CHAPTER V.
THE TEMPLE.
When they came to Paris in the twelfth century, the Templars obtained leave to settle in the Marshes, whose baleful exhalations cost the town a plague or two every year. In no long time they had completely transformed that dismal and pestilential swamp. Herculean labours witnessed as their outcome oaks, elms, and beeches growing where the rotten ooze had bred but reeds and osiers. Vast buildings, too, arose as if by magic, with towers and turrets protecting them, drawbridges, battlemented walls, and trenches. The principal tower of the pile enclosed the treasure and arsenal of the Order, and four smaller towers or turrets served as a prison for those who had transgressed the stark monastic rules. On the broad terrace of the Temple three hundred men had space for exercise at cross-bow and halberd.
Philip III. bestowed a royal recompense on the laborious monks who had reclaimed those miasmatic marshes and given new means of defence to the capital; and towards the close of the thirteenth century the Templars had become an extraordinary power in France. In Paris they exercised large justiciary rights, and had their gallows standing without the Temple walls. They were concerned in all enterprises, civil, political, and military; their sovereignty was such that princes had to reckon with them, on pain of contact with the monkish steel. They had great monopolies of grain, and owned some of the richest lands in the kingdom; they touched the revenues of from eight to ten thousand manors. The Templars guarded at need the towns, treasures, and archives of royalty; and kings, popes, and nobles were their visitors and guests.
The fortress dwelling of the Temple which had sprung fairy-like from the foul marshes of Paris shone with a splendour above that of the royal residence. Twenty-four columns of silver, carved and chased, sustained the audience-chamber of the grand master; and the chapter-hall, paved in mosaic, and enriched with woodwork in cedar of Lebanon, contained sixty huge vases of solid gold and a veritable armoury of Arabian, Moorish, and Turkish weapons, chiselled, damascened, and crusted with precious stones. The private chamber of every knight of the Order was distinguished by some particular object of beauty; whilst the chambers of the officers and commanders were stored with riches "so that they were a wonder to behold."
How great a gulf separated the wealthy and powerful Templars of Paris from those "poor brothers of the Temple who rode two on one horse, lived frugally, without wives or children, had no goods of their own, and who, when they were not taking the field against the infidels, were employed in mending their weapons and the harness of their horses, or in pious exercises prescribed for them by their chief."
The first institution of the Order of the Temple dates from the year 1118, when "certain brave and devout gentlemen" obtained from King Baudouin III. "the noble favour of guarding the approaches to Jerusalem." The Council of Troyes, in 1128, confirmed the religious and military Order of the Templars. The knights clothed themselves in long white robes adorned with a red cross; and the standard of the Order, called the Beaucèant, was white and black, for an emblem of life and death,—death for the infidels and life for the Christians of the Holy Land. Bravery in battle was almost an article of their faith; no Templar would fly from three opponents.
In the day of their military and political power, the Templars of France acknowledged none but the authority of the grand master of the Order, and treated with royalty as between power and power. Up to the reign of Philippe le Bel, the Kings of France were little more than courtiers of the Temple, Royalty knocked humbly at those august, defiant portals, for leave to deposit within them its treasures and its charters, or to solicit a loan from the golden coffers of the knights. Not so, however, Philippe le Bel.
This was the sovereign who, in 1307, broke the power of the Knights Templars of France. The act of accusation which he flung at the Order proscribed its members as "ravening wolves," "a perfidious and idolatrous society, whose works, nay, whose very words soil the earth and infect the air." The last grand master, Jacques de Molay, seized by the King's Inquisitor, passed through the torments of the torture chamber, and thence to the torments of the stake. The Knights of the Temple in their turn, loaded with chains, were led before the Inquisitor, Guillaume de Paris, to answer his charges of heresy and idolatry. The Templars were pursued through all the States of Europe, the Pope encouraging the hue and cry. Jacques de Molay, and his companion in misfortunes, Gui, Dauphin of Auvergne, were burned alive in Paris; and the persecution of the Templars lasted for six years. Their Order was abolished, and most of their wealth was bestowed by Philippe upon the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem.
The prison of the Temple became a prison of the State; and the Temple and the Louvre were the forerunners of the Bastille. The Dukes of Aquitaine and Brabant were confined in the Temple under Philippe V. and Philippe de Valois, the Counts of Dammartin and Flanders under King John. Four sovereigns, indeed, Charles VII., Louis XI., Charles VIII., and Louis XII., seemed to have forgotten the dungeon which the Templars had bequeathed them (they might well have done so, since Mediæval Paris had its prisons at every turn); and the cells and chambers in the great tower of the Temple remained closed,—to be opened no more until after the 10th of August, 1792.