Ther Poor Knights

The pope abolished the Knights Templar in 1312. He never convicted them, and the bull that shut them down says so.Before dawn on Friday 13 October 1307, royal officers across France opened sealed letters and arrested every member of the Order of the Temple they could find. Within two weeks the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, had confessed before the masters of the University of Paris to denying Christ at his own reception. Of the 138 brothers questioned in Paris that autumn, all but four confessed to something. Seven years later, on 18 March 1314, Molay stood on a platform outside Notre-Dame, declared the order innocent and everything he had said false, and was burned that evening on an island in the Seine.In between, the case fell apart. The same charges were put to the same order in England, Aragon, Castile, Portugal, Cyprus and the German lands, and where torture was not used, almost no one confessed. The bishops at Vienne twice refused to condemn the Templars without hearing them. So Clement V found a formula. Vox in excelso suppresses the order not by definitive sentence, because the evidence could not support one, but by papal provision. Christendom’s most famous religious order was shut down because a king of France wanted it gone and a pope could not find a way to say no.This is the order’s whole life, told from the documents: a few poor knights guarding the pilgrim road around 1119; Bernard of Clairvaux arguing that a monk could kill without sin; the papal exemptions that earned the Temple every bishop’s resentment; the castles, the fall of Acre in 1291, and the Paris tower that held the treasury of France. Then the king, his lawyer, the arrests and the end at Vienne. And then the legend, treated as history in its own right: who invented each piece of it, and when.What you’ll learn:Why Philip IV needed the Temple gone, and how his lawyer had rehearsed the method on Boniface VIIIWhat the Latin Rule actually required of a brother, and what the reception ceremony the charges were built on looked like in the order’s own lawWhy Templars confessed where royal officers were in the room and almost nowhere else, and why that comparison settles the questionWhat the Chinon parchment, found in the Vatican archives in 2001, records, and what historians still disagree aboutHow the Hospitallers and the Teutonic Knights survived the loss of the Holy Land and the Templars did notWhere Baphomet, the treasure fleet, the curse, Rosslyn Chapel, the Priory of Sion and Friday the thirteenth each came from, with the date of first appearance set against 1307This book is for you if:You met the Templars in a novel, a game or a documentary and want to know what is actually known, with the grails, codes and secret survivals tested fairly rather than mockedYou have read a history of the Crusades and want the order on its own terms: its law, its money, its politics and its endingYou are visiting the Temple Church, Tomar, Ponferrada or Acre and want to know what there is genuinely TemplarThe charges were never proved, the pope said so in writing, and the men who defended the order in Paris paid for it. That is a better story than a treasure, because it happened.