The Templars and the Crusades (overview part 4)

Even after this final failure of the Crusades, the Templars survived throughout Europe as powerful landed elite. They retained their focus on the Holy Land, and their last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, drew up plans for a new Crusade to regain that territory, having explored the possibility of alliances with the Mongols and Armenians. Before that could happen, though, the king of France, Philip the Fair, accused the Templars of blasphemous crimes. Philip and his ministers, notably William of Nogaret, had all the Templars in France arrested on Friday 13th of October 1307. They initiated a persecution and unleashed against the Templars the horrors of the Inquisition.

The King bullied the Pope, Clement V into cooperation. Soon broken-spirited Templars were brought before ecclesiastical courts, to make dreadful confessions. Their testimony ranging from denying Christ and spitting on the cross, to worshipping a monstrous idol (sometimes named as Baphomet), to the giving or receiving of obscene kisses and to sodomy, to carnal rites with demons in female form, and to visions of the devil in the form of a cat. Others doggedly denied any wrongdoing. Eventually, the Pope ordered all the Templars in Europe to be arrested, and urged the royal authorities to use torture against them when similar confessions were not forthcoming. Ultimately, in 1312, the pope declared the Order abolished and banned. Two years later, Jacques de Molay, was brought out to affirm the Order's guilt before the people and dignitaries of Paris. He unexpectedly used the opportunity to utterly repudiate the confession that had been forced from him in previous years. He declared the Order to be wholly innocent. He was supported by his colleague Geofrey de Charney, Preceptor of Normandy. The King was furious and at once ordered both to burnt at the stake. They met their deaths with resigned courage. To the king they were relapsed heretics. There were plenty at the time, though, and there have been plenty since, that have considered them martyrs. Two other high ranking Templar prisoners kept quiet and were led back to their dungeons.

The Master of the Temple in England, meanwhile, William de la More, who had always maintained the Order's innocence, died in the Tower of London. The trial of the Templars was a dark period in history, and the only time the inquisitors were reluctantly admitted to ply their trade in England. However in a compromise settlement most of the English brethren were permitted to retire as penitents to scattered monasteries after abjuring all heresy. There were no burnings and little torture was used outside the region controlled by the French regime. Nor were any confessions of heresy, idolatry, apostasy or sodomy forthcoming. In the French realm no Templar died defending his supposed alternative creed. They all die professing their fidelity to the Church; they died for repudiating the lies they had been forced to tell. In the Iberian Peninsula and in Cyprus the Templars maintained their innocence and it was necessary for the authorities to besiege them in their castles before they could be brought to trial. Plenty proved willing to attest to the Order's innocence, and distinguished record of service to the Christian cause.

One of the dark ironies of the Crusades is that the Knights Templar were destroyed not by their Muslim enemy but by the Christian institutions that gave them life. Controversy about the demise of the Templars has raged ever since their dramatic suppression (along with speculation that they protected some great treasure or secret knowledge). The Templars' initiation ceremonies were held in secret, and the Order's habit of secrecy invited suspicion once dark rumours were spread. However as all the confessions heard at the trials were evidently coerced, there seem to be few grounds for believing in the accusations. It is hard to believe and that the Templars might have forced initiates to deny Christ and spit on the cross, even as some sort of test.