The Knights Templar seek redress

We live in a litigious age, with so many seeking redress to the courts for wrongs, be they real or imagined. It reaches to the highest levels and can have wide implications.

In recent years the rather curious legal processes of the Vatican have been in the news with internal espionage and more recently charges relation to high-level fraud and corruption. All grist to the journalist’s mill and those of webmasters and bloggers. 

However a story on the usually very sober Rome based  Zenit website promised something that could be not the trial of the century but of the millennium: the Knights Templar are seeking to sue the Holy See for restitution and compensation, and to establish a new legal basis for their relationship with the Papacy.

The report can be seen at Knights Templar Sue the Pope and Call for Their Rehabilitation

Now, maybe these are not the Knights Templar from 1312, but then who knows? Some Freemasons claim thatthey are, for what that is worth…. not much in my opinion. The Portuguese Order of Christ has a good claim, as they were re-established from the Templars by King Dinis.

This Spanish based group has tried several times in recent years to sue, so we shall have to wait and see what happens.

Try to imagine calculating over seven centuries of lost income, maybe at compound interest, let alone the restitution of property. What about compensation for reputational damage? Will they want the Holy Shroud back? Will they make the French State a party as successor to King Philip IV? Given the present Pope’s oft stated opposition to the death penalty will he feel compelled to pay compensation to the heirs of Jacques de Molay, Geoffrey de Charnay and the other victims? 

Normally I have an instinctive reaction against anything other than a purely academic work that refers to the Knights Templar. Who knows, with the right lawyer, this could be fun. Maybe the courts in California would be a good place to pursue the suit.

  

The Templars and their pet

Military men and religious communities have a tradition of having animal pets.

Regimental mascots are a familiar sight, ranging from an Irish wolfhound, to Welsh mountain goats and to Shetland ponies, complete with an appropriate ceremonial uniform and attendant NCO. Labradors have long been associated with officers of the RAF

Chaucer’s prioress of course had her pet dog, much, no doubt, to the horror of the nunnery’s episcopal Visitor.

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Oratorians, because of the tradition of St Philip having a cat, are keen to have their community provided with a pet cat. Pushkin, at the Birmingham Oratory became an international celebrity when he was stroked by Pope Benedict on his visit. Oxford used to have Buskin as its resident mouser as well as the Rubrics - a pair of goldfish in an outside pool who were so named because they were small, red, and largely ignored.

Medievalists.net takes us in a recent post to an interesting combination with the Knights Templar in Acre before it fell in 1291. As a community of military men organised as a religious community it is perhaps no surprise that they would have a pet, but the choice is, shall we say, distinctive. A crocodile. Yes, a crocodile - admittedly one that had been de-toothed. It could perhaps give you a nasty suck. One wonders if being appointed keeper of the Crocodile was the Templar equivalent of being assigned the short straw….

The article can be seen at Did the Knights Templar Keep a Pet Crocodile? A Medieval Mystery Unveiled

The deaths of Jacques de Molay and Geoffrey de Charnay in 1314

This evening is the 700th anniversary of the burning at the stake of Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Order of the Temple, and Geoffrey de Charnay, the Master of the Order in Normandy in Paris. There is an online life of the Grand Master here, and there is one of Geoffrey de Charnay here. The Charnay family in later generations had custody of the Shroud of Turin as set out in Ian Wilson's book The Holy Shroud, which links its transmission to the west to the Templars.

There is an illustrated online blog post today on the Daily Telegraph website by Dominic Selwood about the events in the years 1307-1314 that occurred leading to the suppression of the Order of the Temple and the deaths of Molay and Charnay. It can be viewed here.

Malcolm Barber has written what is, I suppose, now the standard book on the topic in The Trial of the Templars.  The executions of 1314 also appear in the first part of Maurice Druon's splendid series of novels The Accursed Kings - the first of these The Iron King begins with the burnings of the Templars and ends with the death of the King in November that same year, and covers the intervening crises which in Druon's interpretaion led to the Hundred Year War. A really splendid series of novels and wonderful televison in the original 1973-4 version - but do ignore the remake!

These days I tend to ignore anything about the Knights Templar that is not solid history like the work of historians like Barber, or clear dramatic recounting of specific events such as in Druon's books. Whatever the Templars did do - and they did much that was certainly good - or did not do - the allegations against them appear to be a mixture of some truth, falsehood, misunderstanding and very serious political manipulation - they do not deserve their continuing current fate of attracting so many loopy theories and associations.

The downfall of the Templars is a far from edifying episode - and really is so for all concerned. The Papacy was weak and vacillating, the French Crown cynical and mercenary, the Templars had perhaps lost something of their origibal vision as well as purpose - possible or actual abuses by a few of them could be made to besmirch the whole Order, which seems a rather contemporary point.  

The Temple Church

Yesterday I once again led a group of students from the CBL International programme at Oriel on a tour of Legal London.

When we had finished I found myself outside the Temple Church, which, unlike the situation on most of my previous visits was open, so I paid my couple of pounds and had a leisurely walk round this remarkable survival from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The round nave of the Temple Church, with the choir to the right.
The column in the right foreground is a modern memorial to the Order of the Temple erected by the Inns.

Image: roundaboutlondon.wordpress.com

The late twelfth century round nave, built by the Knight Templar and modelled or inspired by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, together with the now replaced choir, was consecrated on February 11th 1185 by Patriarch Heraclius of Jerusalem, as is recorded in a Latin inscription over the west door.

In the nave are series of  effigies of nobles with connections to the Order, the most famous being that of

William the Marshal Earl of Pembroke who died in 1219 as Regent of England for the young King Henry III. His career is recounted in the Song of William the Marshal written soon after his death. Unfortunately the effects of the bombing in 1941 resulted in some damage to the effigies, as can be seen from displays of older photographs in the church, but they are still very moving as a record of part of the elite of thirteenth century England.

The chancel was replaced by a larger aisled one in 1240, apparently with the intention of it being the burial place for King Henry III and his Queen. Although one of their infant sons is buried there it was of course his rebuilding of Westminster Abbey from 1245 that led to that becoming the medieval royal necropolis.

 

The view from the nave into the choir

Image: a-london-tourist-guide.com

 

 

Inside the church are reconstructed plans of the site as it is thought to have been when used by the Templars before their suppression in 1312. One thing I learned from these was the fact that the Knights had their jousting or training ground on what is now the site of the Royal Courts of Justice.

Transferred to the Knights Hospitaller after 1312 and seized by the Crown in 1540 the church was formally given to the tenants of the buildings adjacent, the Inns of the Inner and Middle Temple by King James I  in 1608, on condition that they maintained the building, which they have done. On display in the church was a photograph of a charter of renewal of the grant from the present Queen in 2008.

On May 10th 1941 the church and both Inns suffered bomb damage, which was graphically brought out by some of the photographs on display. The devastation of the Inner Temple was particularly serious, which lost its nineteenth century Hall and many adjacent buildings, and the church itself was burnt out.

The post-war restoration, completed in 1957, is  good, though I perhaps regret that the mid-nineteenth century neo-medieval colour scheme was not reproduced - that is no doubt more what would have been there originally. However the restoration did allow for the reinstatement of surviving seventeenth century furnishings removed in the Victorian period and preserved in storage.

There is more about the church and its history here.

The Chaplain bears the title Master of the Temple and like the church belongs to both Inns. One of his late sixteenth century predecessors, who is  commemorated by a modern monument in the church, was Richard Hooker, the codifier of Anglican ecclesiology.

The church is very well worth seeing, as indeed are both of the two Inns, and the other two which are north of the Strand, Lincoln's and Grey's.