century, were practiced as part of their peculiar religious service, and
at the admission of new members: for though the Catholic liturgy was
used in their chapels, the initiated performed a cult of their own in
the chapter house, or chapel, before break of day. This consisted of
confession and communion, as understood by Templars. This confession
they regarded on the one hand as an act of brotherly trust, and on the
other of brotherly counsel: hence, they confessed only to the chaplains
of the order; in the latter times of the order the members were
forbidden to confess to priests that were not Templars. By them the
communion was taken in the natural species and substance of bread and
wine, and in token of brotherly love, not as commemorative of any
sacrifice.
Two images played a part in the Templar rites. The image of John the
Baptist typified the order’s opposition to the Church’s creed. The other
image, jealously guarded from the eyes of outsiders, has been called an
“idol.” It was made chiefly of copper, gilt, and represented now a human
skull, anon the countenance of an old man heavily bearded
(makroprosopos), again a very small face (mikroprosopos), which would be
now the face of a man, then of a woman, anon male and female at once; it
would have now one, again two or three, heads, with bright shining eyes
of carbuncles. The idol was by some Templars called “Bassomet,” but why,
does not appear. From the statements of members of the order it would
seem that this idol was a kind of talisman that brought all manner of
good fortune; that it was set up for veneration as rival to the cross,
and that they called it “the savior of the order.”
There were two forms of admission, the general and the special (or
secret) form: the latter was used only at the admission of postulants
that could be trusted with the secrets of the order. The Scribe, acting
as Receptor, first asked the brethren, in chapter, if they had any
objection to make the admission of the postulant. If none objected the
postulant was led into an adjoining room and questioned as to his
purpose in seeking entrance to the order, whether he knew of any
impediment on his part, whether he owed debts that he could not pay,
whether he was married or engaged to be married, and so forth. The
questions having been satisfactorily answered, and the minutes of the
replies reported to the brethren, the matter was again put to vote.
Next, the candidate was brought before the chapter, and, after more
questioning, took the vows and was formally admitted. In the secret rite
of admission the Receptor showed to the candidate the Idol, with these
words: “Believe in this, put your trust in this, and all will be well
with you.” Then he girded the candidate with a cord of white wool
fibres, the Baptist’s girdle, as it was called, which he was to wear
over the shirt. The obligation of secrecy was very sternly enforced.
Those who betrayed any of the secrets of the order were cast into
prison, and the candidate was threatened with dungeons and death should
he communicate to an outsider any information about the ceremony of
initiation.
Thus did the Templars, an order instituted for the purpose of guarding
the Church’s interests, in the end reject the Church’s doctrines, and
adopt principles that tended inevitably to the overthrow, not only of
the Papacy, but of Christianism itself. Such was the irreconcilable
opposition between the avowed and the secret convictions of the
Templars, and such was the hypocrisy of the order: for, though they had
apostatized from the creeds of the Church, they would not formally quit
her communion; and though they regarded as true many points of
anti-Christian doctrine, they veiled these with mystery, or even on
occasion made sport of them, instead of publishing them, as so many
poor, unarmed heretics did; and hence their aspirations were foiled, and
the most powerful association of that time perished, not in glorious
battle, but in ignominious dungeons and at the stake.
4. THE DOWNFALL OF THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR.
The Crusades having failed utterly, the Holy Land having again come
under the power of the “infidels,” and the occupation of the knightly
orders having gone, the Popes cast about for a remedy for this
undesirable state of things. The order of German Knights had already
forestalled the problem by choosing as their theatre of action the
countries on the Baltic Sea, and the Spanish orders by waging continual
wars against the Moors; and the Knights of Saint John (Hospitalers)
later found a place for themselves by occupying Rhodes. But the Templars
were without any fit employment, and that circumstance was the occasion
of their downfall. About the year 1305 Pope Clement V. proposed a union
of the Templars with the Hospitalers, and, if possible, with other
orders, but both Templars and Hospitalers rejected the advice.
