Chapter V · POLITICAL HERESY UTILIZED BY THE STATE.

IT was inevitable that secular potentates should follow the example of the Church in the employment of a weapon so efficient as the charge of heresy, when they chanced to be in the position of controlling the ecclesiastical organization.

A typical illustration of this is seen when, during the anarchy which prevailed in Rome after the death of Innocent VII. in 1406, Basilio Ordelaffi incurred the enmity of the Colonnas and the Savelli, and they found that the easiest way to deal with him was through the Inquisition. Under their impulsion it seized him and two of his adherents, Matteo and Merenda. Through means procured by his daughter, Ordelaffi escaped from prison and was condemned in contumaciam. The others confessed—doubtless under torture—the heresies attributed to them, were handed over to the secular arm, and were duly burned. Their houses were torn down, and on their sites in time were erected two others, one of which afterwards became the dwelling of Michael Angelo and the other of Salvator Rosa.[256]

Secular potentates, however, had not waited till the fifteenth century to appreciate the facilities afforded by heresy and the Inquisition for the accomplishment of their objects. Already a hundred years earlier the methods of the Inquisition had suggested to Philippe le Bel the great crime of the Middle Ages—the destruction of the Order of the Temple.

When, in 1119, Hugues de Payen and Geoffroi de Saint-Adhémar with seven companions devoted themselves to the pious task of keeping the roads to Jerusalem clear of robbers, that pilgrims might traverse them in safety, and when Raymond du Puy about the same time organized the Poor Brethren of the Hospital of St. John, they opened a new career which was irresistibly attractive to the warlike ardor and religious enthusiasm of the age. The strange combination of monasticism and chivalry corresponded so exactly to the ideal of Christian knighthood that the Military Orders thus founded speedily were reckoned among the leading institutions of Europe. At the Council of Troyes, in 1128, a Rule, drawn up it is said by St. Bernard, was assigned to Hugues and his associates, who were known as the Poor Soldiers of the Temple. They were assigned a white habit, as a symbol of innocence, to which Eugenius III. added a red cross, and their standard, Bauséant, half black and half white, with its legend, “Non nobis Domine,” soon became the rallying-point of the Christian chivalry. The Rule, based upon that of the strict Cistercian Order, was exceedingly severe. The members were bound by the three monastic vows of obedience, poverty, and chastity, and these were enforced in the statutes of the Order with the utmost rigor. The applicant for admission was required to ask permission to become the serf and slave of the “House” forever, and was warned that he henceforth surrendered his own will irrevocably. He was promised bread and water and the poor vestments of the House; and if after death gold or silver were found among his effects his body was thrust into unconsecrated ground, or, if buried, it was exhumed. Chastity was prescribed in the same unsparing fashion, and even the kiss of a mother was forbidden.[257]

The fame of the Order quickly filled all Europe; knights of the noblest blood, dukes and princes, renounced the world to serve Christ in its ranks, and soon in its general chapter three hundred knights were gathered, in addition to serving brethren. Their possessions spread immensely. Towns and villages and churches and manors were bestowed upon them, from which the revenues were sent to the Grand Master, whose official residence was Jerusalem, together with the proceeds of the collections of an organized system of beggary, their agents for which penetrated into every corner of Christendom. Scarce had the Order been organized when, in 1133, the mighty warrior, Alonso I. of Aragon, known as el Batallador and also as el Emperador, because his rule extended over Navarre and a large portion of Castile, dying without children, left his whole dominions to the Holy Sepulchre and to the Knights of the Temple and of the Hospital in undivided thirds; and though the will was not executed, the knights were promised and doubtless received compensation from his successor, Ramiro el Monje. More practical was the liberality of Philip Augustus, in 1222, when he left the two Orders two thousand marks apiece absolutely, and the enormous sum of fifty thousand marks each on condition of keeping in service for three years three hundred knights in the Holy Land. We can understand how, in 1191, the Templars could buy the Island of Cyprus from Richard of England for twenty-five thousand silver marks, although they sold it the next year for the same price to Gui, King of Jerusalem. We can understand, also, that this enormous development began to excite apprehension and hostility. At the Council of Lateran, in 1179, there was bitter strife between the prelates and the Military Orders, resulting in a decree which required the Templars to surrender all recently acquired churches and tithes—an order which, in 1186, Urban III. defined as meaning all acquired within the ten years previous to the council.[258]

This indicates that already the prelates were beginning to feel jealous of the new organization. In fact, the antagonism which we have already traced in the thirteenth century between the Mendicant Orders and the secular clergy was but the repetition of that which had long existed with respect to the Military Orders. These from the first were the especial favorites of the Holy See, whose policy it was to elevate them into a militia depending solely on Rome, thus rendering them an instrument in extending its influence and breaking down the independence of the local churches. Privileges and immunities were showered upon them: they were exempted from tolls and tithes and taxes of all kinds; their churches and houses were endowed with the right of asylum; their persons enjoyed the inviolability accorded to ecclesiastics; they were released from all feudal obligations and allegiance; they were justiciable only by Rome; bishops were forbidden to excommunicate them, and were even ordered to refer to the Roman curia all the infinite questions which arose in local quarrels. In 1255, after the misfortunes of the crusade of St. Louis, alms given to their collectors were declared to entitle the donors to Holy Land indulgences. In short, nothing was omitted by the popes that would stimulate their growth and bind them firmly to the chair of St. Peter.[259]

Thus it was inevitable that antagonism should spring up between the secular hierarchy and the Military Orders. The Templars were continually complaining that the prelates were endeavoring to oppress them, to impose exactions, and to regain by various devices the jurisdiction from which the popes had relieved them; their right of asylum was violated; the priests interfered with their begging collectors, and repressed and intercepted the pious legacies designed for them; the customary quarrels over burials and burial-fees were numerous, for, until the rise of the Mendicants, and even afterwards, it was a frequent thing for nobles to order their sepulture in the Temple or the Hospital. To these complaints the popes ever lent a ready ear, and the favoritism which they manifested only gave a sharper edge to the hostility of the defeated prelates. In 1264 there was a threatened rupture between the papacy and the Temple. Étienne de Sissy, Marshal of the Order and Preceptor of Apulia, refused to assist in the crusade preparing against Manfred, and was removed by Urban IV. When ordered to resign his commission he boldly replied to Urban that no pope had ever interfered with the internal affairs of the Order, and that he would resign his office only to the Grand Master who had conferred it. Urban excommunicated him, but the Order sustained him, being discontented because the succors levied for the Holy Land were diverted to the papal enterprise against Manfred. The following year a new pope, Clement IV., in removing the excommunication, bitterly reproached the Order for its ingratitude, and pointed out that only the support of the papacy could sustain it against the hostility of the bishops and princes, which apparently was notorious. Still the Order held out, and in common with the Hospitallers and Cistercians, refused to pay a tithe to Charles of Anjou, in spite of which Clement issued numerous bulls confirming and enlarging its privileges.[260]

That this antagonism on the part of temporal and spiritual potentates had ample justification there can be little doubt. If, as we have seen, the Mendicant Orders rapidly declined from the enthusiastic self-abnegation of Dominic and Francis, such a body as the Templars, composed of ambitious and warlike knights, could hardly be expected long to retain its pristine ascetic devotion. Already, in 1152, the selfish eagerness of the Grand Master, Bernard de Tremelai, to secure the spoils of Ascalon nearly prevented the capture of that city, and the fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem was hastened when, in 1172, the savage ferocity of Eudes de Saint-Amand, then Grand Master, prevented the conversion of the King of the Assassins and all his people. It was not without show of justification that about this time Walter Mapes attributes the misfortunes of the Christians of the East to the corruption of the Military Orders. By the end of the century we have seen from King Richard’s rejoinder to Foulques de Neuilly that Templar was already synonymous with pride, and in 1207 Innocent III. took the Order to task in an epistle of violent denunciation. His apostolic ears, he said, were frequently disturbed with complaints of their excesses. Apostatizing from God and scandalizing the Church, their unbridled pride abused the enormous privileges bestowed upon them. Employing doctrines worthy of demons, they give their cross to every tramp who can pay them two or three pence a year, and then assert that these are entitled to ecclesiastical services and Christian burial, even though laboring under excommunication. Thus ensnared by the devil they ensnare the souls of the faithful. He forbears to dwell further on these and other wickednesses by which they deserve to be despoiled of their privileges, preferring to hope that they will free themselves from their turpitude. A concluding allusion to their lack of respect towards papal legates probably explains the venomous vigor of the papal attack, but the accusations which it makes touch points on which there is other conclusive evidence. Although by the statutes of the Order the purchase of admission, directly or indirectly, was simony, entailing expulsion on him who paid and degradation on the preceptor who was privy to it, there can be no doubt that many doubtful characters thus effected entrance into the Order. The papal letters and privileges so freely bestowed upon them were moreover largely abused, to the vexation and oppression of those with whom they came in contact, for, exclusively justiciable in the Roman curia, they were secure against all pleaders who could not afford that distant, doubtful, and expensive litigation. The evils thence arising were greatly intensified when the policy was adopted of forming a class of serving brethren, by whom their extensive properties were cultivated and managed without the cost of hired labor. Churls of every degree, husbandmen, shepherds, swineherds, mechanics, household servants, were thus admitted into the Order, until they constituted at least nine tenths of it, and although these were distinguished by a brown mantle in place of the white garment of the knights, and although they complained of the contempt and oppression with which they were treated by their knightly brethren, nevertheless, in their relations with the outside world, they were full members of the Order, shrouded with its inviolability and entitled to all its privileges, which they were not likely by moderation to render less odious to the community.[261]

