran rampant in the Christian world, and nobody knew which pope to follow. The breach was healed at last, in 1417, but by that time, the papacy, and the Church as a whole, had suffered such a loss of legitimacy that it was a major factor in the success of the Protestant Reformation.
Clement had everything Phillip wanted in a pope: He was puny, weak, new in the job, and owed everything to his French king. Now was the time for the boldest move of Phillip’s reign — the arrest of the Knights Templar.
The setup
Phillip had to set the snare just right. His aim was to destroy the Templar Order and confiscate all their treasuries and properties in France, but he had to achieve it legally. The one surefire way was to accuse them of crimes so heinous that, if proved, no one would dare come to their rescue. It was no good to simply accuse the Grand Master or a handful of leaders. It had to be all of them, and he had to find a way to make the charges stick. And he had to be quick about it, because battle-hardened Templar knights were already returning to France, partly because of tensions on Cyprus between the Templars and the island’s king. Phillip needed no more knights to cope with.
King Phillip’s audacious plan was to arrest every Templar in France, charge them with heresy, and exact immediate confessions from them by torture, before the pope or anyone else could protest on their behalf. By making the charges religious in nature, Phillip would be seen not as an avaricious thief, but as a noble servant of God.
Jacques de Molay had been called out of Cyprus to Poitiers, France, for the purpose of discussing a new crusade to retake the Holy Land with the new pope. For almost two years, he shuttled back and forth between the pope and King Phillip, essentially stamping out various diplomatic fires, such as the proposal to merge all the military orders.
In June of 1307, de Molay rode into Paris at the head of a column of his knights, with a dozen horses laden with gold and silver, to begin the financing of the new Crusade. For the next several months, Phillip treated the aging Grand Master with interest and diplomacy, and de Molay believed he and the Order were at a new turning point. He didn’t know how right he was.
October 1307: An unlucky Friday the 13th
The end began at dawn on Friday, October 13, 1307. The sealed order to Phillip’s Seneschals and bailiffs had gone out a full month before. It was accompanied by a personal letter from the king, filled with lofty prose about how heartrending it was to be compelled to do his duty, while detailing frightening accusations against the Templars. The letter would have had an eye-popping effect on the king’s men, and their secrecy was undoubtedly assured. The sealed arrest order was not to be opened until the appointed day.
At this time, France was the most populous nation of Europe, even including Russia. And it was no tiny country either, no Luxembourg or Monaco. France took up more than 40,000 square miles, an enormous area to cover from the back of a horse. Yet Phillip IV managed to carry off his own Night of the Long Knives, in a country without telephones, trains, or automobiles. It was a stunning piece of work. Hundreds of the king’s men simultaneously opened letters all over the country ordering them to converge on every Templar castle, commandery, preceptory, farm, vineyard, or mill.
It was shockingly effective, instantly chopping off the head of the Order.
Phillip obviously had a hit list of the most important knights to nab. Accounts differ wildly, but the most respected ones agree that 625 members of the Order were arrested in the first wave (for more details of the numbers of Templars arrested, see Chapter 6). These included the Grand Master; the Visitor-General; the Preceptors of Normandy, Cyprus, and Aquitane; and the Templars’ Royal Treasurer.
The vast majority of the literally thousands of Templar properties in France were small manors and farms, tended by as few as two or three aging brethren.
Often, a small preceptory with a few serving brothers and the occasional aged knight was all there was to meet these armed bailiffs of the king. The average age of those arrested was 41. They were not, as a rule, the cream of the Order’s hardened fighting force, and many of those tending these unfortified properties were in their 60s and 70s.
The Templars were put into isolation, and immediately subjected to the gruesome tactics of medieval interrogation on the very first day of their arrest.
The technique of the strapaddo was common. It involved binding the victim’s wrists behind his back, passing the rope over a high beam, pulling him off of the ground, and suddenly dropping him, snapping his arms and dislocating his shoulders. Stretching the victim on the rack was another favored method.
Perhaps the most horrible was coating the victim’s feet in lard or oil, and then slowly roasting them over a flame. More than one knight was handed the tiny bones that fell from his burned feet by his gleeful torturers. Subjected to these agonies, the overwhelming majority of the knights confessed to every charge that was put to them.
The Accusations
The original charges against the arrested Templars were:
● Denying Christ, and spitting or urinating on the cross
● Denying the sacraments and having contempt for the Mass
● Worshiping idols, referred to in most cases as either a cat, or a head of various descriptions, during rituals that were kept secret
● Engaging in homosexual acts of kissing each other on the lips, navel, or the base of the spine while naked, and other forms of sodomy
● Acquiring property and profit by illegal or immoral means
By June of the next year, the Grand Inquisitor in Paris presented an expanded list of 127 accusations against the Order, but these original charges formed the essential core of Phillip’s flimsy case. (For more detail on the accusations, see Chapter 6.)
