Templars admitted no strangers into their ranks; but their number
having nevertheless considerably increased, they soon preferred a
request to the Holy See to ratify the institution of their order. At
the Council of Troyes, in 1228, Hugues de Payens, accompanied with
five of his companions, presented the letters that the brotherhood
had received from the pope and the patriarch of Jerusalem, together
with the certificate of the founding of their order. Cardinal Matthew,
Bishop of Alba, who presided over the council as the pope’s legate,
granted them an authentic confirmation of their order, and a special
code was drawn up for them under the guidance of St. Bernard.
The Templars were bound to go to mass three times a week, and to
communicate thrice a year; they wore a white robe symbolical of purity,
to which Pope Eugenius III. added a red cross, to remind them of their
oath to be always ready to shed their blood in defence of the Christian
religion. Their rules were of great austerity; they prescribed
perpetual exile, and war for the holy places to the death. The knights
were to accept every combat, however outnumbered they might be, to ask
no quarter, and to give no ransom. However irksome might prove the
observance of these regulations, they were not allowed to escape them
by entering the ranks of a less austere order.
[Illustration:
Fig. 146.--Knight of Malta.
Fig. 147.--Templar in Travelling Dress.
Fac-similes of Woodcuts by Jost Amman, in his work entitled
“Cleri totius Romanæ ecclesiæ ... habitus;” 4to., Frankfort,
1585.]
The unbelievers dreaded no enemy so much as these poor soldiers of
Christ, of whom it was said that they possessed the gentleness of the
lamb and the patience of the hermit, united to the courage of the hero
and the strength of the lion. Their standard, termed _Beaucéant_,
was half black and half white, and inscribed with these words: _Non
nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam_.[12]
According to the rules of St. Bernard, the Order of the Temple was
composed of _milites_, or knights commanders, of serving brothers,
called _armigeri_, or men bearing arms, and of _clientes_,
or clients, whose duty it was to attend to domestic matters. Their
oaths were similar to those of St. John of Jerusalem. They swore to
live in chastity, poverty, and obedience. Some of their number obtained
permission to marry, but on condition of their no longer wearing the
white dress, and of their bequeathing a portion of their property to
the order. The distinctive mark of the Templars was, according to some,
a broad red patriarchal cross; according to others, a red Maltese cross
embroidered with gold. As they all made public profession of extreme
poverty, they were forbidden to use valuable articles of furniture, or
gold or silver utensils; to wear velvet trappings in the field, helmets
with armorial bearings, silken sashes, or other superfluous articles
of clothing; and they were only permitted to wear an under doublet of
white wool.
The Order of the Temple had only been established fifty years when its
knights held at Jerusalem its first general chapter, attended by three
hundred gentlemen, and as many serving brothers, most of whom were
French. The chapter elected a grand master, Gérard de Rederfort, and
in so doing freed themselves from the jurisdiction of the patriarch
of Jerusalem. The new grand master transferred the seat of the order
to St. Jean d’Acre, and manifested the prowess of his knights on
several occasions against the troops of Saladin, who attempted shortly
afterwards to capture the town, but who was obliged to abandon the task.
The resources of the Knights Templars increased, in a very short
space, in such a remarkable manner, by donations and legacies, that
some historians declare that the revenue of the order amounted to
four and a half millions sterling; others merely observe that the
Templars possessed enormous wealth in Christendom, one item being nine
thousand houses. In 1129 they already had several establishments in
the Low Countries; six years later the King of Navarre and of Aragon,
Alphonso I., bequeathed his states to the order; but it was with great
difficulty that the knights obtained possession of even a few of his
towns. At that time, however, they possessed seventeen strongholds in
the kingdom of Valencia. In their quarters in London were deposited
most of the treasures of the English crown, and King Philip Augustus,
on the eve of his departure for the Holy Land, entrusted them with the
care of his jewels and archives.
