Latin Romania were compromised by parallel attempts at the union of the Roman and Greek Orthodox churches from the 1270s. After the death of Charles of Anjou in 1285, strenuous and persistent diplomatic efforts to involve the French royal family in Greece produced few tangible results. By 1320, despite the anti-Latin policies of the Byzantine emperor, Andronicus II, prospects for an anti-Greek crusade had effectively ended. Never popular in the west, such plans had consistently failed to be supported by extensive preaching or successful fundraising. After the 1320s, western policy turned to attempts to ally with the Greeks against Turkish pirates and acquisitive emirs in the Aegean. As with the Greeks, moves in the years before and after 1300 to accommodate another former enemy, the Mongols, removed another crusade target. The Mongol successor state of the Golden Horde in what is now southern Russia and the Ukraine began to operate within the orbit of the secular politics of eastern Europe, one competing power amidst the rivalries of Lithuania, Poland, Novgorod, Hungary and the Teutonic Knights. Only rarely could the interests of a Christian power extract a papal grant of crusade privileges against the Golden Horde, as in 1345, when the Genoese were defending their Crimean trading base at Caffa.25 Only a very few new applications for crusading privileges appeared, such as the abortive plans and attempts to conquer the Canary Islands in 1344–5 and 1402, justified by the principle of the expansion (
THE FALL OF THE TEMPLARS
As another symptom of contraction, one of the most prominent military, ideological and institutional features of active crusading was attacked and transformed. By 1291, the reputation of the military orders had long been equivocal. No observer could ignore their contribution to the cause of the cross on all fronts. Yet other clerical interest groups resented the orders for their papally protected privileges. Their demands for profit from their extensive estates in the west, although justified as a means of funding war in the east, aroused resentment from their tenants. Secular rulers, notably the kings of France, relied on their banking skills, especially those of the Templars, to help manage royal finance. Rulers regarded the orders’ autonomy and supposed wealth with envy and suspicion even as they employed their leaders in secular government. The Masters and regional heads of the orders occupied important positions as representatives of large landed corporations in all the kingdoms of western Europe. In Spain, their autonomy was gradually eroded by the determined royal patronage and increasing control, until they became by the end of the middle ages almost an arm of the state. Hermann von Salza played a major political role in imperial politics under Frederick II and, as a prince of the empire, helped create a unique order-state in Prussia. In France, the Temple in Paris acted as a sort of national bank in the thirteenth century, closely integrated into servicing royal finances. In England the Priors of the Hospital sat in the House of Lords, some even acted as the king’s treasurer, such as Joseph Chauncy (1273–80) or Robert Hales (1381), the veteran of the Christian attack on Alexandria in 1365 who paid for his involvement in government with his life at the hands of rebels in London during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.27
However, the loss of the Holy Land in 1291 cast the very function of the orders into doubt. The Teutonic Knights, in the years around 1300, were vigorously attacked by the local Livonian church hierarchy, who accused them of cruelty, greed, friendship with pagans, larceny and violence against the church. The Knights were saved by their continuing role as defenders, with their blood and treasure, of the Christians of Livonia against the pagan Lithuanians. Even so, their escape from papal censure and suppression was a close-run thing.28 The Order of St John could still claim their original hospitaller calling. Yet, almost from the earliest days of the militarized religious communities in the mid-twelfth century, writers had noted the rivalries and divisions between the orders, from the Egyptian wars of the 1160s to the civil wars of later thirteenth-century Outremer. Sermons and chronicles may have included elevating anecdotes of the special Christian heroism of members of the orders, yet the darker aspect of their reputation could not be dispelled, especially once mainland Outremer fell.
The loss of the orders’ great fortresses in Syria and Palestine represented a potentially terminal threat to the orders’ occupation. Reform was suggested at the Second Lyons Council of 1274. Scandal had never been far from some military orders, unregulated by local ecclesiastical authority and institutionally introspective as their calling made them. The suppression of the Swordbrothers in 1237 could be seen only as an extreme – or publicized – example of the pitfalls inherent in a corporate ideal that insisted on the awkward marriage of religious conventual exclusivity with close and necessary involvement in secular affairs – war, diplomacy, finance and property. Some of these temporal snares were common to all religious orders, many of which attracted similar complaints of corruption throughout the middle ages. However, the military orders were more vulnerable. Their vocation, perched at an extreme of cultural acceptability, had always been controversial in some quarters. Unlike other religious orders, the success of a military order could, in a sense, be tested by tangible, not just imagined spiritual, results. Defeat in the Holy Land indicated clear failure. The cause could only be God’s displeasure, provoked by contumacious sin. The military orders thus stood as symbols – potential scapegoats – for the perceived moral failings of Christendom.29
Criticism, not all of it consistent, grew in scope after 1274. The orders were accused of being corrupt. Their ineffectual worldiness required the disendowment of their estates situated away from the frontlines. The orders should be amalgamated into one super-order to provide a well-funded, disciplined core for attempts to recover and defend the Holy Land. Some even argued that rule in a reconquered Holy Land should be vested in such a united order and its head, a
The arrest, persecution, trials and final suppression of the Templars did not, therefore, come from nowhere.31 Beginning with the arrest of all Templars in France on Friday 13 October 1307 (allegedly the origin for the ill-omen of Friday 13th), punctuated by torture, confessions, recantations and burnings, the sordid process was driven by officials of the king of France, appeased by the papal Curia and the other monarchs of western Europe. The attack culminated in the order’s suppression by Clement V at the Council of Vienne in 1312 and the final, brusque execution by burning of the last Master in Paris in 1314. The assault on the Templars became notorious for the luridness of the accusations against them, the barbarism of the use of torture by French inquisitors, the inconsistent leadership of Clement V, the confused defence mounted by the order and the single- minded ruthlessness of Philip IV of France and his ministers, especially Guillaume de Plaisians and Guillaume de Nogaret. The ambitious but sporadically spendthrift Philip IV may have wanted control of Templar propertied wealth. He may also genuinely have believed them to have failed in their holy mission, to which he possibly held a sincere attachment.32
If so, he was by no means alone. Pious conviction, self-righteous brutality and myopic moral certainty are familiar partners. There existed sufficient belief in the justice of their cause among the French persecutors and the watching secular and ecclesiastical elites of western Christendom to sustain a campaign of oppression that reeked of hypocrisy, mendacity and avarice as well as cruelty. The charges of blasphemy, sodomy, irregular and obscene ceremonies, the common currency of formal ecclesiastical abuse, were lent added plausibility by the perception of dereliction of duty. The low grade of Templar membership, comprising a worryingly high number of dim, often elderly and politically inadequate minor nobility, did not enhance their defence or inspire confidence in the order’s long-term value or viability. The garbled accounts of peculiar, half-remembered admission rituals may indicate some strange practices, not uncommon in closed, secretive elite male societies. Yet the confessions to the substantive charges appear mainly to have been extracted under torture, the trauma of public humiliation and sudden loss of liberty or the threat of violence. When led to the stake by his persecutors in 1314, the unfortunate Jacques de Molay insisted on his and his order’s innocence of all charges, a protestation