The Confessions
Phillip’s goal was to arrest all the Templars, subject them to torture immediately, and exact confessions from them on the very first day. He knew that the pope would be livid over his actions, and that Church officials would be wary of agreeing to the kinds of interrogations Phillip had in mind, so time was of the essence. He wanted to hand Clement V a stack of confessions so damning that the pope would lose his stomach for siding with the Order.
The pope reacted just as Phillip had planned. His outrage over the arrests turned to dread and resignation as the “evidence” was presented to him. Phillip leaned on Clement to issue papal arrest warrants all across Europe, which were largely ignored or skirted around by other monarchs. Very few show trials went on outside of France, and there were no cases (outside of the tortured knights in France) of Templars who admitted to the charges of heresy.
In an outburst of courage and remorse, most of the arrested Templars subsequently recanted their confessions, and proclaimed to Church officials that their statements were made under the pain of torture and threat of death. To intimidate the remaining Templars, Phillip ordered 54 of the knights to be burned at the stake in 1310, for the sin of recanting their confessions.
In 1312, Clement finally decided to end the situation at a council in Vienna. Just to make certain the decision went the way he intended, Phillip stationed his army on the outskirts of the city. The pliant pope officially dissolved the
Order, without formally condemning it. Clement was as mushy as usual. All Templar possessions apart from the cash were handed over to the Knights Hospitaller, and many Templars who freely confessed were set free and assigned to other Orders. Those who did not confess were sent to the stake. Phillip, ever the cheap gangster, soothed his loss of the Templars’ tangible assets by strong-arming a yearly fee from the Hospitallers, to defray his costs of prosecuting the Templars.
The End
By 1314, both the pope and public opinion had abandoned the Knights Templar. The four senior Templar officers in Phillip’s custody had been waiting in prison for seven grim years. All of them were old, the youngest being Geoffroy de Charney, who was almost 60. Jacques de Molay (see Figure 5-4) was in his 70s and had spent four years in solitary confinement. The four men were finally led onto a platform in front of Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral to hear the charges and make their public confessions. The charges were read, and two of the men accepted their fate of perpetual imprisonment and were led away.
Figure 5-4: Jacques de Molay and Geoffroy de Charney are burned at the stake on the tiny IIe-des-Juifs in Paris. King Phillip watched from his palace across the river.
But Jacques de Molay and his trusted follower Geoffroy de Charney did not follow suit. Weakened with age and imprisonment, de Molay shouted in a voice that startled the assembly that he and the Templars were innocent of all the charges. They were returned to their cells at once, while Phillip called together his council and quickly pronounced sentence, using the insane logic of the Inquisition; if they had recanted their confessions, then they were considered “relapsed heretics,” and the penalty was the stake.
Late that afternoon, de Molay and de Charney were led to the place of execution, which was a tiny isolated island adjacent to the Isle de la Cite, called the Ile-des-Juifs (Island of the Jews). The condemned men could see Notre Dame Cathedral in the east, but the site was not chosen for their view. Rather, it was chosen so that King Phillip could enjoy the entertainment without leaving his palace just across the River Seine.
Each man was stripped down to his shirt and tied to the stake. Jacques de Molay, with unbelievable courage, asked not only that he be turned to face the Cathedral, but that his hands be freed, so that he could die at prayer. His request was granted. The two men were roasted alive by the Inquisitional method that began with hot coals, so that their agony could be prolonged as much as possible. It was dusk on March 18, 1314.
When the Pont Neuf was built, the Ile de Juifs was joined to the rest of the Ile de la Cite, and today there are not one but two plaques near the bridge to commemorate this event. Jacques de Molay did not go to his God in silence. Instead, he died defiantly shouting his innocence and that of the Templars, calling on King Phillip and Pope Clement to meet him before the throne of God in one year’s time, where they would all be judged together. Creepily enough, both men, relatively young, would be dead within the year. One month after the death of de Molay, Pope Clement V, age 54, died, it was said, of cancer. Phillip the Fair, age 46, died in a hunting accident probably brought on by a stroke. He died on November 29, 1314, managing to get in just under the wire.
The gruesome death of Jacques de Molay is the last act of the Templar story. At least, the last act of the accepted, scholarly story of the Knights Templar that is told, in names and dates, between the covers of the history books. But in reality, his death is only the beginning. It’s the beginning of the myth of the Knights Templar, which is the maelstrom around which an endless stream of fact blended with speculation swirls, unabated.