Templars on trial: why were the Knights accused of such heinous crimes?

It was a spectacular fall from grace for the Knights Templar, a military-religious order that had long been esteemed across Europe and beyond.

For nearly two centuries, since the order’s foundation in Jerusalem c1119, the Templars had been charged with defending residents of, and pilgrims to, the crusader states of the Middle East.

Once celebrated across the Christian world for their unwavering courage in battle and the zeal with which they served God, suddenly they were being reviled and at- tacked. How and why did this dramatic collapse in fortunes come about?

The driving force behind the assault on the Templars was France’s King Philip IV, ‘the Fair’. Philip was outwardly pious, but also in great need of cash. Indeed, he had a track record of crushing minority groups in pursuit of easy money.

In the early 1290s, he had arrested all of the so-called Lombard bankers – Italian moneylenders – in France, and confiscated their goods. And in 1306, he had expelled France’s Jewish community and seized their assets.

Now he turned his sights on the Templars – another reputedly wealthy group. Pope Clement V was coerced into acquiescence and, in 1307, the pontiff ordered the Templars’ arrest. The torture now began.

Accused of a litany of heinous crimes, some Templars proclaimed their innocence. Thirty-six such men died during the initial interrogations in Paris; their defiant testimonies were erased from the legal records.

Most, though, confessed quickly. Across France, torture was routinely applied to suspects: victims were told what to say, and then brutalised until they said it.

One Templar priest in Albi, north-east of Toulouse, told how his feet had been burned over a fire. This did not mean just an uncomfortable toasting: a couple of days later, two bones fell out of the dead flesh of his gruesomely barbecued foot. One brother later testified that he was encouraged to confess “by the hanging of weights on his genitals and other members”.

Another French Templar, Brother Ponsard of Gizy, disarmingly honest about the power of torture, summed up the pros and cons of the methodology.

When he appeared in front of a papal commission in November 1309, he was adamant that the charges made against him were trumped up – but added that, if his captors chose to torture him, he would readily agree with whatever they suggested. He wanted it placed on record that he would confess to anything – if subjected to torture.

Over the following months, the confessions kept flooding in. Satanism, heresy, sexual perversion and financial corruption – the Templars of France were found guilty of them all. In fact, given the sheer weight of the obscene and outlandish crimes of which they stood accused, it’s perhaps surprising that it would be another four years before the order was finally dissolved.

A papal edict

Templars weren’t only found in France, though: this international order drew members from Christian nations across Europe. What, then, was the fate of the Templars across the Channel?

After all, at the time England was still a Catholic nation, subject to papal edict just as much as France. And though Edward II initially doubted the charges levelled at the order, in December 1307 he received a directive from the pope to arrest Templars in England – which he did in January 1308. Soon, all but a very small handful of the 144 Templars based in Britain and Ireland were in custody.

Relations between Templars in Britain and France were close, and members on either side of the Channel would almost certainly have been equally guilty (or, more likely, innocent) of the alleged crimes. But the two groups experienced strikingly different fates at the hands of the respective authorities following the mass arrests of October 1307, mostly because English law was strikingly different from that of France.

In early 14th-century England, there was less royal control of the judiciary. English courts did not have an inquisition. Most importantly, English law relied on witnesses and a jury, and torture was not routinely used within the legal system. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, two years of harsh but non-violent interrogation in England yielded no confessions and almost no evidence of guilt.

For all that, Templars in Britain were still charged with terrible crimes – and by examining those accusations in greater detail, we can get to the bottom of a question that has puzzled historians for centuries: were the Templars guilty of any of the charges laid against them, or were they the victims of an egregious 14th-century stitch-up?

Chief among the charges in Britain was the allegation that the Templars’ leaders had deliberately sent whistleblowers overseas to die.

One of the witnesses, for example, was a Carmelite friar (the Templars, it should be noted, had privileges that did not always endear them to rival monastic orders) named Robert of Maidenesford, who said that he had been told by a servant, who remained conveniently anonymous, that because a brother “did not agree to their cursed profession he was sent secretly to overseas regions and there was killed by those to whom he was sent”.