Thus the knights furnished ample cause for external hostility and internal disquiet, though there is probably no ground for the accusation that, in 1229, they betrayed Frederic II. to the infidel, and, in 1250, St. Louis to the Soldan of Egypt. Yet Frederic II. doubtless had ample reason for dissatisfaction with their conduct during his crusade, which he revenged by expelling them from Sicily in 1229, and confiscating their property; and though he recalled them soon after and assumed to restore their possessions, he retained a large portion. Still, pious liberality continued to increase the wealth of the Order, though as the Christian possessions in the East shrank more and more, people began to attribute the ceaseless misfortunes to the bitter jealousy and animosity existing between the rival Orders of the Temple and the Hospital, which in 1243 had broken out into open war in Palestine, to the great comfort of the infidel. A remedy was naturally sought in a union of the two Orders, together with that of the Teutonic Knights. At the Council of Lyons, in 1274, Gregory N. vainly endeavored to effect this, but the countervailing influences, including, it was said, the gold of the brethren, were too powerful. In these reproaches perhaps the Orders were held to an undeserved accountability, for while their quarrels and the general misconduct of the Latins in Palestine did much to wreck the kingdom of Jerusalem, the real responsibility lay rather with the papacy. When thousands of heretics were sent as crusaders in punishment, the glory of the service was fatally tarnished. When money raised and vows taken for the Holy Land were diverted to the purposes of the papal power in Italy, when the doctrine was publicly announced that the home interests of the Holy See were more important than the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre, the enthusiasm of Christendom against the infidel was chilled. When salvation could be trained at almost any time by a short term of service near home in the quarrels of the Church, whether on the Weser or in Lombardy, the devotion which had carried thousands to the Syrian deserts found a less rugged and a safer path to heaven. It is easy thus to understand how in the development of papal aggrandizement through the thirteenth century recruits and money were lacking to maintain against the countless hordes of Tartars the conquests of Godfrey of Bouillon. In addition to all this the Holy Land was made a penal settlement whither were sent the malefactors of Europe, rendering the Latin colony a horde of miscreants whose crimes deserved and whose disorders invited the vengeance of Heaven.[262]

With the fall of Acre, in 1291, the Christians were driven definitely from the shores of Syria, causing intense grief and indignation throughout Europe. In that disastrous siege, brought on by the perfidy of a band of crusaders who refused to observe an existing truce, the Hospital won more glory than the Temple, although the Grand Master, Guillaume de Beaujeu, had been chosen to command the defence, and fell bravely fighting for the cross. After the surrender and massacre, his successor, the monk Gaudini, sailed for Cyprus with ten knights, the sole survivors of five hundred who had held out to the last. Again, not without reason, the cry went up that the disaster was the result of the quarrels between the Military Orders, and Nicholas IV. promptly sent letters to the kings and prelates of Christendom asking their opinions on the project of uniting them, in view of the projected crusade which was to sail on St. John’s day, 1293, under Edward I. of England. At least one affirmative answer was received from the provincial council of Salzburg, but ere it reached Rome Nicholas was dead. A long interregnum, followed by the election of the hermit Pier Morrone, put an end to the project for the time, but it was again taken up by Boniface VIII., to be interrupted and laid aside, probably by his engrossing quarrel with Philippe le Bel. What was the drift of public opinion at the time is probably reflected in a tract on the recovery of the Holy Land addressed to Edward I. It is there proposed that the two Orders, whose scandalous quarrels have rendered them the object of scorn, shall be fused together and confined to their eastern possessions, which should be sufficient for their support, while their combined revenues from their western property, estimated at eight hundred thousand livres Tournois per annum, be employed to further the crusade. Evidently the idea was spreading that their wealth could be seized and used to better purpose than it was likely to be in their hands.[263]

Thus the Order was somewhat discredited in popular estimation when, in 1297, Jacques de Molay, whose terrible fate has cast a sombre shadow over his name through the centuries, was elected Grand Master, after a vigorous and bitter opposition by the partisans of Hugues de Peraud. A few years of earnest struggle to regain a foothold in Palestine seemed to exhaust the energy and resources of the Order, and it became quiescent in Cyprus. Its next exploit, though not official, was not of a nature to conciliate public opinion. Charles de Valois, the evil genius of his brother Philippe le Bel, and of his nephews, in 1300 married Catherine, granddaughter of Baldwin II. of Constantinople, and titular empress. In 1306 he proposed to make good his wife’s claims on the imperial throne, and he found a ready instrument in Clement V., who persuaded himself that the attempt would not be a weakening of Christianity in the East, but a means of recovering Palestine, or at least of reducing the Greek Church to subjection. He therefore endeavored to unite the Italian republics and princes in this crusade against Christians. Charles II. of Naples undertook an expedition in conjunction with the Templars. A fleet was fitted out under the command of Roger, a Templar of high reputation for skill and audacity. It captured Thessalonica, but in place of actively pursuing Andronicus II., the Templars turned their arms against the Latin princes of Greece, ravaged cruelly the shores of Thrace and the Morea, and returned with immense booty, having aroused enmities which were an element in their downfall. In contrast to this the Hospitallers were acquiring fresh renown as the champions of Christ by gallantly conquering, after a four years’ struggle, the island of Rhodes, in which they so long maintained the cause of Christianity in the East. In 1306 Clement V. sent for de Molay and Guillaume de Villaret, Grand Master of the Hospitallers, to consult about a new crusade and the often discussed project of the union of the Orders. He told them to come as secretly as possible, but while the Hospitaller, engrossed with preparations for the siege of Rhodes, excused himself, de Molay came in state, with a retinue of sixty knights, and manifested no intention of returning to his station in the East. This well might arouse the question whether the Templars were about to abandon their sphere of duty, and if so, what were the ambitious schemes which might lead them to transfer their headquarters to France. The Teutonic knights in withdrawing from the East were carving out for themselves a kingdom amid the Pagans of northeastern Europe. Had the Templars any similar aspirations nearer home?[264]

Suspicions of the kind might not unnaturally be excited, and yet be wholly without foundation. Modern writers have exercised their ingenuity in conjecturing that there was a plot on hand for the Templars to seize the south of France and erect it into an independent kingdom. The Order had early multiplied rapidly in the provinces from the Garonne to the Rhone; it is assumed that they were deeply tinctured with Catharism, and held relations with the concealed heretics in those regions. All this is the sheerest assumption without the slightest foundation. There was not a trace of Catharism in the Order,[265] and we have seen how by this time the Cathari of Languedoc had been virtually exterminated, and how the land had been Gallicized by the Inquisition. Such an alliance would have been a source of weakness, not of strength, for it would have brought upon them all Europe in arms, and had there been a shred of evidence to that effect, Philippe le Bel would have made the most of it. Neither can it be assumed that they were intriguing with the discontented, orthodox population. Bernard Délicieux and the Carcassais would never have turned to the feeble Ferrand of Majorca if they could have summoned to their assistance the powerful Order of the Temple. Yet even the Order of the Temple, however great might have been its aggregate, was fatally weakened for such ambitious projects by being scattered in isolated fragments over the whole extent of Europe; and its inability to concentrate its forces for either aggression or defence was shown when it surrendered with scarce an effort at self-preservation in one country after another. Besides, it was by no means so numerous and wealthy as has been popularly supposed. The dramatic circumstances of its destruction have inflamed the imagination of all who have written about it, leading to a not unnatural exaggeration in contrasting its prosperity and its misery. An anonymous contemporary tells us that the Templars were so rich and powerful that they could scarce have been suppressed but for the secret and sudden movement of Philippe le Bel. Villani, who was also a contemporary, says that their power and wealth were well-nigh incomputable. As time went on conceptions became magnified by distance. Trithemius assures us that it was the richest of all the monastic Orders, not only in gold and silver, but in its vast dominions, towns and castles in all the lands of Europe. Modern writers have even exceeded this in their efforts to present definite figures. Maillard de Chambure assumes that at the time of its downfall it numbered thirty thousand knights with a revenue of eight million livres Tournois. Wilcke estimates its income at twenty million thalers of modern money, and asserts that in France alone it could keep in the field an army of fifteen thousand cavaliers. Zöckler calculates its income at fifty-four millions of francs, and that it numbered twenty thousand knights. Even the cautious Havemann echoes the extravagant statement that in wealth and power it could rival all the princes of Christendom, while Schottmüller assumes that in France alone there were fifteen thousand brethren, and over twenty thousand in the whole Order.[266]

