Chapter 6
In This Chapter
● Figuring out King Phillip’s motives
● Examining the evidence against the Order
● Getting a grip on heresy
A quick glance through a TV Guide will prove that the public has gone absolutely bonkers over television shows that feature autopsies, and usually at dinnertime. Terminology that was once confined to homicide cops and medical examiners has now insinuated itself into the American idiom. We’d love to sound high-minded and say we’re above all this gory ambulance chasing, but we’ll break down and admit it: We have a favorite ourselves. Despite the heart-stopping dramatic tension and boffo special effects of a show like CSI: Miami, it’s the straightforward documentary style of A&E’s Cold Case Files that has captured our hearts — and not just for the comforting presence and soothing voice of producer Bill Kurtis. It’s because of the fascination of seeing real cops at work, patiently digging for evidence with a dogged determination to see justice done in a case that can sometimes be three or four decades old and has been long forgotten.
Maybe the passing of seven centuries is asking a bit much, but we’d love to turn these guys loose on the case of the Knights Templar. So much of the evidence used against the Order smelled like yesterday’s cod when it was delivered up; by now, it stinks to high heaven. Not to mention the tactics of the Inquisition, that were strutted through the courtroom disguised as evidence. Come now. There’s not much that people won’t admit when they’re being branded with hot pokers.
So, even though we haven’t got a badge, we’re going to take another look at the case against the Knights Templar and the evidence that sent them to exile, prison, or the stake. In this chapter, we let you know whether it would hold up under the cold and clinical examination of modern forensics.
The Chief Accuser
Nowadays, prosecutors like to hold a few charges back when dealing with a serial killer or a career criminal, so that, if one of the charges pending gets blown because of a Miranda glitch or a loss of evidence, one of the others can be pulled out of their pocket, thereby keeping the little creep in jail. King Phillip’s tactics with the Templars were just the opposite, and though they were despicable, they were also effective. The idea was to simply rain down the charges, like overheated basketball fans throwing hot dogs and beer cups at opposition players — so many charges that, as soon as one was addressed to the best of their ability, another was instantly poured on, before the accused could even catch his breath.
When an accuser has motives of his own, plus a hidden agenda, it makes him a legitimate target for a defense attorney. And doubtless King Phillip would have been fried to a golden brown by an attorney, if the Templars had been fortunate enough to have one. As it is, we have to question a dead witness. Difficult, but not impossible.
As we establish in Chapter 5, Phillip was a man who’d have sold his own mother, if he could have gotten a single golden livre out of it. After all, he’d already done this twice before. Both the Lombards (Italian bankers) and the Jews had been recently expelled from France after a series of charges were made against them, their property confiscated by the crown. Oddly enough, in an age that was rife with anti-Semitism, both the pope and the Templars protested his brutal treatment of the Jews, and Phillip proved with his contemptuous lack of a reply that he didn’t give a tinker’s dam. This is called modus operandi by lawyers — the man’s method of doing business. In other words, if a guy has already strangled two women with a pair of pantyhose, he makes for a great suspect when you find another woman strangled with panty hose. Score one for the defense.
Point two on the subject of modus operandi. In 1302, Phillip levied a tax on the Catholic clergy of one-half of their income. Many a king had attempted to tax the Church, but no one had ever tried to pull a heist like that. Enraged, Pope Boniface VIII issued a papal bull, Clericis laicos, proclaiming that no one had the right to tax the Church without the pope’s permission, and he promptly excommunicated Phillip. Again.
This set off an all-out war between Phillip and the papacy, one that the king would eventually win. With jaw-dropping gall, Phillip had Boniface kidnapped, pressured, then beaten to a pulp by his murderous henchman, Guillaume de Nogaret. The pope died soon after. Phillip never stopped telling himself that the man was a heretic, and that he’d done the world a favor. But the incident shows that Phillip didn’t care about the holiness of his adversary when he was on their scent. Score two.
In 1305, Phillip’s queen, Jeanne de Navarre, died under shady circumstances, and there were rumors that he’d had her killed. Only gossip, of course, but sometimes gossip is a valuable tool in assessing character, because it says what people are willing to believe about you, whether it’s true or not.
After Jeanne’s death, Phillip applied to the Templars to join the Order, now that he was a widower — a curious move, tactically speaking. He may have even meant it. He actually volunteered to abdicate in favor of his son, which would leave him free to take the title Bellator Rex (Warrior King) and to lead the Templars, combined with the other military orders, into one powerful order of the Knights of Jerusalem in retaking the holy city. (Like many, he held the military orders responsible for the loss of the Holy Land, and so the idea being noised around all over Europe of merging the Orders may well have made his mouth water, in terms of the temporal and spiritual power that he would achieve as its head.)
When de Molay turned him down, Phillip may have felt that the man was standing between him and his glorious Christian destiny. On the other hand, Phillip was a master of propaganda, and it’s entirely probable that he was simply making a big show of public piety. It would make it that much harder later for someone to say he had a personal ax to grind with the Templars. After all, he’d wanted to become one, right?
