The Templars (22 page)

In fact Clement had already heard something of these bizarre practises from James of Molay himself when the two met at Poitiers in May 1307, five months before the arrests. In the Pope’s words, the Grand Master had told him of ‘many strange and unheard-of things’ which had caused Clement ‘great sorrow, anxiety and upset of heart’. The Grand Master feared that these initiation ceremonies, which had been going on for a century or more, were getting out of hand, and the Pope agreed to instigate an inquiry to root out these practises before they erupted into scandal. In August 1307 Clement had also written to King Philip on this count, telling him that ‘we could scarcely bring our mind to believe what was said at that time’. But Philip’s spies within the Templars had informed the king of these practises long before that, providing Philip with the material that he cynically manipulated with such devastating effect.

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

The Templars were not heretics but they were not innocent either for they had actually denied the divinity of Christ even if it was all a pretence. Apostasy could be forgiven but sinners had to repent and submit to harsh penance. That was how Clement dealt with the seventy-two Templars he interviewed at Poitiers. But he could not do the same for the leaders without seeing them, and though he issued a formal summons for the appearance of James of Molay and the other leading Templars, this was refused by the king with the repeated claim that they were ill.

The Mystery of Chinon

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

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

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

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

When the cardinals reported back to the Pope, Clement accepted the explanation of James of Molay and the other Templar leaders that the charges against them of sodomy and blasphemy were due to a misunderstanding of the knighthood’s arcane rituals, which had their origins in their struggle against the Muslims in Outremer. Denying Christ and spitting on the cross, as well as kissing other men’s behinds, were understood to simulate the kind of humiliation and torture that a knight might be subjected to by the enemy if captured. They were taught to abuse their own religion ‘in words only, not in spirit’.

Noting that the Templars had asked his pardon, the Pope wrote, ‘We hereby decree that they are absolved by the Church and may again receive Christian sacraments.’ Of James of Molay in particular the Pope recorded that after hearing what he had to say, ‘We concluded to extend
the mercy of absolution for these acts to Brother James of Molay, the Grand Master of the order, who denounced in our presence the described heresy and any other heresy, and swore in person on the Lord’s Holy Gospel, and humbly asked for the mercy of absolution, restoring him to unity with the Church and reinstating him to communion of the faithful and sacraments of the Church.’

At this point Clement was still trying to save the Templars as an order; his object was reform, and then probably to combine the Templars with the Hospitallers. But the Pope failed to make the details of his absolution public because the scandal of the Templars had aroused extreme passions; Clement was still trying to avoid either a confrontation with Philip or a schism within the Church.

The Chinon Parchment

Everything written about the trial–and beliefs–of the Knights Templar has become redundant since the discovery of the Chinon Parchment. Uncertain and unexplained circumstances surrounding the fall of the order had led to a variety of theories about their activities and the motives of others involved in their trial. The accepted view of historians, over the centuries, had tended to be that the Templars were not heretics but that they were guilty of something–but of what? Historians also saw Pope Clement V as the pliant and weak creature of Philip IV of France, with whom he was thought to have colluded to destroy the Templars and seize their fortune.

The discovery of the Chinon Parchment has thrown a new and clarifying light on these mysteries and misconceptions. The parchment is a contemporary account of the testimony of James of Molay and other Templar leaders at a secret Papal hearing held at the royal castle of Chinon from 17 to 20 August 1308. The document reveals that the Pope found no heresy among the Templars and granted absolution to its leaders. Indeed, he fought with some determination to protect the Templars against the French king. Fatally, however, the Pope delayed making his absolution public owing to the extreme passions of the time. And so Phillip IV was able to have James of Molay and the other Templar leaders put to death before the Pope’s verdict could be published.

Subsequently the Chinon Parchment was mislabelled and misplaced amid the labyrinthine files of the Secret Archive until Barbara Frale, an Italian researcher at the Vatican School of Paleontology, found it and recognised its significance. She deciphered its tangled and coded writing and published her findings in the
Journal of Medieval History
in 2004. This was followed in 2007 by a facsimile publication of the parchment by the Vatican itself–no doubt eager to avoid the appearance of yet more conspiracy amid the fallout from their fictional machinations in Dan Brown’s bestselling novel
The Da Vinci Code
.

The Templars Rally

In March 1309 the Papal court established itself at Avignon, which in those days was not within the kingdom of France and had the added benefit of offering the Pope a quick escape over the Italian border. In November 1309 the Papal commission into the order of the Templars began its sittings; this was the inquiry that Clement had agreed to establish after his meeting with Philip at Poitiers the previous year.

Slowly the accused Templars rallied, and instead of confessing they began mounting a defence. By early May 1310 nearly six hundred Templars were defending their order, and they denied their previous confessions. In contrast to the Cathars, who truly were heretics and went to their deaths for what they believed, not one Templar was prepared to be martyred for the heresies which members of the order were supposed to have guarded
so fiercely for so long, quite simply because there was no heresy, only the malignant interpretation put on their practises by a malignant king.

Deeply worried by this growing confidence among the Templars, Philip took drastic action and had the Archbishop of Sens, a royal nominee, reopen his episcopal inquiry against individual Templars in his diocese. Obedient to his king, the archbishop found fifty-four Templars guilty as relapsed heretics–in other words guilty of having revoked their earlier confessions–and handed them over to the secular authorities. On 12 May 1310 in a field outside Paris the fifty-four Templars were burnt at the stake. Yet even after these burnings not all the remaining Templars were cowed nor was their morale completely crushed, though this intimidation by burning did have its effect, and many Templars fell silent or returned to their confessions.

The Suppression of the Templars

Since 1308 Pope Clement had been intending to hold an ecumenical council at Vienne in the Rhone-Alps region of France to consider three great matters: the Templars, the Holy Land and the reform of the Church. Originally scheduled for October 1310, it had to be postponed a year because the Pope’s contest with the king of France over the Templars was dragging on. Now in the summer of 1311 Clement had gathered information about the Templars from investigations all round France and abroad to present at the council. What he found was that only in France and in regions under French domination or influence were there substantial confessions from Templars–that is areas where the French authorities and their collaborators had applied ferocious tortures to their victims, or where their testimony was deliberately distorted to turn admitted irregularities into heresy. Clement was becoming eager to wind up the Templar matter before its controversies caused wider and deeper troubles for the Church.

Clement had senior advisors who argued that no time should be wasted on discussion or defence, and that the Pope should use his executive powers to abolish the Templars forthwith. One said that the Templars had ‘already caused the Christian name to smell among unbelievers and infidels and have shaken some of the faithful in the stability of their
faith’. He added that suppression of the order should take place without delay in case ‘the capricious spark of this error ignites in flames, which could burn the whole world’. But then in late October a dramatic event occurred which did much to counter the arguments of those in favour of swift abolition–seven Templars appeared at the council to argue for the defence of the order. The Pope reacted swiftly and had them locked up.