The peculiar secrecy in which all the affairs of the Order were shrouded renders such estimates purely conjectural. As to numbers, it has been overlooked that the great body of members were serving brethren, not fighting-men—herdsmen, husbandmen, and menials employed on the lands and in the houses of the knights, and adding little to their effective force. When they considered it a legitimate boast that in the one hundred and eighty years of their active existence twenty thousand of the brethren had perished in Palestine, we can see that at no time could the roll of knights have exceeded a few thousand at most. At the Council of Vienne the dissolution of the Order was urged on the ground that more than two thousand depositions of witnesses had been taken, and as these depositions covered virtually all the prisoners examined in France, England, Spain, Italy, and Germany, whose evidence could be used, it shows that the whole number can only have been insignificant in comparison with what had been generally imagined. Cyprus was the headquarters of the Order after the fall of Acre, yet at the time of the seizure there were but one hundred and eighteen members there of all ranks, and the numbers with which we meet in the trials everywhere are ludicrously out of proportion with the enormous total popularly attributed to the Order. A contemporary, of warmly papalist sympathies, expresses his grief at the penalties righteously incurred by fifteen thousand champions of Christ, which may be taken as an approximate guess at the existing number; and if among these we assume fifteen hundred knights, we shall probably be rather over than under the reality. As for the wealth of the Order, in the general effort to appropriate its possessions it was every one’s interest to conceal the details of the aggregate, but we chance to have a standard which shows that the estimates of its supereminent riches are grossly exaggerated. In 1244 Matthew Paris states that it possessed throughout Christendom nine thousand manors, while the Hospitallers had nineteen thousand. Nowhere was it more prosperous than in Aquitaine, and about the year 1300, in a computation of a tithe granted to Philippe le Bel, in the province of Bordeaux, the Templars are set down at six thousand livres, the Hospitallers at the same, while the Cistercians are registered for twelve thousand. In the accounts of a royal collector in 1293 there are specified in Auvergne fourteen Temple preceptories, paying in all three hundred and ninety-two livres, while the preceptories of the Hospitallers number twenty-four, with a payment of three hundred and sixty-four livres. It will be remembered that a contemporary writer estimates the combined revenues of the two Orders at eight hundred thousand livres Tournois per annum, and of this the larger portion probably belonged to the Hospital.[267]

Yet the wealth of the Order was more than sufficient to excite the cupidity of royal freebooters, and its power and privileges quite enough to arouse distrust in the mind of a less suspicious despot than Philippe le Bel. Many ingenious theories have been advanced to explain his action, but they are superfluous. In his quarrel with Boniface VIII., though the Templars were accused of secretly sending money to Rome in defiance of his prohibition, they stood by him and signed an act approving and confirming the assembly of the Louvre in June, 1303, where Boniface was formally accused of heresy, and an appeal was made to a future council to be assembled on the subject. So cordial, in fact, was the understanding between the king and the Templars that royal letters of July 10, 1303, show that the collection of all the royal revenues throughout France was intrusted to Hugues de Peraud, the Visitor of France, who had narrowly missed obtaining the Grand Mastership of the Order. In June, 1304, Philippe confirmed all their privileges, and in October he issued an Ordonnance granting them additional ones and speaking of their merits in terms of warm appreciation. They lent him, in 1299, the enormous sum of five hundred thousand livres for the dowry of his sister. As late as 1306, when Hugues de Peraud had suffered a loss of two thousand silver marks deposited with Tommaso and Vanno Mozzi, Florentine bankers, who fraudulently disappeared, Philippe promptly intervened and ordered restitution of the sum by Aimon, Abbot of S. Antoine, who had gone security for the bankers. When in his extreme financial straits he debased the coinage until a popular insurrection was excited in Paris, it was in the Temple that he took refuge, and it was the Templars that defended him against the assaults of the mob. But these very obligations were too great to be incurred by a monarch who was striving to render himself absolute, and the recollection of them could hardly fail to suggest that the Order was a dangerous factor in a kingdom where feudal institutions were being converted into a despotism. While it might not have strength to sever a portion of the provinces and erect an independent principality, it might at any moment become a disagreeable element in a contest with the great feudatories to whom the knights were bound by common sympathies and interests. He was engaged in reducing them to subjection by the extension of the royal jurisdiction, and the Templars were subject to no jurisdiction save that of the Holy See. They were not his subjects; they owed him no obedience or allegiance; he could not summon them to perform military service as he could his bishops, but they enjoyed the right to declare war and make peace on their own account without responsibility to any one; they were clothed in all the personal inviolability of ecclesiastics, and he possessed no means of control over them as he did with the hierarchy of the Gallican Church. They were exempt from all taxes and tolls and customs dues; their lands contributed nothing to his necessities, save when he could wring from the pope the concession of a tithe. While thus in every way independent of him, they were bound by rules of the blindest and most submissive obedience to their own superiors. The command of the Master was received as an order from God; no member could have a lock upon a bag or trunk, could bathe or let blood, could open a letter from a kinsman without permission of his commander, and any disobedience forfeited the habit and entailed imprisonment in chains, with its indelible disabilities. It is true that in 1295 there had been symptoms of turbulence in the Order, when the intervention of Boniface VIII. was required to enforce subjection to the Master, but this had passed away, and the discipline within its ranks was a religious obligation which rendered it vastly more efficient for action than the elastic allegiance of the vassal to his seigneur. Such a body of armed warriors was an anomaly in a feudal organization, and when the Templars seemed to have abandoned their military activity in the East, Philippe, in view of their wealth and numbers in France, may well have regarded them as a possible obstacle to his schemes of monarchical aggrandizement to be got rid of at the first favorable moment. At the commencement of his reign he had endeavored to put a stop to the perpetual acquisitions of both the religious Orders and the Templars, through which increasing bodies of land were falling under mainmorte, and the fruitlessness of the effort must have strengthened his convictions of its necessity. If it be asked why he attacked the Templars rather than the Hospitallers, the answer is probably to be found in the fact that the Temple was the weaker of the two, while the secrecy shrouding its ritual rendered it an object of popular suspicion.[268]

Walsingham asserts that Philippe’s design in assailing the Templars was to procure for one of his younger sons the title of King of Jerusalem, with the Templar possessions as an appanage. Such a project was completely within the line of thought of the time, and would have resulted in precipitating Europe anew upon Syria. It may possibly have been a motive at the outset, and was gravely discussed in the Council of Vienne in favor of Philippe le Long, but it is evident that no sovereign outside of France would have permitted the Templar dominions within his territories to pass under the control of a member of the aspiring house of Capet.[269]

For the explanation of Philippe’s action, however, we need hardly look further than to financial considerations. He was in desperate straits for money to meet the endless drain of the Flemish war. He had imposed taxes until some of his subjects were in revolt, and others were on the verge of it. He had debased the currency until he earned the name of the Counterfeiter, had found himself utterly unable to redeem his promises, and had discovered by experience that of all financial devices it was the most costly and ruinous. His resources were exhausted and his scruples were few. The stream of confiscations from Languedoc was beginning to run dry, while the sums which it had supplied to the royal treasury for more than half a century had shown the profit which was derivable from well-applied persecution of heresy. He had just carried out a financial expedient of the same kind as his dealings with the Templars, by arresting all the Jews of the kingdom simultaneously, stripping them of their property, and banishing them under pain of death. A memorandum of questions for consideration, still preserved in the Trésor des Chartres, shows that he expected to benefit in the same way from the confiscation of the Templar possessions, while, as we shall see, he overlooked the fact that these, as ecclesiastical property, were subject to the imprescriptible rights of the Church.[270]

The stories about Squin de Florian, a renegade Templar, and Noffo Dei, a wicked Florentine, both condemned to death and concocting the accusations to save themselves, are probably but the conception of an imaginative chronicler, handed down from one annalist to another.[271] Such special interposition was wholly unnecessary. The foolish secrecy in which the Templars enveloped their proceedings was a natural stimulus of popular curiosity and suspicion. Alone among religious Orders, the ceremonies of reception were conducted in the strictest privacy; chapters were held at daybreak with doors closely guarded, and no participant was allowed to speak of what was done, even to a fellow-Templar not concerned in the chapter, under the heaviest penalty known—that of expulsion. That this should lead to gossip and stories of rites too repulsive and hideous to bear the light was inevitable. It was the one damaging fact against them, and when Humbert Blanc, Preceptor of Auvergne, was asked on his trial why such secrecy was observed if they had nothing to conceal, he could only answer “through folly.” Thus it was common report that the neophyte was subjected to the humiliation of kissing the posteriors of his preceptor—a report which the Hospitallers took special pleasure in circulating. That unnatural lusts should be attributed to the Order is easily understood, for it was a prevalent vice of the Middle Ages, and one to which monastic communities were especially subject; as recently as 1292 a horrible scandal of this kind had led to the banishment of many professors and theologians of the University of Paris. Darker rumors were not lacking of unchristian practices introduced in the Order by a Grand Master taken prisoner by the Soldan of Babylon, and procuring his release under promise of rendering them obligatory on the members. There was also a legend that in the early days of the Order two Templars were riding on one horse in a battle beyond seas. The one in front recommended himself to Christ and was sorely wounded; the one behind recommended himself to him who best could help, and he escaped. The latter was said to be the demon in human shape who told his wounded comrade that if he would believe him the Order would grow in wealth and power. The Templar was seduced, and thence came error and unbelief into the organization. We have seen how readily such stories obtained credence throughout the Middle Ages, how they grew and became embroidered with the most fantastic details. The public mind was ripe to believe anything of the Templars; a spark only was needed to produce a conflagration.[272]

Philippe’s ministers and agents—Guillaume de Nogaret, Guillaume de Plaisian, Renaud de Roye, and Enguerrand de Marigny—were quite fitted to appreciate such an opportunity to relieve the royal exchequer, nor could they be at a loss in finding testimony upon which to frame a formidable list of charges, for we have already seen how readily evidence was procured from apparently respectable witnesses convicting Boniface VIII. of crimes equally atrocious. In the present case the task was easier: the Templars could have been no exception to the general demoralization of the monastic Orders, and in their ranks there must have been many desperate adventurers, ready for any crime that would bring a profit. Expelled members there were in plenty who had been ejected for their misdeeds, and who could lose nothing by gratifying their resentments. Apostates also were there who had fled from the Order and were liable to imprisonment if caught, besides the crowd of worthless ribalds whom the royal agents could always secure when evidence for any purpose was wanted. These were quietly collected by Guillaume de Nogaret, and kept in the greatest secrecy at Corbeil under charge of the Dominican, Humbert. Heresy was, of course, the most available charge to bring. The Inquisition was there as an unfailing instrument to secure conviction. Popular rumor, no matter by whom affirmed, was sufficient to require arrest and trial, and when once on trial there were few indeed from whom the inquisitorial process could not wring conviction. When once the attempt was determined upon the result was inevitable.[273]