Incidentally, to add insult to injury, the Templars insisted that Phillip pay off his substantial loans to them before discussing it further. He refused, and the loans remained outstanding.
Philip had twice devalued the coinage of France by recalling it and recasting the money with less precious metal in it, skimming some off the top. He was unquestionably in need of serious influxes of cash. In 1306, he had been forced to hide in the Paris temple from angry mobs who were rioting over the new currency. Many people have speculated that it was at this key moment that Phillip saw the vast Templar treasury and determined to have it for his own. Though the story may well be a myth, it could just as easily be true, because of what happened next.
The Paris temple was one of the largest repositories of wealth in Europe; it included much of the treasury of the French government. Shortly after his visit to the vaults, Phillip had a new treasury building constructed where the Louvre stands today. He transferred half of the gold on deposit with the Templars into this new facility; the other half was left in the hands of the Templars, who continued to handle some of their old jobs, like paying the French military, until their arrest.
Finally, the tale has always been told that, shortly after the arrest of the Templars, their treasury was found to be empty. Some say the treasure was a myth and never really existed, though we find this one hard to believe. The vaults of the Paris commandery could hardly have been a myth. The other far more common assertion is that, tipped off, the Templars spirited the treasure away before Phillip could get his hands on it. There is certainly an emotional satisfaction in believing this theory, though it has holes in it you could drive a truck through. There’s little doubt that the not-inconsiderable wealth of the Templars in other commanderies was spirited away, but not Paris, right under the king’s nose. The one theory of the treasure that doesn’t seem to get much air time is that Phillip stole it, and then claimed that he’d found the vaults to be empty. It would have been far easier, because all he had to do was transport it a very short distance to his newly constructed vaults. There is evidence that Phillip almost immediately recalled the French coinage from the countryside and recast it once again, this time with the proper face-value weight of gold or silver. No one can say with certainty that an influx of precious metals for the new coinage had come from plundered Templar coffers — but it certainly came from somewhere.
Opening Move: An Illegal Arrest
By the very act of arresting the Templars, Phillip knew that what he was doing was illegal. Two centuries before, the pope had decreed that the Templars would enjoy immunity from arrest and prosecution in secular courts. Only ecclesiastical courts could try a Templar. It was Phillip’s unscrupulous plan that if he struck quickly enough, and then put them to the question at once (the euphemism of the day for torture), he could cop some quick confessions. That way, when the issue was raised that he’d had no right to arrest them in the first place, he could respond with a sheep-eyed look of innocence, “But they’re heretics and sodomites. They already admitted it. Are you trying to protect heretics and sodomites?” Yes, indeed, his trial runs had taught him every dirty trick in the book — including how to plot.
Phillip was a first-rate plotter. With probably between 1,500 and 2,000 knights across France to be arrested, all in one fell swoop (and a pretty spectacular one, as fell swoops go), literally hundreds of knights, sheriffs, bailiffs, messengers, and others needed to be informed in advance. Communication was slow, even on horseback, and France is one of the largest countries in Europe — nearly 500,000 square miles. It took days for orders from the king to be galloped from one end of the country to the other. Phillip’s sealed warrants of arrest were issued on September 14, 1307, a full month before the Templars were to be arrested, and it’s absurd to believe that no one peeked at them ahead of time. The Templars probably were not all taken without prior knowledge, which is an issue that becomes much more important in Chapter 7.
The numbers game: How many knights?
Despite legends and books claiming that as many as 20,000 Knights Templar were arrested on Friday, October 13, 1307, history doesn't back this up. Understand that knight meant a trained, armed warrior on horseback, but the vast majority of Templars were not knights.
In his History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages (1908), historian Henry Charles Lea suggested that there were 15,000 Templars in France, and it has long been surmised that there were approximately 9 or 10 serving brethren in the Order for every knight. If that's true, that means 1,500 may have been knights. This seems to be close to what Pope Clement V himself believed; he surmised that there were 2,000 of them. Using that same 1-to-10 ratio, we come up with 20,000 Templars of all descriptions. That is not an unlikely guess, because they had an estimated 9,000 properties in France of varying sizes, from castles and manor houses down to rickety shacks on lonely vineyards. And if this sounds like a piddling number of knights for Phillip to fear, there may be truth in that — though two things should be noted:
● The toughest of the fighting knights were usually where they were needed, in the Holy Land and Spain, but knights made homeless by the defeats in the Levant were beginning to trickle back into France.
● Even a unit of 300 skilled, well-armed mounted knights, riding their powerful and steel-plated war horses, was quite a formidable force during a charge. Picture 300 Sherman tanks pouring down the hill toward you.
At any rate, there are 138 surviving court documents for members of the Order who appeared before the Grand Inquisitor, and only 14 were actually knights. Of the 546 defendants who testified in 1310, only 18 of them were knights.
One figure that comes up again and again is that all but 24 knights were arrested, and 12 of those who eluded capture at first were caught later, apparently a quote from Mathew of Paris — but no one says 12 out of how many. So of course, many people assume that means 12 out of 20,000. But logic dictates that Phillip had a hit list of specific knights or important Templars he was targeting, which is where the reference to the missing 24 probably comes from. Yet there are no precise figures that have survived to say just how many Templars Phillip's men really did arrest. And there would have been no point to clogging up the country's dungeons with lowly serving brethren who had no knowledge of the Order's official activities.