Philip IV. (the Fair) of France found in the Templars a serious
obstacle to his ambition, and in the early years of his reign sought
to compel them by force to aid him in his schemes; but failing in that
design, tried to win them by loading them with favors. Many different
explanations have been offered to account for another change of policy
on the part of Philip, but none of them is historically sound.
Probably the change noticeable in the king’s attitude toward the order
in 1305 was in some way connected with the outrageous doings of the
Inquisition in the South of France; doubtless rumors of heresy in the
Templar order had come to the omnipresent ear of the Holy Court. The
Inquisitor-General of France, William Imbert, prior of the Dominicans
in Paris, begged the King to call the Templars to account. The King,
on Nov. 14, 1305, informed Clement V. of the accusation, but Clement,
notwithstanding this, invited not only the Grandmaster of the
Hospitalers, but also the head of the Templars, to meet with himself
in conference about the project of a new Crusade. Yet in his letter to
the Templars’ Grandmaster, James Molay (who resided in his palace in
Cyprus), he counseled him to come without escort, “lest the news of
his departure should give occasion to enemies (of the order) to make a
sudden onslaught.” The Master of the Hospitalers was unable to come,
being busied with the siege of Rhodes, and Molay, contrary to the
Pope’s advice, came to France escorted by his entire council, sixty
knights, and bringing the treasure and the archives of his order. In
May, 1307, the Pope and the King met at Poictiers, and, it is
supposed, discussed thoroughly the question of the Templars: about the
same time the Templars informed the Pope of the dangers that
threatened them, and asked for an investigation of the charges brought
against them: such investigation the Pope decided to institute. It
cannot be determined whether it was with the Pope’s approval, or
against his wishes, that Philip on Oct. 13, 1307, had all the Templars
in France arrested and their goods seized.
Five heads of complaint were alleged against the order; viz.,
profanation of the cross, worship of an idol, indecent rites of
initiation, omission of the sacramental words (i.e., the words of
consecration or of transubstantiation, Hoc est corpus meum) in masses
performed by priests belonging to the order, and indulgence of unnatural
lusts. Two days after the arrests the people of Paris, whose partiality
for the Templars was feared, were assembled before the royal palace, and
there were labored with by monks and royal officials, to turn them
against the order. The King took up his residence in the “Temple,” the
Paris house of the order, in which was hid the treasure of the
Grandmaster (150,000 gold florins, and twelve horseloads of silver
pence). It was not quite 500 years later when the Temple became the
prison of a descendant of the King. In that same building, in presence
of the masters and bachelors of the university, the trial of the
Grandmaster and his brethren was commenced, and proceeded under the
direction of Imbert. The procedure was the same as in the ordinary
trials for heresy and witchcraft in the court of the Inquisition.
Confessions were obtained by use of the torture, and it is impossible at
this day to tell how much in those confessions was due to the employment
of that peculiar method of eliciting truth, and how much, if any part,
was prompted by the desire to atone for past offenses by truthful (even
if forced) admission of guilt.
The Pope was not pleased with this turn of affairs. He claimed for
himself the right to proceed against the Templars, declared that the
King was infringing the privileges of the See of Rome, and attributed
the action taken against the Templars to a desire to get possession of
the order’s treasury and to annihilate a society whose existence was a
cause of anxiety to the King. He, therefore, protested against the whole
proceeding, and demanded that the arrested Templars and their property
should be surrendered to him as judge of the questions at issue. The
King refused, but he came to an understanding with the Pope in the
matter of the prosecution, and Nov. 22 the Pope, by the bull “Pastoralis
Praeeminentiae,” ordered the arrest of all the Templars throughout the
Christian world. The King of England, Edward II. who was Philip’s
son-in-law, obeyed this precept, though he had previously expressed
disbelief of the guilt of the Templars. A like change of mind was seen
in Aragon. In Cyprus the Templars attempted resistance, but submitted.
Denis, King of Portugal, refused to institute a prosecution against
them.
