Templars
a famous military order, which, like the Hospitallers and the Teutonic Knights, owed its origin to the Crusades. In the year 1119 two comrades of Godfrey de Bouillon, Hugues de Payen and Geoffroi de Saint-Adhémar, bound themselves and seven other French Adhémar, bound other French themselves and knights to guard pilgrims to the holy places from the attacks of the Saracens, the Saracens , taking before the patriarch of Jerusalem solemn vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. King Baldwin II. gave them for quarters part of his palace, which was built on the site of the Temple of Solomon close to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Hence they took their name as Templars, and the houses of the order, as at Paris and London, that of the Temple. At the Council of Troyes (1128) Bernard of Clairvaux drew up its rule in 72 statutes, substantially the groundwork of the statutes as finally revised in the middle of the 13th century. The order at first consisted of knights alone, but later its members were grouped as knights, all of noble birth, chaplains, and men-at-arms (fratres servientes), besides mercenaries, retainers, and craftsmen affiliated and enjoying its protection. The knights took the vows for life or for a certain period, and they alone wore the white linen mantle, with the eightpointed red cross on the left shoulder (granted by Pope Eugenius III.), and white linen girdle; black or brown garments were worn by all others. The seal of the order showed the Temple, later two riders-a Templar and a helpless pilgrim-on one horse.
The discipline of the order was austere, excluding all needless luxury or display in food, dress, or armor, and all worldly pleasures were forbidden. At the head of the whole order stood the Grand-master; under him Masters, Grand Priors, Commanders, or Preceptors ruled the various provinces of Jerusalem, Tripoli, Antioch and Cyprus, Portugal , Castile and Leon, Aragon, France and Auvergne, Aquitaine and Poitou, Provence, England, Germany, Italy (Middle and Upper), Apulia and Sicily. Second in command to the Grandmaster stood the Seneschal, his deputy; next the Marshal, the Marshal , whose business, moreover, was to provide arms, horses, and all the material , hor and all the material of war. The Templars were by a papal TEMPLARS bull in 1172 rendered independent of the authority of the bishops, owning allegiance to the Pope alone. Their houses enjoyed right of sanctuary, and they often preserved the treasure of kings and nobles.
The Templars, at once knights and monks, realized the two dearest of mediæval ideals, and men of the highest courage and purest devotion flocked into their ranks, bringing with them their wealth to fill their coffers. Already by 1260 the order is said to have numbered 20,000 knights, and these perhaps the finest fighting men the world has seen.
Charges of pride, of immorality and impieties, of secret heresies, and even of betraying Frederic II. to the infidel (1229) and St. Louis to the Sultan of Egypt (1250) were yet to be hurled against the order; never, from the beginning to the end of their two centuries of history, was a Templar charged with cowardice before the enemy. The most famous successors of Hugues de Payen (died 1136) were Bernard de Tremelai, who fell at Ascalon in 1153; Eudes de Saint-Amand (died 1179), who won a glorious victory over Saladin at Ascalon (1177), only to fall next year into the Sultan's hands after a disastrous battle; Gerard de Riderfort, who suffered a terrible defeat near Nazareth in 1187, a second at Hittin two months later, and died in battle under the walls of Acre in 1189; Robert de Sable, who aided Richard Cœur de Lion to gain a glorious victory in the plain of Arsouf (1191), and bought from him the island of Cyprus, which was soon transferred to Guy de Lusignan, whereupon Acre became the seat of the order, the famous stronghold of Pilgrim's Castle being built, whose stupendous ruins exist to this day; Peter de Montaigu, whose courage helped to take Damietta in 1219; Hermann de Perigord, who rebuilt the fortress of Safed; Guillaume de Sonnac, slain beside St. Louis at the Nile in 1250; Thomas Berard, an Englishman, under whom Safed was lost in 1266, Jaffa and Antioch in 1268; and Guillaume de Beaujeu, who lost Tripoli in 1290, and fell in the bloody capture of Acre in 1291. The remnant of the Templars sailed to Cyprus, and the latest dying gleams of the order's vigor in the East were the rash attempts to capture Alexandria (1300), and to establish a settlement at Tortosa (1300-1302) under the last and most ill-fated of its grandmasters.
The Templars had failed in their work; their usefulness was past; the order had now only to sink into extinction in one of the darkest tragedies of history.
Their wealth and pride had sowed a har- TEMPLARS vest of fear and hatred; their loyalty to the Pope and their exceptional privileges had long since aroused the jealousy of the bishops; their bitter quarrels with the Hospitallers, which blazed into open warfare in Palestine in 1243, had shocked the moral sense of Christendom; and the exclusiveness and secrecy with which all their affairs were conducted opened a door for all manner of sinister suspicions among the populace. Philip the Fair of France was a king who covered with a thin veneer of piety a character of complete unscrupulousness; he had succeeded in placing Clement V., a miserable creature of his own, on the papal throne (1305), and in his minister Guillaume de Nogaret and the officers of the Inquisition he found servants of character unscrupulous as his own. In the wealth of the Templars he saw a tempting prize, and the train of treachery was soon complete.
The Grand-master Jacques de Molay was summoned from Cyprus by the Pope in 1306; he went taking with him the treasure of the order, and awaited his fate in France. On Oct. 13, 1307, the Grand-master and 140 Templars were seized at the Temple and flung into prison. Two degraded Templars supplied some of the charges the king required; tortures, infamous beyond the infamies of the Inquisition, provided the remainder. In August, 1308, Clement sent throughout Christendom the 127 articles of interrogation for the accused, and evidence in detail self-contradictory beyond all parallel was quickly accumulated. In the 225 witnesses sent to the papal commission (1310-1311) from various parts of France the depositions, as Mr. Lea points out, occur most suspiciously in groups of identity according to the bishops from whose preliminary tribunals they had come.
Philip held a so-called national assembly at Tours (May, 1308) which obsequiously expressed its approval of the condemnation. The Pope now took the formal responsibility upon himself by personally examining 72 Templars brought before him, when those who had already confessed under torture confirmed their confessions, knowing well that the penalty of retraction was burning forthwith as a relapsed heretic. The Pope contended that the fate of the order as an institution must be submitted to a general council. Meantime, to the public commission appointed to examine into the charges at Paris, there came (March, 1310), as many as 546 Templars who offered to defend the order against all the charges. Four of these were at length commissioned to be present at the TEMPLARS