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—— ON THIS DAY ——
OCTOBER 13, 1307
Paris, France
719 years ago
The Knights Templar, the medieval military order founded to protect pilgrims in the Holy Land, whose members in France were arrested on the orders of King Philip IV on Friday, October 13, 1307.
In September 1307, sealed orders went out from King Philip IV of France to his officials throughout the kingdom, to be opened on a specified day. At dawn on Friday, October 13, they were carried out. Royal officers arrested every member of the Knights Templar they could find, several thousand men in all, from the Grand Master Jacques de Molay in Paris down to the farm laborers on the order's rural estates. The operation was so well planned that almost none escaped.
The charges were sensational. The Templars were accused of denying Christ and spitting on the cross during secret initiation rites, of worshipping an idol, and of obscene practices. Under torture by royal interrogators, most of the prisoners confessed to at least some of it, including de Molay himself. Few historians today believe the accusations. The king's motives are easier to credit: he was deeply in debt, partly to the Templars, and their wealth was within his reach.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
The trials of the Knights Templar, the seven-year legal and political struggle between the French crown and the papacy that ended with the suppression of the order in 1312.
The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon had been founded in Jerusalem around 1119 by a handful of knights who vowed to protect Christian pilgrims on the dangerous roads of the Holy Land. They took their name from their headquarters on the Temple Mount. Endorsed by the Church and answerable only to the pope, the order grew into an elite fighting force and, less famously, into a financial network. A pilgrim could deposit money at a Templar house in London or Paris and draw on it in the East, and kings came to use the order as a treasury and a lender. By 1300 the Templars held estates across Europe.
They had also lost their purpose. The last Crusader stronghold at Acre fell in 1291, leaving a rich military order with no war to fight and few friends at court. Philip IV had already expelled the Jews of France and seized their property, and had humiliated one pope. The new pope, Clement V, was a Frenchman living under the king's shadow. Clement protested the arrests but soon ordered Templars seized throughout Christendom. When dozens of French Templars retracted their confessions in 1310, Philip had fifty-four of them burned as relapsed heretics, which ended the resistance. Clement dissolved the order at the Council of Vienne in 1312, and most of its property passed to the rival Knights Hospitaller, after the French crown had deducted its expenses.
On March 18, 1314, Jacques de Molay, then about seventy, was brought before a crowd in Paris to hear his sentence of life imprisonment. He publicly withdrew his confession and declared the order innocent. Philip had him burned that evening on a small island in the Seine. Legend says he summoned king and pope to meet him before God's judgment within the year. Clement died a month later and Philip that November, which did the legend no harm. In 2001 a researcher in the Vatican archives found the Chinon Parchment, showing that Clement had privately absolved the Templar leaders of heresy in 1308. The popular claim that the arrests are the origin of the Friday the thirteenth superstition appears to be a modern invention, though it has proved as durable as the rest of the Templar myth.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
The fall of the Templars showed the rising power of the state over the Church. A king destroyed an order that answered only to the pope and bent the papacy to his will in doing so. It was a marker in the long shift of power from religious to secular rulers in Europe.
The Templars were pioneers of international finance. Their system of deposits, credit, and transfers across long distances anticipated later banking, and their destruction is an early example of a government expropriating its creditors.
The order's sudden end created an enduring myth. Secret rites, lost treasure, and a dying curse have fed seven centuries of speculation, from Masonic legends to modern thrillers. Very little of it has any basis in the historical record.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
At dawn on Friday, October 13, 1307, the king of France arrested an entire religious order in a single morning because he wanted its money. The confessions were tortured, the pope was cowed, and the last Grand Master died in the flames insisting on his innocence. The legends began almost at once and have never stopped.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
“God knows who is wrong and has sinned. Soon a calamity will occur to those who have condemned us to death.”
— Attributed by tradition to Jacques de Molay at the stake, March 18, 1314
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about the Knights Templar, their origins in the Crusades, the arrests of October 13, 1307, King Philip IV, and the fate of Jacques de Molay?