Still, the attempt could not be successful without the concurrence of Clement V., for the inquisitorial courts, both of the Holy Office and of the bishops, were under papal control, and, besides, public opinion would require that the guilt of the Order should be proved in other lands besides France. To enable Philippe to enjoy the expected confiscations in his own dominions, confiscation must be general throughout Europe, and for this the co-operation of the Holy See was essential. Clement subsequently declared that Philippe broached the subject to him in all its details before his coronation at Lyons, November 14, 1305,[274] but the papal bulls throughout the whole matter are so infected with mendacity that slender reliance is to be placed on their statements. Doubtless there was some discussion about the current reports defaming the Order, but Clement is probably not subject to the imputation which historians have thrown upon him, that his summons to de Molay and de Villaret in 1306 was purely a decoy. It seems to me reasonable to conclude that he sent for them in good faith, and that de Molay’s own imprudence in establishing himself in France, as though for a permanence, excited at once the suspicions and cupidity of the king, and ripened into action what had previously been merely a vague conception.[275]

If such was the case, Philippe was not long in maturing the project, nor were his agents slow in gathering material for the accusation. In his interview with Clement at Poitiers, in the spring of 1307, he vainly demanded the condemnation of the memory of Boniface VIII., and, failing in this, he brought forward the charges against the Templars, while temporarily dropping the other matter, but with equal lack of immediate result. Clement sent for de Molay, who came to him with Raimbaud de Caron, Preceptor of Cyprus, Geoffroi de Gonneville, Preceptor of Aquitaine and Poitou, and Hugues de Peraud, Visitor of France, the principal officers of the Order then in the kingdom. The charges were communicated to them in all their foulness. Clement subsequently had the audacity to declare to all Europe that de Molay before his arrest confessed their truth in the presence of his subordinates and of ecclesiastics and laymen, but this is a manifest lie. The Templars returned to Paris evidently relieved of all anxiety, thinking that they had justified themselves completely, and de Molay, on October 12, the eve of the arrest, had the honor to be one of the four pall-bearers at the obsequies of Catharine, wife of Charles de Valois, evidently for the purpose of lulling him with a sense of security. Nay, more, on August 24, Clement had written to Philippe urging him to make peace with England, and referring to his charges against the Templars in their conversations at Lyons and Poitiers, and the representations on the subject made by his agents. The charges, he says, appear to him incredible and impossible, but as de Molay and the chief officers of the Order had complained of the reports as injurious, and had repeatedly asked for an investigation, offering to submit to the severest punishment if found guilty, he proposes in a few days, on his return to Poitiers, to commence, with the advice of his cardinals, an examination into the matter, for which he asks the king to send him the proofs.[276]

No impression had evidently thus far been made upon Clement, and he was endeavoring, in so far as he dared, to shuffle the affair aside. Philippe, however, had under his hands the machinery requisite to attain his ends, and he felt assured that when the Church was once committed to it, Clement would not venture to withdraw. The Inquisitor of France, Guillaume de Paris, was his confessor as well as papal chaplain, and could be relied upon. It was his official duty to take cognizance of all accusations of heresy, and to summon the secular power to his assistance, while his awful authority overrode all the special immunities and personal inviolability of the Order. As the Templars were all defamed for heresy by credible witnesses, it was strictly according to legal form for Frère Guillaume to summon Philippe to arrest those within his territories and bring them before the Inquisition for trial. As the enterprise was a large one, secrecy and combined operations were requisite for its success, and Philippe, as soon as Clement’s letter had shown him that he was not to expect immediate papal co-operation, lost no time. He always asserted that he had acted under requisition from the inquisitor, and excused his haste by declaring that his victims were collecting their treasures and preparing to fly. On September 14 royal letters were sent out to the king’s representatives throughout France, ordering the simultaneous arrest, under authority from Frère Guillaume, of all members of the Order on October 13, and the sequestration of all property. Frère Guillaume, on September 20, addressed all inquisitors and all Dominican priors, sub-priors, and lectors, commissioning them to act, and reciting the crimes of the Templars, which he characterized as sufficient to move the earth and disturb the elements. He had, he said, examined the witnesses, he had summoned the king to lend his aid, and he cunningly added that the pope was informed of the charges. The royal instructions were that the Templars when seized were to be strictly guarded in solitary confinement; they were to be brought before the inquisitorial commissioners one by one; the articles of accusation were to be read over to them; they were to be promised pardon if they would confess the truth and return to the Church, and be told that otherwise they were to be put to death, while torture was not to be spared in extracting confession. The depositions so obtained were to be sent to the king as speedily as possible, under the seals of the inquisitors. All Templar property was to be sequestrated and careful inventories be made out. In undertaking an act which would shock public opinion in no common fashion, it was necessary that it should be justified at once by the confessions wrung from the prisoners, and nothing was to be spared, whether by promises, threats, or violence, to secure the result.[277]

This was all strictly in accordance with inquisitorial practice, and the result corresponded with the royal expectations. Under the able management of Guillaume de Nogaret, to whom the direction of the affair was confided, on October 13 at daybreak the arrests took place throughout the land, but few of the Templars escaping. Nogaret himself took charge of the Paris Temple, where about a hundred and forty Templars, with de Molay and his chief officials at their head, were seized, and the vast treasure of the Order fell into the king’s hands. The air had been thick with presages of the impending storm, but the Templars underrated the audacity of the king and had made no preparations to avert the blow. Now they were powerless in the hands of the unsparing tribunal which could at will prove them guilty out of their own mouths, and hold them up to the scorn and detestation of mankind.[278]

Philippe’s first care was to secure the support of public opinion and allay the excitement caused by this unexpected move. The next day, Saturday, October 14, the masters of the university and the cathedral canons were assembled in Nôtre Dame, where Guillaume de Nogaret, the Prévôt of Paris, and other royal officials made a statement of the offences which had been proved against the Templars. The following day, Sunday the 15th, the people were invited to assemble in the garden of the royal palace, where the matter was explained to them by the Dominicans and the royal spokesmen, while similar measures were adopted throughout the kingdom. On Monday, the 16th, royal letters were addressed to all the princes of Christendom announcing the discovery of the Templar heresy, and urging them to aid the king in the defence of the faith by following his example. At once the Inquisition was set busily at work. From October 19 to November 24 Frère Guillaume and his assistants were employed in recording the confessions of a hundred and thirty-eight prisoners captured in the Temple, and so efficacious were the means employed that but three refused to admit at least some of the charges. What these methods were the records of course fail to show, for, as we have seen, the official confession was always made after removal from the torture-chamber, and the victim was required to swear that it was free and unconstrained, without fear or force, though he knew that if he retracted what he had uttered or promised to utter on the rack he would be liable to fresh torture, or to the stake as a relapsed heretic. The same scenes were enacting all over France, where the commissioners of Frère Guillaume, and sometimes Frère Guillaume himself, with the assistance of the royal officials, were engaged in the same work. In fact, the complaisant Guillaume, in default of proper material for labor so extensive, seems occasionally to have commissioned the royal deputies to act. A few of the reports of these examinations have been preserved, from Champagne, Normandy, Querci, Bigorre, Beaucaire, and Languedoc, and in these the occasional allusions to torture show that it was employed whenever necessary. In all cases, of course, it was not required, for the promise of pardon and the threat of burning would frequently suffice, in conjunction with starvation and the harshness of the prison. The rigor of the application of the inquisitorial process is shown by the numerous deaths and the occasional suicides prompted by despair to which the records bear testimony. In Paris alone, according to the testimony of Ponsard de Gisiac, thirty-six Templars perished under torture; at Sens, Jacques de Saciac said that twenty-five had died of torment and suffering, and the mortality elsewhere was notorious. When a number of the Templars subsequently repeated their confessions before the pope and cardinals in consistory, they dwelt upon the excessive tortures which they had endured, although Clement in reporting the result was careful to specify that their confessions were free and unconstrained. De Molay, of course, was not spared. He was speedily brought into a complying state of mind. Although his confession, October 24, is exceedingly brief, and only admits a portion of the errors charged, yet he was induced to sign a letter addressed to the brethren stating that he had confessed and recommending them to do the same, as having been deceived by ancient error. As soon as he and other chiefs of the Order were thus committed, the masters and students of all the faculties of the university were summoned to meet in the Temple; the wretched victims were brought before them and were required to repeat their confessions, which they did, with the addition that these errors had prevailed in the Order for thirty years and more.[279]

