Chapter V: Part 5

Apollonius was born in Tyana, a town in Cappadocia. Previous to his birth, says Philostratus, the god Proteus appeared to his mother and told her that the child soon to see the light was the God himself. This happened in a meadow, where, after gathering flowers, she had fallen asleep, while swans gathered round her and intoned their song. When the child was grown up he became a strict observer of the Pythagorean rule of life, abstaining from fleshmeat and wine, and wearing linen garments. His abode was a temple sacred to Aesculapius, god of healing. Unworthy offerers of gifts to the god he drove out, and healed such of the sick as repented of their transgressions. He rejected the Grecian mythology as fabulous, preferring far to it the fables of Esop, and his only prayer was addressed to the sun. He refused to take possession of an estate inherited from his father, and imposed on himself a silence of several years’ duration. During his extensive travels he always lodged in temples, corrected abuses in the conduct of the divine service, couched his teachings in brief sentences, gathered around him disciples, of whom one was false and a traitor; sided with the persecuted and righted the wrongs of the oppressed. Everywhere he understood the languages of the natives without learning them, and even read the thoughts of men; but the language of the beasts he learned from the Arabs of Mesopotamia. On entering that country the publican asked him whether he had with him anything subject to toll. The answer of Apollonius was that he carried about righteousness, temperance, a manly soul and a patient spirit—and many another virtue named he. The sullen taxman, who had no mind for anything that lay outside his own duties, took the names of virtues for names of women, saying: “There, your maids are all down in the book.” But Apollonius calmly went his way, with the brief remark: “They are not maids, but high-born dames;” nor paid he impost on his ideal goods. In spite of his frankness of speech he was treated with great distinction by the king of that country. He told the king that he would best strengthen his royal power by honoring many and putting trust in but a few. The king, who was ill, having been comforted by the prophet, confessed that he had been freed from anxiety, not only with regard to his kingdom, but also with regard to death. From Babylon Apollonius bent his steps toward India, and there, according to the highly embellished story, saw men four or five ells in height, also men who were half white and half black; dragons, too, of various size he saw. He constantly carried on with Damis, the one disciple who accompanied him, instructive conversations about the animals and the people whom they met. An Indian king, dazzled by the splendor of the prophet’s genius, would not wear the crown in his presence. With the Brahmans, many of whose conjurfeats are recorded, e. g., flitting through the air, or at touch of their wands causing the earth to spring aloft, Apollonius swapped wisdoms; and as, in the opinion of Damis, the wisdom of the Brahmans was derived from Pythagoras, it was from Pythagoras also, of course, that they got their doctrine of metempsychosis. We learn that Apollonius also entertained that curious idea, and that he imagined himself to have been once an Indian tax-gatherer, and was wont to tell of many incidents of that phase of his life. Furthermore, in his presence the Brahmans cured the possessed, the lame, the blind, and women in difficult labor, by imposition of hands, and by giving good counsels—practices resembling those used in our day by sympathists, so-called. Apollonius returned to Babylon and Ninive, passing through fabulous lands, and then journeyed to the Ionians of Asia Minor. Apollonius banished from Ephesus an epidemic which was there raging, by requiring the citizens to stone a beggar in whom he discerned the daemon who was the cause of the disease; the culprit, under the storm of stones, was changed into a dog. Voyaging by sea to Greece, the Sage Apollonius imposed on his shipmates with the story that Achilles had appeared unto him five ells in height, and before his eyes had grown to twelve ells. At Athens, where he arrived during the Eleusinian mysteries, the priests refused to initiate him, because he was a conjurer; whereupon the Sage of Tyana told them that already he knew more about the mysteries than the priests. This alarmed them, and they wished to recall their refusal; but it was Apollonius’s turn now to refuse them, so he deferred to another time his initiation, but in public discourses let his light shine before the Athenians. In Athens, too, there was a youth possessed, who laughed and cried without cause. Apollonius having detected the true nature of the ailment, of which no one else had any suspicion, with stern looks and words of menace confronted the daemon, who thereupon fled away, and in token of his passage overturned a statue that no one had touched. But the youth, rubbing his eyes as though waking from sleep, was seen to be cured. At Corinth the Sage detected in the bride of a comely youth a lamia or empusa; i. e., one of a class of spectral beings that used to haunt people, and under pretense of being in love with them, would eat the flesh off their bones. In the presence of Apollonius all her arts and all her imps disappeared, and the spectre was unmasked and confessed her evil intent. At the Olympian Games also this apostle of the Pythagorean philosophy preached. His following was increased by the accession of several members with their slaves; these he called his “congregation.” With them he went to Rome, where the infamous Nero then reigned, who had prohibited philosophy, which he classed with soothsaying. But one who was in the service of the tyrant, impressed by the wisdom of the traveler, allowed him to lecture in the temples, and to these lectures there was great concourse. But one of his disciples who had accompanied him from Corinth, and who in Rome had ventured to condemn publicly the conduct of Nero and the prevailing immorality, was expelled from the city by Tigellinus, captain of the emperor’s bodyguard, and trusty tool of the tyrant, while Apollonius himself was kept under surveillance. But not only could nothing be proved against him; his wisdom filled even the sanguinary minions with admiration, though he spoke to them only the stern truth. For example, being asked by Tigellinus why he had no fear of Nero, he answered: “The God who makes him an object of fear made me fearless.” Asked what he thought of Nero, “Better than you do,” he replied; “ye think him gifted for singing, I for silence.” Whereupon Tigellinus: “Go wherever you please; you are stronger than any power of mine.” A bride in Rome having died, the body was on the way to the place of interment. Apollonius bade the bearers to halt, touched the damsel, uttering some secret words, and called her back from death. Philostratus himself is in doubt whether the death was not apparent only. The philosopher then journeyed to the Strait of Gibraltar, whence he traversed Spain, Sicily and Greece, and then revisited Egypt. At Alexandria he recognized the innocence of one among eight criminals, interceded for him and had the man’s execution put off till the last moment; then arrived the order to spare his life; he had confessed only under torture. The story is also told that Apollonius, on paying a visit to Vespasian, in Alexandria, “made him Caesar,” thus giving to the Roman Empire once again, after a long interval, a just ruler; but after Vespasian’s elevation to the throne, the philosopher frankly spoke the truth to him, when the Emperor annulled, as an unjust privilege, the liberties of Greece, which Nero had in a capricious humor granted on the occasion of the Olympian Games. Leaving Egypt, Apollonius journeyed to Ethiopia to visit the Gymnosophists, who dwelt in a sort of little republic of their own, on a mountain, and conducted a famous school. Probably because they were less conceited, went naked, and performed no magical feats, our Sage deemed them less wise than the Brahmans, and had resultless controversies with them about the relative superiority of Grecian and Egyptian art, the former representing the gods as resembling man, the latter as resembling animals. In that region Apollonius exorcised a satyr that was said to have killed two women. About the time of the taking of Jerusalem by Titus, Apollonius happened to be in the neighborhood of that city, and praised the Roman general for his “moderation” (though it was a curious sort of moderation which leveled a great city with the ground). Titus answered: “I have made conquest of Solyma; you have made conquest of me,” and thereafter employed Apollonius as his adviser. At Tarsus he not only cured a young man of hydrophobia, but the dog also that had bitten him.