Inasmuch as the measure was one that affected all countries, the case of
the Templars belonged of right to the Papal jurisdiction. Even Philip
admitted this; but he mistrusted the Pope, and feared that the Templars
might be acquitted, and then take revenge on the King. Negotiations were
opened. The King demanded the death of the Templars, but the Pope would
not consent to this till their guilt was fully proven; and again he
demanded the surrender to him of their persons and their possessions.
The King at last acceded to the demand, for he had need of the Pope’s
assistance in procuring the election of his brother as successor to the
assassinated German King, Albert.
Under the Papal jurisdiction the trials were conducted with more lenity:
torture was not employed. But the Pope became convinced of the guilt of
the accused; till then he had been in doubt. Molay made, without
compulsion, many very important admissions, as did several high
officials of the order, but on sundry points they contradicted one
another. Nevertheless, the Pope was still firmly of the opinion that
only individual Templars were on trial, not the order, while for the
King the annihilation of the order was the main thing. August 8, 1308,
the bull “Faciens Misericordiam” ordered a prosecution of the Templars
in every country of Christendom; and on the 12th of the same month, by
the bull “Regnans in Coelis,” a council was summoned for the year 1310,
to determine the question of the Templars. Further ordinances of the
Pope had to do with the surrender of the properties of the order to the
Church.
Meanwhile the Pope had forgotten to aid the French King’s brother in his
pretensions to the crown of the Roman Empire. On the contrary, he
favored the election of Henry VII. of Luxemburg, and was glad to find in
him a prince who would strenuously oppose the overweening ambition of
Philip IV. The tension between the Pope and the French King was
increasing, and the trials of the Templars went on sluggishly for two
years more. There was much arbitrary ill-usage of Templars. The bishops,
to whom the Pope had committed the prosecution of the individual members
of the order, in many places gave loose rein to their ancient enmity
toward the Templars, and freely used the torture; nevertheless, very
many of the accused maintained the innocence of their order, and
declared the prior confessions false. This can be explained only by
supposing that the abuses in the order did not extend to all the houses.
Molay’s behavior on his trial was neither firm nor dignified, ever
balancing between self-accusation and vindication. He was never sure of
his ground, sought to retard procedure, used equivocal and obscure
phrases, and continually protested his orthodoxy; and the other members
for the most part acted in like manner: but their excuse is the hard
usage they endured, and Molay was not permitted to complain of that.
All the Templars arrested in Paris, numbering 546, were on the 28th of
May, 1310, mustered in the garden of the Bishop’s palace, and there the
accusation was read to them. Six of the accused—three knights and three
clerics—protested in the name of all against the treatment they had
received, and demanded the release of all Templars and arrest of their
accusers. In vain! During the investigation thirty-six members of the
order died in prison at Paris. May 12, 1310, those who had retracted
their confessions, to the number of 54, were burned alive: to these were
afterward added eight more, and at Rheims nine met the same fate: they
all protested their innocence at the supreme moment. It is worthy of
note that the Pope, who till then had favored delay in the proceedings,
was now for instant action. He sharply reproved the English authorities
for refusing to employ the torture; and he did his best to accomplish
the destruction of the Templars at Avignon, who had taken up arms to
defend themselves; but, though defeated, they were adjudged innocent;
and it was the same in Castile. In Germany, where the order, though weak
in numbers, made a resolute stand, the Pope offered no convincing proof
of the charges; and in England, too, nothing could be proved against the
accused members. But throughout the greater part of Italy the Templars
fared as in France, except that they were not condemned to the stake. In
vain did the celebrated Raymond Lully, at the Council of Vienne (1312),
plead for the preservation of the order by a consolidation of all the
military orders in one, whose Grandmaster should be that French prince
who happened to be King of Jerusalem: for he hoped thus to conciliate
the good will of Philip. The Pope, who had long been urged by the King
to suppress the order, now made haste to save the property of the
Templars from falling into secular hands, and so, by the bulls “Vox in
Excelso” and “Ad Providam Christi Vicarii,” published April 3 and May 2,
1312, respectively, he made over to the Hospitalers all the estates of
the Templars, estates in Spain excepted.