The errors charged against them were virtually five: I. That when a neophyte was received the preceptor led him behind the altar, or to the sacristy or other secret place, showed him a crucifix and made him thrice renounce the prophet and spit upon the cross. II. He was then stripped, and the preceptor kissed him thrice, on the posteriors, the navel, and the mouth. III. He was then told that unnatural lust was lawful, and it was commonly indulged in throughout the Order. IV. The cord which the Templars wore over the shirt day and night as a symbol of chastity had been consecrated by wrapping it around an idol in the form of a human head with a great beard, and this head was adored in the chapters, though only known to the Grand Master and the elders. V. The priests of the Order do not consecrate the host in celebrating mass. When, in August, 1308, Clement sent throughout Europe a series of articles for the interrogation of the accused, drawn up for him by Philippe, and varying according to different recensions from eighty-seven to one hundred and twenty-seven in number, these charges were elaborated, and varied on the basis of the immense mass of confessions which had meanwhile been obtained. The indecent kisses were represented as mutual between the receptor and the received; disbelief in the sacrament of the altar was asserted; a cat was said to appear in the chapters and to be worshipped; the Grand Master or preceptor presiding in a chapter was held to have power of absolving from all sin; all brethren were instructed to acquire property for the Order by fair means or foul, and all the above were declared to be fixed and absolute rules of the Order, dating from a time beyond the memory of any member. Besides these, it was reproached for the secrecy of its proceedings and neglect in the distribution of alms. Even this however, did not satisfy the public imagination, and the most absurd exaggerations found credence, such as we have so frequently seen in the case of other heresies. The Templars were said to have admitted betraying St. Louis and the stronghold of Acre, and that they had such arrangements with the Soldan of Babylon that if a new crusade were undertaken the Christians would all be sold to him. They had conveyed away a portion of the royal treasure, to the great injury of the kingdom. The cord of chastity was magnified into a leather belt, worn next the skin, and the mahommerie of this girdle was so powerful that as long as it was worn no Templar could abandon his errors. Sometimes a Templar who died in this false belief was burned, and of his ashes a powder was made which confirmed the neophytes in their infidelity. When a child was born of a virgin to a Templar it was roasted, and of its fat an ointment was made wherewith to anoint the idol worshipped in the chapters, to which, according to other rumors, human sacrifices were offered. Such were the stories which passed from mouth to mouth and served to intensify popular abhorrence.[280]

It is, perhaps, necessary at this point to discuss the still mooted question as to the guilt or innocence of the Order. Disputants have from various motives been led to find among the Templars Manichæan, Gnostic, and Cabalistic errors justifying their destruction. Hammer-Purgstall boasted that he had discovered and identified no less than thirty Templar images, in spite of the fact that at the time of their sudden arrest the Inquisition, aided by the eager creatures of Philippe, was unable to lay its hands on a single one. The only thing approaching it was a metal reliquary in the form of a female head produced from the Paris Temple, which, on being opened, was found to contain a small skull preserved as a relic of the eleven thousand virgins.[281]

This fact alone would serve to dispose of the gravest of the charges, for, if the depositions of some of the accused are to be believed, these idols were kept in every commandery and were employed in every reception of a neophyte. With regard to the other accusations, not admitting thus of physical proof, it is to be observed that much has been made by modern theorists of the fact that the rules and statutes of the Order were reserved exclusively for its chiefs, and it has been assumed that in them were developed the secret mysteries of the heresy. Yet nothing of the kind was alleged in the proceedings; the statutes were never offered in evidence by the prosecution, although many of them must have been obtained in the sudden seizure, and this for the best of reasons. Sedulously as they were destroyed, two or three copies escaped, and these, carefully collated, have been printed. They breathe nothing but the most ascetic piety and devotion to the Church, and the numerous illustrative cases cited in them show that up to a period not long anterior to the destruction of the Order there were constant efforts made to enforce the rigid Rule framed by St. Bernard and promulgated by the Council of Troyes in 1128. Thus there is absolutely no external evidence against the Order, and the proof rests entirely upon confessions extracted by the alternative of pardon or burning, by torture, by the threat of torture, or by the indirect torture of prison and starvation, which the Inquisition, both papal and episcopal, know so well how to employ. We shall see, in the development of the affair, that when these agencies were not employed no admissions of criminality could be obtained.[282] No one who had studied the criminal jurisprudence of the later Middle Ages will attach the slightest weight to confessions obtained under such conditions. We have seen, in the case of the Stedingers, how easy it was to create belief in the most groundless charges. We have seen, under Conrad of Marburg, how readily the fear of death and the promise of absolution would cause nobles of birth and station to convict themselves of the foulest and most impossible offences. We shall see, when we come to consider persecution for witchcraft, with what facility the rack and strappado procured from victims of all ranks confessions of participating in the Sabbat, and of holding personal intercourse with demons, of charming away harvests, of conjuring hail-storms, and of killing men and cattle with spells. Riding through the air on a broomstick, and commerce with incubi and succubi rest upon evidence of precisely the same character and of much greater weight than that upon which the Templars were convicted, for the witch was sure of burning if she confessed, and had a chance of escaping if she could endure the torture, while the Templar was threatened with death for obstinacy, and was promised immunity as a reward for confession. If we accept the evidence against the Templar we cannot reject it in the case of the witch.

As the testimony thus has no intrinsic weight, the only scientific method of analyzing the affair is to sift the whole mass of confessions, and determine their credibility according to the internal evidence which they afford of being credible or otherwise. Several hundred depositions have reached us, taken in France, England, and Italy, for the most part naturally those incriminating the Order, for the assertions of innocence were usually suppressed, and the most damaging witnesses were made the most of. These are sufficiently numerous to afford us ample material for estimating the character of the proof on which the Order was condemned, and to obtain from them a reasonable approximation to the truth requires only the application of a few tests suggested by common-sense.

There is, firstly, the extreme inherent improbability that a rich, worldly, and ambitious body of men like the Templars should be secretly engaged in the dangerous and visionary task of laying the foundations of a new religion, which would bring them no advantage if they succeeded in supplanting Christianity, and which was certain to lead them to destruction in the infinite chances of detection. To admit this is to ascribe to them a spiritual exaltation and a readiness for martyrdom which we might expect from the asceticism of a Catharan or a Dolcinist, but not from the worldliness which was the real corroding vice of the Order. Secondly, if the Templars were thus engaged in the desperate enterprise of propagating a new faith under the eyes of the Inquisition, they would be wary in initiating strangers; they would exercise extreme caution as to the admission of members, and only reveal to them their secrets by degrees, as they found them worthy of confidence and zealously willing to incur the risk of martyrdom. Thirdly, if a new dogma were thus secretly taught as an indispensable portion of the Rule, its doctrines would be rigidly defined and its ritual be closely administered. The witnesses who confessed to initiation would all tell the same story and give the same details.

Thus evidence of the weightiest and most coherent character would be requisite to overcome the inherent improbability that the Templars could be embarked in an enterprise so insane, in place of which we have only confessions extracted by the threat or application of torture, and not a single instance of a persistent heretic maintaining the belief imputed to him. Turning to the testimony to see whether it comports with the conditions which we have named, we find that no discrimination whatever was exercised in the admission of neophytes. Not a single witness speaks of any preliminary preparation, though several intimate that they obtained entrance by making over their property to the Order.[283] Indeed, one of the charges was, that there was no preliminary probation, and that the neophyte at once became a professed member in full standing, which, as explained by a knight of Mas Deu, was because their services were considered to be at once required against the Saracens.[284] Youths and even children of tender years were admitted, although in violation of the statutes of the Order, of ages ranging from ten or eleven years upward.[285] High-born knights, priding themselves on their honor, priests, laborers, husbandmen, menials of all kinds were brought in, and, if we are to believe their evidence, they were without notice obliged, by threats of death and lifelong imprisonment, to undergo the severest personal humiliation, and to perform the awful task of renouncing their Saviour and spitting on, or even more outrageously defiling, the cross which was the object of their veneration and the symbol of their faith. Such a method of propagating heresy by force in the Europe of the Inquisition, of trusting such fearful secrets to children and to unwilling men of all conditions, is so absurd that its mere assertion deprives the testimony of all claim to credence.

Equally damaging to the credibility of the evidence is the self-contradictory character of its details. It was obtained by examining the accused on a series of charges elaborately drawn up, and by requiring answers to each article in succession, so that the general features of the so-called confessions were suggested in advance. Had the charges been true there could have been little variation in the answers, but in place of a definite faith or a systematic ritual we find every possible variation that could suggest itself to witnesses striving to invent stories that should satisfy their torturers. Some say that they were taught Deism—that God in heaven alone was to be worshipped.[286] Others, that they were forced to renounce God.[287] The usual formula reported, however, was simply to renounce Christ, or Jesus, while others were called upon to renounce Notre Sire, or la Profeta, or Christ, the Virgin, and the Saints.[288] Some professed that they could not recollect whether their renunciation had been of God or of Christ.[289] Sometimes we hear that instruction was given that they should not believe in Christ, that he was a false prophet, that he suffered for his own sins, but more frequently that the only reason alleged was that such was the Rule of the Order.[290] It was the same with the idol which has so greatly exercised the imagination of commentators. Some witnesses swore that it was produced whenever a neophyte was received, and that its adoration was a part of the ceremony; others that it was only exhibited and worshipped in the secrecy of chapters; by far the greater number, however, had never seen it or heard of it. Of those who professed to have seen it, scarce two described it alike, within the limits suggested by the articles of accusation, which spoke of it as a head. Sometimes it is black, sometimes white, sometimes with black hair, and sometimes white and black mixed, and again with a long white beard. Some witnesses saw its neck and shoulders covered with gold; one declared that it was a demon (Maufé) on which no one could look without trembling; another that it had for eyes carbuncles which lighted up the room; another that it had two faces; another three faces; another four legs, two behind and two before, and yet another said it was a statue with three heads. On one occasion it is a picture, on another a painting on a plaque, on another a small female figure which the preceptor draws from under his garments, and on another the statue of a boy, a cubit in height, sedulously concealed in the treasury of the preceptory. According to the testimony of one witness it degenerated into a calf. Sometimes it is called the Saviour, and sometimes Bafomet or Maguineth—corruptions of Mahomet—and is worshipped as Allah. Sometimes it is God, creating all things, causing the trees to bloom and the grass to germinate, and then again it is a friend of God who can approach him and intercede for the suppliant. Sometimes it gives responses, and sometimes it is accompanied or replaced by the devil in the form of a black or gray cat or raven, who occasionally answers the questions addressed to him, the performance winding up, like the witches’ Sabbat, with the introduction of demons in the form of beautiful women.[291]

