Military and religious life in the Middle Ages and at the period of the Renaissance

by P. L. Jacob

Fig. 148.—The Earthern Vase, on one side of which is seen, between two fleurs-de-lis, the figure of St. Paul bitten by a serpent, bears a Latin inscription signifying, “In the name of St. Paul, and by this stone, thou shalt drive out poison.” On the other side is engraved in relief the cross of the Temple, between a sword and a serpent. Another Vase bears the head of a saint and a sword, and is surrounded by venomous animals and herbs. On the Medal is represented a dragon with an Italian legend signifying, “The grace of St. Paul is proof against any poison.” These objects were found in 1863 at Florence, on the site of the old Church of the Templars, dedicated to St. Paul.—Collection of M. Gancia.

The Templars were magnificent soldiers, and the annals of the Crusades are full of their feats of arms. Few knights acquired the fame they did in their expeditions across the seas; though always inferior in number to the infidel, who held them in greater fear than the Crusaders, they almost always defeated them. The defence of Gaza, the battle of Tiberias, the capture of Damietta, and the Egyptian Crusade, are all splendid attestations of their courage and prowess.

The Templars in time reached the summit of their fortunes, the height of their prosperity and their fame, and nothing was left to them but to decay. Inflated with wealth, laden with privileges which gave them almost sovereign power, the only judges they recognised were the pope and themselves. The order at last became so demoralised by luxury and idleness that it forgot the aim for which it was founded, disdained to obey its own rules, and gave itself up to the love of gain and thirst for pleasure. Its covetousness and pride soon became boundless. The knights pretended that they were above the reach of even crowned heads: they seized and pillaged without concern the property of both infidels and Christians.

Their jealousy of the Knights Hospitallers induced them to interfere with a man of position, a vassal of the Order of St. John, and to drive him from a castle he possessed in the neighbourhood of their establishment at Margat. This caused a violent quarrel between the two orders, which soon became a permanent struggle for supremacy. The pope wrote to the grand masters of both orders to exhort them to re-establish peace and good-will, and to forget their mutual rancour, so dangerous for Christendom and so fatal to the interests of the Holy Land. An apparent truce took place between them; but the Templars had not forgotten their hatred, and they lost no opportunity of showing it to the knights of St. John. Moreover, they no longer cared to support the holy cause that had led to the birth of their order. They signed a treaty of alliance with the Old Man of the Mountain, the leader of the sect of the Assassins or Ishmaelites, the most implacable enemies of the cross; they allowed him, on condition of paying tribute, to fortify himself in Lebanon; they made war against the king of Cyprus and the prince of Antioch; ravaged Thrace and Greece, where the Christian nobles had founded principalities, marquisates, and baronies; took Athens by storm, and massacred Robert de Brienne, its duke.

In short, the consciousness of their strength, of their wealth, and of their power, inspired the Templars with an audacity that nothing could restrain. Their pride, which had become proverbial, was particularly offensive. Their belief and their morals were very far from orthodox, and even in 1273, Pope Gregory X. had thought of fusing their order in that of the Hospitallers. In the beginning of the following century, Philippe le Bel, King of France, received weighty accusations against them of most serious offences, accusations that were generally believed to be true, and consulted Pope Clement V. on the subject. Clement at first declared the crimes with which they were accused to be altogether improbable, but the grand master having insisted on a rigorous inquiry, the pope wrote to the king for the details of his information. Philippe le Bel wished to decide the matter himself, and proceeded to arrest all the Templars within his jurisdiction, amongst them their grand master, Jacques de Molai, who had just returned from Cyprus.

Fig. 149.—Seal of the Knights of Christ (Thirteenth Century).—Early Device of the Order of Templars, representing two knights on one horse.

One hundred and forty knights were examined in Paris, and all but three confessed that the order practised a secret initiation, in which the aspirants were bound to deny Christ, and spit upon the cross; and that, moreover, immoral customs were practised amongst them. Many of them also confessed that they had committed acts of idolatry. A learned contemporary writer, De Wilcke, a German protestant clergyman, has epitomized the researches of two of his co-religionists—Moldenhawer, who discovered in the National Library in Paris the original records of the examination, and Munster, who found in the library of the Vatican the original notes of the proceedings that took place in England. This is De Wilcke’s conclusion: “The two facts of the denial of Christ and the spitting on the cross are attested by all the witnesses who were examined, with one or two exceptions.”

In spite of the scandal caused by these confessions, Pope Clement V. urgently protested against Philippe’s course of action, and represented to him that the Templars were a religious body, under the control of the Holy See alone, that the king was consequently wrong to make himself their judge, and that he had no authority over either their possessions or their persons.

Philippe unwillingly yielded to the pope’s remonstrances, and the pontiff himself examined seventy-two Templars, whose confessions tallied with the avowals made in the first instance at Paris.