Anne Gilmour, in Trials of the Templars in the Papal States and Abruzzi, claims that 1,151 Templars were brought to trial between 1307 and 1311. If that's true, then somewhere between 14,000 and 18,000 Templars escaped arrest, and there can be no doubt that those numbers included hundreds of knights. So, there may very well have been as many as 20,000 combined knights, Sergeants, Squires, Chaplains, and other various and assorted serving brethren in France, as well as lay brethren, who were pretty much paid employees. But there were very few actual knightswho would have been any sort of threat to Phillip.
Most important, it is simply a fable that every single Templar in France was arrested by Phillip.
The Charge Sheet
Because it was an absolute rain of accusations, from the bizarre to the dangerously plausible, it requires a good deal of elbow room to discuss them all. But one thing really needs to be said here and now about the mystery of the charges against the Templars: So many of the world’s foremost scholars, and some lesser lights of academia as well, all seem to tap in to their inner attorney on the subject of the charges against the Templars. It’s always phrased so carefully; the Templars were “in all likelihood innocent,” the charges were “most probably false,” and so on. It’s as if they’re all scared of a lawsuit, or afraid to make a definite statement, only to be proved a fool two years from now when someone digs up some grainy YouTube footage of an Aleister Crowley-style Templar orgy, complete with Satanic altar and ritualistic sex.
So, we’ll just say it right here and now. The charges were false.
However, one problem with examining the charges one at a time is that, as the defiant Templars sat in jail, having denied the initial confessions that were wrenched from them under torture, the accusations just kept growing, until they reached an astonishing list of 127 items. In this book, we concentrate on the generalities of the initial charges. Most of the additional ones were variations on the same theme. And besides, although they were more overblown, the charges were so similar to the ones Phillip had made against the Cathars, and the Jews, and the Lombards, and Pope Boniface, and assorted wealthy individuals, that by now everyone knew the lyrics by heart. They only got weirder as they rolled along.
Considering the whiter-than-white image of the Templars, even the initial charges against them were nothing if not bizarre. The phantasmagorical aspect of the accusations has always given the whole affair a Salem-witch-trial air. You know, crazy teenaged girls who were getting the first attention they’d ever had in their dreary lives, falling down and foaming at the mouth, claiming they’d seen the milkman’s wife make a cow fly. Here are the accusations. Make of them what you will. To us, they look an awful lot like a flying cow.
● Phillip claimed that incoming Templar brothers, during their ceremony of initiation, were ordered to deny Christ, as well as Mary and all the saints. He accused Templars of spitting on the cross or grinding a crucifix under their heel, as well as spitting or urinating on images of Christ or the cross.
● Phillip claimed that Knights Templar bestowed “obscene kisses” on their new brothers, or the new brothers on the higher officers, including kisses on the mouth, navel, and buttocks. He accused them of any and all acts of sodomy on one another.
● Phillip claimed that Templar priests denied a belief in the sacrament of the Mass (the central pillar of the Catholic faith) and that they did not bother to consecrate the host (the wafer that became the body of Christ during the Mass), making a mockery of it. He accused Templar Grand Masters of absolving brother knights of their sins when they had no authority to do so.
● Phillip claimed that the Order taught that the blessed sacraments were only a show, a screen to be viewed by outsiders, and that the true worship of the Templars was reserved for something called Baphomet. The supposed identity of Baphomet was all over the place, from a hanged cat to the mummified head of John the Baptist.
● Phillip accused Templars of holding all their chapter meetings and ceremonies at night, so that no one could see the secrets of their true fashion of worship.
● Phillip claimed that the Knights Templar had abused the trust put in them in regards to the issue of money, that they were not giving the amounts claimed to upkeep Templar charities, and that they used extortion and other illegal means in accumulating their vast wealth.
Initially, the first Templars arrested were brutally tortured, and the overwhelming majority of them confessed, including the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay. Soon after, these same men recanted their confessions, knowing that meant automatic conviction as lapsed heretics, and, undoubtedly, death.
By the twisted logic of the Inquisition, if a man confessed, even under torture, it was often felt that he was confronting his sin and was now ready for the repentance and punishment that would save his soul. The torture itself was not considered to be punishment — it was simply a tool that was used to mortify the flesh in order to free the soul from Satan’s grip. The punishment varied, and it wasn’t always death. But if a defendant confessed and then later recanted, he was considered a “relapsed heretic,” beyond the redemption of God, and he was going to go to the stake. Even considering some of the more horrific death sentences of the day — like being hanged, cut down while living, and then butchered and castrated, or being drawn and quartered, torn into four pieces by four horses — death by fire was probably the most agonizing, and the most terrifying, of them all. Yet, after the humiliation of quick confessions by men who were the most courageous on earth, they were willing to face this horror to take back their confessions.
