CHAP. Such legislation as this opened the hearts of the Languedocians to Philip, and they supported him with far more zeal than the northerns in his quarrel with Pope Boniface. The king, to show his gratitude, made a journey to the south,-confirmed most of the municipal privileges of the region, and acted the popular sovereign. This, however, was whilst the war of Flanders was raging, and to counteract the bad effect of the taxes which he was heaping on the towns of Languedoc. Whether, owing to the pressure of these, or to the opposition of the king and his functionaries to the exactions of the clergy, priests and magistrates of many cities in the south began to show turbulence, and it was said that even heresy revived. This the monarch found himself compelled to crush some years later, when many of the citizens and magistrates of Narbonne and Carcassonne were executed, and the towns deprived of their privileges. The discontent of the civic classes with Philip in these later years of his reign was not confined to Languedoc. In 1306, a serious sedition broke out in Paris, occasioned by the adulteration of the coin. The householders, says the continuator of Nangis, demanded their rents in the old coin, as the king's edict warranted. This was tripling the price to the tenants, and the lower orders rose in consequence against the house proprietors and the king. They besieged the latter in the Temple, where he kept his treasure, and which was in fact his office of finance. The strength of the building protected Philip, but the mob wreaked their vengeance on one of his councillors, Stephen Barbette, a rich citizen, and destroyed his house in St. Martin in the Fields. The tumult soon abated, when Philip found no difficulty in seizing the most culpable, and hanging them to the trees which stood before the entrances to Paris. There is no reign in French history so little illus VIII. trated by the pen of the chronicler as that of Philip CHAP. the Fair. No knight or noble was the companion of his hours of either pastime or business, and no De Joinville could record his acts or his words; of the clergy he made no confidants. It is remarkable, that when his tent was surprised by the Flemings, the intimate attendants upon royalty who fell on that occasion were two citizens of Paris. Law and finance were his occupation and his pleasure, and those whom he trusted and consulted in these matters fell after Philip's death into the power of their enemies, and had their property and papers confiscated, so that no record remains except what was published in ordonnances or inserted upon the rolls of parliament. We are therefore left to conjecture what was the origin of the deadly grudge which the monarch owed to the Templars. Their position was certainly one that excited envy. They possessed great wealth, both in landed revenues and hoarded coin, of which they were most chary. When St. Louis wanted money of them to pay his ransom in Egypt, it was only on the threat of breaking open their coffers that they advanced the sum demanded. Philip in his necessities must have felt irritated at his inability to tax this rich monastic order. He demanded to be admitted a knight of the Temple, but the fraternity respectfully declined the honour. Brother Hugh, visitor of the Temple, signed one of the collective letters of adherence to Philip in his quarrel with Pope Boniface, but that the order zealously supported him against the Pope may be doubted. Joined to any such personal objection to the Templars, there were no doubt public and just grounds of dissatisfaction with them. The order had been established and endowed on the express condition of defending the Holy Land, yet very few of them had been there in the last fatal years. Their occupation was now gone, Palestine being irrecoverably CHAP. lost. And the presence of some 15,000 military monks, the greater number of them French, in Europe, might be cause of alarm, and could not be of advantage. They were accused, like all monks, of being untrue to their vows, and their lives and ceremonies in the interior of their religious houses were shrouded in mystery. Moreover, the Templars do not seem to have been so highly connected as has been alleged, or to have been chosen from the first ranks of the aristocracy. Guy, brother of the Dauphin of Auvergne, was in this respect the most eminent of the order. Of gentle birth they were no doubt; but a perusal of their interrogatories produces the conviction that they were illiterate men, of no superior minds or attainments, dignified neither by birth nor letters. It was impossible for such a class of men long to maintain so enviable a position. And when charges were brought against them, they were neither able to defend themselves, nor had they friends or connections to stand up for them. The probability is, that it was their wealth that tempted Philip, who knew by experience the rich spoil that was to be won by confiscating the property of corporations or large bodies. He had seized the Italian bankers in the beginning of his reign. The plunder of the Jews had filled his treasury. The king always proceeded by stealth, crushing his victims unawares, lest they should secrete their property; and he pursued the same course with the Templars. The first accusation against them was made by persons of the worst character, by the prior of Montfaucon, whom the grand master had degraded and condemned to prison, and by one Noffo Dei, or Squin. They, evidently to ameliorate their lot, announced that they had most fearful revelations to make against the Templars. The objectionable character of the informers in nowise abated the zeal of the king's legists or of the monarch himself. The charges were sufficient to ruin the order, and Place it and its wealth at the king's mercy. As to truth ar justice, these never entered into the consideration of Philip; the sole care of the king was to get the treasure and the grand master of the order from Palestine to France. He then opened the matter to Pope Clement. The churchman endeavoured to pacify the vindictive ardour of the monarch; but, once embarked in a state prosecution, Philip knew no rest. He issued orders in October, 1307, for the simultaneous arrest of the Templars in all their chief residences on the same night. They were fully and successfully executed: the grand master and a hundred and forty knights were seized by Nogaret in the Temple of Paris at the appointed time. On the following Sunday the king caused to be publicly proclaimed in the palace hall and in the churches the crimes for which the Templars were accused and had been arrested. The accusation was, that every new recipient into the order of the Temple was made to spit upon the cross, tread upon it, and deny the Saviour, those refusing being thrown into a dungeon or condemned to die. Moreover that they worshipped a head, wore a string which was consecrated by having touched or encircled this head, and practised the most abominable and unnatural crimes. These accusations, framed on the testimony of the two informers, were arranged in a list of questions, to produce affirmative answers to which the unfortunate Templars were subjected to the torture. The examiners and operators on the occasion were no other than the inquisitors, the same whom Philip's ordonnance had long since condemned. The mode of procedure then denounced was now adopted against the Templars. When the list of questions was put to them, the necessary consequence of their total denial was a continuance or aggravation of torture. Thirty-six of their number perished under the pressure of these torments in Paris.* The * Triginta sex de dictis fratribus fuerunt mortui Parisiis per jainnam · Procès des Templiers. et tormenta. СНАР. VIII. VIII. CHAP. others, according to their powers of endurance or the cruelty of the inquisitors, confessed to a greater or fewer number of the charges. As to defence, it was out of the question: the court would not permit advocates "whose noise was not to be tolerated in cases of heresy." And Jacques de Molay, the grand master, asked "how could he prepare a defence, when kept a close prisoner without four pence?" Charges equally heinous and almost of the same kind were, previously and subsequently, made against Pope Boniface by the same accuser, Nogaret, who arraigned the Templars; and had the trial proceeded, the Pope remaining in the power of the French lawyers, they could no doubt have proved those crimes in the same way as they proved them against the Templars. With trials conducted after the custom of the Inquisition, any crime might be proved against any person or number of persons accused. And what those crimes were, depended evidently on the imagination and rancour of the accuser, rather than on the guilt of the accused. A great many theories have been propounded, and very diverse judgments passed, upon this subject. Those who altogether exculpate and those who totally condemn the Templars can make, each of them, a plausible case. But the supposition of complete innocence cannot do away with the numberless instances in which Templars admitted the spitting on the cross and the worship of the head; whilst the existence of this foolish rite cannot be explained as the initiation either into a secret religion or into a system and habits of gross sensuality. No evidence reveals these. Had a peculiar religion existed amongst the Templars, or such gross sensuality as parts of the initiation would imply, some proofs must have been elicited from a number of Templars who were anxious to purchase immunity by Literally four denarii. "Who loses freedom," (libero arbitrio) says one of the accused, "loses all means of defence, even the power of science and the use of intellect." |