Similar contradictions are observable in the evidence as to the ritual of reception. The details laid down in the Rule are accurately and uniformly described, but when the witnesses come to speak of the sacrilegious rites imputed to them, they flounder among almost every variation that could suggest itself to their imaginations. Usually renunciation of God or Christ and spitting on the cross are both required, but in many cases renunciation without spitting suffices, and in as many more spitting without renunciation.[292] Occasionally spitting is not sufficient, but trampling is added, and even urination; indeed some over-zealous witnesses declared that the Templars assembled yearly to perform the latter ceremony, while others, while admitting the sacrilege of their reception rites, say that the yearly adoration of the cross on Good Friday, prescribed in the Rule, was also observed with great devotion.[293] Generally a plain cross is described as the object of contempt, but sometimes a crucifix is used, or a painting of the crucifixion in an illuminated missal; the cross on the preceptor’s mantle is a common device, and even two straws laid crosswise on the ground suffices. In some cases spitting thrice upon the ground was only required, without anything being said as to its being in disrespect of Christ.[294] Many witnesses declared that the sacrilege was performed in full view of the assembled brethren, others that the neophyte was taken into a dark corner, or behind the altar, or into another room carefully closed; in one case it took place in a field, in another in a grange, in another in a cooper-shop, and in another in a room used for the manufacture of shoes.[295] As a rule the preceptor was represented as enforcing it, but in many cases the duty was confided to one or more serving brethren, and in one instance the person officiating had his head hidden in a cowl.[296] Almost universally it formed part of the ceremonies of reception, sometimes even before the vows were administered or the mantle bestowed, but generally at the conclusion, after the neophyte was fully committed, but there were occasional instances in which it was postponed until a later hour, or to the next day, or to longer intervals, extending, in one or two cases, to months and years.[297] Some witnesses declared that it formed part of all receptions; others that it had been enforced in their case, but they had never seen it or heard of it in other receptions at which they had been present. In general they swore that they were told it was a rule of the Order, but some said that it was explained to them as a joke, and others that they were told to do it with the mouth and not with the heart. One, indeed, deposed that he had been offered the choice between renouncing Christ, spitting on the cross, and the indecent kiss, and he selected the spitting.[298] In fact, the evidence as to the enforcement of the sacrilege is hopelessly contradictory. In many cases the neophyte was excused after a slight resistance; in others he was thrust into a dark dungeon until he yielded. Egidio, Preceptor of San Gemignano of Florence, stated that he had known two recalcitrant neophytes carried in chains to Rome, where they perished in prison, and Niccolò Regino, Preceptor of Grosseto, said that recusants were slain, or sent to distant parts, like Sardinia, where they ended their days. Geoffroi de Charney, Preceptor of Normandy, swore that he enforced it upon the first neophyte whom he received, but that he never did so afterwards, and Gui Dauphin, one of the high officers of the Order, said virtually the same thing; Gaucher de Liancourt, Preceptor of Reims, on the other hand, testified that he had required it in all cases, for if he had not he would have been imprisoned for life, and Hugues de Peraud, the Visitor of France, declared that it was obligatory on him.[299]

It would be a work of supererogation to pursue this examination further. The same irreconcilable confusion reigns in the evidence as to the other charges—the cord of chastity, the obscene kiss, the mutilation of the canon of the mass,[300] the power of absolution assigned to the Grand Master, the license for unnatural crime. It might be argued, as these witnesses had been received into the Order at times varying from fifty to sixty years previous to within a few months, and at places so widely apart as Palestine and England, that these variations are explicable by local usages or by a gradually perfected belief and ritual. An investigation of the confessions shows, however, that no such explanation will suffice; there can be no grouping as to the time or place of the ceremony. Yet there can be a grouping which is of supreme significance, a grouping as to the tribunal through which the witness passed. This is often very notable among the two hundred and twenty-five who were sent to the papal commission from various parts of France, and examined in 1310 and 1311. As a rule they manifested extreme anxiety that their present depositions should accord with those which they had made when subject to inquisition by the bishops—doubtless they made them as nearly so as their memories would permit—and it is easy to see how greater or less rigor, or how concert between those confined in the same prison, had led to the concoction of stories such as would satisfy their judges. Thus the confessions obtained by the Ordinary of Poitiers have a character distinct from those extorted by the Bishop of Clermont, and we can classify the penitents of the Bishop of Le Mans, the Archbishop of Sens, the Archbishop of Tours, the Bishops of Amiens, Rodez, Macon, in fact of nearly all the prelates who took part in the terrible drama.[301]

Another feature indicating the untrustworthy character of the evidence is that large numbers of the witnesses swore that they had confessed the sacrilege committed to priests and friars of all kinds, to bishops, and even to papal penitentiaries, and had received absolution by the imposition of penance, usually of a trifling character, such as fasting on Fridays for a few months or a year.[302] No ordinary confessor could absolve for heresy; it was a sin reserved for the inquisitor, papal or episcopal. The most that the confessor could have done would have been to send the penitent to some one competent to grant absolution, which would only have been administered under the heaviest penance, including denunciation of the Order. To suppose, in fact, that thousands of men, during a period of fifty or a hundred years, could have been entrapped into such a heresy without its becoming matter of notoriety, is in itself so violent an assumption as to deprive the whole story of all claims upon belief.

Thus the more closely the enormous aggregate of testimony is examined the more utterly worthless it appears, and this is confirmed by the fact that nowhere could compromising evidence be obtained without the use of inquisitorial methods. Had thousands of men been unwillingly forced to abjure their faith and been terrorized into keeping the dread secret, as soon as the pressure was removed by the seizure there would have been a universal eagerness to unburden the conscience and seek reconciliation with the Church. No torture would have been requisite to obtain all the evidence required. In view, therefore, of the extreme improbability of the charge, of the means employed to obtain proof for its support, and the lack of coherence in the proof so obtained, it appears to me that no judicial mind in possession of the facts can hesitate to pronounce a sentence, not merely of not proven, but of acquittal. The theory that there were inner grades in the Order, by which those alone to be trusted were initiated in its secret doctrines, is perfectly untenable. As there is no evidence of any kind to support it, it is a matter of mere conjecture, which is sufficiently negatived by the fact that with scarce an exception those who confessed, whether ploughmen or knights, relate the sacrilege as taking place on their admission. If the witnesses on whom the prosecution relied are to be believed at all, the infection pervaded the whole Order.

Yet it is by no means improbable that there may have been some foundation for the popular gossip that the neophyte at his reception was forced to kiss the posteriors of his preceptor. As we have seen, a large majority of the Order consisted of serving brethren on whom the knights looked down with infinite contempt. Some such occasional command on the part of a reckless knight, to enforce the principle of absolute obedience, in admitting a plebeian to nominal fraternity and equality, would not have been foreign to the manners of the age. Who can say, moreover, that men, soured with the disillusion of life within the Order, chafing under the bonds of their irrevocable vow, and perhaps released from all religious convictions amid the license of the East, may not occasionally have tested the obedience of a neophyte by bidding him to spit at the cross on the mantle that had grown hateful to him?[303] No one who recognizes the wayward perversity of human nature, or who is familiar with the condition of monasticism at the period, can deny the possibilities of such occasional performances, whether as brutal jokes or spiteful assertions of supremacy, but the only rational conclusion from the whole tremendous tragedy is that the Order was innocent of the crime for which it was punished.

While Philippe was seizing his prey, Clement, at Poitiers, was occupied in the equally lucrative work of sending collectors throughout Germany to exact a tithe of all ecclesiastical revenues for the recovery of the Holy Land. When aroused from this with the news that Philippe, under the authority of Frère Guillaume the inquisitor, had thus taken decided and irrevocable action in a matter which was still before him for consideration, his first emotion naturally was that of wounded pride and indignation, sharpened perhaps by the apprehension that he would not be able to secure his share of the spoils. He dared not publicly disavow responsibility for the act, and what would be the current of public opinion outside of France no man could divine. In this cruel dilemma he wrote to Philippe, October 27, 1307, expressing his indignation that the king should have taken action in a matter which the brief of August 24 showed to be receiving papal consideration. Carefully suppressing the fact of the intervention of the Inquisition which legally justified the whole proceeding, Clement sought a further ground of complaint by reminding the king that Templars were not under royal jurisdiction, but under that of the Holy See, and he had committed a grave act of disobedience in seizing their persons and property, both of which must be forthwith delivered to two cardinals sent for the purpose. These were Berenger de Frédole, Cardinal of SS. Nereo and Achille, and Étienne de Suissi of S. Ciriaco, both Frenchmen and creatures of Philippe, who had procured their elevation to the sacred college. He seems to have had no trouble in coming to an understanding with them, for, though the trials and tortures were pushed unremittingly, another letter of Clement’s, December 1, praises the king for putting the matter in the hands of the Holy See, and one of Philippe’s of December 24 announces that he had no intention of infringing on the rights of the Church and does not intend to abandon his own; he has, he says, delivered the Templars to the cardinals, and the administration of their property shall be kept separate from that of the crown. Clement’s susceptibilities being thus soothed, even before the trials at Paris were ended he issued, November 22, the bull Pastoralis præeminentiæ, addressed to all the potentates of Europe, in which he related what Philippe had done at the requisition of the Inquisitor of France, in order that the Templars might be presented to the judgment of the Church; how the chiefs of the Order had confessed the crimes imputed to them; how he himself had examined one of them who was employed about his person and had confirmed the truth of the allegations. Therefore he orders all the sovereigns to do likewise, retaining the prisoners and holding their property in the name of the pope and subject to his order. Should the Order prove innocent the property is to be restored to it, otherwise it is to be employed for the recovery of the Holy Land.[304] This was the irrevocable act which decided the fate of the Templars, as we shall see hereafter when we consider the action of the princes of Europe outside of France.