To tell the truth, the whole thing has always struck both of us as some sort of deal gone sour, and the scholar Malcolm Barber puts forward this theory. It’s as if, in order to win, Phillip took a promise-them-anything-but-get-their-confessions route. They may well have been told while under torture that if they just confessed and then took their medicine (whatever concession to Phillip that may have been), they would be forgiven and the whole thing would soon be forgotten. The unity with which they all proclaimed their innocence, so soon after the unity of confessing their guilt, really does fit that scenario. They went along and then found out Phillip wouldn’t keep his end of the bargain, so they recanted, knowing that, in all probability, they were going to die anyway. It’s one interesting possibility. But it doesn’t address the issue of whether there was any truth to the charges to begin with.
So, beyond the obvious motive of greed, would Phillip have had any other motives for lying about the Templars?
Phillip IV was, if nothing else, puffed up with his own piety. For a man with so much innocent blood on his hands from the victims of his temper tantrums, he had a hugely inflated public image of saintliness. His letters to the pope and to the arresting Seneschals and bailiffs who actually hauled off the Templars were filled with the heart-rending, soul-searching exhortations of a tortured Christian conscience.
Like a pit bull with a law degree, nothing was as important to Phillip as being right. After his handpicked pope, Clement V, was installed on the throne of St. Peter, Phillip attempted to force the new, nervous pontiff to actually dig up the remains of his murdered enemy, Pope Boniface VIII, and try his bones posthumously for heresy. He was a man who loved to surround himself with a coven of lawyers, which in and of itself makes him easy to hate. He then took extraordinary pains to find legal and ecclesiastical loopholes that made his actions lawful in the eyes of both Church and State. Apart from that fact, there seems to be one more deeper, darker facet to his (and Nogaret’s) outward fanatical piety: It was probably more than a hypocritical camouflage to cloak their true feelings.
There’s a reason lie detectors aren’t allowed to be used as evidence in most court cases: It’s because some people can lie their heads off and still breeze through a lie-detector test. Some of them are just plain sociopaths, people who simply have no conscience. Others are a bit more complicated — they’re people who are narcissistic (madly in love with themselves) and pathological liars. The lie they tell initially, in order to make the path easier for themselves, gets told again and again, and in a very short time, they come to believe the lie themselves. Based on the testimony of the people who were there, this does seem to be the case with Phillip and his chief henchman. After all, Phillip’s grandfather was a bona fide saint of the Catholic Church, which is a heavy burden to live up to. It’s entirely probable that his elastic ethics, combined with rationalizations of elephantine proportions, were the tools that made it possible.
The caliber of the witnesses
The caliber of the witnesses was pretty lousy, actually. You could almost see the money changing hands outside the court. One of the most important witnesses was a professional blackmailer and murderer, who was procured as a witness by a professional paid informant. This little rat fink was named Arnolfo Deghi, and he had done dirty work for Guillaume de Nogaret before.
De Nogaret had risen to become a personal pet, negotiator, brown-noser, and finally chancellor. It was through Deghi that de Nogaret made contact with a renegade ex-Templar named Esquiu de Florian. Florian had once been the prior of the Templar preceptory in Montfaucon, but for reasons we don’t know, he was busted from his position. So, he decided to get even by lying in wait for his Grand Master and stabbing him to death. He then hit the road to avoid his death penalty, ending up in Spain, where he tried to extort money from the King of Aragon by offering information that would allow him to confiscate Templar property in Spain, of which Florian would get a share off the top. There were no buyers in Spain, but he found one back in France.
Phillip was in need of a witness who could say he’d actually been there during closed and secret Templar meetings. Florian would do very nicely. And so, de Nogaret set up an elaborate farce to protect his king. He had powerful friends in his home city of Toulouse, especially in the prison, which is hardly surprising. He arranged for Florian and Deghi to occupy the same cell on bogus charges. Then, Florian, in a fit of repentance, could tell Deghi his tall tales of idol worship, sodomy, and witchcraft (leaving out the murder he’d committed, of course). Deghi, good Christian that he was, could pass this information on to de Nogaret. That way, the pious Phillip could have this information fall into his lap completely by accident, shocking him dreadfully, and forcing him to do something about it. Brother. How underhanded can you get?
With witnesses like these, we think little more needs to be said about the character of the men testifying against the Templars.
Dangerous foreign entanglements
Before addressing the charges, we need to make one more point, to try to make sense how such witnesses could be believed. Apart from financial improprieties, there was one thing drawing all these various allegations together. If you haven’t yet read Chapter 5, understand that the Templars were coping with a very real vulnerability in their attempts to defend themselves. People generally believed that the Knights Templar, unlike the innocent boys back home, had been exposed to sinister, occult rituals and beliefs as they manned their posts at the far-flung edges of the Christian world. All the charges played to the superstitions of an incredibly provincial medieval public. The charges underscored an image of a Christian faith that had been tainted, compromised by its dangerous and incessant contact with the dark and evil forces of infidel or pagan sects.