The unfortunate Grandmaster Molay, who received a pittance of four sous
per diem to alleviate his misery, bore his imprisonment with great
fortitude; but March 11, 1313, he and Godfrey de Charney, an official of
the order, having retracted their confessions, were slowly burnt to
death on an island in the Seine, by order of the King, without any
judicial process. Molay, it is said, cited the two murderers of his
brethren, Philip and Clement, to appear before the judgment seat of God.
They both died, one of colic, the other in consequence of a fall from
his horse, eight and thirteen months, respectively, after the death of
Molay. The order was suppressed everywhere except in Portugal, where it
took the name “Order of Jesus Christ,” and continued in existence. Its
Grandmaster, Prince Henry the navigator, a hundred years afterward,
employed its wealth in promoting the high ends of civilization. In other
countries the Templars either wandered about as fugitives, or entered
the order of Hospitalers. The seizure of the order’s estates in France
was annulled by the bull of suppression, but Philip, nevertheless,
maintained his hold on the house of the order in Paris, and on the
treasure there stored. The remainder of the property was plundered by
the nobility and the Church; and the Pope surely was not forgetful of
his own interest. The Hospitalers afterward succeeded to their rights,
but that did them hardly less harm than good, for it cost them a great
sum to release the estates of the Templars from the grasp of the
robbers; besides, many a small piece of property was made away with by
princes, great lords, orders, churches, and monasteries.
_PART SEVENTH_
_The Femgerichte._
1. COURTS OF JUSTICE IN THE MIDDLE AGE.
The wild disorder attending the irruption of the Gothic nations having
subsided, society, which had lost its bearings, had to organize itself
anew. The first step toward this end was taken when society’s task was
distributed among innumerable fractional parts of itself, each fraction
trying to do its own share of the work; the next step was the uniting of
all these fractional parts under one religious idea—that of
Christianism, and under one political law—that of feudalism. The Pope
and the Emperor represented the religious and the political ideas
respectively. As long as one was true to Pope and Emperor—i.e., was a
good Christian and a good subject—all was well with him, and he might,
in all other matters, do as he pleased. The principle of Justice was not
regarded: no wrong act was punished as violating right, but always as
doing harm. Even murder was not regarded as infringement of human right
to life, but simply as harm done to the people of the murdered one. If
one was without relatives, his slayer went unpunished; but if the
murdered man left a family or kinsmen, the murderer, on paying to them a
certain sum, went forth free. Thus, the utmost unrestraint prevailed in
the several small aggregations of people, and the utmost diversity
between one little community and another. Of bureaucratic, centralized,
cast-iron government there was no faintest foreshadow; nor was
government a function assigned to any one, but, like the administration
of justice, an acquired right. In a given province this one had acquired
the government, that one the civil and a third the criminal judiciary;
one was obeyed in peace, another commanded the people in war.
Jurisdictions were undefined and inextricably mixed up—a consequence of
the feudal system, under which the King granted rights now to one man,
again to another, as favors, never inquiring how these might consist
with rights previously granted to others. In this way it became possible
in the Middle Age for such juristic abnormities as the Femgerichte to
come into existence. The Femgerichte resulted from the confusion
existing in judiciary affairs, just as the religious abnormity of the
monastic orders of knights resulted from the very opposite condition of
things in the Church—the excess of regulation. For the confusion
(absence of regulation) and the excessive regulation were near akin;
they both sprang out of the unrestraint of private life in the Middle
Age, which unrestraint naturally produced, under the rule of the Church,
a multitude of monastic rules (e.g., the Rule of St. Augustin, of St.
Benedict, of St. Columba, etc.); while, on the contrary, the feebleness
of the Empire, due to the jealousy of the Popes and the ambition and
avarice of the feudal lords, was fatal to any organization of the
administrative and judicial functions, and though there were many codes
of law, there could be no standard for distinguishing right and wrong.