Philippe thus had forced Clement’s hand, and Clement was fairly committed to the investigation, which in the hands of the Inquisition could only end in the destruction of the Order. Secure in his position, the king pushed on the examination of the prisoners throughout the kingdom, and the vigilance of his agents is shown in the case of two German Templars returning home, whom they arrested at Chaumont and delivered to the Inquisitor of the Three Bishoprics. One was a priest, the other a serving brother, and the inquisitor in reporting to Philippe says that he had not tortured the latter because he was very sick, but that neither had admitted that there was in the Order aught that was not pure and holy. The examinations went on during the winter of 1308, when Clement unexpectedly put a stop to them. What was his motive we can only conjecture; probably he found that Philippe’s promises with regard to the Templar possessions were not likely to be fulfilled, and that an assertion of his control was necessary. Whatever his reasons, he suddenly suspended in the premises the power of all the inquisitors and bishops in France and evoked to himself the cognizance of the whole affair, alleging that the suddenness of the seizure without consulting him, although so near and so accessible, had excited in him grave suspicions, which had not been allayed by the records of the examinations submitted to him, for these were of a character rather to excite incredulity—though in November he had proclaimed to all Christendom his conviction of their truth. It shows how completely the whole judicial proceedings were inquisitional that this brought them to an immediate close, provoking Philippe to uncontrollable wrath. Angrily he wrote to Clement that he had sinned greatly: even popes, he hints, may fall into heresy; he had wronged all the prelates and inquisitors of France; he had inspired the Templars with hopes and they were retracting their confessions, especially Hugues de Peraud, who had had the honor of dining with the cardinal-deputies. Evidently some intrigue was on foot, and Clement was balancing, irresolute as to which side offered most advantage, and satisfied at least to show to Philippe that he was indispensable. Philippe at first was disposed to assert his independence and claim jurisdiction, and he applied to the University for an opinion to support his claims, but the Faculty of Theology replied, March 25, 1308, as it could not help doing: the Templars were religious and consequently exempt from secular jurisdiction; the only cognizance which a secular court could have over heresy was at the request of the Church after it had abandoned the heretic; in case of necessity the secular power could arrest a heretic, but it could only be for the purpose of delivering him to the ecclesiastical court; and finally the Templar property must be held for the purpose for which it was given to the Order.[305]

Philippe, thus foiled, proceeded to bring a still stronger pressure to bear on Clement. He appealed to his subservient bishops and summoned a national assembly, to meet April 15 in Tours, to deliberate with him on the subject of the Templars. Already, at the Assembly of Paris in 1302, he had called in the Tiers-État and had learned to value its support in his quarrel with Boniface, and now he again brought in the communes, thus founding the institution of the States-General. After some delay the assembly met in May. In his summons Philippe had detailed the crimes of the Templars as admitted facts which ought to arouse for their punishment not only arms and the laws, but brute cattle and the four elements. He desired his subjects to participate in the pious work, and therefore he ordered the towns to select each two deputies zealous for the faith. From a gathering collected under such impulsion it was not difficult, in spite of the secret leaning of the nobles to the proscribed Order, to procure a virtually unanimous expression of opinion that the Templars deserved death.[306]

With the prestige of the nation at his back, Philippe went from Tours, at the end of May, to Clement at Poitiers, accompanied by a strong deputation, including his brothers, his sons, and his councillors. Long and earnest were the disputations over the affair, Philippe urging, through his spokesman, Guillaume de Plaisian, that the Templars had been found guilty and that immediate punishment should follow; Clement reiterating his grievance that an affair of such magnitude, exclusively appertaining to the Holy See, should be carried on without his initiative. A body like the Order of the Temple had powerful friends all over Europe whose influence with the curia was great, and the papal perplexities were manifold as one side or the other preponderated; but Clement had irrevocably committed himself in the face of all Europe by his bull of November 22, and it was in reality but a question of the terms on which he would allow the affair to go on in France by removing the suspension of the powers of the Inquisition. The bargaining was sharp, but an agreement was reached. As Clement had reserved the matter for papal judgment, it was necessary that some show of investigation should be had. Seventy-two Templars were drawn from the prisons of Paris to be examined by the pope and sacred college, that they might be able to assert personal knowledge of their guilt. Clement might well shrink from confronting de Molay and the chiefs of the Order whom he was betraying, while at the same time they could not be arbitrarily omitted. They were therefore stopped at Chinon near Tours, under pretext of sickness, while the others were sent forward to Poitiers. From the 28th of June to July 1 they were solemnly examined by five cardinals friendly to Philippe deputed for the purpose. The official report of the examinations shows the care which had been exercised in the selection of those who were to perform this scene in the drama. A portion of them were spontaneous witnesses who had left, or had tried to leave, the Order. The rest, with the terrible penalty for retraction impending over them, confirmed the confessions made before the Inquisition, which in many cases had been extracted by torture. Then, July 2, they were brought before the pope in full consistory and the same scene was enacted. Thus the papal jurisdiction was recognized; Clement in his subsequent bulls could speak of his own knowledge, and could declare that the accused had confessed their errors spontaneously and without coercion, and had humbly begged for absolution and reconciliation.[307]

The agreement duly executed between Clement and Philippe bore that the Templars should be delivered to the pope, but be guarded in his name by the king; that their trials should be proceeded with by the bishops in their several dioceses, to whom, at the special and earnest request of the king, the inquisitors were adjoined—but de Molay and the Preceptors of the East, of Normandy, Poitou, and Provence, were reserved for the papal judgment; the property was to be placed in the hands of commissioners named by the pope and bishops, to whom the king was secretly to add appointees of his own, but he was to pledge himself in writing that it should be employed solely for the Holy Land. Clement assumed that the fate of the Order, as an institution, was too weighty a question to be decided without the intervention of a general council, and it was decided to call one in October, 1310. The Cardinal of Palestrina was named as the papal representative in charge of the persons of the Templars—a duty which he speedily fulfilled by transferring them to the king under condition that they should be held at the disposition of the Church. Clement performed his part of the bargain by removing, July 5, the suspension of the inquisitors and bishops, and restoring their jurisdiction in the matter. Directions were sent at the same time to each of the bishops in France to associate with himself two cathedral canons, two Dominicans, and two Franciscans, and proceed with the trials of the individual Templars within his diocese, admitting inquisitors to participate at will, but taking no action against the Order as a whole; all persons were ordered, under pain of excommunication, to arrest Templars and deliver them to the inquisitors or episcopal officials, and Philippe furnished twenty copies of royal letters commanding his subjects to restore to the papal deputies all property, real and personal, of the Order.[308]

Although Clement declared in his bulls to Europe that Philippe had manifested his disinterestedness by surrendering all the Templar property, the question was one which gave rise to a good deal of skilful fencing on both sides. It is not worth while to pursue the affair in its details, but we shall see how in the end Philippe successfully cheated his partner in the game and retained the control which he apparently gave up.[309]

The rival powers having thus come to an understanding about their victims, proceedings were resumed with fresh energy. Clement made up for his previous hesitation with ample show of zeal. De Molay and the chief officials with him were detained at Chinon until the middle of August, when the Cardinals of SS. Nereo and Achille, of S. Ciriaco and of S. Angelo, were sent thither to examine them. These reported, August 20, to Philippe, that on the 17th and following days they had interrogated the Grand Master, the Master of Cyprus, the Visitor of France, and the Preceptors of Normandy and Poitou, who had confirmed their previous confessions and had humbly asked for absolution and reconciliation, which had been duly given them, and the king is asked to pardon them. There are two things noteworthy in this which illustrate the duplicity pervading the whole affair. In the papal bulls of August 12, five days before this examination was commenced, its results are fully set forth, with the assertion that the confessions were free and spontaneous. Moreover, when, in November, 1309, this bull was read over by the papal commission to de Molay, on hearing its recital of what he was said to have confessed he was stupefied, and, crossing himself twice, said he wished to God the custom of the Saracens and Tartars were observed towards persons so perverse, for they beheaded or cut in two those who thus perverted the truth. He might have said more had not Guillaume de Plaisian, the royal agent, who pretended to be his friend, cautioned him as to the risk which he ran in thus constructively retracting his confession, and he contented himself with asking for time for consideration.[310]