[Illustration: Fig. 148.--The Earthern Vase, on one side of which
is seen, between two fleurs-de-lis, the figure of St. Paul bitten
by a serpent, bears a Latin inscription signifying, “In the name
of St. Paul, and by this stone, thou shalt drive out poison.” On
the other side is engraved in relief the cross of the Temple,
between a sword and a serpent. Another Vase bears the head of
a saint and a sword, and is surrounded by venomous animals and
herbs. On the Medal is represented a dragon with an Italian
legend signifying, “The grace of St. Paul is proof against
any poison.” These objects were found in 1863 at Florence, on
the site of the old Church of the Templars, dedicated to St.
Paul.--Collection of M. Gancia.]
The Templars were magnificent soldiers, and the annals of the Crusades
are full of their feats of arms. Few knights acquired the fame they did
in their expeditions across the seas; though always inferior in number
to the infidel, who held them in greater fear than the Crusaders,
they almost always defeated them. The defence of Gaza, the battle of
Tiberias, the capture of Damietta, and the Egyptian Crusade, are all
splendid attestations of their courage and prowess.
The Templars in time reached the summit of their fortunes, the height
of their prosperity and their fame, and nothing was left to them but
to decay. Inflated with wealth, laden with privileges which gave them
almost sovereign power, the only judges they recognised were the pope
and themselves. The order at last became so demoralised by luxury and
idleness that it forgot the aim for which it was founded, disdained to
obey its own rules, and gave itself up to the love of gain and thirst
for pleasure. Its covetousness and pride soon became boundless. The
knights pretended that they were above the reach of even crowned heads:
they seized and pillaged without concern the property of both infidels
and Christians.
Their jealousy of the Knights Hospitallers induced them to interfere
with a man of position, a vassal of the Order of St. John, and to
drive him from a castle he possessed in the neighbourhood of their
establishment at Margat. This caused a violent quarrel between the
two orders, which soon became a permanent struggle for supremacy.
The pope wrote to the grand masters of both orders to exhort them to
re-establish peace and good-will, and to forget their mutual rancour,
so dangerous for Christendom and so fatal to the interests of the Holy
Land. An apparent truce took place between them; but the Templars had
not forgotten their hatred, and they lost no opportunity of showing it
to the knights of St. John. Moreover, they no longer cared to support
the holy cause that had led to the birth of their order. They signed a
treaty of alliance with the Old Man of the Mountain, the leader of the
sect of the Assassins or Ishmaelites, the most implacable enemies of
the cross; they allowed him, on condition of paying tribute, to fortify
himself in Lebanon; they made war against the king of Cyprus and the
prince of Antioch; ravaged Thrace and Greece, where the Christian
nobles had founded principalities, marquisates, and baronies; took
Athens by storm, and massacred Robert de Brienne, its duke.
In short, the consciousness of their strength, of their wealth, and of
their power, inspired the Templars with an audacity that nothing could
restrain. Their pride, which had become proverbial, was particularly
offensive. Their belief and their morals were very far from orthodox,
and even in 1273, Pope Gregory X. had thought of fusing their order in
that of the Hospitallers. In the beginning of the following century,
Philippe le Bel, King of France, received weighty accusations against
them of most serious offences, accusations that were generally believed
to be true, and consulted Pope Clement V. on the subject. Clement at
first declared the crimes with which they were accused to be altogether
improbable, but the grand master having insisted on a rigorous inquiry,
the pope wrote to the king for the details of his information. Philippe
le Bel wished to decide the matter himself, and proceeded to arrest all
the Templars within his jurisdiction, amongst them their grand master,
Jacques de Molai, who had just returned from Cyprus.
[Illustration: Fig. 149.--Seal of the Knights of Christ
(Thirteenth Century).--Early Device of the Order of Templars,
representing two knights on one horse.]
One hundred and forty knights were examined in Paris, and all but three
confessed that the order practised a secret initiation, in which the
aspirants were bound to deny Christ, and spit upon the cross; and that,
moreover, immoral customs were practised amongst them. Many of them
also confessed that they had committed acts of idolatry. A learned
contemporary writer, De Wilcke, a German protestant clergyman, has
epitomized the researches of two of his co-religionists--Moldenhawer,
who discovered in the National Library in Paris the original records of
the examination, and Munster, who found in the library of the Vatican
the original notes of the proceedings that took place in England. This
is De Wilcke’s conclusion: “The two facts of the denial of Christ and
the spitting on the cross are attested by all the witnesses who were
examined, with one or two exceptions.”