This widespread suspicion was definitely an Achilles heel for the Knights Templar. They were as far-flung as geese, traveling through the wide and alien world, in an age when that sort of thing just wasn’t done. Not only did they travel to the very edges of the Christian world, they lived there, on and beyond the frontiers of Western civilization. And in the process of defending and extending those frontiers, they were both diplomats and traders, dealing with the peoples of those lands of such exotic “otherness” that seemed so dangerous to Christian eyes. They’d already been accused of being far too clubby with the Muslims in the East, of being influenced by the alluring Moorish culture in the south of Spain, and of being sympathetic to the Cathars in the south of France. All these — especially the suspicion of chumminess with Muslims, Jews, and infidels — made the Templars an easy target for accusations of heresy.
Blowing Away the Charges, One by One
In this section, we examine the principal charges against the Order and see if they hold water.
Desecrating the cross
One of the most common psychological outrages used by Muslims against Christians while fighting each other in the Holy Land was the desecration of the cross. When Muslim forces took a Christian stronghold, their first act was to tear down any church crosses and drag them behind their horses, with Muslims spitting on them as they passed. Desecration of the cross was also a tactic used against Christian prisoners. Muslim captors often ordered their Christian prisoners to spit or urinate on the cross in order to win mercy.
Some researchers, attempting to take both sides, have suggested that the Templars may have acted out these dramas as part of their ritual in an effort to fortify the Christian resolve of new knights who may have been forced to perform such acts, if they were captured by the Saracens. Such rituals would have had to have been held in secret, because the outside world would have completely misunderstood the purpose of them. If true, the Templars performing such acts as a dramatic lesson would have been free of any actual desecration, though as Christians, it would certainly have made them uncomfortable, which of course would have been the purpose. This theory doesn’t hold a great deal of water with us, but it’s certainly possible. Anybody who’s sat through any films made by the War Department for our boys overseas in the 1940s and 1950s has surely seen dumber things.
Ritual training aside, this accusation is nearly impossible to defend, because it suffers as much as the others from the problem of proving a negative — in a secret ceremony of initiation, with no witnesses, how do you prove that it didn’t happen? However, we can address this charge using a little common sense, combined with a knowledge of Templar history. For example, after the infamous defeat of the Franks at the Battle of Hattin, Saladin decreed that all the Templar knights were to be put to death at once; no ransom, no slave market, no mercy at all for these holy warriors that he considered his most dangerous enemy. For the Arabs, whose royalty preferred the garrote, beheading was an ignominious death for traitors and infidels. But Saladin could take off a man’s head in one sweeping stroke. This was too easy a death. To their horror, a small band of Sufis (a mystical sect of Islam that preaches peace and unity with the Divine) in the encampment was ordered by Saladin to do the beheading. To the uproarious amusement of the victorious soldiers gathered around them, the Sufis were making a complete mess of the executions, needing in some cases seven or eight blows to finally behead the knights. Despite the unimaginable anguish of the knights within that circle of laughing men, the Templars were not only lined up quietly, but virtually shouldering one another out of the way to be next, according to witnesses who were present. Does that sound like the behavior of men who did not believe in Christ? Would men who believed only in satanic self-gratification be that proud and eager to face their maker? Somehow we doubt it.
Denying the sacrament of the Mass
This charge is very similar to the preceding one, denying Christ, and it has within it the same difficulty of mounting a viable defense. Blessing sacramental bread and wine is something a priest would generally do in private, so there’s very little opportunity to prove that the Templar chaplain had not blessed the Eucharist. Of course, once again, tampering with the Eucharist in some way was also a standard charge in witch trials and persecution of Jews. Several times in Europe in this period, large-scale pogroms(the beating and murder of Jews and the destruction of their property) were caused by an urban legend that Jews had somehow desecrated the Eucharist; one riot started over the accusation of a Jewish baker having substituted bread that had been baked with the blood of Christian babies. Absurd, certainly. But again, it played to the fears and superstitions of the crowd. Nobody was supposed to tamper with the Eucharist. But like the bulk of the charges against the Templars, there was not a single shred of evidence to back up this ridiculous assertion.
Sodomy
This charge didn’t get thrown into the stewpot just to add a piquant spice of scandalous sex to the trial. For one thing, it was thrown in to make sure that the Templars burned. Sodomy equaled a death sentence, period. In folklore, sodomy was always tied to devil worship. Country people knew for an absolute fact that the “Musselmen” (Muslims) practiced sodomy. Sodomy, by definition, was just about any deviant sexuality, which meant, to the Church, any sex that didn’t have procreation as its ultimate goal. Make babies, or keep yourself buttoned up.
If historical records are any indication, getting away with homosexual activity was strictly a pastime for kings. We know of many royals in Europe, from Edward II in France to Richard the Lionheart, who far preferred sex with men to women.
Andrew McCall, in his book The Medieval Underworld, an examination of the lives of outcast groups in the Middle Ages, discusses the attitudes toward homosexuality in the days of Greece and Rome, which ran the gamut from a grudging tolerance to open acceptance. But by the Middle Ages, the idea of homosexuality was tied completely to the concept of profanity or demonology, which is why the two most common words used in addressing it are abomination and sodomy, both words that were loaded with the baggage of heresy. For the common people, on the other hand, homosexuality could be a hanging offense, and the same was true in Islamic culture, despite European beliefs to the contrary. For the most part, Sunnis and other Islamic sects abhorred homosexuality, and the punishment was death.
