Alain Demurger - The Persecution of the Knights Templar: Scandal, Torture, Trial

ALSO BY ALAIN DEMURGER

The Last Templar

THE PERSECUTION
of the
KNIGHTS TEMPLAR

Scandal, Torture, Trial

ALAIN DEMURGER

PEGASUS BOOKS

NEW YORK LONDON

T HE P ERSCECUTION OF THE K NIGHTS T EMPLAR

Pegasus Books, Ltd.
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Copyright 2015, 2018, Editions Payot & Rivages

First Pegasus Books hardcover edition January 2019

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ISBN: 978-1-64313-001-9

ISBN: 978-1-64313-089-7 (ebk.)

Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

I can easily rank among the plots against a whole society the ordeal of the Knights Templar. This barbarity was even more atrocious because it was committed through the judicial system. This was not at all one of those furies that sudden revenge or the necessity of self-defence might seem to justify; it was a deliberate project to exterminate a whole order which was too proud and too rich. I can well imagine there were young members whose debauched behaviour merited some punishment, but I will never believe that a grand master and numerous knights, including princes, all venerable by their age and their services rendered, could be guilty of the absurd and pointless villainies of which they were accused. I will never believe that a whole religious order in Europe could have renounced the Christian religion, for which it fought in Asia, in Africa, and for which many still languished in the chains of the Turks and Arabs, preferring to die in their dungeons than to abjure their religion.

Indeed I can easily believe in more than eighty knights, who, dying, swore to God their innocence. Let us not hesitate to rank their proscription among the grievous effects of a time of ignorance and barbarity.

Voltaire, Concerning Conspiracies against Peoples, or Proscriptions, 1766

CONTENTS

Tables

Maps

Origins of Templars who came to defend the Order in 1310

Templar Prisons in Paris, 1310

T he reader will notice that some elements of the names of some of the individuals and places discussed in the text and listed in the index are given in italics. The author explains this as follows:

The trial unfolded in the Middle Ages, and the notaries and scribes who recorded the interrogations of the Templars wrote in Latin, while the Templars mostly spoke in French. And so all the names of individuals and places were given in French, and were then translated more or less accurately into Latin. Not all were translated fully, however, and so we see various spellings of the same name: Oiselay, which becomes Oyselier, Oyselaer and so on. It is common practice among historians of the Middle Ages to use roman type for the names of people and places for which we are confident of the French rendering (or at least if the words sound French), and to use italics for those that are in Latin, and whose French equivalent cannot be determined. For example, Jean de Alneto is italicised because we cant be sure of the French equivalent: Aunet, Alnet or perhaps Aunay. In any event, Alneto is clearly not French, and writing it in roman type would indicate that it is. Sometimes, when there is a significant difference between the Latin name and its French spelling, I have included both, with the Latin name in italic in parentheses, for example: Herbley (Arreblayo).

Such conventions are not merely the whims of historians but reflect the reality of the fourteenth century and the challenges of communication that arose in an affair, such as that of the Templars, which brought together a large number of men who spoke only the vernacular and men of the Church who spoke only in Latin. Entire sessions of the trial were devoted to translating from Latin into French (and in the English trial, from Latin into English), the texts of the indictments.

T he trial of the Templars, sometimes known as the Templar Affair, continues to intrigue through its sheer magnitude: here was a religious order with a military vocation powerful, international, protected by the pope being accused of heresy by the king of France, Philip IV the Fair. On 13 October 1307 the Templars in the kingdom of France were arrested and imprisoned, and their possessions seized and impounded on the orders of the king. Tortured and interrogated in the months of October and November 1307, they confessed to appalling acts: when knights entered the Order, they renounced Christ, trampled or spat on the cross and engaged in sodomy and other lewd acts; their priests didnt consecrate the host during the Mass; and they held their chapter meetings at night, in secret.

This is how the Templar Affair began.

The Order began with a handful of knights who offered to defend the Holy Land of Jerusalem, the city of Christ and the Latin states that had been established following the First Crusade (10959): the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, the County of Tripoli, the Principality of Antioch and the County of Edessa, which soon disappeared. These states needed men, weapons and money to defend themselves against the Muslim kingdoms of the region, which, having survived the shock of the First Crusade, were regrouping and attempting to regain the territories they had lost. Help came regularly from the West in the form of the constant Crusading expeditions during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but it also came from the resources of the states themselves, which had feudal-type armies similar to those in the West. This was not enough. A few Christian knights, led by Hugues de Payns, a knight from the Champagne region, began to assist the canons of the Holy Sepulchre. The knights felt that their talents were being wasted, and sought to establish themselves as a religious order, subject to a Rule and to religious vows of obedience, chastity and poverty, under the direction of a master. In 1120 they received permission from the king of Jerusalem, Baldwin II, and from the patriarch of the holy city. They just needed the recognition of the Roman Church and the pope. This wasnt a foregone conclusion, because their proposal was novel, indeed almost revolutionary: they would be a new religious order whose vocation was not, like Benedictine monasticism and its Cistercian variant, meditation and contemplation but action and furthermore military action. Their proposal was thus violent, involving the possibility of killing and of being killed.