Having boldly denounced the Emperor Domitian at Ephesus, Apollonius was betrayed by his disciple Euphrates, and a plot was laid against him. Straightway he took ship for Rome, to confront the tyrant in his palace. In Rome he was thrown into prison, and treated with much harshness; but he defended himself with great spirit against the charges brought by his accuser, and was acquitted. Thereupon he uttered a tirade of reproaches against Domitian’s satellites, and suddenly vanished miraculously from the judgment hall, appearing the same day in the vicinity of Naples, where he had friends. From Naples he went to Ephesus; there, in ecstasy, he saw the assassination of Domitian, at that moment taking place in Rome; then he died. None knew what age he had attained, whether 80 years or 100, nor the time, nor the place, nor the manner of his death. According to Philostratus he appeared after his death to a young man of his native town, Tyana, who doubted the immortality of the soul, and invoked Apollonius to explain the matter; but he was invisible to the other persons present.

2. ALEXANDER THE FALSE PROPHET.

It is no matter of surprise that the cold, austere virtue and wisdom, the rather hollow religion, and the clumsy miracles of Apollonius neither built up a school for him nor kept the heathen religion on its feet; and though the emperors of the third century, from Caracalla to Diocletian, consecrated temples to him, and one of them, Alexander Severus, placed his bust, with those of Moses, Socrates and Jesus, in his private chapel, nevertheless the Sage of Tyana was soon forgotten, and with him, alas! the memory of his noble courage in the presence of tyrants. On the other hand, the charlatanry he practiced became more and more the order of the day, till at last it threw off all disguise. Whether this result is chargeable to his disciples, who, like the disciples of another master, prized his miracles more than his teachings, is a question that cannot be decided; but the fact is that soon after his death (the close of the first century) a number of impostors, wearing the cloak of religion, began to ply their trade. The satirist Lucian, who lived in the second century, and who made sport of everything—religion and philosophy, gods and men, heathen and Christians—has immortalized the tomfooleries of these pseudoprophets.

Of these the best known was Alexander of Abonotichus, in Asia Minor, a man greater in fraud, says Lucian, than his namesake, the son of Philip, in heroism. He was a large, handsome man, and by scrupulous care of his complexion, his hair, and his beard, enhanced the advantage nature had given him. But his character was “a compound of mendacity, fraud, perjury, and low tricks of every kind.” In his boyhood he was apprenticed to a quack of Tyana, a renegade disciple of Apollonius (whose life, by the way, Lucian, who lived nearer to him than Philostratus, calls a “comedy”), and by him was instructed in all the artifices whereby one can outwit and defraud his fellows. After his master’s death Alexander went into business on his own account. In Macedonia he procured one of the large harmless serpents found in that province and went back to his native town—Abonotichus—there to set up an “oracle factory,” as Lucian calls it. At Chalcedon he secretly placed on a roadside a tablet bearing the inscription that the god Aesculapius, with his father, Apollo, was soon to be at Abonotichus; the finding of this tablet caused great excitement. Meanwhile Alexander, in his native place, went about with his long, curling locks falling over his shoulders, wearing a purple robe with white stripes, and armed with a sabre. His stupid fellow townsmen, though they knew his parents, who were poor, believed him when he claimed descent from Perseus, and when they heard of the tablet set about erecting a temple to Aesculapius. Between the foundation stones of the temple Alexander secretly placed a goose-egg shell containing a newly-hatched snake; then with the wild gesticulations of a god-inspired enthusiast, hastened to the market-place, and there announced to the people that Aesculapius had just been born at the temple in the form of a serpent. To prove his oracle true he held up before them the egg with the snake. On the publication of this wondrous news, the populace flocked to the market-place. Alexander had a hut of boards erected, within which he seated himself in a reclining chair; then taking up the large snake already mentioned, which he had kept out of sight, he laid it on his breast, drew over its head a linen mask, painted to resemble a human face, the mouth of which would open and shut on pulling a string, and gave out to the people that the newborn god had already grown to that great size, and was now ready to give oracles. From all Asia Minor and Thrace the people came in thousands to witness the miracle. The mystic semi-obscurity of the hut and the magical effects of artificial light magnified the impression that the charlatan and his snake made on the people. Whoever wished to receive an oracle of the god had to write his question on a tablet, which was then to be sealed with wax and handed to the prophet. When the people had retired he melted the seals, read the questions, wrote the answers, then sealed the tablets again, and gave them back (with the answers) the seals apparently intact. The tariff for oracles was a drachma and eight oboli (about 25 cents), and the annual receipts amounted to seventy or eighty thousand drachmas (say $15,000), but he had out of this sum to pay a host of assistants and confederates. When the temple was completed Alexander carried on his business there.

