Europe's inner demons

Other Templars before Hugues de Pairaud had been deeply involved in affairs of state. Templars were indeed often men of great worldly wisdom, widely travelled, experienced, shrewd; and monarchs and prelates were happy to give them leading appointments in their households and to employ them as confidential envoys. The chamberlain at the papal curia was almost always a Templar, Templars often functioned as almoners at royal courts, some Templars spent years travelling between East and West on diplomatic and political missions. As for the chief officers of the order — not only the grand master, who was always in the Holy Land, but also the grand preceptors of the various western provinces, and under them the preceptors or priors, who themselves often had jurisdiction over dozens of houses — they were great dignitaries in church and state. At court they took precedence as ecclesiastics, and in the councils of the Church they were respected as leaders of warriors.

The order as a whole enjoyed extraordinary prerogatives. The papacy in particular expressed its good will in a series of privileges, culminating in 1163 in the bull Omne datum optimum

. The Temple had supported Pope Alexander III against rival candidates for the papacy; and this bull shows the extent of the pope’s gratitude. For it turned the Temple into an autonomous institution, subject to no authority, secular or ecclesiastical, save only the pope himself. The order and all its possessions were declared to be, in perpetuity, under the safeguard and protection of the Holy Sec. Moreover the order was entitled to build its own churches, and to appoint its own confessors. The Temple had always cultivated secrecy, no doubt in the first place for military reasons; but this bull encouraged the habit. Chapter meetings from which all outsiders were rigorously excluded, and where every crack in door or wall was carefully blocked, symbolized the Templars’ sense of being a race apart.

Inevitably the Temple attracted hostility, and from many different quarters. As an ecclesiastical order it was hated by many elements in the Church. Much of the land bestowed on the order was taken from ecclesiastical estates; parish priests and monasteries saw their tithes reduced, and resented it bitterly. And that was not all: only too aware of its privileges and exemptions, the Temple itself constantly infringed the rights of other religious institutions. It claimed tithes which rightly belonged to others; it acquired churches which were not intended for its use; it installed and removed priests in the churches that came tinder its control. Above all, the concessions which the order had received from the papacy removed it from effective control by the bishops, for whom Templars often showed open contempt. Sometimes they arranged for their priests to administer the sacraments to persons whom bishops had excommunicated. Even popes had occasions to protest about this. The history of the Temple in the West was punctuated by disputes with ecclesiastics and ecclesiastical bodies, both about money and about rights.

Through its involvement in finance and trade the order also came into conflict with secular interests. In France we find vintners protesting about unfair competition from the Templars, who were entitled to sell wine tax-free; and cloth-merchants complaining that the Templars were killing their trade by exorbitant levies. The Temple even acquired a fleet of its own and appropriated much of the pilgrim traffic to the Holy Land; thus earning the enmity of the shipping houses of Marseilles and the Italian merchant republics.

In pursuit of its own interests the Temple was ruthless. Filled with a conviction of their own superiority, trained to regard themselves as the fighting elite of Christendom, Templars had little sympathy for the sufferings of others and little regard for their feelings or opinions. Early in the thirteenth century Pope Innocent III, who was a friend of the order and had once been a Templar himself, issued a bull entitled De insolentia Templariorum; and the term was justified. Protected from the ban of any ecclesiastic other than the pope, set almost above the secular law as well, the Templars were bound to become a singularly arrogant body of men. Ruthlessncss and arrogance are in any case normal characteristics of a warrior aristocracy. In the case of the Templars they were reinforced by the privileges and exemptions bestowed on the order. In a dispute with its neighbours, a house of Templars was as capable as any other noble household of employing arson and murder; but it was less likely to be visited with commensurate penalties.