The Templars and the Shroud of Christ (5 page)

The Islamic re-conquest of the Holy Land went on apace throughout the 1200s, and the military orders were forced to become used to defeat after defeat. The Order of the Temple had to adapt itself to changing conditions changing, for its part, its functions; if it was no longer possible to focus on military service, since the Islamic front was too strong, it was possible to advance the financial activities that one day, when the time was right, could have served to reconquer Jerusalem. The Temple thus became a kind of
bank in the service of the Crusade; Popes used it to keep and invest the alms collected for the Holy Land, and the order was also used as a treasury by Christian sovereigns.
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Between 1260 and 1270, the
Sultan Baibars cut the Christian kingdom down to a thin strip of coast land headed by the town of Acre in Syria. Western society started feeling serious doubts about the utility of military orders; many wondered whether it was right to keep these gigantic enterprises, loaded with privileges, going, when all they seemed to do was taking one defeat after another and seemed wholly unable to recover the Holy Places. In 1291
Acre also was taken, in spite of a desperate resistance in which Templars proved heroic and the Grand Master
Guillaume de Beaujeu died fighting to cover the retreat of others. The last bulwark in the Holy Land was now gone, and the crusading age closed with defeat.
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The event immediately had serious consequences for the military orders, who were forced to find other Eastern seats. Templars and
Hospitallers moved to Cyprus, while the
Teutonic Knights, an order founded in the middle of the 13th century, shifted their activities to the frontier of north-eastern Europe.
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The fall of
Acre convinced Pope Nicholas IV that it was necessary to join Templars and
Hospitallers into a new single order, larger and stronger, and finally able to recover the Holy Land. This project had already been mooted in the Council of Lyons, 1274, when it had also been suggested that the leadership of the new Order should be offered to one of the Christian sovereigns, possibly a widower or unmarried in order to respect the monastic nature of the institutions. Nothing had come of this initiative, because the Grand Masters of both Temple and Hospital had opposed it fiercely. In 1305 the new Pope
Clemens V started the idea of fusion off again, and requested the heads of Temple and Hospital to offer a view on the matter and also to produce a plan for a new Crusade. Templar Grand Master Jacques de
Molay declared firmly against it: if the two Orders had been united and placed under a European sovereign, the latter would have made the new Order a tool for his own political goals and forgotten all about Jerusalem and the Holy Land.

As for the new Crusader expedition, the Templar leader suggested to the Pope that its military leadership should not be entrusted to
Philip the Fair, but rather to
James II of Aragon. The Catalan sovereign could be very useful thanks to his powerful fleet, and besides – and this was very important – he was known to be very respectful of Apostolic authority and to have a mind in line with that of the Templars, who regarded the Pope as the order’s lord and master.
Philip the Fair, on the other hand, declared himself openly autonomous from Papal authority. Only a few years earlier, from 1294 to 1303, the King of France had been in open conflict with Pope
Boniface VIII and had been excommunicated by him; the assault of Anagni, intended to arrest the Pope and take him prisoner beyond the Alps, had prevented the Bull of Excommunication from being published, but the King’s position was still very dubious. There also was a fact that should not be neglected:
Philip the Fair wanted to pass the Crusader troops through Armenia, with the intention of conquering that kingdom, which was Christian though not Catholic, and make it a French dependency. The Temple had a province of its own in Armenia, and the local leaders had informed the Templars that they would never have admitted French cavalry within their fortresses, for fear of being treacherously attacked. The memorial written by Jacques de
Molay unmasked the French monarchy’s true intentions in the Crusade to come, and no doubt put a major spike in
Philip the Fair’s plans; the king and his advisers surely saw the Order as a serious obstacle in their international policy. Still in 1306,
Philip the Fair found himself beset by popular revolt because of some financial manoeuvres of his which had unleashed horrendous inflation in the kingdom. The king badly needed good money to stop the hole, and in the Paris Temple Tower – a fortress of awe-inspiring size – vast liquid capitals were kept. That was when the plot against the Order was started.
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Early in 1307, Jacques de
Molay sailed from Cyprus to the European mainland to meet with
Clemens V, while the leader of the
Hospitallers had put off the trip because he had been forced to take command of certain military operations involving his order. The Grand Master of the Temple would never come back to the East again; a few months later, the long
trial was to start, whose notorious events may be summed up in a few essential phases.