The cause of this difference of development between State and Church
was, that the Church had grown from the top downward, from the hierarchy
down to the people; while the State, on the contrary, had grown from
below upward. During the process of migration and settlement, each
nation or horde was self-governed, perfectly free and independent:
hence, the popular, genial, oftentimes even jovial and humorous cast of
Teutonic law, as compared with the hard, pedantic, abstruse, austere
character of the Jus Romanum. Roman law has only a corpus juris;
Teutonic law has Wise Saws, Juristic Proverbs, Juristic Drolleries,
Juristic Myths (Weistuemer, Rechtssprichtwoerter, Rechtsschwoernke,
Rechtssagen).
Originally, among the Germans, the freemen themselves were the court and
chose their president, the Graf (graf now equals count). Not until the
time of Karl the Great (Charlemagne) did the grafs become standing
officials, and later an hereditary order and lords proprietary. As the
functions of government were by degrees entrusted to fewer and ever
fewer hands, being transferred from the people to favored feudal lords,
and from them passing finally into the hands of an individual
sovereign—a quite natural process, for while the people increased in
number they did not become better educated, and therefore grew ever less
fitted for self-government—so, too, judgment, quitting the open,
embowered courts amid the lindens, with heaven’s breezes whispering
among the leaves, and heaven’s blue dome overarching all, withdrew
behind dank and frowning walls, from the countenance of the whole people
to a meeting of a small bench of stern judges.
Thus gradually were the rights of the freemen diminished. The freemen
was less and less frequently called to sit in judgment, for the
president of the court, the graf, was no longer an equal, but a great
lord, their superior, who made up the court as to him seemed best, and
who even cared nothing for the Emperor.[2]
Footnote 2:
What follows regarding the Femgerichte is based on Theodor Lindner’s
work, “Die Femgerichte,” Münster and Paderborn, 1888. (Whatever may
have been the original meaning of the word “fem” in “femgericht,” it
is enough to know that in usage it is equivalent to “secret”; hence
femgericht—secret judgment, or secret tribunal.)
Westphalia was the original home of the Femgerichte, and they owed their
rise to the fact that there the royal ban (Koenigsbann), that is to say,
the right possessed by the King alone, of conferring the grafship on the
grafs, was still alive, in modified form indeed, yet with its substance
unimpaired. Owing to the granting of various privileges to
ecclesiastical and secular magnates the jurisdiction of the grafs was in
time divided up. Besides, there were special courts for freemen, and
special courts for the half-free and the unfree, the former courts being
under the free grafs, and the other under the gaugrafafs (district
grafs). Now, as the majority of the population were under the gaugrafs,
the possession of a gaugrafship developed into sovereignty; while the
position of the free grafs became peculiar: the office was often sold
and passed from hand to hand. The free grafs, who were often persons of
little means, in order to maintain their dignity, had to lean on the
King’s ban, or warrant, obtainable from the King alone. But often the
free grafships died out, or they were consolidated with gaugrafships.
But nowhere did they retain so much of their original character as in
Westphalia—a geographical expression of various meanings, indeed, but in
general it denoted the region between the Rhine and the Weser. The term
Freigraf dates from the twelfth century.
Not only the King but the duke also had influence over the free
grafships. After the break-up of the ancient duchy of Saxony, every
princely land proprietor within its territory was duke of Westphalia;
this is specially true of the Archbishop of Cologne, and also of the
bishops of Muenster, Osnabrueck and Minden, and of the Duke of
Saxe-Lauenburg—dukes of Westphalia all, but with more or less
limitation. Probably the duke was entitled to preside over any free
court, and to summon to his own tribunal, the “botding,” the free grafs.
So, too, the stuhlherr (lord of the manor) possessed the right of
presiding, even when he was no prince, but only a graf; and often he
assumed that the free graf gave judgment only in his (the lord’s) name,
and so granted release from the jurisdiction of the free courts, to
cities, for example. The free graf and his assessors, the schoeffen (a
lower grade of judges), afterward called freischoeffen, constituted the
freigericht (free court), afterward known as femgericht. These offices
might fall to any freeman—and any one was reckoned a freeman who had
“his own smoke,” i. e., a house of his own.