But Robert of Maidenesford was no ordinary cleric. The imaginative Carmelite was also allegedly party to a plot to burn a man to death in an oven, so he may not have been the most reliable witness.

Similarly, two Dominican friars testified that troublesome Templars in Britain were given sealed letters to take out to the east, the contents of which were later found to include instructions that the recipient of each letter should kill the bearer. But this hearsay was an old trope: it later found a suitably dramatic and equally fictitious home in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Of course, many Templars in Britain were sent abroad – fighting and serving overseas was, after all, what they had volunteered to do. In the absence of any real evidence, or real crimes, their inquisitors were surely just scraping the barrel with this allegation.

But was another grave accusation made against the Templars also false: that they were fabulously rich and hoarding treasure?

This charge was not entirely irrational. The money for crusading had to come from somewhere, and the Templars were given substantial tax breaks and properties through which to fund the defence of the Holy Land.

It’s not hard to see how other clerical orders, lacking these advantages, could soon start accusing the Templars of greed and avarice.

Far from hoarding secret treasure, though, property owned by Templars in Britain was carefully documented. Inventories of their assets were made by royal officials in January 1308, when the brothers were first arrested, and again a year later, on 4 March 1309.

Any Satanic idols or secret treasures would not have remained secret – yet the accounts show that the personal possessions of the Templars were, in fact, surprisingly simple.

In London, the king’s men seized only some clothes and wall coverings; two crossbows and a few swords; two books; and some sundry iron forks and fire stands. They found no precious metals, with the poignant exception of the property of one Richard of Herdwick, from whom were confiscated two silver cups and 12 silver spoons.

Certainly, any hidden treasure remained firmly hidden. Even the rumoured corporate treasure of the order’s New Temple headquarters proved a major disappointment for the bailiffs.

Far from hoarding ‘secret treasure’, the property owned by the Templars in Britain was carefully documented

A number of valuables were held in its vestry – rich furnishings and beautiful fabrics, some reliquaries, ivory and high-quality silverwork – but nothing out of the ordinary for the provincial headquarters of a major religious order.

Was there any concealed loot? Inventories of goods owned by Templars in Britain record no hoards of money, jewels or idols, just items that might be expected in a holy order’s properties.

A total of 53 silver spoons were mentioned in the inventories, six of which were found at a home for aged and infirm Templars in Denney, Cambridgeshire. This amounted to one spoon for every two Templars arrested in Britain – hardly a treasure trove. Even in France, where the order was taken completely by surprise, no treasures were discovered.

Dark knights?

Another of the most damaging charges laid against the Templars – and the one that has arguably done most to fuel the conspiracies and bizarre tales of covert societies that still reverberate around the internet today – was the accusation that the Templars had evolved into a secret Satanic cult.

If the Templars were trying to run a secret society, they were doing a spectacularly bad job

A secret cult requires, above all else, secrecy – but the Templars were never shut off from the rest of society. Their famous New Temple headquarters complex in London had the walls, the money and the financial skills that helped to create the Templar legend. Yet, as with so much of the mythology surrounding the order, almost nothing was what it seemed.

The New Temple was a vibrant and public centre for finance and worship, law and commerce – the very antithesis of a malevolent nest of conspiracies, devil worship or secret societies. If Templars in Britain were, in fact, trying to run a secret society, they were doing a spectacularly bad job of it.

This headquarters was a remarkably public place: people were walking in and out of the precinct almost all of the time. The church was open to the public for prayer. Pilgrims came to see the relics held there. Many non-Templars – women as well as men – worked or lived in the order’s houses.

There was even a thoroughfare running through the middle of the precinct. This right of way was used by pedestrians and as a lane for trans- porting goods down to a wharf on the Thames. In other words, the supposedly most secretive and private site owned by the order had what was, in effect, a public road running through the middle of it.