In spite of the scandal caused by these confessions, Pope Clement V.
urgently protested against Philippe’s course of action, and represented
to him that the Templars were a religious body, under the control
of the Holy See alone, that the king was consequently wrong to make
himself their judge, and that he had no authority over either their
possessions or their persons.
Philippe unwillingly yielded to the pope’s remonstrances, and the
pontiff himself examined seventy-two Templars, whose confessions
tallied with the avowals made in the first instance at Paris.
An inquiry was instituted in England, in Italy, in Spain, and in
Germany. The answers extracted in the course of the different
examinations were not exactly coincident, but the confessions of
impiety and immorality were very numerous, except in Spain. The
Aragonese Templars took up arms and held themselves on the defensive in
their fortresses; they were however, conquered by King James II., and
thrown into prison as rebels. The Templars of Castile were arrested,
tried before an ecclesiastical tribunal, and declared innocent.
[Illustration: Fig. 150.--Council of Vienne.--Fresco executed in
the Vatican Library by order of Pope Pius V. (Sixteenth Century).]
The pope acknowledged the existence of serious irregularities amongst
the knights of the order, but persisted in reserving to himself the
right to pronounce a final decision. He, however, instructed every
bishop in the Christian world to investigate the cases within his own
diocese, and to absolve the innocent, and condemn the guilty Templars
according to the utmost rigour of the law.
The provincial council of Paris handed over the contumacious to the
secular authorities; fifty-nine of the guilty knights were burnt in
that city at the back of the abbey of St. Antoine. A second council, at
Senlis, in a similar manner delivered nine Templars to the mercies of
the secular judge, who sentenced them to be burnt at the stake. It is
said that the culprits retracted their confession on the scaffold, and
died protesting their innocence. As soon as the commissioners appointed
by the pope were informed of these executions they suspended their
sittings, declaring that the terror inspired by these capital penalties
deprived the prisoners of the tranquillity of mind necessary to their
defence. They further requested the council of Paris to act with more
deliberation.
When Pope Clement V. had obtained all the necessary information he
convoked the council of Vienne (Fig. 150), and there, on the 22nd
of March, 1312, pronounced his decision, which rather absolved than
condemned the order, and placed their persons and their property at
his disposal and at that of the Church. In Spain and in Portugal, this
property was applied to the defence of the Christians against the
constant attacks of the Saracens and the Moors (Fig. 151); but the
greater portion of the possessions of the Templars, and particularly
those they held in France, was transferred to the keeping of the
Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem, who continued to devote
themselves to the cause of the holy places, and kept up the good works
to perform which the Templars had received so many and such costly
donations.
The serious abuses and crimes which caused the suppression of the order
had not fortunately vitiated the whole of its members: most of the
Templars were set at liberty, many of them, preserving their former
rank, enrolled themselves in the Order of St. John. In this wise, as
is pointed out by Wilcke, Albert de Blacas, prior of Aix, obtained
the commandership of Saint-Maurice, as prior of the Hospitallers; and
Frederick, grand prior of Lower Germany, retained the title in the
Order of St. John of Jerusalem.
[Illustration: Fig. 151.--Our Lady of Grace sheltering under
the folds of her mantle the first Grand Masters of the Military
Order of Montessa. This order was established in Spain in 1317 by
James II., King of Aragon, with the approval of John XXII., as a
substitute for the Order of the Temple, with whose possessions it
was endowed.--From a Painting on Wood of the Fifteenth Century,
held in veneration in the Church of the Temple, at Valencia; and
from the “Iconografia Española” of M. Carderera.]