Holy Mother Church endured an eruption of various sexual scandals in the 13th century, from the pope on down the line to the Benedictines and the Dominicans. But never, not once, did anyone find any reason to investigate the Templars. It was a common joke of the day that the Knights Templar were too obsessed with money to have any desire left over for sex. Nevertheless, might there have been homosexual contact among some of the Knights Templar? Certainly. It would be naive to say otherwise. The modern Catholic Church has had more than its share of humiliating publicity over the actions of a tiny handful of its priests placed in positions of trust. Likewise, it is not a stretch of the imagination to believe that there were certain preceptories that may have had a more conducive atmosphere to private homosexual practices than others. Punishments for it in some ecclesiastical courts, where men understood the loneliness of monastic life, were sometimes mild, and could include anything from a penance to expulsion, if the guilty party seemed to be unrepentant, or a repeat offender. Yet in the case of the Templars, there are records concerning a case of three brethren who were “well acquainted” with each other. One was killed, another died trying to escape, and the third spent the rest of his life in irons. The Templars obviously didn’t look on it as a trifling offense.
This is doubtless one more reason Phillip made sure to combine the accusation of sodomy with implications of devil worship. It’s especially apparent in the charge of the kiss on the backside of the master, le besa de derrier, a ritual still practiced by many advertising executives. Again, both nobles and peasants supposed it to be an essential part of all Black Masses and Satanic worship, which assured a death sentence.
Embezzlement
Oddly enough, although this was the least lurid charge, it was in many ways the most shocking, and even seven centuries later, it’s the easiest one to refute. The men who handled money for the Templars were incredibly meticulous. They all knew that any whiff of financial improprieties would be the end of them. It’s true that the greatest bulk of Templar financial documents, and others as well, were destroyed on Cyprus, whereas Hospitaller documents survived, leaving them with no burden of assumed guilt to live down, even to the present day. (Yes, they still exist, as the Knights of Malta; see Chapter 9.) However, a great number of Templar financial documents still are available to historians, due to the wide reach of the organization. None of them contains any hint of impropriety. Oh, you had the occasional dissatisfied customer, who claimed that mistakes had been made, and that there was more money in his account than he’d been credited. That’s only natural. But all these small whirlwinds were quickly and efficiently worked out to the satisfaction of all parties.
The Templars had been the bankers of the French crown for two centuries, and again, never was there an accusation of fiddling by any of the kings before Phillip. Apart from that, they did a great deal of banking for the Vatican, as well, and those sharp-eyed gentlemen were nobody’s fools. Still, the Templar reputation for honesty and exactitude had never been questioned. There was no desperate Templar money-crunch, either, that may have driven them to embezzlement. All the treasuries from the East had been moved to safer ground, by men who risked and often gave their lives to do so. Does it really seem likely that, after two centuries of working to maintain their trusted position with the high and the mighty, they would suddenly start dipping fingers into the till after 1300, for no reason at all?
Baphomet
We saved the weirdest one for last. This thing about Baphomet has been endlessly debated, down through the ages. Historians who believe it may have had a basis in fact have said it could have been the head of John the Baptist, tying the Templars to the Johannite heresy, or maybe it was the head of Hugues de Payens. The purpose of the charge was crystal clear: Idol worship was another witchcraft-related accusation brought against the Order. But no one has ever managed to determine just what, exactly, was the origin of this particular allegation. The stories of the various witnesses were growing more and more bizarre, and so Phillip’s interrogators could “suggest” just about anything, and the agonized knights would have admitted it. As a result, the descriptions varied wildly. Some claimed they worshipped the bearded head of a man, one said a head with two faces, while others said it was a cat. Some claimed it was a skull, while still more described it as a horned demon. But, like the rest of the charges leveled against the Order, outside of France, in countries where the knights were not tortured, no such admission was ever made.
Still others said the secret ritual had paid homage to a skull. But the presence of a skull — or a whole lot of skulls — in a religious building in the medieval period was by no means any proof of witchcraft, heresy, devil worship, or even cool Halloween decor. The skull was a symbol of mortality, which every man was urged to keep in mind at all times. A plaque outside of the subterranean catacombs of Paris today reminds visitors, “Happy is he who is forever faced with the hour of his death and prepares himself for the end every day.” Europe is dotted with chapels and churches whose walls, columns, and archways are made up of the skulls and bones of hundreds of years’ worth of clergy and parishioners. It’s a cheery decor.
You’ll find skulls on headstones, often accompanied by the wings of angels carrying the skulls to heaven, which is hardly an image of evil. Equally important was the use of the skull as a reminder of the sin of vanity. A king, a pope, a blacksmith, and a supermodel all look the same when the flesh falls away.
So it would not be out of the ordinary if the Templars had skulls prominently displayed in their chapels or preceptories. Of course, worshipping them would have been another matter.
Where the accusation gets dicey concerns the legend of the mystical Skull of Sidon (see Chapter 4 for lots more detail on this story). Never mind that the myth of a magical skull mixed up with necrophilia predated the Templars.
