Friday 13 October 1307, six in the morning. Philip IV, king of France, orders his sergeants to carry out what we would now call an anti-terrorist blitz: the immediate and simultaneous arrest of every Templar knight in the kingdom. Grand Master included. No exceptions for illness, rank, old age or military merit. The destruction of the Order of the Temple in Europe had just begun, and over the next seven years it would become irreversible. Come with me into the depths of this article and I'll tell you the whole story.
At dawn on that Friday the 13th, the king's agents burst simultaneously into every commandery, palace, private house, farm and estate of the Templars in the kingdom. The operation had been prepared in the greatest secrecy for weeks, perhaps months, with thousands of orders sealed in wax with the king's signet, addressed to the commanders of every military and police barracks, and which could not be opened until the eve of the 13th. When those red wax seals were broken in unison at six in the morning, within a few hours hundreds — not to say thousands — of Knights Templar were dragged from their beds and arrested on the gravest and entirely false charges. Some of them so absurd they bordered on the ridiculous, all fabricated by the king's personal secretary expressly to destroy them. The most powerful order in Christendom, which had survived two centuries of war in the Holy Land, was annihilated in a single day. And not by the Saracen sword, but by paper and pen. By the conspiracy of two men — well, three, but we'll come to the third later: Philip IV the Fair, king of France, and Clement V, number 195 on the official list of the popes of the Catholic Church, and a Frenchman himself. Let me give you the verdict up front, since I have spent years living with these characters: it was not a trial. It was armed robbery, a common theft.
Philip the Fair: the king who owed too much
To understand the destruction of the Temple you must first understand its executioner, and I warn you the man makes your skin crawl.
Philip IV of France, called the Fair, was indeed a tall man of great physical beauty, but with a gaze so cold and unsettling that he had been nicknamed «a beautiful statue with the eyes of a fish». Yes, a dead fish. There his amiable virtues ended. Cold to the point of the inhuman, calculating, of bottomless ambition, Philip was an absolutist king two centuries before the word was coined for Louis XIV, the one to whom tradition attributes L'État c'est moi, I am the State. Philip too wanted a wholly centralised, obedient and wealthy state, and regarded as an obstacle anything that stood in the way: be it a pope, a banker, an ambitious soldier or a religious order with two centuries of glorious history behind it.
And Philip had a very concrete problem: he was in debt up to his eyebrows. To whom? To the Templars, precisely.
Because by 1307 the Temple was no longer that brotherhood of nine poor knights riding two to a horse, founded by Hugues de Payens two hundred years earlier. It had evolved into the first and most sophisticated bank in Europe. It held fortunes in custody, issued what we would now call letters of credit — you deposited your money in Paris, received one of those letters covered in wax and official seals to prove it, and withdrew it, minus the Templars' commission for the great favour they were doing you, in Saint John of Acre, without carrying a single coin along roads infested with bandits and murderers — it lent to princes and kings, to merchants, bishops and popes, and ran a capillary financial network stretching from Lisbon to Jerusalem. Something like the Goldman Sachs or the JP Morgan of the medieval age, with its own network of cash machines, so to speak. The royal treasury of France itself — well, the little that was left of it, since the king had blown almost all of it — was kept in the tower of the Paris Temple. Read that again: the king of France himself kept his money in the strongroom of the Templars' bank.
And he owed them astronomical sums for his wars against England and Flanders.
This is where the matter becomes transparent. Philip did not want to rob the bank: he wanted to burn it down with the bankers inside and keep the building and the vault. By physically eliminating the Temple he cancelled his debt at a stroke, confiscated an immense patrimony of castles, lands and commanderies easily sold by weight of gold, and in passing wiped off the map an autonomous power that answered not to him but to the pope. A state within his state. For a man like Philip, that was simply intolerable.
