The Church had now washed its hands of the Tempiars. in accordance with Church practise, once it had decided on a defendant’s fate he was handed over to the secuiar authorities for punishment, in this case aimost aii the Tempiars in France had been in royai hands aii aiong, and the dispensai of their fates did not require the transfer of their persons. The treatment meted out by the royai authorities to individuai Tempiars varied. Those who had confessed were subjected to penances, and these were sometimes heavy, including lengthy imprisonment. Others who had confessed to nothing or were otherwise of little account were sent to monasteries for the rest of the! r lives.
The leading Templars, including the Grand Master, had to wait until 18 March 1314 before their cases were disposed of. They might well have expected that their cases had been disposed of long before at Chinon when they received Papal absolution, and almost certainly they would now have been expecting to be treated accordingly. But the hearings at Chinon still remained secret, and instead Hugh of Pairaud, Geoffrey of Gonneville, Geoffrey of Charney and James of Molay were brought for final judgement before a small commission of French cardinals and ecclesiastics at Paris, among them that same archbishop of Sens who had so happily for the king burned fifty-four Templars in May 1310.
The sentence was handed down. On the basis of their earlier confessions, as twisted by the crown, all four men were condemned to harsh and perpetual punishment-in effect to starve and rot in prison until they were released by a lingering death. Hugh of Pairaud and Geoffrey of Gonneville accepted their fate in silence. ‘But lo’, wrote a chronicler of the time, ‘when the cardinals believed that they had imposed an end to the affair, immediately and unexpectedly two of them, namely the Grand Master and the master of Normandy, defending themselves obstinately against the cardinal who had preached the sermon and against the archbishop of Sens, returned to the denial both of the confession as well as everything which they had confessed.’
James of Molay was in his seventies; he and Geoffrey of Charney, the master of Normandy, had been in the king’s dungeons for the last seven years. For six of those years they had lived under the expectation that their absolution by the Pope would free them from their nightmare, that they would live again in sunlight among those loved by the Church and Christ. But now in the midst of betrayal and despair they refused to give themselves into perpetual incarceration in a living hell. Loudly protesting their innocence and asserting that the order of the Templars was pure and holy, James of Molay and Geoffrey of Charney put themselves into the hands of God.
At once the king ordered that they be condemned as relapsed heretics, and on that same evening, at Vespers, they were taken to the lie des Javiaux, a small island in the Seine east of Notre Dame, and bound to the stake. The chronicler described their last moments: They were seen to be so prepared to sustain the fire with easy mind and will that they brought from all those who saw them much admiration and surprise for the Constance of their death and final denial.’ The last of the Templars went to their deaths with courage, in the tradition of their order.
Vatican Backs Templar Link with the Turin Shroud
The Turin Shroud is claimed to be the linen cloth that covered the body of Jesus after the Crucifixion. A relic answering to its description was among the treasures that were taken from Constantinople when the city was sacked by the Fourth Crusade in 1204. In a letter sent the following year to Pope Innocent III, a Byzantine aristocrat complained that ‘the Venetians partitioned the treasures of gold, silverand ivory while the French did the same with the relics of the saints and the most sacred of all, the linen in which our Lord Jesus Christ was wrapped after his death and before the resurrection’. But the certain provenance of the Shroud can only be traced back to 1357 when it was displayed i n the church at Li rey i n the diocese of Troyes by the widow of a French knight called Geoffrey of Charney who, it is said, was the nephew of that same Geoffrey of Charney burnt at the stake with James of Molay.
This has led some historians to believe that after the sack of Constantinople the linen relic passed into the hands of the Templars who took it to France, where it formed part of theirfamous treasure. But is this true?
Remarkably, in April 2009 support came from the Vatican itself, where Barbara Frale, the scholar who discovered the Chi non Parchment, found a further document, this one the testimony of Arnaut Sabbatier, a young Frenchman who entered the order in 1287. As part of his initiation, he said, he was taken to ‘a secret piace to which oniy the brothers of the Tempie had access’, where he was shown ‘a iong iinen cioth on which was impressed the figure of a man’ and was toid to venerate the image by kissing its feet three times. The Tempiars had rescued the Shroud to ensure that it did not faii into the hands of heretics such as the Gathers, who ciaimed that Jesus did not have a true human body but oniy the appearance of a man and neither died on the Cross nor was resurrected. For their pains they were burnt at the stake.
Not that this discovery has any bearing on the authenticity of the Shroud. The Vatican ieaves the question of whether or not the Shroud is a medievai forgery to the faith of beiievers. But it does suggest that the cioth today known as the Turin Shroud, fake or not, was in the possession of the Tempiars, that they beiieved it to be reai, and that for a century it piayed a centrai part in their initiation ceremonies.
World History
