Did you know why Friday the 13th brings such bad luck? The Templars' curse

The superstition no one can explain

There are buildings without a 13th floor. Airlines that skip row 13. Hotels where room 13 simply does not appear on the floor plan. Psychiatry has even given the fear its own name: paraskevidekatriaphobia, the pathological panic of Friday the 13th. It is a long and convoluted name for a superstition that, deep down, we all carry inside us a little — because who hasn't glanced twice at the calendar when a Friday falls on the 13th, and shrugged with a nervous smile?

Cultural historians have offered several hypotheses to explain the origin of the taboo. Some trace it back to the Last Supper, where thirteen guests are said to have gathered before Jesus was betrayed and crucified, as it happens, on a Friday. Others link it to Norse mythology, where the trickster god Loki arrived as the thirteenth guest at a divine banquet and triggered the death of Balder. There are even those who attribute it to numerical and kabbalistic coincidences in the lunar calendar.

All of these theories have a grain of truth. But the most cinematic, the most documented, and the one that European popular imagination has ultimately adopted as the definitive explanation has a very specific setting: a pyre burning in front of a Parisian cathedral, an old knight burning alive, and a curse spoken aloud before death. To understand why Friday the 13th still sends shivers down our spines, we must go back to 1307, to the day of the mass arrest of the Templars.

The dawn of 13 October 1307

What happened that morning was one of the best-coordinated police operations of the entire Middle Ages. Weeks earlier, the seneschals and bailiffs of the kingdom of France had received sealed envelopes bearing the royal seal, together with the strict order not to open them under any circumstance until the morning of 13 October. When they broke the seals at dawn, they read instructions as short as they were devastating: arrest immediately, in their own jurisdictions, all members of the Order of the Temple and confiscate their assets in the name of the king.

That morning, simultaneously, in commanderies, inns, farms, castles and chapels spread across the entire kingdom, thousands of Templar knights, sergeants, chaplains and serving brothers were dragged from their beds, chained, and led to the royal dungeons. The blow was so swift and so absolute that barely a handful managed to escape. Most of the fugitives ended up taking refuge in Portugal, Scotland or Aragon — kingdoms where the Order kept its autonomy or where, at the very least, the persecution was not so relentless.

The formal charges against the Templars were as grotesque as they were sophisticated. They were accused of worshipping a demonic idol called Baphomet; of spitting and urinating on the crucifix during secret initiation ceremonies; of practising ritual sodomy among the brethren; of kissing each other in obscene places on the body; of denying Christ. These were charges of heresy, sacrilege and idolatry — the gravest that canon law contemplated, and the only ones for which a secular king could technically demand the trial of warrior monks who answered directly to the Pope.

None of it had any factual basis. But under torture — the rack, the strappado, embers applied to the soles of the feet — men end up confessing anything. And that was exactly what happened.

Philip IV the Fair, the greedy king

To understand why a Christian monarch decided to wipe out the most celebrated soldiers of Christendom, we have to look squarely at the man who ordered the operation: Philip IV of France, known as the Fair. The nickname referred exclusively to his physical appearance — tall, blond, of classic features, with a majestic presence. Inside, however, Philip IV was one of the coldest and most calculating souls ever to sit on a European throne. The chroniclers who met him agreed on a description that has become famous: a beautiful statue with the eyes of a fish.

When he came to power in 1285, Philip inherited a kingdom in full territorial expansion but with empty coffers. The wars against Flanders, especially the disaster of the Golden Spurs in 1302, left him literally bankrupt. He resorted to every trick imaginable: he debased the coinage several times, taxed the clergy against the express will of Pope Boniface VIII, expelled the Lombard bankers in 1291 by confiscating their goods, expelled the Jews from France in 1306 and kept their fortunes. Each expulsion was, deep down, a way of wiping out debt by decree and filling the royal treasury with someone else's wealth.

But one creditor remained untouchable: the Order of the Temple. The Templars had invented, two centuries earlier, the first forms of modern international banking. They accepted deposits in one commandery and allowed withdrawals in another hundreds of kilometres away by means of a letter of credit; they lent money to kings and emperors; they kept royal treasures in their fortresses. The French Crown itself was up to its neck in debt to the Order — a debt inherited in part from the ransom that Philip's grandfather, Saint Louis, had had to pay the Muslims after being captured during the Seventh Crusade.

There was also a personal grievance. When he was widowed in 1305, Philip IV formally asked to enter the Order of the Temple, dreaming even of one day becoming Grand Master. The Order politely answered no. For a man with Philip the Fair's pride, that refusal was a wound that could only heal in blood. If he could not command the Templars from within, he would annihilate them from without. And along the way, of course, keep all the gold they were guarding.

Guillaume de Nogaret, the architect of the plot

Philip IV had the will. What he needed was a man capable of building a legally impeccable case against a religious order that answered directly to the Pope. That man was called Guillaume de Nogaret, his Keeper of the Seals, a jurist, the son of Cathars, a professor of law trained at the University of Montpellier, and probably the sharpest and most utterly unscrupulous mind in the kingdom of France.