But his title to public regard did not pass unchallenged. The Epicureans, who detested all trickery, and who believed that enjoyment was the only end in life worth thinking of, manifested their hostility to the prophet, and were, in turn, denounced by him as atheists and Christians. To safeguard his reputation he added to his repertoire. First, he began to give oracles viva voce, a confederate behind a screen speaking the responses into a tube terminating at the mouth of the snake’s mask. But the charge for such oracles was higher, and they were elicited only for the behoof of persons of eminence. Alexander’s fame spread even to Rome, and dupes from that seat of enlightenment came to consult the serpent-god. One of these addle-pate pilgrims from Rome asked the oracle what manner of woman he should take to wife. The oracle named the daughter of Alexander; so he married her, and offered hecatombs to his mother-in-law, his bride’s mother, in her capacity of moon-goddess, for such Alexander gave her out to be. Encouraged by many successes not inferior to this, the prophet instituted many mystic festivals, from which he excluded all unbelievers in God, as Epicureans and Christians. At these festivals the birth of Aesculapius and the nuptials of Alexander and the Moon-Goddess were represented dramatically, though perhaps a trifle too realistically. The prophet also claimed to be a reincarnation of Pythagoras, and in proof showed his thigh encased in gilded leather. His life was a continuous debauch. In time he began to hold what we should now call “dark seances;” that is, he would sit in absolute darkness and make response to questions submitted in writing on sealed tablets. As he could not read the questions at all, his answers (the oracles) were expressed for the most part in unintelligible language. Lucian once tested his powers by submitting to him the one question, “When will Alexander be caught at his tricks,” written on eight tablets; he got eight different answers, all irrelevant. He missed no opportunity of unmasking the rogue, and of teaching the people by the evidence of their own senses that the man was a vulgar impostor. The knave affected a mild friendship for his adversary, but he bribed the helmsman of a vessel on which Lucian sailed to throw him overboard; this the man had not the courage to do. Lucian wished to have the impostor put on trial for this crime, but the proconsul advised him not to invoke the help of the law, Alexander being too high in favor with the officials and the public. The city of Abonotichus had coins struck bearing the effigy of the Aesculapius serpent, and the pseudoprophet attained the age of seventy years, enjoying to the end the undiminished respect of the people.

Many were the impostors that sprang up after Alexander, and wherever there was any lack of real ones, fictitious pseudoprophets were imagined by satiric writers, Lucian’s Peregrinus, for example, a renegade Christian who devotes himself to a death by fire to win fame. It was a mad world then. New mysteries were invented in plenty, and people came in crowds for initiation. The “Golden Ass” of Apuleius is a striking satire on this mystery furore. To this period belong the Gnostics, whose doctrines were a mixture of Judaism, heathenism and Christianism; the Manichees, who gave a Christian varnish to the Persian fire worship; the Kabbalists, who heaped a vast amount of rubbish together, got out of the Hebrew Bible by juggling with its sentences, words, letters and numbers. Amid this tangle of doctrines the heathen religions sank, Judaism lost its native land, and Christianism fell into an incalculable number of sects—an evil that was not to be corrected even by the artificial unity of the Church under the Apostolical See.

_PART SIXTH._
_The Knights Templar._

1. THE MIDDLE AGE.

With the spread of Christianism the heathen mysteries came everywhere to an end, and the Christian mysteries took their place. The Christians, it is true, no longer constituted a secret society, after their faith had become the creed of the state; but there was plenty of mystic doctrine, nevertheless, and incessant strife of parties and sects, Arians and Athanasians, Pelasgians and Semipelagians, Nestorians, Monophysites and Monothelites, Adoptionists, Priscillianists, and Donatists, to name no more, over Christ’s nature, on the question whether the Holy Ghost proceeds only from the Father or equally from him and the Son; whether the soul is saved by good works or by grace of God, and so on interminably. This wrangling so occupied the minds of all that there was no longer need of secret societies. Theology, i. e., the struggle for creed, and war, i. e., the struggle for power, were the occupations of the Middle Age. Monks and knights were the two great classes of that time, with the Pope as supreme head on one side, and the Emperor on the other.

