The Knights Templar

Friggatriskaidekaphobia is the irrational fear of Friday the 13^th. For the Templars, that end began in the early morning hours of Friday, October 13, 1307. The Templars, founded in 1118 as a band of poor, pious knights, have been romantically reimagined in art, literature, film and folklore for centuries. The fact that they were shockingly villainized and disbanded in 1307—after a dizzying rise to wealth and power—only added to their legendary mystique.

Founded around 1118 as a monastic military order devoted to the protection of pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land following the Christian capture of Jerusalem during the First Crusade. Set up during the crusading period, they were named for their initial headquarters on the Temple Mount (Haram al-Sharif) in Jerusalem. They recruited western, Christian warriors who took an oath to live quasi-monastic lives devoted to the principles of chastity, poverty and obedience, and wore iconic uniforms of black or white robes emblazoned with a red cross.

Initially these men were tasked with defending pilgrims around Christian-occupied Jerusalem, but over time they expanded their role. These knights created a revolutionary banking system that protected pilgrims’ finances. This banking system was successful and eventually expanded throughout Europe. During the 12th and 13th centuries the Templars developed an elite military wing devoted to ferocious warfare against the Islamic rulers of Syria, North Africa and the Iberian peninsula, supported by a vast, profitable business empire of land and property on which they paid very little or no tax.

The Knights Templar escort Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem in an illustration from around 1800.

he Knights Templar quickly became one of the richest and most influential groups of the Middle Ages, thanks to lavish donations from the crowned heads of Europe, eager to curry favor with the fierce Knights. By the turn of the 14th century, the Templars had established a system of castles, churches and banks throughout Western Europe. And it was this astonishing wealth that would lead to their downfall.

By 1307, however, the crusades were going badly. Calls for reform of the Templars were becoming commonplace. The order’s popularity was waning. And they had acquired a calculating political enemy in the form of King Philip IV of France, who owed a considerable debt and wished to roll up the Templars and appropriate their wealth as a means of balancing a troublesome budget deficit.

Prior to the Friday 13th arrests, the king’s ministers had spent more than a year interviewing disgruntled former Templars and compiling a small, questionable, sexed-up dossier of supposed misdeeds, including allegations that Templars had spat on the cross, denied Christ, kissed one another in homoerotic induction rituals and worshiped false idols.

These charges were written up in formal letters of condemnation. The Templars were condemned en masse as having disgraced the French flag and the country. Their crimes, wrote the king, were “horrible to contemplate, terrible to hear of.” His accusations were widely circulated, and his campaign to destroy the Templars rested on the relentless, repetitive dissemination of his baseless claims in every public arena he could find.

Secret documents had been sent by couriers throughout France. Philip sent his plan to all the King’s men and Bailiffs throughout France a month beforehand with orders not to read the plans until dawn on Friday the 13th. The papers included lurid details and whispers of black magic and scandalous sexual rituals. They were sent by King Philip IV of France, an avaricious monarch who in the preceding years had launched attacks on the Lombards (a powerful banking group) and France’s Jews (who he had expelled so he could confiscate their property for his depleted coffers).

In the days and weeks that followed that fateful Friday, more than 600 Templars were arrested on false charges, including Grand Master Jacques de Molay, and the Order’s treasurer. This began a process of interrogation, public examination and reputational demolition that ended four and a half years later with the order being dissolved. But while some of the highest-ranking members were caught up in Philip’s net, so too were hundreds of non-warriors; middle-aged men who managed the day-to-day banking and farming activities that kept the organization humming. The men were charged with a wide array of offenses including heresy, devil worship and spitting on the cross, homosexuality, fraud, and financial corruption.

The Templars were kept in isolation and fed meager rations that often amounted to just bread and water. Nearly all were brutally tortured. One common practice used by medieval inquisitors was the “strappdo,” in which the hands of the accused are tied behind their backs, and then suspended in the air by a rope around their wrists, intended to dislocate the shoulders. As Dan Jones notes in his book, The Templars: The Rise and Spectacular Fall of the Knights Templar, one of the accused’s hands were tied so tightly that blood pooled in his fingertips, and he was kept in a pit no wider than a single footstep. Many of the men were likely stretched on the infamous rack, or had their feet dipped in oil and held over a fire to burn. Given the extreme conditions, it’s not surprising that within weeks, hundreds of Templars confessed to false charges, including Jacques de Molay.

Pope Clement V was horrified. Despite the fact that he’d been elected almost solely because of Philip’s influence, he feared crossing the extremely popular Templars. The Knight’s coerced “confessions,” however, forced his hands. Philip, who had anticipated Clement’s reaction, made sure the allegations against the Templars included detailed descriptions of their supposed heresy, counting on the gossipy, salacious accounts to carry much weight with the Church.

Illustration depicting the Knights Templar in battle, based on a fresco in the Chapel of the Templars in Cressac sur Charente, France.

Over several years, this medieval “fake news” was repeated over and over again, its loudness and frequency making up for the fact that it was a lie, until in 1312 a council of the Church reached the conclusion that the Templars’ name had been so blackened the order’s members ought to be forcibly retired.

Clement issued a papal bull ordering the Western kings to arrest Templars living in their lands. Few followed the papal request, but the fate of the French Templars had already been sealed. Their lands and money were confiscated and officially dispersed to another religious order, the Hospitallers, although Philip did get his hands on some of the coveted funds.

Within weeks of their confessions, many of Templars recanted, and Clement shut down the inquisition trials in early 1308. The Templars lingered in their cells for two years before Philip had more than 50 of the them burned at the stake in 1310. Two years later, Clement formally dissolved the Order though he did so without saying they’d been guilty as charged. In the wake of that dissolution, some Templars again confessed to gain their freedom, while others died in captivity.

Desiring to humiliate the Templars further, Philip decided to have Jacques De Molay, the Grandmaster of the Templars, admit to heresy at a large public gathering. Jacques, instead, used the public forum to apologize to the people and explain what had happened to the Templars.

The Grandmaster’s final words before being burned at the stake were used to curse King Philip IV & Pope Clement V and state that they would both be dead by the end of the year. Both men did meet their demise before the year’s end, which adds even more clout to the powerful lore of Friday the 13th.

In the spring of 1314, Grand Master Molay and several other Templars were burned at the stake in Paris, bringing an end to their remarkable era, and launching an even longer-lasting theory about the evil possibilities of Friday the 13th.