Yet not one of the countless people passing through the Templars’ headquarters spotted that the order had turned away from mainstream Christianity to devil worship and idolatry.

Another accusation was that admission to the Templars was a secretive affair. Admission ceremonies were of particular interest to the inquisitors, who imagined such a ritual to be the moment when devout and enthusiastic volunteers would learn that the order was a front for Satanic worship.

But could this really have been true? In Britain, the Templars’ induction service was held in public. Far from being secretive, it was a cross between a family party and a modern graduation ceremony.

Across western Europe, young recruits usually joined the Templar house closest to their homes, so their devout and often influential families were close at hand, had there been anything untoward to report. They would have been eager to support their sons in revealing any trace of heresy.

It is true that many left the order, sometimes because of misdemeanours, or because they did not take to the rigours of Templar life. But these men, often disgruntled and with every reason to hold a grudge, told no tales of rampant wrongdoing.

Then there was the lack of complaints from the new entrants. Young knights joined because they were, as one Templar told the papal commissioners in Paris, “inspired by zeal for the orthodox faith, [and] have made their profession in the order of the Temple, remaining in it until the end of their lives.

If such men had known, seen or heard of the detestable insults and blasphemies to the name of Jesus Christ, they would have cried out against them and revealed everything to the whole world.” His logic was unarguable.

But perhaps the most convincing proof of innocence – especially relating to charges of Satanism – was conspicuous by its absence at Templar trials. It was never produced in court precisely because it was so compelling.

On the day the order was dissolved in France, an inventory was made of all Templar possessions. There had been no warning of the impending suppression, so all idols would still have been held in Templars’ treasuries and chapels.

But the results were hugely disappointing for the inquisitors. Physical evidence of devil worship was non-existent in both France and Britain. Many religious books were found, but no hint in writing of any Satanic worship. There were crosses – large and small, precious and valueless – again, all normal items of Christian devotion and in suspiciously good condition.

This was particularly embarrassing, given that new entrants to the order were supposedly forced to trample and then urinate on a crucifix.

In fact, the meticulous catalogues of possessions reveal nothing more than the pious reliquaries and other devotional aids that might be expected in one of the less academically gifted holy orders.

So why, in the absence of real evidence, was the order suppressed? Greed and credulity played a large part. The Templars’ property portfolios were undoubtedly tempting.

But perhaps the final key to understanding the ‘guilt’ of the Templars lies in their role – or, rather, lack of one.

No longer useful

For as long as the Templars still had a useful part to play in defending the Christian near east, no one accused them of anything substantive. But in 1291, Acre, capital of the last remaining crusader outposts in the Middle East, fell.

On 18 May, Mamluk armies broke through the city’s defences. The Templar grand master, William of Beaujeu, had gathered his men for a last charge, but their numbers were pitifully few – no more than “10 or 12 brethren and [William’s] own household troops”.

In that last battle, an English Templar squire struggled to rise from the body of his dead horse, while pots of Greek fire – an early incendiary weapon – exploded around him. He was so badly hit “that his surcoat burst into flames. There was no one to help him, and so his face was burned, and then his whole body, and he burned as if he had been a cauldron of pitch, and he died there.”

But heroism counted for nothing. The fall of Acre meant the loss of the crusader states of the Middle East. It also meant that the Templars were left unemployed, unfocused and easy prey for opportunistic enemies.

Templars were doubtless guilty of many minor misdemeanours. But, beyond the normal vagaries of human weakness, the charges they faced were trumped up, based on almost no evidence other than irredeemably compromised confessions extracted from frightened men under torture.

Their real ‘crime’ was far more prosaic than all of the medieval and modern conspiracy theories. No one needed an elite and expensive army on the frontiers of Christendom any more – the Templars were redundant. And in March 1312, the papal order was finally issued to suppress the order.

The Templars were no more.

• On the podcast | The Knights Templar: everything you wanted to know

This article was first published in the October 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine