King Phillip IV, Pope Clement V, and the
Fall of the Knights Templar
By Christopher Hodapp and Alice Von Kannon
The Crusades of the Knights Templar were failures, but their ultimate doom came from
outside the Order — from the manipulation of church and state by a greedy French king.
King Phillip the Fair
King Phillip IV of France — nicknamed Phillip the Fair for his looks, not his ethics —
was one of the most remarkable figures of the early 14th century, a king so forwardlooking and modernistic that he seemed to have been born out of his time and place.
Chicago in the 1930s should have been his time and place. The only difference between
this guy and Al Capone was the pinstriped suit.
Kingship was the ultimate power trip in the Middle Ages, and all kings have had their
little eccentricities. Phillip the Fair's eccentricity — in fact, his obsession — was money.
In the course of his reign, one lousy decision after another was brought about by his
mania for gold, and his belief that enough of it would make of him a great king and of
France a great nation. Phillip's monumental avarice knew no bounds of decency or fear of
consequence. It's true that he left the nation larger than he found it, but this wasn't
through the usual route of conquest; he bought new towns and counties. He seemed to
believe there was absolutely nothing that money couldn't buy. Phillip hid behind the skirt
of the power of his royal position to trump up charges against any group in the land that
seemed to have a little bit of green. It began with the Lombards.
The Lombards were Italian bankers living in France to do business there. The word was
that Phillip had borrowed from them, heavily. Suddenly, the wealthiest among them had
various charges brought against them that had them expelled from France. The king, of
course, kept their goods and money. Finally, he had all the remaining Lombards expelled
and swooped in to gather up their money, too.
Next, in 1306, he turned his sights on France's Jews, a group that few Christians were
willing to risk their own lives to defend. Many of the Jewish moneylenders of France had
done fairly well in the previous two centuries, and, of course, as with the Lombards, it
was rumored that Phillip was personally in hock to them. Charging that they "dishonored
Christian custom and behavior," he expelled them from France, stealing all their money
and belongings.
Looking back, it seems obvious that Phillip's actions against the Lombards and the Jews
were practice runs, simply to see if he could pull it off. By that time, he clearly had
another organization in his sights, one with fabled wealth — enough gold, Phillip thought,
to make even him feel secure. Phillip clearly had his eye on the Knights Templar.
Pope Clement V
Unfortunately for the Knights Templar, at the beginning of the 14th century, a papal
disaster was brewing, a political and religious mess that no one could ever have foreseen.
It would be the final blow, the one from which they would not recover. Catholics often
refer to it as the Babylonian Captivity. Nowadays, it's usually called the Avignon Papacy
or the Great Schism. Either way, an atom bomb by any other name still blows everything
to bits.
King Phillip IV of France and his personal henchman Guillaume de Nogaret had been in
severe conflict with the then-reigning pope, Boniface VIII. The pope had declared that
the king of France had no right to tax Church property, and the money-hungry king
Phillip had, obviously, disagreed. De Nogaret kidnapped an important French bishop, and
the pope had come out swinging over it. He issued a papal bull proclaiming that kings
must be subordinate to the Church, and that popes held ultimate authority over both
spiritual and temporal matters on earth. To make sure they got the message, Boniface
excommunicated Phillip and de Nogaret. Phillip answered his challenge by sending the
brutal, devious, and bad-tempered de Nogaret at the head of an army to meet up with
Italian allies and capture the pope. Boniface was, indeed, kidnapped and held for three
days. After being beaten to a pulp, he was released; a month later, he died. The French
king had proved just who was subordinate to whom, and he didn't mind a little papal
blood on his hands. Pope Boniface's successor, Pope Benedict XI, lasted only a year in
office — poisoned, it was said, by de Nogaret.
But there were diplomatic difficulties to suffer for killing two popes. Consequently, King
Phillip decided it would be easier to just buy one. He began procuring cardinals, pulling
strings behind the scenes until the number of French cardinals in the Vatican's College of
Cardinals was equal to the Italian ones. They then obligingly elected his handpicked
candidate, Bertrand de Goth, making him Pope Clement V. The city of Rome was in
turmoil, and the safety of the Vatican was in question. So, it didn't take much to convince
the new French pope that his life would be in serious danger by living there. Clement
obliged by staying in France, having his ceremony of investiture in Lyons. In 1309, he
moved the Holy See to the city of Avignon (which was actually owned by the king of
Sicily), right on Phillip's back doorstep.
Clement had everything Phillip wanted in a pope: He was puny, weak, new in the job,
and owed everything to his French king. Now was the time for the boldest move of
Phillip's reign — the arrest of the Knights Templar.
King Phillip IV of France set his sights on the fabled riches of the Knights Templar. His
aim was to destroy the Templar Order and confiscate all their treasuries and properties in
France, but he had to achieve it legally. The one surefire way was to accuse them of
crimes so heinous that, if proved, no one would dare come to their rescue. It was no good
to simply accuse the Grand Master or a handful of leaders. It had to be all of them, and he
had to find a way to make the charges stick. And he had to be quick about it, because
battle-hardened Templar knights were already returning to France, partly because of
tensions on Cyprus between the Templars and the island's king. Phillip needed no more
knights to cope with.
King Phillip's audacious plan was to arrest every Templar in France, charge them with
heresy, and exact immediate confessions from them by torture before Pope Clement V or
anyone else could protest on their behalf. By making the charges religious in nature,
Phillip would be seen not as an avaricious thief, but as a noble servant of God.
Jacques de Molay, Grand Master of the Knights Templar, had been called to Poitiers,
France, for the purpose of discussing with the new pope a new crusade to retake the Holy
Land. For almost two years, he shuttled back and forth between the pope and King Phillip,
essentially stamping out various diplomatic fires, such as the proposal to merge all the
military orders.
In June 1307, de Molay rode into Paris at the head of a column of his knights, with a
dozen horses laden with gold and silver, to begin the financing of the new Crusade. For
the next several months, Phillip treated the aging Grand Master with interest and
diplomacy, and de Molay believed he and the Order were at a new turning point. He
didn't know how right he was.
October 1307: An unlucky Friday the 13th
The end began at dawn on Friday, October 13, 1307. The sealed order to Phillip's bailiffs
had gone out a full month before. It was accompanied by a personal letter from the king,
filled with lofty prose about how heart-rending it was to be compelled to do his duty,
while detailing frightening accusations against the Templars. The letter would have had
an eye-popping effect on the king's men, and their secrecy was undoubtedly assured. The
sealed arrest order was not to be opened until the appointed day.
At this time, France was the most populous nation of Europe, even including Russia. And
it was no tiny country either; France took up more than 40,000 square miles, an enormous
area to cover from the back of a horse. Yet Phillip IV managed to carry off a stunning
piece of work. Hundreds of the king's men simultaneously opened letters all over the
country ordering them to converge on every Templar castle, commandery, preceptory,
farm, vineyard, or mill.
It was shockingly effective, instantly chopping off the head of the Order. Phillip
obviously had a hit list of the most important knights to nab. Accounts differ wildly, but
the most respected ones agree that 625 members of the Order were arrested in the first
wave. These included the Grand Master; the Visitor-General; the Preceptors of
Normandy, Cyprus, and Aquitaine; and the Templars' Royal Treasurer.
The arrested Templars, whose average age was 41, were put into isolation and
immediately subjected to the gruesome tactics of medieval "interrogation" on the very
first day of their arrest. The technique of the strapaddo was common. It involved binding
the victim's wrists behind his back, passing the rope over a high beam, pulling him off of
the ground, and suddenly dropping him, snapping his arms and dislocating his shoulders.
Stretching the victim on the rack was another favored method. Perhaps the most horrible
was coating the victim's feet in lard or oil, and then slowly roasting them over a flame.
Subjected to these agonies, the overwhelming majority of the knights confessed to every
charge that was put to them.
The confessions
Phillip's goal was to arrest all the Templars, subject them to torture immediately, and
exact confessions from them on the very first day. He knew that the pope would be livid
over his actions, and that Church officials would be wary of agreeing to the kinds of
interrogations Phillip had in mind, so time was of the essence. He wanted to hand
Clement V a stack of confessions so damning that the pope would lose his stomach for
siding with the Order.
The pope reacted just as Phillip had planned. His outrage over the arrests turned to dread
and resignation as the "evidence" was presented to him. Phillip leaned on Clement to
issue papal arrest warrants all across Europe, which were largely ignored or skirted by
other monarchs. Very few show trials went on outside of France, and there were no cases
(outside of the tortured knights in France) of Templars who admitted to the charges of
heresy.
In an outburst of courage and remorse, most of the arrested Templars subsequently
recanted their confessions and proclaimed to Church officials that their statements were
made under the pain of torture and threat of death. To intimidate the remaining Templars,
Phillip ordered 54 of the knights to be burned at the stake in 1310, for the sin of recanting
their confessions.
In 1312, Clement finally decided to end the situation at a council in Vienna. Just to make
certain the decision went the way he intended, Phillip stationed his army on the outskirts
of the city. The pliant pope officially dissolved the Order, without formally condemning
it. All Templar possessions apart from the cash were handed over to the Knights
Hospitaller, and many Templars who freely confessed were set free and assigned to other
Orders. Those who did not confess were sent to the stake. Phillip, ever the cheap gangster,
soothed his loss of the Templars' tangible assets by strong-arming a yearly fee from the
Hospitallers to defray his costs of prosecuting the Templars.