And here something else happens—it was a problem I had to resolve in my thesis, but I was torn between contradictory sources. Just when the pope has finally won jurisdiction over the knights, he suddenly hands them back to the king. Why does this happen? Molay retracts his confession; Clement allows him a defense, and three cardinals are summoned to interrogate him. On November 26, 1309, Molay proudly defends the order and its purity; he even goes so far as to threaten its accusers.
But then he is visited by an envoy from the king, Guillaume de Plaisans, whom Molay considers a friend. He is given some obscure advice, and two days later, on November 28, he issues a meek and vague deposition, in which he claims to be a poor, uneducated knight, and he confines himself to listing the (now remote) merits of the Temple, its acts of charity, the blood the Templars shed in the Holy Land, and so on.
To make matters worse, Nogaret suddenly arrives and reminds everyone that the Temple once had dubious contacts with Saladin. Now the implied crime is high treason. Molay’s excuses are pathetic. He has endured two years in prison, and in this deposition he seems a broken man, but he seemed a broken man immediately after his arrest, too. In March of the following year Molay adopts a new strategy in a third deposition. Now he refuses to speak at all, saying that he will address the pope himself but no one else.
A dramatic twist, and here the epic theater begins. In April of 1310, five hundred and fifty Templars ask to be allowed to speak in defense of the order. They denounce the torture to which they have been subjected and deny the charges against them. They demonstrate that all the accusations are implausible. But the king and Nogaret know what to do. Some Templars have retracted their confessions? Fine. Their retraction only makes them recidivists and perjurers—relapsi—a terrible charge in those days. He who confesses and repents may be pardoned, but he who not only does not repent but also retracts his confession, forswears himself, and stubbornly denies that he has anything to repent, he must die. Fifty such perjurers are condemned to death.
It is easy to predict the response of the other prisoners. If you confess, you stay alive, though locked up, and you can wait and see what happens. If you do not confess, or, worse, if you retract your confession, you go to the stake. The five hundred surviving retractors retract their retraction.
As it turns out, the ones who repented chose wisely. In 1312 those who have not confessed are sentenced to life imprisonment, whereas those who confessed are pardoned. Philip is not looking for a massacre; he just wants to dissolve the order. The freed knights, broken in mind and body by four or five years in prison, quietly drift into other orders. All they want is to be forgotten, and this silent disappearance will fuel the legend of the order’s underground survival.
Molay was still asking to be heard by the pope. Clement had convened a council in Vienne in 1311, but Molay had not been invited. The suppression of the order is ratified and its property turned over to the Hospitalers, though temporarily it is to be administered by the king.
Another three years go by, and finally an agreement is reached with the pope. On March 19, 1314, in front of Notre-Dame, Molay is sentenced to life imprisonment. He reacts with a surge of dignity. He had expected the pope to allow him to exculpate himself; he now feels betrayed. He knows that if he retracts yet again he will be condemned as a recidivist and perjurer. What does he feel in his heart as he stands there after almost seven years awaiting judgment?
Does he regain the courage of his forebears? Or does he simply decide that, ruined as he now is, condemned to end his days in dishonor, buried alive, he might as well die a decent death? Because he protests in a loud voice that he and his brothers are innocent. The Templars, he says, committed one crime and one crime only: out of cowardice they betrayed the Temple. He will do so no longer.
Nogaret is overjoyed. A public crime requires public condemnation, definitive, immediate. Geoffroy de Charnay, the Templar preceptor of Normandy, follows Molay’s example. The king makes his decision that very day: a pyre is erected at the tip of the Ile de la Cité. At sundown, Molay and Charnay are burned at the stake.
Tradition has it that before his death the grand master prophesied the ruin of his persecutors. And, indeed, the pope, the king, and Nogaret all die before the year is out. Once the king is gone, Marigny comes under suspicion of embezzlement. His enemies accuse him of witchcraft and have him hanged. Many begin to think of Molay as a martyr. Dante himself voices widespread indignation at the persecution of the Templars.
And that is where history ends and legend begins. One part of the legend insists that when Louis XVI was guillotined, an unknown man climbed onto the block and shouted: “Jacques de Molay, you are avenged!”
That was more or less the story I told that night at Pilade’s, with constant interruptions.
Belbo, for instance, would ask: “Are you sure you didn’t read this in Orwell or Koestler?” Or: “Wait a minute, this is just what happened to what’s-his-name, that guy in the Cultural Revolution.” And Diotallevi kept interjecting, sententiously: “Historia magistra vitae.” To which Belbo responded: “Come on, cabalists don’t believe in history.” And Diotallevi invariably answered: “That’s just the point. Everything is repeated, in a circle. History is a master because it teaches us that it doesn’t exist.
It’s the permutations that matter.”
“We still haven’t answered the real question,” Belbo finally said. “Who were the Templars? At first you made them sound like sergeants in a John Ford movie, then like a bunch of bums, then like knights in an illuminated miniature, then like bankers of God carrying on their dirty deals, then like a routed army, then like devotees of a satanic sect, and finally like martyrs to free thought. What were they in the end?”
“Probably they were all those things. ‘What was the Catholic Church?’ a Martian historian in the year 3000 might ask. ‘The people who got themselves thrown to the lions or the ones who killed heretics?’ All of the above.”
“But did they do those horrible things or didn’t they?”
“The funny thing is that their followers—the neo-Templars of various epochs—say they did. And they offer justifications. For instance, it was like fraternity hazing. You want to be a Templar? Okay, prove you have balls, spit on the crucifix, and let’s see if God strikes you dead. If you join this militia, you have to give yourself to your brothers heart and soul, so let them kiss your ass.
An alternative thesis is that they were asked to deny Christ in order to see how they would behave if the Saracens got them. Which seems idiotic, because you don’t train someone to resist torture by making him do—even if only symbolically—what the torturer will ask of him.
A third thesis: In the East the Templars had come into contact with Manichean heretics who despised the Cross, regarding it as the instrument of the Lord’s torture. The Manicheans also preached renunciation of the world and discouraged marriage and procreation. An old idea, common to many heresies in the early centuries of Christianity. It was later taken up by the Cathars—and in fact there’s a whole tradition claiming that the Templars were steeped in Catharism.
And this would explain the sodomy—also only symbolic. Let’s assume the knights came into contact with Manichean heretics. Well, they weren’t exactly intellectuals, so perhaps—partly out of naivete, partly out of snobbery and esprit de corps—they invented a personal ceremony to distinguish themselves from the other Crusaders. They performed various ritual acts of recognition, without bothering about their significance.”
“And that Baphomet business?”
“Many of the depositions do mention a figura Baffometi, but this may have been an error made by the first scribe, an error copied into all subsequent documents. Or the records may have been tampered with. In some cases there was talk of Mahomet (istud caput vester deus est, et vester Mahumet), which would suggest that the Templars had created a syncretic liturgy of their own. Some depositions say that they were also urged to call out ‘Yalla,’ which could be Allah.
But the Moslems didn’t worship images of Mahomet, so where does the object come from? The depositions say that many people saw carved heads, but sometimes it was not just a head but a whole idol—wooden, with kinky hair, covered with gold, and always with a beard. It seems that investigators did find such heads and confronted the accused with them, but no trace of them remains. Everyone saw the heads, and no one saw them. Like the cat: some saw a gray cat, others a red cat,