Nogaret already had a rather telling résumé before he took on the Templars. In September 1303, in the name of the king, he had led the famous attack of Anagni against Pope Boniface VIII: with a handful of mercenaries and Italian allies, he stormed the papal residence, slapped the Pontiff in the face and held him prisoner for three days. Boniface was rescued by the inhabitants of the town, but died of the shock a few weeks later. That precedent told you everything you needed to know about Nogaret: he was a man willing to go as far as necessary.

The plan he devised against the Temple was a masterpiece of procedural engineering. First, he infiltrated spies into several commanderies to collect rumours, anecdotes, ritual misunderstandings — anything that could be reinterpreted as heresy. Then, he drafted the indictment himself, deliberately choosing the most sensationalist charges, the ones that would have the greatest impact on popular opinion. Next, he coordinated the interrogation protocol with the royal Inquisition, led by the king's confessor Guillaume Imbert. And finally, he synchronized the arrest operation with such precision that not a single Templar commandery in France had time to react.

Under torture, in the weeks that followed, the French Templars confessed exactly what Nogaret had written in advance in his indictment. One hundred and twenty-three confessed to having spat on the crucifix. One hundred and five claimed to have denied Christ. All of them signed whatever was put in front of them, because the pain was unbearable and the promise of death was preferable to the rack. Nogaret had his case.

Clement V, the puppet pope

One link was still missing. The Templars were an exempt religious order, which meant they answered to the Pope and only to the Pope. To destroy them legally, the complicity of Rome was needed. The problem — for Rome — was that the Pope, at that moment, was no longer in Rome.

In 1305, after the death of Boniface VIII and of his brief successor Benedict XI, Philip IV had manoeuvred the conclave into electing a French archbishop of his confidence: Bertrand de Got, who took the name of Clement V. He wasn't even crowned in Rome. The coronation took place in Lyon, and shortly afterwards Clement V moved the papal seat to Avignon, in the south of France, inaugurating what history knows as the Avignon Captivity: seventy years of French popes ruling under the direct shadow of the king of France.

Clement V was not a bad man. He was a scrupulous canonist, tormented by his fragile health, who for years tried, with genuine effort, to save the Templars from the machinery Philip IV had set in motion. He even drafted a document — the famous Chinon Parchment, rediscovered in the Vatican archives in 2001 — in which he quietly absolved Jacques de Molay and the main Templar leaders of the charges of heresy. But he never had the courage to make it public. Philip IV pressed him relentlessly, threatening to convene a general council to put his predecessor Boniface VIII on posthumous trial for heresy — a scandal that would have brought the Church to its knees.

In the end, Clement gave in. On 22 March 1312, at the Council of Vienne, he issued the bull Vox in Excelso, by which he officially dissolved the Order of the Temple. He did not condemn it — an important theological nuance — but suppressed it administratively, transferring its assets to the Order of the Hospital. Two hundred years of Templar history were wiped out with a stroke of the pen, without a definitive sentence, without a condemnatory verdict, without a formal defence. Only the silence of a Pope who knew he was committing an infamy and preferred to sign it rather than face the king.

Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master

While all this was happening, in the dungeons of the Bastille and the Temple Tower, the last Grand Master of the Order awaited his fate. Jacques de Molay had been born around 1243 in Burgundy, into a family of minor nobility, and joined the Temple very young, in 1265, in the chapel of Beaune. He spent most of his life in the Holy Land, fighting the Muslims in the last Christian strongholds of the East. In 1292, after the fall of Acre and the definitive loss of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, he was elected Grand Master. He was about fifty years old, with vast military experience and one fixed idea: to organise a new Crusade to recapture the Holy Land.

When Clement V summoned him to France in 1305 — supposedly to discuss merging the Temple with the Hospitallers and to plan that new Crusade — Molay travelled to Paris accompanied by sixty knights and a considerable cargo of gold. Philip IV received him with all honours. He named him godfather to one of his sons — an extreme public gesture of trust. And two years later, in the early hours of 13 October, he had him dragged in chains from his room in the Temple Tower down to an underground cell. The betrayal was so complete, so calculated and so perfect that even today it is hard to read about it without a shiver.

Molay confessed under torture. He confessed to having spat on the cross, to having denied Christ, to everything they asked. He was an elderly man — close to seventy — and the tortures were inhuman. But after the first few months, when he was transferred to a less brutal regime of confinement while awaiting the final trial, he began to retract. He did not want to die condemned by lies. He wanted to die defending the Order he had served for more than forty years.

On 18 March 1314, almost seven years after the arrest, Jacques de Molay and the Preceptor of Normandy, Geoffroy de Charnay, were led to a scaffold raised in front of Notre-Dame Cathedral, on the small Île aux Juifs — the Island of the Jews — in the Seine. The sentence they were about to hear was life imprisonment. When the judge finished reading it, Molay rose, looked at the crowd gathered on the banks, and declared aloud that everything he had confessed was false, that the Order was innocent, that he was dying as a knight of Christ. Charnay confirmed the retraction with identical firmness.