And it was not the first time he had done it, mind you. In 1306 — a year earlier; note the dress rehearsal — he had arrested every Jew in France in a single day, expelling them and confiscating their goods. He had devalued the currency so often that the people of Paris rioted against him. And in 1303 his men had gone so far as to assault Pope Boniface VIII himself at his residence in Anagni, in Lazio, an outrage from which the aged pontiff died within the month. The man who directed that operation was his shrewdest, murkiest and most sinister minister, a demon come straight from hell to do evil and who, here on earth and in human form, called himself Guillaume de Nogaret. Hold on to the name, because this almighty son of a bad mother — whom I, if you will allow me, would rather call outright HDLGP · FdP · SoB · Huso —, first cousin to Satan himself, is going to come back. Oh yes, he most certainly is going to come back, my friends…
Clement V: the pocket pope
To execute a plan of this magnitude, Philip needed the pope. The Temple depended directly on Rome: no king had jurisdiction over the order. Without the pope, no legal operation was possible.
And Philip had the good fortune — or the skill, with him one never knows — to have the perfect pope. Clement V, born in Gascony in southern France, was a man of fragile health and still more fragile will. Elected with the decisive support of the French crown, he never once set foot in Rome: he installed the papal court at Avignon, at the gates of the kingdom of France, surrounded on all sides by Gallic influence. History remembers him as the first pope of the «Avignon captivity». And one has to admit that «the poor captive pope of Avignon» is a most evocative phrase, but the more exact one would be «puppet, soulless marionette and pocket pope».
Clement did not merely consent to the persecution of the Templars without protecting them. He endorsed it, legitimised it and extended it by bull to the whole of Christendom. It was he who convoked the Council of Vienne, where on 22 March 1312 the order was officially suppressed by the bull Vox in excelso. And note the legal detail, because it is exquisitely shameless: the bull does not condemn the Templars. It acknowledges that the accusations had not been proven, and suppresses the order all the same «for the good of the peace of the Church». Translated from curial Latin into plain English: because the king of France demanded it.
The accusations: a suffocating suit cut to measure
Let us talk about the charges, because they are a masterpiece of cynicism.
The Templars were accused of denying Christ in their secret initiation rituals, of spitting and urinating on the cross, of worshipping a demonic idol called Baphomet, of obscene kisses on forbidden parts and of practising institutionalised sodomy as an act of initiation into the order. Note the design: they were not accused of theft or financial corruption, which would have required account books and evidence. They were accused of exactly the kind of crime that in the Middle Ages needed no evidence: the secret, nocturnal, ritual crime, impossible to witness — all the more so when there were no cameras or mobile phones — and therefore impossible to refute. If you denied it, the devil was helping you lie convincingly to save yourself. If you confessed it, under unspeakable torture, you were guilty and had to die. The trap had no way out, and it had none by design.
The confessions were extracted by torture, applied with a zeal that made resistance physically impossible. And the apparatus that applied it in France answered not to the pope but to the king: at the head of it all stood the secretary Guillaume de Nogaret — I told you the name would return —, the same man who had gone to Anagni to threaten and strike Boniface VIII in his own palace, the famous outrage of Anagni. Philip's keeper of the seals, his man for dirty work, now commanding the largest inquisitorial process in the history of France. And he was equal to it, because Nogaret had in his day been professor of jurisprudence at the University of Montpellier.
Almost all of them confessed. Almost all of them retracted afterwards, the moment they were released from the ropes of the rack and the other instruments of torture. And here the system bared its sharpest fang: retracting a confession made you a «relapsed heretic», a repeat offender. And the relapsed went to the stake with no further formality and rather faster. In May 1310, fifty-four Templars who had had the courage to retract as a body were burned alive outside Paris in a single day. Their real crime: telling the truth twice.
The Chinon parchment: the evidence that slept for seven centuries
And now let me tell you the final, unexpected twist of this story, because it is one of those that reconcile me with the historian's trade.
In 2001, the Italian palaeographer Barbara Frale found in the Vatican Secret Archive — today the Vatican Apostolic Archive — a document mislaid and lost for centuries: the so-called Chinon parchment, dated August 1308. It records that Clement V's personal envoys interrogated at the fortress of Chinon the last Templar Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, and the leadership of the Temple held there… and absolved them of the charge of heresy, readmitting them to the sacraments.
Read it slowly, because it is worth every word: the pope knew they were not heretics. He put it in writing. And four years later he suppressed the order anyway, and two years after that he allowed the burning of the very men his envoys had absolved. There are betrayals that need no adjectives.