The pope had specially reserved his judgment in the case of the
grand master, Jacques de Molai, in that of the Visitor of France,
and in those of the commanders of Guyenne and of Normandy. Several
cardinals-legate, with some French bishops and doctors of the
University of Paris, constituted the tribunal which was to pass the
sentence in the name of the pontiff. After satisfying themselves that
these four eminent knights had repeated their avowals before a second
commission, the members of the tribunal, convinced of their guilt,
caused a scaffold to be erected in front of Notre-Dame, and there, on
Monday, March 18th, 1314, the four Templars were publicly condemned
to imprisonment for life. On the scaffold the grand master and one
of the others recanted their confession of guilt and protested their
innocence. The cardinals, surprised at this recantation, committed
the prisoners to the care of the provost of Paris, with orders to
bring them before them the next day, when the tribunal had had time to
deliberate on this fresh incident. But Philippe le Bel, learning what
was taking place, hurriedly assembled his council, and had the grand
master, and the other Templar who had similarly persisted in denying
his twice-avowed guilt, burnt alive the same night. They underwent
this horrible torture protesting their innocence to the last. The two
remaining knights who had acknowledged their guilt were kept for some
time in prison, but were afterwards set at liberty.
[Illustration: Fig. 152.--Surrender of the Town of Montefrio,
near Granada, in 1486. The alcids and Moorish chiefs, after the
siege, delivering the keys of the town to Ferdinand the Catholic
and Queen Isabella.--Bas-relief on the stalls of the choir of
the high altar of the cathedral, carved in wood in the Sixteenth
Century.]
Other orders of knighthood, having more or less of a religious
character, were founded in the Middle Ages, or during the Renaissance
period: the principal were, in Spain, the Order of the Knights of
Calatrava; in Germany, the Order of the Teuton Knights; the Order of
the Golden Fleece in the Low Countries, in Spain, and in Austria;
that of St. Maurice and St. Lazarus in Savoy; that of St. Stephen in
Tuscany; and in France, those of St. Michael and of the Holy Ghost,
which were merely honorary orders, although the first Order of the Holy
Ghost, founded in 1352 by Louis d’Anjou, King of Jerusalem and Sicily,
had for its object the re-establishment of an essentially military
knighthood, as a means for bringing about a new crusade.
The Knights of Calatrava, on whom their founder, Don Raymond, Abbot of
Citeaux, imposed the regulations of his own monastery, distinguished
themselves by many brilliant feats of arms, particularly against the
Moors of Spain and Africa (Fig. 152); and the princes in whose cause
they had fought in these wars--termed, like the Crusades in the East,
holy--granted them large possessions and considerable privileges. They
were bound by a triple vow of poverty, obedience, and chastity, and,
like the Templars, wore a red cross embroidered on a white mantle. From
the days of Ferdinand the Catholic and Isabella, the sovereigns of
Spain have always been the grand masters of this order, which acquired
and long retained a considerable amount of importance, even when it had
ceased to signify anything but an indication of nobility. The order of
Alcantara, which had a similar origin to that of Calatrava, ran a like
career and was in like manner doomed to decay. Spain, too, was the only
country that possessed a military order for ladies. After the heroic
defence of Placentia against the English by the women of that city in
1390, John I., the sovereign of Castile, created in their honour the
order of the Ladies of the Sash, which was united at a later period to
the Order of the Belt, founded in the fourteenth century to do battle
against the Moors.
The Teutonic Knights, whose order had been founded in 1128, at
Jerusalem, by the German Crusaders, obeyed the rules of St. Augustin.
They were subject beside to special statutes somewhat similar to those
of the Knights of St. John and of the Temple, whose privileges they
also enjoyed. Their first grand master, Henri Walpot, established his
residence near St. Jean d’Acre.
This order was divided, like that of St. John, into knights, chaplains,
and serving brethren. Its members wore a white mantle with a rather
broad black cross, picked out with silver, on the left sleeve. To gain
admission into the order it was necessary for the candidate to be over
fifteen years of age, and to be of a strong, robust build, in order to
resist the fatigues of war. Its knights, bound by a vow of chastity,
were expected to avoid all intercourse with women; they were not even
allowed to give their own mothers a filial kiss when they saluted them.
They possessed no individual property; they always left their cell
doors open, so that everybody might see what they were doing. Their
arms were free from both gold and silver ornaments, and for a long
period they spent their lives in great humility. Their most celebrated
grand master, Hermann de Salza, received in 1210, from Pope Honorius
III. and the Emperor Frederick II., whom he had reconciled, large
possessions and high honours.
