Europe's inner demons

Nevertheless it was not easy to prosecute the Temple as a heretical sect. By rights the tracking down and prosecution of heretics pertained not to the secular authorities but to the Church; and the Temple was in any case protected, in that various papal privileges placed it directly under the jurisdiction of the Holy See. To proceed directly against the Temple meant to infringe the prerogative of the pope twice over. Philip could risk it only because the reigning pope was unable to stand up to him. Clement V was a Frenchman, he and his court were resident not in Rome but in France, he owed his very election to Philip’s influence, his freedom of action was largely dependent on Philip’s goodwill. Such a situation would have hampered even a vigorous and strong-willed pope; but Clement was compliant by nature, and he was also weakened by a grave internal malady which often incapacitated him for months on end. The arrest of the Templars opened a struggle between king and pope; but it was an unequal struggle, and in the end Philip secured most of his aims.

Philip could not however rely on the operation of ordinary criminal law to produce the desired result; for that, he had to have recourse to the “inquisitorial” procedure which had been developed for dealing with heretics and which had been perfected by the Inquisition during the preceding century.^***

As we have seen, under this procedure the odds were in any case weighted against the accused; but at least the inquisitors usually concentrated on discovering real heretics and eradicating real heresies, and went soberly about the business. But the inquisitorial procedure could also, at times, be shamelessly abused: the victims of Conrad of Marburg were forced to confess to wholly imaginary offences, and so were the Templars. In the proceedings against the Temple the Inquisition was subordinate to the royal power — a situation without parallel in the history of medieval Europe.⁽¹⁵⁾

The first interrogation was actually carried out by the royal officials; only after it was satisfactorily completed were the inquisitors called in, to hear the confessions elaborated and confirmed. Moreover the inquisitors themselves acted under the instructions of a man styled general inquisitor for the whole of France — but he too was in effect a servant of the state. The office appears to have been invented for the purpose by King Philip; at any rate its incumbent, the Dominican friar Guillaume Imbert of Paris, was Philip’s own confessor and was far more closely connected with him than with Pope Clement. The task given him by his royal patron was to legitimate the suppression of the Temple, as a heretical sect of the most sinister kind. He did his best, to the delight of the king and the intense vexation of the pope.

The Templars were in a helpless position. In the first place they were numerically far weaker than is often supposed — there were probably less than 4,000 in the whole of Europe, and only about half of those were in France; the knights amongst the French Templars numbered only a few hundred. Then they were quite unprepared, organizationally and psychologically, to stand up to the onslaught which the king had so carefully planned. They lived scattered, in their many houses, through the length and breadth of the land. Seized suddenly, without any warning, kept in complete ignorance concerning their fellows in other areas, and often in solitary confinement, they were told that countless Templars had already confessed to all the charges. If they confessed in their turn, they would be spared, set at liberty, reconciled to the Church; if not, they would be executed.⁽¹⁶⁾

If this failed to produce the desired effect, torture was applied — and the tortures could include having one’s feet roasted until the bones fell from their sockets (one Templar actually exhibited a handful of his bones at a later enquiry).⁽¹⁷⁾ In such circumstances it is hardly surprising that, in the first interrogations, in Paris, only four Templars out of 138 refused to confess to any ot the offences.