Under a cloak of infamy

At dawn on 13 October 1307, the King of France’s soldiers appeared in full battle dress at all Templar commands in the kingdom to arrest all the monks in residence; they immediately started questioning them, tortured a number of confessions out of them, and had them written up in official form so as to send them to the Pope as evidence. They were following, word by word, the warrant of arrest signed by
Philip the Fair and secretly sent out on the previous 14 September. The King claimed to have acted after consultation with the Pope and on a direct request of the French Inquisition, because a strong suspicion of heresy had arisen over the order. He said:

They who are received within the Order ask thrice for bread and water; then the preceptor or master who receives them leads them secretly behind the altar or in the sacristy; then, still in secret, he shows them the cross and image of Our Lord Jesus Christ and orders them to thrice deny the Prophet, that is, Our Lord whose image is present, and to thrice spit on the Cross; then they are made to strip their clothes off, and he who receives them kisses them at the end of the spine, under the pants, then on the umbilicus, and finally on the mouth, and says that if any brother of the order wants to be joined with them carnally, they must not deny themselves, for under the statutes of the order they are required to bear it. For this reason, many of them practice sodomy. And each of them wears over their shirt a thin strand of rope which he is always to bear, his whole life long; these strands have been touched and placed around an
idol with the head of a man with a long beard, a head they kiss and worship in their provincial chapters: but this is not known to all the brothers, but only to the Grand Master and the elders. Furthermore, the priests of their order do not consecrate the Body of Our Lord; this will have to be investigated most especially when Templar priests will be questioned.
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With incredible speed for the time, the fruit of a detailed strategy worked out in advance over years,
Philip the Fair’s officials gathered hundreds of confessions across the kingdom, which were presented to
Clemens V as evidence of heresy before the Curia had time to react. The lawmen of the Crown had meant this to tie the Pope’s hands, leaving him little or no space for autonomous action: immediately after the arrests, Guillaume de
Nogaret, the royal lawyer who had been sent to Anagni to arrest
Boniface VIII, organised some popular assemblies in which the Templars’ guilt was advertised as certain. Franciscan and Dominican friars were ordered to preach to the people of the Templars’ heresy, so as to create a true prejudice among the commons.

Inquiries went on throughout France at a frantic pace till the start of the next year; in a short time, the dossier of accusations set up by the King’s men of law swelled to monstrous proportions, and the charges already set out in the indictment of October 1307 were joined by new ones, formed from materials gathered here and there as pressure and torture produced their crop of confessions. It was an obscene crescendo, greedily fed by popular imagination that was to continue all the length of the trial like a river bursting its banks, dragging all kinds of detritus on its rabid way to the sea. It wasn’t enough to have denied Christ and outraged the Cross: the charges against the Templars were eventually to grow from seven to more than seventy.
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Clemens V went from a state of utter confusion in the weeks that followed the arrests to a suspicion that the King was acting entirely in bad faith: a suspicion that turned into certainty when, towards the end of November 1307, two Cardinals sent to Paris to question the local Templar prisoners and so clarify the situation, came back to the Curia with the news that they had not been allowed to so much as see the prisoners. In December, a second delegation of the same prelates reached Paris, this time with the power to excommunicate
Philip the Fair if prevented again from meeting the prisoners. This allowed Jacques de
Molay to denounce all the violence and grave irregularities he had suffered. The following February, the Pope suspended the whole French Inquisition for grave irregularities and abuses of power, which stopped the
trial in its tracks. The whole spring that followed was spent in a heated diplomatic war between the King, who had taken over the Temple’s goods and wanted the Order condemned, and the Pontiff, who refused to make any decision before he had personally examined the prisoners. Faced with
Clemens V’s obstinacy, the King understood he had no choice; so he allowed a minority of Templars, including the Grand Master and other high officials of the Order, to leave Paris under escort to reach the Roman Curia, then resident in Poitiers, and be questioned by the Pope. Between June 28 and July 2 of 1308,
Clemens V was at last able to make his own investigation of the Templars; although the Pope was the only person on Earth who had the legal authority to investigate the order, paradoxically it was only then that he was able even to see the accused in person, after months in which the confessions that had been tortured out of them had been going openly all over Europe. The evidence was by now as polluted as it could possibly be, the Order’s honour had been crushed under a colossal cloak of infamy.