On August 12 Clement issued a series of bulls which regulated the methods of procedure in the case, and showed that he was prepared fully to perform his part of the agreement with Philippe. The bull Faciens misericordiam, addressed to the prelates of Christendom, recited at great length the proceedings thus far taken against the accused, and the guilt which they had spontaneously acknowledged; it directed the bishops, in conjunction with inquisitorial commissioners appointed by the pope, to summon all Templars before them and make inquisition concerning them. After this provincial councils were to be summoned, where the guilt or innocence of the individuals was to be determined, and in all the proceedings the local inquisitors had a right to take part. The results of the inquisitions, moreover, were to be promptly transmitted to the pope. With this was enclosed a long and elaborate series of articles on which the accused were to be examined—articles drawn up in Paris by the royal officials—and the whole was ordered to be published in the vernacular in all parish churches. The bull Regnans in cælis, addressed to all princes and prelates, repeated the narrative part of the other, and ended by convoking, for October 1, 1310, a general council at Vienne, to decide as to the fate of the Order, to consult as to the recovery of the Holy Land, and to take such action as might be required for the reformation of the Church. By another bull, Faciens misericordiam, dated August 8, a formal summons was issued to all and singular of the Templars to appear before the council, personally or by procurators, on a certain day, to answer to the charges against the Order, and the Cardinal of Palestrina, who was in charge of them, was ordered to produce de Molay and the Preceptors of France, Normandy, Poitou, Aquitaine, and Provence to receive sentence. This was the simplest requirement of judicial procedure, and the manner in which it was subsequently eluded forms one of the darkest features in the whole transaction. Finally there were other bulls elaborately providing for the payment of the papal commissioners and inquisitors, and ordering the Templar possessions everywhere to be sequestrated to await the result of the trial, and to be devoted to the Holy Land in case of condemnation. Much, it was stated, had already been wickedly seized and appropriated, and all persons were summoned to make restitution, under pain of excommunication. All debtors to the Order were summoned to pay, and all persons cognizant of such debts or of stolen property were required to give information. The series of bulls was completed by one of December 30, to be read in all churches, declaring all Templars to be suspect of heresy, ordering their capture as such and delivery to the episcopal ordinaries, and forbidding all potentates and prelates from harboring them or showing them any aid or favor, under pain of excommunication and interdict. At the same time another bull was directed to all the princes of Christendom, commanding them to seize any Templars who might as yet not have been arrested.[311]

The prosecution of the Templars throughout Europe was thus organized. Even such distant points as Achaia, Corsica, and Sardinia were not neglected. The large number of special inquisitors to be appointed was a work of time, and the correspondence between Philippe and Clement on the subject shows that they virtually were selected by the king. In France the work of prosecution was speedily set on foot, and, after a respite of some six months, the Templars found themselves transferred from the improvised inquisitorial tribunals set on foot by Frère Guillaume to the episcopal courts as provided by Clement. In every diocese the bishops were soon busily at work. Curiously enough, some of them doubted whether they could use torture, and applied for instructions, to which Clement answered that they were to be governed by the written law, which removed their misgivings. The papal instructions indicate that these proceedings only concerned those Templars who had not passed through the hands of Frère Guillaume and his commissioners, but there seems to have been little distinction observed as to this. Clement urged forward the proceedings with little regard to formality, and authorized the bishops to act outside of their respective dioceses, and without respect to the place of origin of the accused. The sole object evidently was to extract from them satisfactory confessions, as a preparation for the provincial councils which were to be summoned for their final judgment. Those who had already confessed were not likely to retract. Before the papal commission in 1310, Jean de Cochiac exhibited a letter from Philippe de Vohet and Jean de Jamville, the papal and royal custodians of the prisoners, to those confined at Sens at the time the Bishop of Orleans was sent there to examine them (the archbishopric of Sens was then vacant), warning them that those who revoked the confessions made before “los quizitor” would be burned as relapsed. Vohet, when summoned before the commission, admitted the seal to be his, but denied authorizing the letter, and the commission prudently abstained from pushing the investigation further. The nervous anxiety manifested by most of those brought before the commission that their statements should accord with what they had said before the bishops, shows that they recognized the danger which they incurred.[312]

The treatment of those who refused to confess varied with the temper of the bishops and their adjuncts. The records of their tribunals have mostly disappeared, and we are virtually left to gather what we can from the utterances of a few witnesses who made to the commission chance allusions to their former experiences. Yet the proceedings before the Bishop of Clermont would show that they were not in all cases treated with undue harshness. He had sixty-nine Templars, of whom forty confessed, and twenty-nine refused to admit any evil in the Order. Then he assembled them and divided them into the two groups. The recusants declared that they adhered to their assertion, and that if they should subsequently confess through fear of torture, prison, or other affliction, they protested that they should not be believed, and that it should not prejudice them, nor does it appear that any constraint was afterwards put upon them. The others were asked whether they had any defence to offer, or whether they were ready for definitive sentence, when they unanimously declared that they had nothing to offer nor wished to hear their sentence, but submitted themselves to the mercy of the Church. What that mercy was we shall see hereafter. All bishops were not as mild as he of Clermont, but in the fragmentary recitals before the commission it is not always easy to distinguish the action of the episcopal tribunals from that of Frère Guillaume’s inquisitors. A few instances will suffice to show how, between the two, testimony was obtained against the Order. Jean de Rompreye, a husbandman, declared that he knew nothing but good of the Order, although he had confessed otherwise before the Bishop of Orleans after being thrice tortured. Robert Vigier, a serving brother, likewise denied the accusations, though he had confessed them before the Bishop of Nevers at Paris, on account of the fierceness of the torture, under which he understood that three of his comrades, Gautier, Henri, and Chanteloup, had died. Bernard de Vado, a priest, had been tortured by fire applied to the soles of the feet to such an extent that a few days afterwards the bones of his heels dropped out, in testimony of which he exhibited the bones. Nineteen brethren from Périgord had confessed before the Bishop of Périgord through torture and starvation—one of them had been kept for six months on bread and water, without shoes or upper clothing. Guillaume d’Erré, when brought before the Bishop of Saintes, had denied all the charges, but after being put on bread and water and threatened with torture, had confessed to renouncing Christ and spitting at the cross—a confession which he now retracts. Thomas de Pamplona, under many tortures inflicted on him at St. Jean d’Angely, had confirmed the confession made by de Molay, and then, upon being put upon bread and water, had confessed before the Bishop of Saintes to spitting at the cross, all of which he now retracts. These instances might be multiplied out of the few who had the hardihood to incur the risk of martyrdom attendant upon withdrawing their confessions. Indeed, in the universal terror impressed on the friendless and defenceless wretches, we cannot condemn those who yielded, and can only admire the constancy of those who endured the torture and braved the stake in defence of the Order. What was the general feeling among them was voiced by Aymon de Barbara, who had thrice been tortured, and had for nine weeks been kept on bread and water. He pitifully said that he had suffered in body and soul, but as for retracting his confession, he would not do so as long as he was in prison. The mental struggles which the poor creatures endured are well illustrated by Jean de Cormèle, Preceptor of Moissac, who when brought before the commission hesitated and would not describe the ceremonies at his own reception, though he declared that he had seen nothing wrong at the reception of others. The recollection of the tortures which he had endured in Paris, in which he had lost four teeth, completely unnerved him, and he begged to have time for consideration. He was given until the next day, and when he reappeared his resolution had broken down. He confessed the whole catalogue of villainies; and when asked if he had consulted any one, denied it, but said that he had requested a priest to say for him a mass of the Holy Ghost that God might direct him what to do.[313]

These instances will illustrate the nature of the work in which the whole episcopate of France was engaged during the remainder of the year 1308 and through 1309 and 1310. All this, however, concerned merely the members of the Order as individuals. The fate of the Templar possessions depended upon the judgment to be rendered on the Order as a body corporate, and for this purpose Clement had assigned for it a day on which it was to appear by its syndics and procurators before the Council of Vienne, to put in its defence and show cause why it should not be abolished. Seeing that the officers and members were scattered in prison throughout Europe, this was a manifest impossibility, and some method was imperatively required by which they could, at least constructively, be represented, if only to hear their sentence. Among the bulls of August 12, 1308, therefore, there was one creating a commission, with the Archbishop of Narbonne at its head, authorized to summon before it all the Templars of France, to examine them, and to report the result. Subsequent bulls of May, 1309, directed the commission to set to work, and notified Philippe concerning it. August 8, 1309, the commission assembled in the abbey of Sainte-Genevieve, and by letters addressed to all the archbishops of the kingdom cited all Templars to appear before them on the first working-day after Martinmas, and the Order itself to appear by its syndics and procurators at the Council of Vienne, to receive such sentence as God should decree. On the appointed day, November 12, the commissioners reassembled, but no Templars appeared. For a week they met daily, and daily the form was gone through of a proclamation by the apparitor that if any one wished to appear for the Order or its members the commission was ready to listen to him kindly, but without result. On examining the replies of the prelates they were found to have imperfectly fulfilled their duty. Philippe evidently regarded the whole proceeding with distrust, and was not inclined to aid it. A somewhat peremptory communication on November 18 was addressed to the Bishop of Paris, explaining that their proceedings were not against individuals, but against the whole Order; that no one was to be forced to appear, but that all who so chose must be allowed to come. This brought the bishop before them on November 22, with explanations and apologies; and a summons to Philippe de Vohet and Jean de Jamville, the papal and royal custodians of the Templars, brought those officials to promise obedience. Yet the obstacles to the performance of their task did not disappear. On the 22d they were secretly informed that some persons had come to Paris in lay garments to defend the Order, and had been thrown in prison. Thereupon they sent for Jean de Plublaveh, prévôt of the Châtelet, who said that by royal order he had arrested seven men said to be Templars in disguise, who had come with money to engage advocates in defence of the Order, but on torturing two of them he had found this not to be the case. The matter proved to be of little significance except as manifesting the purpose of the king to control the action of the commission.[314]