The final act of the stupendous tragedy came early in 1314. Jacques de Molay, the grand master, had not hitherto risen to the height of his great position; the fear of torture alone had been enough to make him confess, and this confession had been used to extract avowals from his brethren, subject as they were to unspeakable sufferings and accustomed to yield to the military chief. Humiliation on humiliation had been heaped on the wretched man, public recantations, reiterated confessions. Before the papal commission he had flamed into anger, protested, equivo cated—only in the end to repeat his confession once more. The same had happened before the commission of cardinals at Chinon; the audience with the pope, which he demanded, he had never obtained. On the 6th of May 1312 Pope Clement issued his final decision as to the fate of the Templars in general; that of the five great offices of the order he reserved in his own hand. With this a silence falls over the history of the Templars ; the fate of the order had been decided, that of the individuals still under trial was of little interest to contemporary chroniclers. Then the veil is suddenly lifted. Jacques de Molay has found his wonted courage at last, and with him Gaufrid de Charney, the preceptor of Normandy; on the 14th of March 1314 they were brought out on to a scaffold erected in front of Notre Dame, there in the presence of the papal legates and of the people to repeat their confessions and to receive their sentence of perpetual imprison ment. Instead, they seized the opportunity to withdraw their con fessions and to protest to the assembled thousands the innocence of the order. King Philip the Fair did not wait to consult the Church as to what he should do ; he had them burnt.
A word must be added as to the significance of the work of the Templars and of the manner of their fall in the history of the world. Two great things the order had done for European civilization : in the East and in Spain it had successfully checked the advance of Islam ; it had deepened and given a religious sanction to the idea of the chivalrous man, the homo legalis, and so opened up, to a class of people who for centuries to come were to exercise enormous influence, spheres of activity the beneficent effects of which are still recognizable in the world. On the other hand, the destruction of the Templars had three consequences fateful for Christian civilization. (I) It facilitated the conquests of the Turks by preventing the Templars from playing in Cyprus the part which the Knights of St. John played in Malta. (2) It partly set a precedent for, partly confirmed, the cruel criminal procedure of France, which lasted to the Revolution. (3) It set the seal of the highest authority on the popular belief in witch craf t and personal intercourse with the devil, sanctioned the ex pedient of wringing confessions of such intercourse from the accused by unspeakable tortures, and so made possible the hideous witch-persecutions which darkened the later middle ages and, even in Protestant countries, long survived the period of Ref or mation.
On the question of the guilt or innocence of the Templars in respect of the specific charges on which the order was condemned opinion has long been divided. Their innocence was maintained by the greatest of all their contemporaries, Dante (Purg. xx. 92), and by the historian Villani and others. In more recent times a certain heat was introduced into the discussion of the question owing to its having been for centuries brought into the arena of party controversy, be tween Protestants and Catholics, Gallicans and Ultramontanes, Free masons and the Church. Thus in 1654 Pierre Du Puy, librarian of the Bibliotheque Royale, published his work on the Templars to confute those who sought to establish their innocence in order to discredit a king of France. On the other hand, Nicolas Gurtler pub lished his Historia Templariorum (Amsterdam, 1691, 2nd ed. 1703) to show, as a good Protestant, that the Templars had the usual vices of Roman Catholics, while, according to Loiseleur, the later editors of Du Puy were Freemasons who, under false names, garbled the old material and inserted new in the interests of the supposed origin of their own order in that of the Templars. Several Roman Catholic
champions of the order now entered the field, notably the Pre monstratensian canon R. P. M. Jeune, prior of Etival, who in 1789 published at Paris his Histoire critique et apologitique de l'ordre des chevaliers . . . dits Templiers, a valuable work directed specifically against Gurtler and Du Puy. In the 19th century a fresh impetus was given to the discussion by the publication in 1813 of Raynouard's brilliant defence of the order. The challenge was taken up, among others, by the orientalist F. von Hammer-Purgstall who, in a paper entitled "Mysterium Baphometis" (Fundgraben des Orients, vol. vi., Vienna 1818) , attempted to prove that the Templars followed the doctrines and rites of the Gnostic "Ophites" (q.v.), and gave repro ductions of obscene representations of supposed Gnostic ceremonies and of mystic symbols said to have been found in Templars' build ings. W. F. Wilcke (Geschichte des Tempelherrenordens, 1826, 2nd. ed. 1860), while rejecting Hammer's main conclusions as unproved, argued for the existence of a secret doctrine based not on Gnosticism but on the monotheism of Islam, of which Baphomet (Mahomet) was a symbol. On the other hand, Wilhelm Havermann (Geschichte des Ausganges des Tempelherrenordens, 1846) decided in favour of the innocence of the order. This view was also taken by a succession of German scholars ; in England, by C. G. Addison ; and in France by a whole series of conspicuous writers: Mignet, Guizot, Renan, and others. On the other hand, Hans Prutz, in a series of brilliant con tributions, of which the most well-considered is his Entwicklung and Untergang des Tempelherrenordens (1888), maintained that the custom of denying Christ and spitting on the cross was often, and in some provinces universally, practised at the reception of the brethren, "as a coarse test of obedience, of which the original sense had partly been forgotten, partly heretically interpreted under the influence of later heresies." Prutz points out that the failure of the Crusades had weak ened men's absolute belief in Christianity, at least as represented by the mediaeval Church (Kulturgeschichte der Kreuzziige, p. 268 ff.). H. C. Lea, in his History of the Inquisition (1888, vol. iii.), had already come independently to the conclusion that the Templars were innocent. Lastly appeared the fascinatingly interesting and closely reasoned book of Professor H. Finke (1907) which, based partly on a mass of new material drawn from the Aragonese archives, had for its object to establish the innocence of the order on an incon trovertible basis (Papsthum and Untergang des Templenordens, 1907). BIBLIoGRAPHY.—The original sources given by Du Puy, though often valuable, were selected and edited with a purpose ; but Michelet's Prcces des Templiers (2 vols., 1851, 1860, gives the original minutes of the trial preserved at the Bibliotheque Nationale. This is analysed by Gmelin (op. cit.). Of documents published elsewhere, the most important are in Finke (op. cit., from the Aragonese archives) and K. Schottmbller (Untergang des Templerordens, 1887, from the Vati can archives). The Rule of the Temple has several times been pub lished; the most convenient edition is that of H. de Curzon, La Regle du Temple (1886) ; see also Maillard du Chambure, Regle et statutes secrets des Templiers (1840). In addition to the works already men tioned, the following may be named: M. Lavocat, Proces des freres et de l'ordre du Temple (Paris, 1888) ; G. Schniirer, Die ursprungliche Templerregel (1903) ; C. G. Addison, The Knights Templars (3rd ed. 1854), which contains a valuable account of the suppression of the order in England ; Marquis d'Albon, Cartulaire general de l'Ordre du Temple (1922) ; G. Lizerand (ed.), Le Dossier de l'affaire des Templzers