Sean Martin - The Knights Templar

At around the hour of Vespers, Jacques de Molay and Geoffroi de Charney were led out on to the Ile-des-Javiaux in the Seine. In front of a crowd who had gathered to watch the two Templars in their last moments, the Grand Master and the Preceptor were stripped to their shirts. Witnesses reported that both seemed very calm, almost glad that their torment was now over. As he was fastened to the stake, de Molay asked to be turned towards the cathedral of Notre-Dame, and that his hands be freed so that he could die in prayer. His request was granted. As the flames grew about him, de Molay is said to have once more protested his innocence and that of the Order, and he called both Clement and Philip to meet him before God within the year. (Philip may in fact have been watching from an upstairs window in the nearby palace.) Geoffroi de Charney likewise protested from the stake:

‘I shall follow the way of my master

As a martyr you have killed him

This you have done and know not

God willing on this day

I shall die in the Order like him.’ 33 33 Burman, ibid. , p.272.

After nightfall, when the two men were dust and ash and the crowd had dispersed, a number of friars from the nearby Augustinian house and certain other people – who have never been identified – went to the place of execution and collected the bones of the two Templars, intent on preserving them as relics.

The fact that the Templars fell from grace so spectacularly suggests that some of the wilder accusations against them may have had some basis in reality. While most commentators at the time and subsequently have seen Philip’s avarice as the motivating factor behind his attack on the Order, there are those, such as the eminent mediaeval historian Sir Steven Runciman, who believe that there was some truth to the charges: ‘It would be unwise to dismiss these rumours [of heresy] as the unfounded invention of enemies. There was probably just enough substance to them to suggest the line along which the Order could be most convincingly attacked.’ 34 34 Sir Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades ,Vol. III, p.435 – 6.

If the end of the Order remains controversial, then its beginnings are equally shrouded in mystery and silence.

The traditional picture that Hugues de Payen and Godfroi de St Omer presented themselves to King Baldwin II around the year 1119 with the suggestion that they form an order of nine knights who would protect pilgrims visiting the Holy Land derives from Guillame of Tyre (died c.1186), the first chronicler to mention the Order. Yet Guillame, like most mediaeval historians, is unreliable. He notes that the Council of Troyes was held in the ninth year of the Order’s existence, which would mean that the Templars were possibly launched at the Council of Nablus in 1120, yet he also notes that they accepted no new members for the first nine years as well. As Fulk, Count of Anjou, is known to have joined the Order on his pilgrimage of 1120, this would push the foundation date of the Temple back to 1111. As Runciman notes, Guillame’s dating is ‘confused and at times demonstrably wrong’. 35 35 Runciman, ibid. ,Vol. II, p.477.

If Guillame is confused, then he is not the only one. The other two chronicles dating from the late twelfth century – those of Michael the Syrian and Walter Map – disagree not only with Guillame, but also with each other. According to Michael the Syrian (d.1199), it was the King of Jerusalem who suggested to Hugues de Payen that he form a military order, and puts the initial membership at 30. Walter Map (d.c.1210) believed that the Order was founded by a knight from Burgundy called Paganus who defended pilgrims he saw frequently attacked at a horsepool near Jerusalem. Despite his best efforts, the number of infidels grew and he was forced to seek extra recruits, with the knights subsequently being given lodgings near the Temple of the Lord, which could very well be the al-Aqsa mosque, sitting as it does at the southern end of the Temple platform.

There is a further hint that the Templars were in existence before their official founding date of around 1119. Five years previously, the Bishop of Chartres had written to Hugh, Count of Champagne – himself either a founding Templar or at the very least one of the Order’s first supporters – upon his return from his second visit to the East: ‘We have heard that … before leaving Jerusalem you made a vow to join the Militia of Christ, that you will enrol in this evangelical soldiery.’ 36 36 Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln, op. cit. , p.57. As the phrase ‘Militia of Christ’ would also be employed by St Bernard in reference to the Templars, and given the close ties between Hugh, Bernard and the fledgling Order, it is this comment from the Bishop of Chartres that is perhaps the most persuasive evidence we have that the Templars – in one form or another – existed at least as early as 1114.

The air of mystery that surrounds the Temple’s early years is compounded by the fact that the years before the Council of Troyes are the Order’s least documented period. Indeed, they are hardly documented at all. The Templars themselves had no official records of their foundation, which is unusual for a religious order. There were no Western chroniclers in Outremer until the time of the Second Crusade, and, more remarkably, the King’s chronicler, Fulk de Chartres, who was living in Jerusalem at the time of the Order’s supposed foundation, does not mention them at all. There are only four documents existing prior to Troyes that mention the Templars, two of them making note of the Order in connection with the Hospital. 37 37 Barber, The New Knighthood , p.8. A later chronicle – that of Ernoul and Bernard the Treasurer – also suggests that there was some kind of close link between the two Orders. Interestingly, in this version, the Templars ‘asked the king to give them his palace in front of the Lord’s Temple’. 38 38 Helen Nicholson, The Knights Templar: A New History (Sutton, 2001), pp.29 – 30. Indeed, recent research 39 39 Barber & Bate, op. cit. , p.2. seems to confirm that the Templars were initially given accommodation by the Augustinian Canons of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and that the buildings they occupied were part of the Hospital, which lay just to the south.

So if the Templars were originally based at the Hospital – and possibly as early as 1111 – what were they doing? Out of the four pre-1129 documents, none of them describes the Templars as protecting pilgrims. Could they have been simply providing security at the Hospital, or was something else going on? It has frequently been asserted 40 40 e.g. Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln, op. cit. , pp.35 – 65, pp.81 – 100, in particular pp.62 – 5. that the Templars were part of some grand design that was inaugurated with the First Crusade. While this cannot be proved, it cannot be disproved either. Sufficient gaps exist in the historical record to allow the Templars a more nebulous role than that with which they have been traditionally ascribed. Certainly there were shady characters whose names have not come down to us who were moving in the background in the early years of Outremer. Godfroi de Bouillon, for instance, was accompanied to the East by a group of anonymous advisers. The name is known of only one of them, Peter the Hermit. Peter was possibly linked to a mysterious group of monks who arrived on Godfroi’s estates at Orval in the Ardennes sometime around 1090, having travelled en masse from Calabria in Italy. Peter is then thought to have become Godfroi’s personal tutor, and, in 1095, was one of those who called for a crusade. (Indeed, Peter actually led the first band of crusaders to leave Europe.) When Jerusalem fell, Godfroi was offered the crown of Jerusalem by a group of mysterious nobles, who included ‘a certain bishop of Calabria’, and Godfroi then seems to have had an abbey built just outside the city walls, on Mount Sion. The resulting Order of Sion is one of the most obscure religious fraternities of the period, and it has been suggested 41 41 Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln, op. cit. , pp.81 – 8. that it is from this group that the Templars derived.