If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. Philip asked to be made an honorary Templar. Request denied. An insult no king could swallow. He suggested that the pope merge Templars and Hospitalers and place the new order under the control of one of his sons. Jacques de Molay, grand master of the Temple, arrived with great pomp from Cyprus, where he lived like a monarch in exile. He handed the pope a memorandum that supposedly assessed the advantages of the merger but actually emphasized its disadvantages. Molay brazenly argued that, among other things, the Templars were far wealthier than the Hospitalers, that the merger would enrich the latter at the expense of the former, thus putting the souls of his knights in jeopardy. Molay won this first round: the plan was shelved.
The only recourse left was slander, and here the king held good cards. Rumors about the Templars had been circulating for a long time. Imagine how these “colonials” must have looked to right-thinking Frenchmen, these people who collected tithes everywhere while giving nothing in return, not even—anymore—their own blood as guardians of the Holy Sepulcher.
True, they were Frenchmen. But not completely. People saw them as pieds noirs; at the time, the term was poulains. The Templars flaunted their exotic ways; it was said that among themselves they even spoke the language of the Moors, with which they were familiar. Though they were monks, their savage nature was common knowledge: some years before, Pope Innocent III had issued a bull entitled De insolentia Templariorum. They had taken a vow of poverty, but they lived with the pomp of aristocrats, with the greed of the new merchant classes, and with the effrontery of a corps of musketeers.
The whispering campaign was not long in coming: the Templars were homosexuals, heretics, idolaters worshiping a bearded head of unknown provenance. Perhaps they shared the secrets of the Isma’ilis, for they had had dealings with the Assassins of the Old Man of the Mountain. Philip and his advisers put these rumors to good use.
Philip was assisted by his two evil geniuses, Marigny and Nogaret. It was Marigny who ultimately got control of the Templar treasury, administering it on the king’s behalf until it was transferred to the Hospitalers. It is not clear who got the interest. Nogaret, the king’s lord chancellor, in 1303 had been the strategist behind the incident in Anagni, when Sciarra Colonna slapped Boniface VIII and the pope died of humiliation less than a month later.
Then a man by the name of Esquin de Floyran appeared on the scene. Apparently, while imprisoned for unspecified crimes and on the verge of being executed, Floyran encountered a renegade Templar in his cell and from him heard a terrible confession. In exchange for his life and a tidy sum, Floyran told everything. Which turned out to be exactly what everybody was already rumoring. Now the rumors became formal depositions before a magistrate. The king transmitted Floyran’s sensational revelations to the pope, Clement V, who later moved the papal seat to Avignon. Clement believed some of the charges, but knew it would not be easy to interfere in the Temple’s affairs.
In 1307, however, he agreed to open an official inquiry. Molay, the grand master, was informed, but declared that his conscience was clear. At the king’s side, he continued to take part in official ceremonies, a prince among princes. Clement V seemed to be stalling, and the king began to suspect that the pope wanted to give the Templars time to disappear. But no, the Templars went on drinking and blaspheming in their commanderies, seemingly unaware of the danger. And this is the first enigma.
On September 14, 1307, the king sent sealed messages to all the bailiffs and seneschals of the realm, ordering the mass arrest of the Templars and the confiscation of their property. A month went by between the issuing of this order and the arrest on October 13. But the Templars suspected nothing. On that October morning they all fell into the trap and—another enigma—gave themselves up without a fight. In fact, in the days before the arrests, using the most feeble excuses, the king’s men, wanting to make sure that nothing would escape confiscation, had conducted a kind of inventory of the Temple’s possessions throughout the country. And still the Templars did nothing. Come right in, my dear bailiff, take a look around, make yourself at home.
When he learned what had happened, the pope hazarded a protest, but it was too late. The royal investigators had already brought out their irons and ropes, and many knights had begun to confess under torture. When they confessed, they were handed over to inquisitors, who had methods of their own, even though they were not yet burning people at the stake. The knights confirmed their confessions.
This is the third mystery. Granted, there was torture, and it must have been vigorous, since thirty-six knights died in the course of it. But not a single one of these men of iron, seasoned by their battles with the cruel Turk, resisted arrest. In Paris only four knights out of a hundred and thirty-eight refused to confess. All the others did, including Jacques de Molay.
“What did they confess?” Belbo asked.
“They confessed exactly what was charged in the arrest warrant. There was hardly any variation in the testimony, at least not in France and Italy. In England, where nobody really wanted to go through with the trial, the usual accusations appeared in the depositions, but they were attributed to witnesses outside the order, whose testimony was hearsay. In other words, the Templars confessed only when asked to, and then only to what was charged.”
“Same old inquisitional stuff. We’ve seen it often,” Belbo remarked.
“Yet the behavior of the accused was odd. The charges were that during their initiation rites the Templars denied Christ three times, spat on the crucifix, and were stripped and kissed in posteriori parte spine dorsi, in other words, on the behind, then on the navel and the mouth, in humane dignitatis opprobrium. That they then engaged in mutual fornication. That they were then shown the head of a bearded idol, which they had to worship. Now, how did the accused respond to these charges? Geoffroy de Charnay, who was later burned at the stake with Molay, said that, yes, it had happened to him; he had denied Christ, but with his mouth, not his heart; he didn’t recall whether he spat on the crucifix, because they had been in such a hurry that night.
As for the kiss on the behind, that also had happened to him, and he had heard the preceptor of Auvergne say that, after all, it was better to couple with brothers than to be befouled by a woman, but he personally had not committed carnal sins with other knights. In other words: Yes, it’s all true, but it was only a game, nobody really believed in it, and anyway it was the others who did it, I just went along to be polite.
Jacques de Molay—the grand master himself—said that when they gave him the crucifix, he only pretended to spit on it and spat on the ground instead. He admitted that the initiation ceremonies were more or less as described, but—to tell the truth—he couldn’t say for sure, because he had initiated very few brothers in the course of his career.
Another knight said that he had kissed the master, but only on the mouth, not the behind; it was the master who kissed him on the behind. Some did confess to more than was necessary, saying that they had not only denied Christ but also called Him a criminal, and they had denied the virginity of Mary, and they had urinated on the crucifix, not only on the day of their initiation, but during Holy Week as well. They didn’t believe in the sacraments, they said, and they worshiped not only Baphomet but also the Devil in the form of a cat….”
Equally grotesque, though not as incredible, is the pas de deux that now begins between the king and the pope. The pope wants to take charge of the case; the king insists on seeing the trial through to its conclusion. The pope suggests a temporary suspension of the order: the guilty will be sentenced, then the Temple will be revived in its original purity. The king wants the scandal to spread, wants it to involve the entire order. This will lead to the order’s complete dissolution—politically, religiously, and, most of all, financially.
At one point a document is produced that’s a pure masterpiece. Some doctors of theology argue that in order to prevent them from retracting their confessions, the accused should be denied any defense. Since they have already confessed, there is no need for a trial. A trial is required only if some doubt about the case exists, and here there is no doubt. “Why allow them a defense, whose only purpose would be to shield them from the consequences of their admitted errors? The evidence renders their punishment inescapable.”
But there is still a risk that the pope might take control of the trial, so the king and Nogaret set up a sensational case involving the bishop of Troyes, who is accused of witchcraft by the secret testimony of a mysterious conspirator named Noffo Dei. It will be discovered later that Dei lied—and he will be hanged for his trouble—but in the meantime the poor bishop is publicly accused of sodomy, sacrilege, and usury; the same crimes as the Templars.
Perhaps the king is trying to show the sons of France