The pyre and the curse
The end came on 18 March 1314, on the Île de la Cité, in the very heart of Paris, right opposite the cathedral of Notre-Dame.
Jacques de Molay, last Grand Master of the Temple, and Geoffroy de Charney, preceptor of Normandy, were brought before the people to ratify their confessions publicly in exchange for life imprisonment. Molay was over seventy and had spent seven years rotting in the king's prisons. And at that moment, with freedom within reach of a single sentence, the old man did the last thing anybody expected: he raised his voice and proclaimed before the crowd that the order was innocent, that the confessions had been torn out under torment, and that his only crime had been to lie under torture. Charney backed him.
Both relapsed heretics, they burned at the stake that very evening. It is said that Molay asked to die facing Notre-Dame, with his hands free to pray.
And here is born the legend you all know: from the flames, Molay is said to have summoned king and pope to appear before the tribunal of God within a year. Clement V died in April 1314, a month later. Philip IV died in November, aged forty-six, after a hunting accident. And over the following fourteen years, Philip's three sons died one after another without leaving a male heir, extinguishing the direct Capetian dynasty that had reigned in France for more than three centuries. The French call them les rois maudits, the accursed kings, and under that title Maurice Druon wrote the saga that inspired, among other things, Game of Thrones.
Do I believe in the curse of the Templars and in Friday the 13th? Yes? No? Perhaps… I believe in coincidences that write better than novelists. But you can see why, with material like that, the superstition of Friday the 13th as an ill-omened day has here its most quoted origin. Some dates earn their bad name the hard way.
Betrayal or state conspiracy?
The answer history offers, seven centuries on, is of an uncomfortable clarity: it was a state conspiracy. There is no serious evidence of Templar heresy or of Templar crimes, and since 2001 we know, thanks to Dr Frale's Chinon parchment, that not even the pope believed in it. There was a king devoured by debt and ambition, a pope too weak to say no, and a judicial machinery placed at the service of political power with an efficiency that is frightening even now.
Friday 13 October 1307 did not expose the corruption of an order. It perpetrated one of the greatest institutional injustices of the Middle Ages, and got away with it for free: nobody ever paid for it.
In The Dawn of the Templars, the fourth book of my saga on the Crusades, I narrate the luminous birth of this order: the nine knights, the idealism, the newly conquered Jerusalem. But anyone who knows the ending cannot help reading those beginnings with a lump in the throat. That shadow looming on the horizon, the fragility of what Hugues de Payens founded with such sacrifice, is an essential part of the saga's atmosphere. Because great institutions do not only come into being: they also die. And sometimes they are killed, on an ordinary Friday, by a king's signature.
Sources and references
- The Templar trials (1307–1314) — records preserved in the Vatican Apostolic Archive.
- The Chinon parchment (August 1308) — Vatican Apostolic Archive, published by Barbara Frale in 2001.
- Bull Vox in excelso of Clement V (22 March 1312) — suppression of the Order.
- Chronicle of Geoffroi de Paris — account of 13 October 1307.
There is NO fiction in this article
Everything is in the records: the simultaneous arrests of Friday 13 October 1307 by order of Philip IV, the interrogations, the suppression of the Order at the Council of Vienne by the bull Vox in excelso of 1312 and the burning of Jacques de Molay in 1314. The originals are preserved in the Vatican Apostolic Archive and the account of the raid was written down by Geoffroi de Paris. The confessions were extracted under torment, and it is not this article that says so: the Templars themselves said it the moment they were taken off the rack, when almost all of them retracted — and fifty-four of them burned for it in 1310. The Chinon parchment, found in the Vatican archive and published in 2001, documents that Clement V's envoys absolved the Temple's leadership of heresy in 1308. The outrage of Anagni of 1303, slap to the pope included, was directed by Guillaume de Nogaret. As for motive, no document reads «I did it for the money»; but the king owed the Temple a fortune, he kept its goods, and the man who directed the process was his keeper of the seals, the same who years earlier had gone to Anagni for the pope. The narrator's conclusions and judgements belong to the personal literary voice of the author, David S. Matrecano.