After finding that the officers of the King of France had made extensive use of torture,
Clemens V found that, beyond the falsehoods constructed by the royal lawmen, the Templars admitted that a tradition existed, handed down in strict secrecy, that obliged new members to deny Christ and to carry out some kind of outrage against the Cross (generally spitting). The brothers explained it by saying,
modus est ordinis nostri
, or “it’s a habit of our order”. The existence of this secret ceremonial, a kind of test of obedience placed at the end of the actual ceremony of admission, shifted the responsibility towards the order itself; it was clear that the fault could not be ascribed to the individual brothers, if they had been forced into those unworthy acts by their own seniors just to obey some Order custom. The
Saracens used to torture Christian prisoners to compel them to
reject Christianity, and as a tangible sign of apostasy, they required them to spit on the Crucifix: the Templars’ odd ritual repeated this custom in a highly realistic theatrical manner, including threats, beatings and even isolation in a jail cell. Its purpose was to steel the new member’s character through a traumatic experience, that is by putting him immediately in the presence of what he would suffer if he ever fell into enemy hands; it probably also served to inculcate that total obedience that the Order demanded, surrendering one’s own freedom to hand himself over to the judgment of his superiors in a practically total subjection. The denial of Christ and the spit on the Cross had later been joined by elements of other origin, of the kind of senior-to-junior bullying and “initiations” well known in armed formations, gross and humiliating practical jokes performed by veterans on recruits: these included the three kisses (on the mouth, on the umbilicus and on the buttocks) and the warning not to deny oneself to brothers in search of homosexual sex. The invitation to sodomy was a simple verbal humiliation, never followed by concrete acts; only six Templars out of over 1,000 who confessed in the
trial ever actually spoke of homosexual relations with fellow knights.
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A trial without a verdict

In the Pope’s presence, the Templars had the opportunity to explain that the gestures of the admission ritual were nothing more than a stage performance that had nothing to do with intimate belief, a very unpleasant nuisance which had to be accepted because the Order required it. The fact that the denial happened under constriction excluded personal responsibility, and there could be no real guilt if the outrage against religion had not been done of one’s own will.
Clemens V became convinced that the Templars were not heretics, even though the Order could not be absolved because it had allowed a vulgar and violent military tradition, wholly unworthy of men under vows, to exist. His final judgment was severe, but not condemning; not heretical, but hardly without stain, the Templars had to offer solemn repentance, begging the Church’s pardon for their faults; then they would have been absolved and taken back into the Catholic communion. Between 2 and 10 July 1308, the Pope heard out in person these requests for forgiveness and absolved the Templars as penitents; but an important part of the order had not been reached by his operation. The Grand Master and the Order’s highest officers, who had left Paris with the rest of the convoy, had been kept by royal soldiers in the fortress of Chinon on the shores of the Loire, under the excuse that they were too ill to ride all the way to Poitiers.
Clemens V immediately understood that the King intended to cut off at the neck the significance of the Papal investigation; for if the Pope had not been able to hear the leaders of the Temple, those who knew the whole truth, it was always possible to claim that his verdict was not complete or significant, since it had come from minor witnesses. After completing his investigation of the Templars who had reached him,
Clemens V secretly sent to Chinon castle three cardinals, who heard out the Templar leaders from 17 to 20 August 1308, received their demand for forgiveness, and absolved them in the Pope’s name. It was not what we would call a quashing of the sentence, but a sacramental act which however had juridical features as well: the charge moved against the Templars had been for crimes against religion.
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