All the available knowledge was in the Middle Age employed in the service of the Church, and hence science slept from the migration of the barbarians till the invention of printing. During that period of a thousand years no addition was made to the sum of human knowledge. Arabian and Jewish physicians alone labored to save the intellectual wealth inherited from the ancient Greeks. As for Christendom, it was involved in profound intellectual darkness, and the Doctrine of Light that had been published by the Carpenter’s Son, was lost amid petty controversies and inane interpretations, till at last its strictly monotheistic groundwork was forgotten, and there remained visible only the superstructure of ethnic mysticism and of doctrines, as the Trinity, Incarnation, Resurrection, and Ascension, borrowed from Egyptian and Grecian mythology.

And this ethnico-mystic structure acquired a splendor and a power never before equaled, so that the system was credited to divine intervention, whereas its purely human origin might easily have been traced. The root idea of the ethnic mysticism was to seek the supposedly “lost deity,” to find him, to be unified with him. And the self-same idea underlay the Christian mysticism, and it was by calling that idea into play and by giving it expression in brilliant achievement, that this mysticism won its highest triumph, and, aided by the Papacy, its widest influence. This new embodiment of the mystical idea was seen in the Crusades, in which the Christian mystics joined, going forth to seek the lost sepulchre of their God, and to obtain control of it. Possession of the sepulchre would be the surest guarantee for the unification of godhead and humanity.

In this undertaking the two most powerful estates of the Middle Age took part—the monks and the knights. The monks, under orders from the Pope, joined the armies of the cross; the knights, commanded by the Emperor, marched to the Holy Land and conquered it. After the conquest, when there was a kingdom of Jerusalem after the model of the kingdoms of the West, there arose, as the necessary summit of medieval aspiration, the union of monkery and chivalry, in the monkish orders of knights, whose members wore the sword of the knight and took the monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

These organizations had their origin in the gradual assumption of knightly elements by the monastic orders. Some merchants of Amalfi, oldest commercial emporium of Italy, had, as early as 1048, founded a monastery and a church at Jerusalem, and in conjunction with these a hospital in honor of John the Baptist. There the monks cared for pilgrims who were poor or ailing. Pope Paschal II. granted them a monastic constitution in 1113, and Godfrey of Bouillon, soon after the capture of Jerusalem, endowed them with considerable properties.

They took the title of Brothers Hospitalers of Saint John of Jerusalem; their habit consisted of a black mantle with a white cross. A few years later (1119) the Knights Hugo of Payns, and Godfrey of Saint Omers, associated themselves and six other knights, all French, in a military league, under the style “Poor Knights of Christ,” pledging themselves to keep the highways of the Holy Land safe for pilgrims, and to observe the rule of Saint Benedict. The members were favored by King Baldwin I. and the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and came to be called Templars, because their convent stood on the site of the Solomonic Temple. The Templars received from the Synod of Troyes in 1128 recognition as a regular order, a monastic rule, a monastic habit, a special banner, etc. About the same date the Hospitalers, Johannites, or Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem, became invested with the knightly character. After the Hospitalers came the German Knights, whose theatre of action was principally the region of the Baltic Sea, but they also saw service in Spain in the war against the Saracens. Other knightly orders were those of Calatrava, of Alcantara, of Santiago de Compostella, in England the order of the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre, etc.

2. THE TEMPLARS.

None of these orders rose to higher distinction than the order of the Templars, or of “the Poor Companions of the Temple of Jerusalem,” as it was styled in its rule. In those days it was full of the spirit of lowliness, but the time came when the knights were no longer called themselves “Poor Companions,” but “Knights Templar.” At first the brethren begged their bread, fasted, were diligent in attendance on divine worship, performed the duties of their religion, fed the poor, cared for the sick. Plain and unadorned was their attire, in color either black, white or brown; and the brother who tried to get the finest habit got the shabbiest. The hair and beard were close cropped. The chase was not permitted, except for the extermination of beasts of prey. Women were not allowed to live in the houses of the order; the brethren might not so much as kiss their female relations. But their mode of life became in time very different. They became rich in worldly goods, and so broke the vow of poverty. As an order and as individuals they followed their own inclinations, and thus was their vow of obedience made nought; and their vow of chastity fared not better; while the specific vow of the order—protection of pilgrims to the Holy Land—became a nullity through their negligence, or even by their treasonable surrender of posts to the Saracens.

The candidate for admission to the order was required to be of noble birth, though sometimes illegitimate sons of knights were received. Furthermore, the candidate must be unmarried and unbetrothed; but this rule was circumvented by taking married candidates as “affiliate” members; they also admitted minors and even small boys. Lucre was the impelling motive of this disregard of their rule; money was their god. No other order of knights was in such disrepute for lewdness, duplicity, even treason. Originally all Templars were of one rank and degree—that of knights. But in time ecclesiastics were admitted to attend to the spiritual affairs, and these ecclesiastics were made independent of the ordinary jurisdiction of diocesans. Thus was formed a second rank or degree, subordinate to the knights, and mere dummies on festival and ceremonial occasions. Then was added still another class, Servientes, who were the personal attendants of the knights, or were otherwise employed for the benefit of the order, as mechanics, laborers, etc. The class Affiliates comprised persons of all ranks in life and of both sexes. They were not bound by all the vows of the order; they were required to make the order heir of their property; but they did not live in the houses of the order. These several classes were distinguished by their attire. Knights wore a white mantle with an eight-pointed red cross over the left breast. Clerics wore the cassock, with brown mantle (the mantle of the higher clerics was white). Servientes wore a brown garb. The members called each other Brother, and indeed they stood by each other like brothers; in battle their personal bravery was irreproachable.