The story had circulated among their Muslim enemies that the Templars were in possession of it, and that it had powers that protected them and brought them victories on the battlefield. Unfortunately for the Templars, such fairy tales designed to frighten their foes didn’t sound so fairy-tale-ish to the Inquisition.
But the inquisitors kept beating on this business of idol worship, especially of a cat, which is right out of the witchcraft interrogation playbook. Cats — either live ones or sculpted idols — were commonly referred to as objects of worship in secret occult rituals. Fear of cats was a longtime medieval superstition, and (dog lovers take note) the killing or tormenting of cats was a popular pastime during the period; it was even a regular component of certain feast days in the French calendar. Cats were believed to be connected with Satan and sorcery, so compelling the Templars to admit to cat worship was a clear admission of heresy. Again, such nonsense was never substantiated outside of France, where torture was not applied.
For centuries, researchers have battled over the origin and meaning of Baphomet. The name came up occasionally during the confessions of the tortured knights, in connection with the subject of idol worship. The most common suggestion has been that the word is a variation of Mohammed (Mahomet in Latin), the prophet of Islam. The most logical supposition is that the interrogators wanted to allege that the Templars in the Holy Land had been corrupted by their association with Muslims. The unintended hilarity is, of course, that Muslims forbid any kind of idol worship themselves, to the point where most Islamic art contains no depiction of any living person, plant, or animal. Whether Church or French inquisitors actually knew that is doubtful but largely academic. What was important to them was the tie to infidels and the confession of idolatry.
The Indian author Idries Shah suggested that Baphomet may actually have come from the Arabic word Abufihamat, which means “Father of Understanding.” If that’s true, it could have referred to a statue of Christ, or a head-shaped sculpture representing Christ, John the Baptist, their founder Hughes de Payens, or any number of other symbolic fathers.
What Baphomet doesn’t seem to have meant is what it has come to represent in modern times: the winged, goat-headed, cloven-hoofed demon that commonly appears on Tarot cards (see Figure 6-1). Nineteenth-century French mystic Eliphas Levi came up with the drawing for his book Dogme et Ritual de la haute Magie in 1854. Although Levi claimed Templar origins of his mystical figure, testimony from the trials describes no such thing.
Figure 6-1: Baphomet as depicted in the 19th century by Eliphas Levi.
Heads up: So what Was it?
If there was any “head” at all that was being venerated in Templar ceremonies, it would most likely have been the sort of thing found in Catholic and Eastern churches all over Christendom: a reliquary. The trade in holy relics was a hot one, and the world was filled with teeth, jawbones, tibias, fibulas, phalanges, and metatarsals of a universe of blessed saints and martyrs. One old, dry bone looks much like another, so elaborate containers called reliquaries were often made of gold and silver to house and protect them. But all this speculation presupposes that the forced, tortured confessions of the Templars had any basis in fact in the first place. We believe that the similarity of stories told from one Templar to the next was because of the suggestions of the inquisitors’ questionnaires, and not by some secret, shared ceremony of the Order.
So if the witnesses couldn’t even agree on what Baphomet is, then it would tend to prove the charges false. A modern judge would have thrown the whole mess out of court and threatened to file charges with the French Bar Association if they dared bring it to him again. But Pope Clement V, Phillip’s personal pope, was propelled by no such qualms over the quality of the evidence. It’s interesting to note how many times he disagreed with Phillip — but when push came to shove, everyone knew who was in charge.
The Pope Knuckles Under
The Order was not arrested en masse by the forces of the pope or the Catholic Church. The action was officially ordered and carried out on October 13, 1307, by King Phillip IV. And though Pope Clement had only been in office for two years, and was already regarded as a tool of Phillip, he did seem to be truly outraged that the Templars had been arrested in violation of his sole papal authority over them — and he said so.
A word about torture and the Inquisition
The question that passes through the modern mind when it comes to the torture and burning of those accused of religious "crimes" is obvious: What can possibly be construed as remotely proper about a religion based on the gentle philosophies of Christ torturing confessions out of people?
In crimes against Christianity, so the reasoning went, men may have lied to cover their guilt, but their souls knew the truth. Only when the Christian was dragged to the edge of Hell and forced to confront an eternity of damnation would the conscience, a part of the soul, triumph and tell the truth. That was the ecclesiastical reasoning. In actuality, most people would confess to anything if enough pain was inflicted on them over a long enough period. It's goofy to think that it never occurred to them that the "confession" they got was only given to get them to stop; in fact, this was the principle argument against torture, an argument used by later incarnations of the Inquisition and by the kings who refused to resort to it.
