form of accommodation between the Franks and Islam was a practical necessity, the Templars’ reputation does seem to have been tarnished from this time on (at least in the eyes of their critics in the West).
As has been noted, the Templars often employed Muslim secretaries, and a number of the Order learnt Arabic. Similarly, they had an unpredictable, but sometimes close, relationship with the Assassins, who are often seen as the Islamic equivalent of the Templars. The Order also came into contact with the Sufis. It is not beyond the realms of possibility, therefore, that ideas from the Islamic world found their way back to Europe via the Order. Twelfth-century Moorish Spain, for instance, also acted in this way, with a vast amount of learning coming into Europe via places like the University of Toledo, which had a school entirely devoted to translating works from the Arabic. This influx of knowledge had an incalculable effect on the West; indeed, it would not be too much of an overstatement to suggest that one of the most important things in the intellectual development of the West was the discovery of the East, Arabic culture and science being far in advance of the West at this time. It is this close contact with the Arab world that may have contributed to the alleged religious heterodoxy of the Templars.
Religious heterodoxy nearer home may also have been tainting Templar thought. The Order has long been associated with the Cathars, the heretical dualist sect which flourished in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, mainly in southern France and parts of northern Italy. Alarmed at the spread of the heresy, Pope Innocent proclaimed a crusade against it, which got under way in 1208 under Simon de Montfort. This was the so-called Albigensian Crusade, named after the French town of Albi. It was to last on and off until 1244, when the last Cathar stronghold at Montsegur fell to the forces of Louis IX and its occupants were burnt to death on the Field of the Cremated. While the majority of Templars would have been simple, unlettered men who adhered to the Catholic Church, there were elements within the Order who would have certainly been sympathetic to Catharism. Bertrand de Blancfort, the sixth Grand Master of the Temple, was from a Cathar family, and the Order welcomed Cathars into its ranks once the Albigensian Crusade was under way. So great was the number of Cathar Templars in the Languedoc that, in many preceptories, Cathars outnumbered Catholics. The Order had always accepted excommunicates into its ranks – the reason for this being usually cited as the constant manpower shortage in the East – but the same cannot be said for the Order’s sheltering of Cathars in the West, where the manpower situation was nowhere near as dire. This apparent friendliness towards the Cathars could be a legacy of Bertrand de Blancfort, and it could have also led to the Order’s consideration of the Languedoc – where the Templar presence was particularly strong – as the most likely site for the creation of their own
Catharism was not the only heresy with which the Order has been associated. The other most prominent is the Johannite heresy, the belief that John the Baptist is the real Messiah, with Christ being seen as a usurper and a false prophet. It has been suggested that Hugues de Payen himself was a Johannite, and the Order are known to have held John the Baptist in particularly high regard. The origins for this are obscure, but one possible source could be the Templars’ putative original base in the Hospital: around 1100, the Hospitallers, originally known as the Hospital of Jerusalem of John the Almoner, became – for reasons unknown – the Hospital of Jerusalem of John the Baptist.
Closely associated with the Johannite movement is the cult of Mary Magdalene. The cult of the Virgin Mary was also at its height in the twelfth century, and the two women are traditionally seen as the feminine face of God. St Bernard himself was obsessed with the Divine Feminine, and, given his close relationship with the Templars, may have either transmitted a reverence for the Feminine to the Order, or developed his fascination at the same time as certain other members of the Templars. One must not forget also that Europe at this time was undergoing rapid changes (the so-called Renaissance of the twelfth century), and it is a curious fact that explosions of interest in the Goddess tend to recur at times of great change and enquiry. So, this begs the question: were the Templars secret Goddess worshippers?
Pope Innocent III certainly thought that they were worshipping something other than the God of the New Testament and his only Son, when he admonished the Order in his letter of 1208. He accused them of the usual sins of pride and arrogance – accusations that date back at least as far as the Second Crusade, when rumours of the Order’s alliance with Islam were also beginning to circulate – but also branded them as necromancers who were in danger of doing the Devil’s work unless they got their house in order. That the Pope himself should be moved to admit that there was something altogether not quite right about the Templars suggests that rumours of the Templars being tainted with heresy may well have had some basis in fact.
Charges of Devil worship notoriously resurfaced a century later, during the Order’s trial at the hands of Philip IV. This seven-year period is possibly the best documented in the Order’s history, and it is also the one period in which their alleged unorthodox beliefs were at the centre of interest. The French prosecutors homed in on two areas of Templar practice: the initiation ceremony; and the fact that they were supposed to worship an idol named Baphomet.
At the initiation ceremony, it was alleged, the new brothers had to show their loyalty to the Order by spitting, trampling or urinating on the Cross, and by denying Christ. These have traditionally been seen as another example of Philip’s trumped-up charges. But the recent discovery in the Vatican Library of what is known as the Chinon Parchment suggests that the Templars did indeed spit on the Cross and deny Christ. Under questioning at Chinon in the summer of 1308, Jacques de Molay explained that these apparently sacrilegious practices were designed to get a Templar to experience the sort of torture he would likely receive at the hands of the Saracens, and thereby enable them to deny their religion ‘with the mind only and not with the heart’.43 When one recalls that some of the evidence against the Templars was collected by 12 of Philip’s spies, who joined the Order in 1306 to substantiate the allegations made the year before by the expelled knight Esquin de Floyran, it suggests that the charges against the Order were in fact true, but the purpose of these ceremonies had been misunderstood by Philip’s men.
Misunderstanding is almost certainly at the root of the allegation that the Templars worshipped an idol called Baphomet. Descriptions of it varied, but it was usually described as being a life-sized head, which was said to make the land fertile (as is said of the Grail). That the Templars did possess heads is without doubt. They possessed the head of St Euphemia of Chalcedon at their preceptory in Nicosia on Cyprus, and, more curiously, a silver headshaped reliquary was found after the arrests at the Paris Temple. This bore the inscription CAPUT LVIII, and inside it were parts of a woman’s skull (who was believed to have been one of the 11,000 virgins martyred at Cologne with St Ursula). The heads may have indeed been worshipped, in the way that the Celts revered the head. The Assassins, during their initiation ceremonies, buried the initiate up to his neck in sand, leaving only the head visible, before disinterring him. Given their simulation of Saracen torture, the Templars may also have carried out this practice. A further possibility is that Baphomet, long thought to be a mistranslation of ‘Mahomet’ (the Prophet Muhammad), could well be a corruption of the Arabic word