All these religious orders of knights possessed great power in the Middle Age, their grandmasters ranking next after Popes and monarchs. In fact they recognized no emperor or king as their lord, but only the Pope. The orders were favored by the Pontiffs, who loaded them with praise and privileges, though they feared them. If the Popes had now the arm of the flesh and not of the spirit only to defend them against the secular power, they owed that advantage to the knightly orders. And specially were they beholden to the Templars in this regard. The Templars were free from all Church tribute, and by the Pope’s favor had the right to harbor excommunicated knights, to conduct divine service in churches that were under interdict, to found churches and churchyards; which privileges brought down upon them the enmity of the clergy. As the order was exempt from all episcopal jurisdiction and subject only to the Roman See, the bishops endeavored to have that and other like privileges abated by the Lateran Council in 1179. At the time of their suppression the Templars possessed an empire of five provinces in the East and sixteen in the West, with 15,000 houses of the order. In possession of such resources, they aimed at nothing short of making all Christendom dependent on their order, and to set up a sort of military aristocratic commonwealth, governed ostensibly by the Pope, but really by themselves, with their grandmaster at the head. The grandmaster of the Templars was elected by a college of eight knights, four servientes and one cleric. The Grandmaster was only president of the Council and its representative; but in war he had supreme command; as the Pope’s deputy he had jurisdiction over the clerics. A splendid retinue attended him, and he had a treasury at his disposal. Next in rank after him stood the Seneschal, his deputy for civil affairs, and the Marshal for military, the Treasurer, the Drapier. The Council (Conventus) consisted of the Grandmaster, his assistants (i.e., the grand officers just mentioned), Provincial Masters who might be present, and such knights as the Grandmaster might summon. By addition of all eminent Templars the Council became the General Chapter; this was the legislative body. The other knightly orders were organized on a plan not essentially different. What interests us most at present is those features of the Templar order which marked it as in some respects a secret society.

The order took its first steps in this direction in the thirteenth century, moved thereto by desire to safeguard its riches and power. Its secret doctrines or tenets were borrowed from the heretical sects of the time—Albigenses and Waldenses—or were such beliefs as were held in secret by many of the most enlightened men. Such views were shared by religious men, scholars, and worldlings alike, by the first class out of indignation against the moral degeneration of the rulers of the Church; by the second, because they suspected that the Church’s dogmas were but inventions of Popes and councils, and by the third, because in rejecting the Church’s authority and accepting the heretical doctrines, they fancied that they were freed from the obligations of morality. But the Templars, who were neither pious nor learned, but of whom many were very worldly indeed, found the enlightened new opinions to coincide well with their interest, which prompted them to care rather for their numerous possessions in the West than for the few they held in lands occupied by the Moslem. God, said they, showed his favor to the Mohammedans in the Crusades, and evidently willed the defeat of the Christian arms. So by adopting the more enlightened views, they prepared the way for a withdrawal from the useless Crusades, and a return with bag and baggage to Europe, where they could rest from their glorious but hard and thankless martial labors, and devote themselves to the service of princes, or pass the time in the splendid houses of their order, amid Oriental luxury, and surrounded by gardens like Fairyland, beguiling the hours with gaming and the chase, with songs and lovemaking, the while not neglecting their political interests. But the Templars were rapidly nearing their downfall.

3. THE SECRETS OF THE TEMPLARS.

The Arcana of the Templars consisted of a secret doctrine and of a cult based on the same. The doctrine, which had no ground in scientific research, seems to have been akin to the doctrine of certain sects, specially the Albigenses, who worshiped a superior god of heaven and an inferior god of earth, and ascribed to the latter the origin of evil. For the Templars, Christ was no Son of God, had worked no miracles, had neither risen from the dead nor ascended into heaven; he was, in fact, often spoken of as a false prophet. The Church’s doctrine regarding the transubstantiation of the bread in the mass was for them crass superstition, the eucharist only a commemorative rite, the sacrament of penance a priestly imposture, the Trinity a human invention, veneration of the cross an act of idolatry. That the opposition of the order to the last-mentioned custom led on festival occasions, and particularly when new members were admitted, to overt acts of contempt for the cross, to spitting on the cross, for example—accusations like that are grave not only from the point of view of the Church, but even of common propriety, and they played an important part in the prosecution of the Templars. That postulants were compelled by force of arms and other violent means to perform such highly reprehensible acts is not to be discredited entirely, for they may have been part of a test of the postulants’ willingness to obey superiors: and besides, the objectionable ceremony was not practiced everywhere, but only in France. More excusable was the offense of the Templars in looking on the cross broidered on their mantle, not as the sign of redemption, but as a double T, the initial letter of the name of their society. They were said also to have substituted John the Baptist in the place of Jesus as the order’s patron, because John did not pretend to miraculous powers nor declare himself the Messiah. The clerics of the order must have approved these heretical opinions and practices. There were at that time many enlightened churchmen, and it is to be presumed that the Templars would adopt such of them as were at variance with the hierarchy and took refuge in the order.