It's unfortunate that, mostly because of the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition, torture is bound together with the very word inquisition, as well as with Catholicism. The Inquisition was often merely one of many Catholic bureaucracies, and its purpose was to insure that the rituals of the Church remained on target, particularly in far-flung regions, such as Ireland, where local customs and not particularly well educated priests may have allowed ritual to be influenced by pagan or other beliefs. People are usually surprised to learn that the Inquisition still exists today, renamed the Holy Office in 1908, and finally, in 1965, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
The powers of inquisitors were first given to the new order of Dominican monks in the early 13th century. Their specialty was to argue theology with the Cathars, the most popular heresy in France. In the south, it was becoming more popular than Catholicism, and St. Dominic's idea was that, if they were going to run around the countryside living an ascetic life, arguing Biblical points, the Dominicans would do the same and win the argument. Of course, fairly soon, they decided that if they couldn't win the argument, they'd simply burn them at the stake. Thus was born one of the darkest aspects of the Inquisition, the Albigensian Crusade, when Simon de Montford led the king's soldiers south to wipe out the Cathars. They were killed by the tens of thousands. (We discuss the Cathar beliefs in Chapter 14.)
The Templars had strong ties to the Cathars. Many Templar knights came from the Languedoc, and many of the high officers of the Order had been born into the most important Cathar families of the Languedoc. Local priests who tried to stop the violence being committed against their friends and neighbors were accused of being secret Cathars, and often ended up before the Inquisition themselves. At the least, priests and bishops who objected were barred from their own churches for refusing to implement the rulings of the Inquisition.
Torture was a common feature of ancient and medieval justice; it was not by any means peculiar to the Catholic Church. Church officials did not authorize it for use until the 1250s under Pope Innocent IV, and there were rules about what could and could not be done. Bloodshed and mutilation were prohibited, as was the outright torturing to death of the accused. Naturally, these restrictions resulted in imaginative devices and methods designed to skirt the loopholes. For instance, slowly roasting a man's feet off cauterized the wound and didn't shed blood, and it didn't kill him, either.
Religious interrogation procedure during this period usually followed a pattern: First, the stern threat of death by fire; second, confinement to mull that one over; third, a kindly visit from a member of the clergy to attempt to reason a confession out of the accused; and then, finally, torture.
At first, the Church ruled that two witnesses had to be produced against the accused, and neither could be a convicted heretic. These pesky annoyances were dispensed with by the mid-1200s.
The important part to remember about medieval torture was that it was not considered to be punishment, as ridiculous as that sounds.
Torture was used to elicit the confession, and the punishment was decided after the confession was made. The rules of the Catholic Inquisitors were that the accused could only be tortured once. That was circumvented by simply adjourning the session and starting up again, for days at a time. And, of course, any new evidence found was cause for new charges and a new session of torture was permitted.
In most cases the practice of torture was forbidden to members of the clergy. This meant that the hands of the Church were innocent of actually having exacted such agonies on the accused themselves. Better to let a king or noble's henchmen do the dirty work.
However, one more point made the Templar trial different from those that had come before: There is no question whatsoever that the French king, and not the Inquisition, was calling the shots. The representatives of the Inquisition were, for the most part, there to lend an aura of legitimacy to the whole sorry affair.
Of course, don't think that the Catholic Church has been the sole practitioner of torture against those accused of religious crimes. Protestants gleefully practiced similar activities against heretics in England, Germany, Switzerland, North America, and elsewhere, with special treatment for—you guessed it — Catholics, all through the 1700s. Unfortunately, a stop in at the Amnesty International Web site produces a list of nations that still use torture as part of their "judicial system."
It’s interesting to note how many times, particularly in the beginning, that Clement disagreed with Phillip. When word first arrived that Phillip was looking into certain accusations against the Templars, Clement reacted with disbelief. When he found out about the arrests, which he in all probability did not know were coming, he reacted with fury. And when he discovered that his noble Templar knights were being put to torture, he reacted once more with outrage. But as time passed, from the arrests of 1307, to the final executions in 1314, Clement would express fewer and fewer opinions of his own. Phillip began keeping him as close to the vest as possible; in fact, there were times when sharp-eyed critics said it looked like Clement was virtually under house arrest. Yet, he tried to play the game, to act as though he believed the charges to be true, before he finally dissolved the Order.
The reason: propaganda. Phillip was exquisite at it; he clearly understood how to manipulate public opinion. He had done it before with Pope Boniface VIII, until no one really questioned that the dead pontiff was anything but a crook and a heretic. He had achieved it with the Templars in a very short time, by making their tortured confessions public. And so, to keep him in line, he turned his dark talents on Pope Clement, by circulating stories that he had engaged in blatant nepotism and financial chicanery. When Clement held a papal council to determine the fate of the Templars, Phillip sent along his army to camp just outside the city, for, you know, “protection.”
Secretly Absolved
In August 1308, almost a year after their arrests, Pope Clement had his own investigation of the Templars conducted privately at Chinon, and the results are contained in a document known as the Chinon Parchment. In it, the agents of the pope detail their interviews with Grand Master Jacques de Molay and four other knights.
Three of the men admitted to being asked to spit on and denounce the cross, as part of their secret initiation rites. One admitted to seeing a head revered as an idol. None admitted to the charges of sodomy.
When the interviews were concluded, the cardinals absolved the knights of their sins, lifted the order of excommunication, and reinstated them to receive the sacraments of the Church. But the results of the papal investigation were not made public. Clement V did nothing to release the knights from prison or to stop Phillip from having them burned as heretics six years later.