The Sad History of the Knights Templar By Christopher Check
On a raw March afternoon in 1314, a scaffold stood in the
shadow of Notre Dame. The people of Paris knew what
macabre show was imminent. Seven years before, the King's
constables had stormed all the Templar estates in France
and arrested 5000 knights of the order, much to the
astonishment of the people. Now the curtain was about to
drop on a bizarre tragedy, one scripted by the king
himself.
King Philip the Fair-grandson of St. Louis of France-had
engineered the election of the pope and the relocation of
the papal court to Avignon. Although the papacy may have
been in the ambitious king's pocket, one of the most
powerful and wealthy institutions of the day was not: The
Order of the Temple. Philip knew its vast wealth and
schemed to seize it.
The arrests of the Templars in France was easy: The
fighting men of the order were then on the bloody border
with Islam, in Spain, and on Cyprus. The Templars in
France were aged veterans of the Crusades, well into
their second childhood.
The things the knights confessed under torture defied
belief: trampling and urinating on the Crucifix, secret
rites of obscene kisses, sodomy, usury, treason,
idolatry, heresy. After the arrests came seven years of
inquisition, then hundreds and hundreds of public
executions by burning. In the end, Pope Clement V
abolished the order.
As a large crowd closed around the scaffold, the last
Master of the Knights of the Temple of Jerusalem,
70-year-old Jacques de Molay, stood alongside three of
his brothers in arms, listening as the papal legate read
their crimes in horrible detail. But mercy would yet be
theirs if they repeated to the people of Paris the guilt
they had confessed before the inquisition. Five stakes
piled high with brushwood and faggots awaited them if
they did not.
Two of the knights, eyes cast downward, mumbled their
guilt. Then de Molay and Geoffrey de Charney of Normandy
stepped forward.
"On this terrible day," shouted de Molay, his gaze
meeting the eyes of the crowd, "in my final hour, I shall
let truth triumph and declare, before heaven and all the
saints, that I have committed the greatest of all