The Templars’ secret rites, introduced in the middle of the thirteenth century, were practiced as part of their peculiar religious service, and at the admission of new members: for though the Catholic liturgy was used in their chapels, the initiated performed a cult of their own in the chapter house, or chapel, before break of day. This consisted of confession and communion, as understood by Templars. This confession they regarded on the one hand as an act of brotherly trust, and on the other of brotherly counsel: hence, they confessed only to the chaplains of the order; in the latter times of the order the members were forbidden to confess to priests that were not Templars. By them the communion was taken in the natural species and substance of bread and wine, and in token of brotherly love, not as commemorative of any sacrifice.

Two images played a part in the Templar rites. The image of John the Baptist typified the order’s opposition to the Church’s creed. The other image, jealously guarded from the eyes of outsiders, has been called an “idol.” It was made chiefly of copper, gilt, and represented now a human skull, anon the countenance of an old man heavily bearded (makroprosopos), again a very small face (mikroprosopos), which would be now the face of a man, then of a woman, anon male and female at once; it would have now one, again two or three, heads, with bright shining eyes of carbuncles. The idol was by some Templars called “Bassomet,” but why, does not appear. From the statements of members of the order it would seem that this idol was a kind of talisman that brought all manner of good fortune; that it was set up for veneration as rival to the cross, and that they called it “the savior of the order.”

There were two forms of admission, the general and the special (or secret) form: the latter was used only at the admission of postulants that could be trusted with the secrets of the order. The Scribe, acting as Receptor, first asked the brethren, in chapter, if they had any objection to make the admission of the postulant. If none objected the postulant was led into an adjoining room and questioned as to his purpose in seeking entrance to the order, whether he knew of any impediment on his part, whether he owed debts that he could not pay, whether he was married or engaged to be married, and so forth. The questions having been satisfactorily answered, and the minutes of the replies reported to the brethren, the matter was again put to vote. Next, the candidate was brought before the chapter, and, after more questioning, took the vows and was formally admitted. In the secret rite of admission the Receptor showed to the candidate the Idol, with these words: “Believe in this, put your trust in this, and all will be well with you.” Then he girded the candidate with a cord of white wool fibres, the Baptist’s girdle, as it was called, which he was to wear over the shirt. The obligation of secrecy was very sternly enforced. Those who betrayed any of the secrets of the order were cast into prison, and the candidate was threatened with dungeons and death should he communicate to an outsider any information about the ceremony of initiation.

Thus did the Templars, an order instituted for the purpose of guarding the Church’s interests, in the end reject the Church’s doctrines, and adopt principles that tended inevitably to the overthrow, not only of the Papacy, but of Christianism itself. Such was the irreconcilable opposition between the avowed and the secret convictions of the Templars, and such was the hypocrisy of the order: for, though they had apostatized from the creeds of the Church, they would not formally quit her communion; and though they regarded as true many points of anti-Christian doctrine, they veiled these with mystery, or even on occasion made sport of them, instead of publishing them, as so many poor, unarmed heretics did; and hence their aspirations were foiled, and the most powerful association of that time perished, not in glorious battle, but in ignominious dungeons and at the stake.

4. THE DOWNFALL OF THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR.

The Crusades having failed utterly, the Holy Land having again come under the power of the “infidels,” and the occupation of the knightly orders having gone, the Popes cast about for a remedy for this undesirable state of things. The order of German Knights had already forestalled the problem by choosing as their theatre of action the countries on the Baltic Sea, and the Spanish orders by waging continual wars against the Moors; and the Knights of Saint John (Hospitalers) later found a place for themselves by occupying Rhodes. But the Templars were without any fit employment, and that circumstance was the occasion of their downfall. About the year 1305 Pope Clement V. proposed a union of the Templars with the Hospitalers, and, if possible, with other orders, but both Templars and Hospitalers rejected the advice.

Philip IV. (the Fair) of France found in the Templars a serious obstacle to his ambition, and in the early years of his reign sought to compel them by force to aid him in his schemes; but failing in that design, tried to win them by loading them with favors. Many different explanations have been offered to account for another change of policy on the part of Philip, but none of them is historically sound. Probably the change noticeable in the king’s attitude toward the order in 1305 was in some way connected with the outrageous doings of the Inquisition in the South of France; doubtless rumors of heresy in the Templar order had come to the omnipresent ear of the Holy Court. The Inquisitor-General of France, William Imbert, prior of the Dominicans in Paris, begged the King to call the Templars to account. The King, on Nov. 14, 1305, informed Clement V. of the accusation, but Clement, notwithstanding this, invited not only the Grandmaster of the Hospitalers, but also the head of the Templars, to meet with himself in conference about the project of a new Crusade. Yet in his letter to the Templars’ Grandmaster, James Molay (who resided in his palace in Cyprus), he counseled him to come without escort, “lest the news of his departure should give occasion to enemies (of the order) to make a sudden onslaught.” The Master of the Hospitalers was unable to come, being busied with the siege of Rhodes, and Molay, contrary to the Pope’s advice, came to France escorted by his entire council, sixty knights, and bringing the treasure and the archives of his order. In May, 1307, the Pope and the King met at Poictiers, and, it is supposed, discussed thoroughly the question of the Templars: about the same time the Templars informed the Pope of the dangers that threatened them, and asked for an investigation of the charges brought against them: such investigation the Pope decided to institute. It cannot be determined whether it was with the Pope’s approval, or against his wishes, that Philip on Oct. 13, 1307, had all the Templars in France arrested and their goods seized.

