Europe's inner demons

In other respects too the Templars resembled and outdid other members of the aristocratic caste. Although officially only the order was rich and individual Templars were propertyless, it did not always look like that. Amongst the great officers of the Temple display was often accepted as a business asset; and some of them, in their public appearances, made the same magnificent showing as secular lords and princes. But people did not forget that the Temple was a religious order; and ruthlessness, arrogance, violence against neighbours, pomp and luxury were not held to its credit.

Yet these things would never have led to the persecution, let alone the destruction, of the order. Many other monastic orders enjoyed extensive exemptions and privileges, and were correspondingly unpopular. In the thirteenth century the mendicant orders of Franciscans and Dominicans were envied and attacked most bitterly by the secular clergy. Above all the other great military order, the Hospital of St John, was criticized on precisely the same grounds as the Temple, and with just as much cause. In addition, the Hospital was frequently involved in scandals — popes chided it severely for sexual incontinence, for protecting pilgrim-killers instead of pilgrims, even for straying into heresy. Such complaints as popes voiced from time to time against the Temple were far milder. But the Hospital survived unscathed while the Temple went under. Why?

To fight the Saracens, to defend the Holy Land — that was the purpose of both the great military orders (as well as the smaller and newer order of Teutonic Knights); and much was forgiven them so long as they were manifestly fulfilling it. But the Christian kingdom in the Holy Land could survive only so long as Islam was divided, and the time was bound to come when this tiny outpost of an alien civilization would be finally overwhelmed. In 1290 Acre, the last Christian stronghold, fell to the Moslems. The Templar force went down fighting, and the few who survived were the last Christians to quit Palestine. The remnants of the Christian colony congregated on the island of Cyprus, and a period of reconsideration began. Despite their heavy losses in the East, the military orders still had by far the greater part of their personnel and possessions intact, on the mainland of Europe; and now they had to find new roles. The Hospitallers took to the sea; from Cyprus and later from Rhodes they policed the Mediterranean and combated Moslem piracy. The main body of Teutonic Knights had long been engaged in extending the area of German rule at the expense of the Slavs; the remainder now joined them. Only the Templars failed to find themselves a new field of military activity.

In Spain the Templars continued to fight the Moors, as they had always done; but in other countries they merely protested their undying fidelity to the Holy Land, and stayed at home. The leaders of the Temple seemed to assume that Christendom owed the order a living for its past achievements. It proved a dangerous assumption. Lacking a positive policy of its own, the Temple became a passive object of other people’s policies. It had always been primarily a French order; the one way in which it could be destroyed was through an attack on the French branch; and the one person capable of carrying through such an attack successfully was the king of France. At the beginning of the fourteenth century King Philip IV of France, known as ‘‘the Fair”, found it convenient and profitable to destroy the Temple, and acted accordingly.

Philip was both a shrewdly calculating politician and a bit of a religious megalomaniac. The realm to which he succeeded in 1285 was already larger and more unified than it had ever been, with a single currency issued by the royal mint, a uniform and codified system of law, an efficient civil service staffed no longer by clerics but by lawyers. Philip was wholly devoted to consolidating the unity and increasing the power of this emergent national state. In his eyes this was a holy duty: in furthering the cause of the state and of his dynasty, he was serving God and the Christian faith. Iron-willed, relentless, merciless, he never doubted for a moment that he was acting on God’s behalf, indeed that God was acting through him. To augment the power of the king of France was to carry out the divine intention.