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Weekly articles, reviews and rants about Medieval History and the Middle Ages, from a PhD with attitude. |
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Entry for October 13, 2007: Rehabilitating the Templars or Playing a Papal Shell Game?
It's all the rage in medieval news this week--the Vatican has announced the publication of a new facsimile book of documents from the Templar Trial, "Processus Contra Templarios - Papal Inquiry into the Trial of the Templars". Now, some of you who actually know about Templar historiography will be a bit confused here. Jules Michelet published the French trial documents a century and a half ago in "Le Procès des Templiers". Anne Gilmour-Bryson published an edited version of Cypriot trial documents, "The Trial of the Templars in Cyprus" in 1998. Malcolm Barber discussed the Trial documents at length in his "Trial of the Templars" back in 1978 and Alan Forey covered the Crown of Aragon (in northeastern Spain) in his "The Fall of the Templars in Catalonia and Aragon" (2001). Studies of the Order's history in various countries have covered the local versions of the Trial, and its documentation.
So, what is this thing, exactly? And why does it cost so bloody much?
The Templars were put on trial by Philip IV (the Fair), King of France in 1307, on charges of heresy. The general consensus is that the perpetually strapped and crusades-obsessed Philip (who never did go to the Holy Land, but talked a really good game about being a Defender of the Faithful like his sainted grandfather, Louis IX) attacked the Templars to get their money. Barber has asserted that the joke was on Philip, since most of the Templars' capital was tied up in a complex series of loans across kingdoms on which Philip could not draw. Alan Forey has claimed that the Templars in the Crown of Aragon, at least, were cash-poor. My own research, incidentally, supports that. The documents that I've seen show a religious order constantly struggling to get its debtors to pay up and being constrained by increasing responsibilities funded by decreasing responsions (payments gathered in from the various houses) throughout the 13th century.
At any rate, Philip had the Templars arrested in France and tortured them to confess to a list of five charges that his sinister chief councilor, Guillame de Nogaret, had compiled an entire month before the arrest. Philip knew he was on thin ground by usurping the role of the Church, though he was hardly the first ruler to do so. So, he bullied other rulers in Europe into arresting the Templars in their own domains. And to make things look especially legitimate, he bullied the French puppet, Bertrand de Goth, that he'd installed as new pope Clement V after causing the death of a hated predecessor, Boniface VIII.
The documents currently being released are facsimiles of the manuscript collection of the Papal Trial. Clement V initially went along with the interrogations (prosecuted by the early Inquisition on behalf of Philip). But he soon became uneasy with the flimsiness of the evidence, and complaints that the rules of interrogation had not been followed. Clement initiated his own papal inquiry. A resistance arose among the brethren on trial, among the sergeants not the knights, as hope grew that the Pope (to whom the Order actually answered) might save them. But a furious Philip ordered 60 Templars who had recanted their confessions burned at the stake in 1310 and the resistance collapsed. Clement backed down and eventually decreed that the Order should be suppressed at the Council of Vienne on March 22, 1312 with the ironically titled bull "Vox in excelso" (Voice on High).
The collection being published by the Vatican includes the transcripts of the Pope's inquiry, as well as a letter (never published) in which Clement stated that he thought that the Order was innocent. This letter has been cited by the publishers of the collection as proof that Clement believed that the Templars were innocent. However, this only confirms what historians like Barber have believed for some time. That Clement, despite being Philip's puppet, insisted on his own inquiry and eventually only suppressed the Order because it could no longer function under the cloud of suspicion raised by the Trial (probably true, as far as it went), rather than condemning it as Philip wished, is strong evidence that he never believed the charges. And he balked despite being threatened by Philip with having Boniface VIII condemned posthumously as a heretic, an action that would have damaged the Papacy even more than the Trial did. On top of this, he was probably already terminally ill with the stomach ailment that would eventually kill him. Clement was not the monster that some have painted him since, but a weak, sick man with few options trapped between a rock and a hard place. The man had a conscience, even if his royal master did not.
Before we give a big YAY for Clement, though, we need to look at the other (actually, bigger) reason why he is one of the worst popes in history. In 1309, Clement moved the papacy from its ancient see at Rome to Avignon, just outside of France, creating the "Babylonian Captivity" that lasted until 1377, when it shattered into the Great Schism, permanently damaging the Church. Despite the dancing around the point that his apologists made, Clement put himself and his court into the control of Philip, tainting the papacy's reputation for international impartiality and leaving a legacy of failure that helped hurry along the Reformation. The Church never really did recover.
Dr. Barbara Frale, who has been working with these documents, claims that the publication of this collection is a vindication of the Templars, something enthusiastically taken up by the media in the past week. Well...not really. Freemasons and other members of the neo-Templar movement (the weirder and more venal making up the "lunatic fringe" satirized by Umberto Eco in his novel "Foucault's Pendulum") have for decades urged the Vatican to pardon the Order. Since the Order was never actually condemned, it's not a big effort to publish this collection, especially since the papacy has rather neatly ensured that very few will have access to it, due to the enormous price tag of over eight thousand dollars for a run of less than eight hundred. At that price, few academic libraries, even fewer academics and essentially no independent scholars will be able to buy it. Would it be useful to have such a large "new" collection of Templar-related documents available? Absolutely. But it's not really available, is it?
Nor is this really a vindication of the Order. A vindication would be for the current pope to state outright that obviously his predecessor had believed in the Order's innocence, and then issue the pardon that Clement clearly wanted to issue during his own lifetime. This has not happened.
So, whom is this an apology for? Clement V, of course. Just as Clement had to protect the reputation of Boniface VIII from charges of heresy, so Benedict XVI appears to feel it necessary to rehabilitate the reputation of Clement V, all for the sake of maintaining the doctrine of papal infallibility. If the only thing that Clement had done had been to back down on the Templar issue, one could buy that. But this is also the pope who began the infamous Babylonian Captivity, and you can't make that reputation go away with a pretty, overpriced volume of facsimile manuscripts published on one of the darker days in Church history.
Nice try, though.
Paula R. Stiles
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