Five heads of complaint were alleged against the order; viz., profanation of the cross, worship of an idol, indecent rites of initiation, omission of the sacramental words (i.e., the words of consecration or of transubstantiation, Hoc est corpus meum) in masses performed by priests belonging to the order, and indulgence of unnatural lusts. Two days after the arrests the people of Paris, whose partiality for the Templars was feared, were assembled before the royal palace, and there were labored with by monks and royal officials, to turn them against the order. The King took up his residence in the “Temple,” the Paris house of the order, in which was hid the treasure of the Grandmaster (150,000 gold florins, and twelve horseloads of silver pence). It was not quite 500 years later when the Temple became the prison of a descendant of the King. In that same building, in presence of the masters and bachelors of the university, the trial of the Grandmaster and his brethren was commenced, and proceeded under the direction of Imbert. The procedure was the same as in the ordinary trials for heresy and witchcraft in the court of the Inquisition. Confessions were obtained by use of the torture, and it is impossible at this day to tell how much in those confessions was due to the employment of that peculiar method of eliciting truth, and how much, if any part, was prompted by the desire to atone for past offenses by truthful (even if forced) admission of guilt.

The Pope was not pleased with this turn of affairs. He claimed for himself the right to proceed against the Templars, declared that the King was infringing the privileges of the See of Rome, and attributed the action taken against the Templars to a desire to get possession of the order’s treasury and to annihilate a society whose existence was a cause of anxiety to the King. He, therefore, protested against the whole proceeding, and demanded that the arrested Templars and their property should be surrendered to him as judge of the questions at issue. The King refused, but he came to an understanding with the Pope in the matter of the prosecution, and Nov. 22 the Pope, by the bull “Pastoralis Praeeminentiae,” ordered the arrest of all the Templars throughout the Christian world. The King of England, Edward II. who was Philip’s son-in-law, obeyed this precept, though he had previously expressed disbelief of the guilt of the Templars. A like change of mind was seen in Aragon. In Cyprus the Templars attempted resistance, but submitted. Denis, King of Portugal, refused to institute a prosecution against them.

Inasmuch as the measure was one that affected all countries, the case of the Templars belonged of right to the Papal jurisdiction. Even Philip admitted this; but he mistrusted the Pope, and feared that the Templars might be acquitted, and then take revenge on the King. Negotiations were opened. The King demanded the death of the Templars, but the Pope would not consent to this till their guilt was fully proven; and again he demanded the surrender to him of their persons and their possessions. The King at last acceded to the demand, for he had need of the Pope’s assistance in procuring the election of his brother as successor to the assassinated German King, Albert.

Under the Papal jurisdiction the trials were conducted with more lenity: torture was not employed. But the Pope became convinced of the guilt of the accused; till then he had been in doubt. Molay made, without compulsion, many very important admissions, as did several high officials of the order, but on sundry points they contradicted one another. Nevertheless, the Pope was still firmly of the opinion that only individual Templars were on trial, not the order, while for the King the annihilation of the order was the main thing. August 8, 1308, the bull “Faciens Misericordiam” ordered a prosecution of the Templars in every country of Christendom; and on the 12th of the same month, by the bull “Regnans in Coelis,” a council was summoned for the year 1310, to determine the question of the Templars. Further ordinances of the Pope had to do with the surrender of the properties of the order to the Church.

Meanwhile the Pope had forgotten to aid the French King’s brother in his pretensions to the crown of the Roman Empire. On the contrary, he favored the election of Henry VII. of Luxemburg, and was glad to find in him a prince who would strenuously oppose the overweening ambition of Philip IV. The tension between the Pope and the French King was increasing, and the trials of the Templars went on sluggishly for two years more. There was much arbitrary ill-usage of Templars. The bishops, to whom the Pope had committed the prosecution of the individual members of the order, in many places gave loose rein to their ancient enmity toward the Templars, and freely used the torture; nevertheless, very many of the accused maintained the innocence of their order, and declared the prior confessions false. This can be explained only by supposing that the abuses in the order did not extend to all the houses. Molay’s behavior on his trial was neither firm nor dignified, ever balancing between self-accusation and vindication. He was never sure of his ground, sought to retard procedure, used equivocal and obscure phrases, and continually protested his orthodoxy; and the other members for the most part acted in like manner: but their excuse is the hard usage they endured, and Molay was not permitted to complain of that.