That very afternoon, Philip IV, who had been told the news by messenger, ordered that both men be burnt alive before nightfall. The pyre was prepared with a slow fire, deliberately, so that the agony would last for hours. Legend has it that Molay, while burning, asked that his hands be tied in front of him so that he could die looking towards Notre-Dame and praying to the Virgin. The crowd watched the execution in silence. When the pyre died down, some Templars disguised as pilgrims approached the embers to gather the charred bones of their Grand Master. Those relics, they say, travelled clandestinely north, to Scotland, where the Order found refuge under King Robert the Bruce and transformed itself into other things — other brotherhoods, other legends.

The curse

Before the flames climbed up his chest, according to the account preserved by several chroniclers and passed down into popular imagination, Jacques de Molay spoke a final sentence. He called Clement V and Philip IV by name, and summoned them to appear within the span of one year before the tribunal of God to answer for their crimes. The exact wording varies from source to source — some consider it apocryphal, others take it as historical — but the substance is always the same: the last Grand Master of the Temple was calling his executioners to the divine court. The unsettling part is not the curse. The unsettling part is what happened next.

On 20 April 1314, barely thirty-three days after Molay's execution, Pope Clement V died at Roquemaure in Provence, victim — according to the chronicles — of a cancer of the pylorus accompanied by appalling diarrhoea. His agony was so repulsive that his own servants abandoned the corpse during the night of the wake. The chronicle tells how a candle fell upon the catafalque, set fire to the cloths, and partially charred the body of the Pope. He died burnt, posthumously, as Molay had died.

On 29 November 1314, eight months after the pyre, Philip IV the Fair fell from his horse during a hunt in the forest of Pont-Sainte-Maxence. Some sources speak of a stroke in mid-gallop; others, of a fall that brought on fever and gangrene. He died a few days later, aged forty-six. He was within the year laid down by Molay's curse.

Guillaume de Nogaret had died a few months before the king, in April of the same 1314. The circumstances are unclear. Some chronicles suggest poisoning; others, a sudden illness. What is certain is that the brain of the plot did not see the end of the fatal year that the Grand Master had proclaimed from the pyre either.

And the curse — if curse it was, and not a series of statistically improbable coincidences — did not stop there. The three sons of Philip IV, the three kings who successively inherited the throne of France — Louis X the Quarrelsome, Philip V the Tall and Charles IV the Fair — died young, one after another, leaving no legitimate male offspring. The dynasty of the direct Capetians, which had ruled France without interruption for three hundred and forty years, came to an end in 1328 with the death of Charles IV. The throne passed to the collateral branch of the Valois, opening the disputed succession that would lead, only a few decades later, to the Hundred Years' War. All of Europe talked about it. The line of Philip the Fair had been erased from the map with surgical efficiency.

The last chapter of the curse — the most cinematic, the one taken up by almost every popular retelling — happened four hundred and seventy-nine years later. On 21 January 1793, in the Place de la Concorde in Paris, the executioner Sanson beheaded with the guillotine King Louis XVI, the last descendant of the Capetians. Some revolutionary chroniclers recorded that when the king's head fell into the basket, an anonymous voice from the crowd — perhaps a Freemason, perhaps a nostalgic Templar, perhaps a later invention — shouted:

"Jacques de Molay, thou art avenged!"

Real or myth, that sentence closed a circle of four and a half centuries. The Capetian line had, at last, been entirely extinguished. The curse spoken on a pyre in front of Notre-Dame by an old knight burning alive had finally reached its end.

The fear that survived seven centuries

Coincidence or curse? Serious historians — and one might as well say it honestly — lean towards the first explanation. Clement V was already ill when Molay died. Philip IV was forty-six years old and his life had been exhausted by wars, politics and currency debasements. The extinction of the direct Capetians can be perfectly explained by the infant mortality of the age and by the demographic fragility of any medieval dynasty. There is, strictly speaking, no mystery here that requires supernatural intervention.

But history, as any writer who has spent his life studying it knows well, is not written with data alone. It is also written with the emotional memory of the generations that pass it on. And the emotional memory of Europe chose to believe in Molay's curse. It chose to tell it, to expand it, to twist it, to mythologise it. It chose to turn Friday, 13 October 1307 into a taboo date. Every time someone in a modern building avoids the 13th floor, or a pilot jokes about flying on Friday the 13th, or a calendar appears marked in red, they are performing — without knowing it — a gesture whose distant origin can be traced back to a pyre burning in front of Notre-Dame.

The Templars are gone. The Order no longer exists. Their treasures dispersed, their commanderies passed into other hands, their archives were burnt or lost. But the superstition they left behind is still there, dormant, crossing the centuries in silence. Every Friday the 13th, almost without realising it, a small part of Europe is still praying for the soul of an old knight burning alive on an island in the Seine. And that, whether curse or coincidence, is the most astonishing proof of how far the weight of a single night can travel in the history of a continent.