The Teutonic Knights conquered Prussia, Livonia, and Courland, and in
1283 became masters of the whole territory between the Vistula and the
Niemen. In 1309 they abandoned Venice, where, twenty years earlier,
their grand master had fixed his ordinary residence, and selected
Marienburg as their head-quarters. At that date the order had reached
the culminating point of its prosperity, and its sway in Germany had
the most fortunate results for Prussia. But luxury soon began to
undermine the religious faith of the knights; and internal struggles,
caused by the elections of their grand masters, introduced fresh
elements of decay into their organization.
[Illustration: Fig. 153.--Sancha de Roxas, who died in 1437,
wearing the scarf which was the insignia of the military order
bearing his name (Fifteenth Century).--From the “Iconografia
Española” of M. Carderera.]
Dragged into endless conflicts with Lithuania and Poland, the order
lost its banners, its treasure, and its principal defenders in the
disastrous battle of Grümwald, in the year 1410, and would have been
utterly ruined but for Henry von Plauen. After the death of this
illustrious grand master, the knights, to whom the treaty of Thorn had
restored their territorial possessions, lost them one after the other
in the few years that elapsed between 1422 and 1436. For thirteen years
Casimir IV., King of Poland, summoned into Prussia by the inhabitants,
who had rebelled against the despotic sway of the knights, laid waste
the country that he had undertaken to protect. The order, driven out of
Marienburg and Konitz, only retained possession of Eastern Prussia, and
held even that under Polish rule; its grand master, whose head-quarters
were now at Königsberg, was, in fact, a prince and a councillor of
Poland. As Prussia was a fief of the Church, the grand master of the
Teutonic Order was bound by vow to preserve it to the Church and to
his own order. Albert of Brandenburg, its last grand master, was
bound by this oath, and by the triple vow of poverty, obedience, and
chastity, which he had taken on entering the order. To rid himself of
the fetters of these oaths he joined the Lutheran Church, and divided
the possessions of his order with his uncle, the aged Sigismund, King
of Poland, who for these considerations bestowed on him the title of
hereditary Duke of Prussia. This was the origin of the royal family of
Prussia. After this easy acquisition of title and territory, Albert of
Brandenburg married the daughter of the King of Denmark. As a matter of
course, the Order of the Teutonic Knights became extinct.
[Illustration: Fig. 154.--Teutonic Knight.--Fac-simile of a
Woodcut by Jost Amman, in his work entitled “Cleri totius Romanæ
ecclesiæ ... habitus:” 4to, Frankfort, 1585.]
[Illustration: Fig. 155.--Chapter of the Golden Fleece, held by
Charles the Bold.--Manuscript of the Fifteenth Century, in the
Burgundian Library, Brussels.]
The Order of the Knights of the Golden Fleece was not founded till
1449. It was then instituted by Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy and
Count of Flanders, in order to induce the nobles of his court to join
him in making war against the Turks, and to attach his subjects by
closer ties to the service of the state. The crusade never took place,
but the order survived, and still exists as an heraldic distinction.
This order, which was placed under the protection of St. Andrew, was
originally composed of twenty-four knights of high rank and stainless
character; their number was increased by the Duke of Burgundy to
thirty-one, and afterwards by Charles V. to fifty-one. The election of
the knights took place in the chapters of the order, and were decided
by a majority of votes. The distinguishing sign of the order was a
necklet of gold, enamelled with the duke’s device, which was composed
of two steels and two flints interlaced, with the motto, _Ante ferit
quam micat_ (It strikes before it lights). From the collar was
suspended a golden sheep, or sheep’s fleece, with the inscription,
_Pretium non vile laborum_ (Labour’s just reward) (Fig. 155).
Since the marriage of Philippe le Beau, son of the Emperor Maximilian
and Mary of Burgundy, with Jane of Aragon, in 1496, the King of Spain
and the Emperor of Austria are, in their own countries, the sovereign
chiefs of the order of the Golden Fleece.