All the Templars arrested in Paris, numbering 546, were on the 28th of May, 1310, mustered in the garden of the Bishop’s palace, and there the accusation was read to them. Six of the accused—three knights and three clerics—protested in the name of all against the treatment they had received, and demanded the release of all Templars and arrest of their accusers. In vain! During the investigation thirty-six members of the order died in prison at Paris. May 12, 1310, those who had retracted their confessions, to the number of 54, were burned alive: to these were afterward added eight more, and at Rheims nine met the same fate: they all protested their innocence at the supreme moment. It is worthy of note that the Pope, who till then had favored delay in the proceedings, was now for instant action. He sharply reproved the English authorities for refusing to employ the torture; and he did his best to accomplish the destruction of the Templars at Avignon, who had taken up arms to defend themselves; but, though defeated, they were adjudged innocent; and it was the same in Castile. In Germany, where the order, though weak in numbers, made a resolute stand, the Pope offered no convincing proof of the charges; and in England, too, nothing could be proved against the accused members. But throughout the greater part of Italy the Templars fared as in France, except that they were not condemned to the stake. In vain did the celebrated Raymond Lully, at the Council of Vienne (1312), plead for the preservation of the order by a consolidation of all the military orders in one, whose Grandmaster should be that French prince who happened to be King of Jerusalem: for he hoped thus to conciliate the good will of Philip. The Pope, who had long been urged by the King to suppress the order, now made haste to save the property of the Templars from falling into secular hands, and so, by the bulls “Vox in Excelso” and “Ad Providam Christi Vicarii,” published April 3 and May 2, 1312, respectively, he made over to the Hospitalers all the estates of the Templars, estates in Spain excepted.

The unfortunate Grandmaster Molay, who received a pittance of four sous per diem to alleviate his misery, bore his imprisonment with great fortitude; but March 11, 1313, he and Godfrey de Charney, an official of the order, having retracted their confessions, were slowly burnt to death on an island in the Seine, by order of the King, without any judicial process. Molay, it is said, cited the two murderers of his brethren, Philip and Clement, to appear before the judgment seat of God. They both died, one of colic, the other in consequence of a fall from his horse, eight and thirteen months, respectively, after the death of Molay. The order was suppressed everywhere except in Portugal, where it took the name “Order of Jesus Christ,” and continued in existence. Its Grandmaster, Prince Henry the navigator, a hundred years afterward, employed its wealth in promoting the high ends of civilization. In other countries the Templars either wandered about as fugitives, or entered the order of Hospitalers. The seizure of the order’s estates in France was annulled by the bull of suppression, but Philip, nevertheless, maintained his hold on the house of the order in Paris, and on the treasure there stored. The remainder of the property was plundered by the nobility and the Church; and the Pope surely was not forgetful of his own interest. The Hospitalers afterward succeeded to their rights, but that did them hardly less harm than good, for it cost them a great sum to release the estates of the Templars from the grasp of the robbers; besides, many a small piece of property was made away with by princes, great lords, orders, churches, and monasteries.

_PART SEVENTH_
_The Femgerichte._

1. COURTS OF JUSTICE IN THE MIDDLE AGE.

The wild disorder attending the irruption of the Gothic nations having subsided, society, which had lost its bearings, had to organize itself anew. The first step toward this end was taken when society’s task was distributed among innumerable fractional parts of itself, each fraction trying to do its own share of the work; the next step was the uniting of all these fractional parts under one religious idea—that of Christianism, and under one political law—that of feudalism. The Pope and the Emperor represented the religious and the political ideas respectively. As long as one was true to Pope and Emperor—i.e., was a good Christian and a good subject—all was well with him, and he might, in all other matters, do as he pleased. The principle of Justice was not regarded: no wrong act was punished as violating right, but always as doing harm. Even murder was not regarded as infringement of human right to life, but simply as harm done to the people of the murdered one. If one was without relatives, his slayer went unpunished; but if the murdered man left a family or kinsmen, the murderer, on paying to them a certain sum, went forth free. Thus, the utmost unrestraint prevailed in the several small aggregations of people, and the utmost diversity between one little community and another. Of bureaucratic, centralized, cast-iron government there was no faintest foreshadow; nor was government a function assigned to any one, but, like the administration of justice, an acquired right. In a given province this one had acquired the government, that one the civil and a third the criminal judiciary; one was obeyed in peace, another commanded the people in war. Jurisdictions were undefined and inextricably mixed up—a consequence of the feudal system, under which the King granted rights now to one man, again to another, as favors, never inquiring how these might consist with rights previously granted to others. In this way it became possible in the Middle Age for such juristic abnormities as the Femgerichte to come into existence. The Femgerichte resulted from the confusion existing in judiciary affairs, just as the religious abnormity of the monastic orders of knights resulted from the very opposite condition of things in the Church—the excess of regulation. For the confusion (absence of regulation) and the excessive regulation were near akin; they both sprang out of the unrestraint of private life in the Middle Age, which unrestraint naturally produced, under the rule of the Church, a multitude of monastic rules (e.g., the Rule of St. Augustin, of St. Benedict, of St. Columba, etc.); while, on the contrary, the feebleness of the Empire, due to the jealousy of the Popes and the ambition and avarice of the feudal lords, was fatal to any organization of the administrative and judicial functions, and though there were many codes of law, there could be no standard for distinguishing right and wrong.

The cause of this difference of development between State and Church was, that the Church had grown from the top downward, from the hierarchy down to the people; while the State, on the contrary, had grown from below upward. During the process of migration and settlement, each nation or horde was self-governed, perfectly free and independent: hence, the popular, genial, oftentimes even jovial and humorous cast of Teutonic law, as compared with the hard, pedantic, abstruse, austere character of the Jus Romanum. Roman law has only a corpus juris; Teutonic law has Wise Saws, Juristic Proverbs, Juristic Drolleries, Juristic Myths (Weistuemer, Rechtssprichtwoerter, Rechtsschwoernke, Rechtssagen).