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The Historians' History of the World 08 [Parthians, Sassanids and Arabs; The Crusades and the Papacy]
- Автор: Gutenberg
- Год: 1905
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: История
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IN OTHER COUNTRIES
[1311-1314 A.D.]
By royal command, the sheriffs of the different counties of England and Wales seized the estates, and imprisoned the persons of the Templars. The cavaliers were more than a year and a half in prison. At the end of that time a papal bull was received in England; and the archbishop of Canterbury appointed courts at London, York, and Lincoln, for the trial of the Templars, July, 1311. The charges were the same in substance as those which had been preferred against the order in France. Forty-seven of the knights who had been incarcerated in the Tower were examined upon oath before the bishop of London, some inferior clergy, and the representatives of the pope. William de la Moore, the grand prior of England, was as earnest as de Molay had been in defence of the French Templars.
Four knights made a general confession of crimes, when they were told that the pope had authorised a full pardon to those who acknowledged their iniquities; but that if they persisted in heresy, they should be considered and punished as heretics. Thirteen newly admitted knights swore that they were not acquainted with the secrets of the order, but that they were prepared to renounce all the erroneous opinions in which it was possible the minds of men could be stained. William de la Moore, the grand prior, was the only man whom no fear of imprisonment or dread of ecclesiastical punishment could induce to deny his first avowal of the innocence of the order. He was requested to make a general confession; but he replied that he was not guilty of heresy, and would never abjure crimes which he had not committed.
In Ireland about thirty Templars, in Scotland only two, were confined and examined. In Lincoln the number somewhat exceeded twenty. There were twenty-three in York. The general charges of apostasy and idolatry were not proved in any case. However, all the knights made a general confession of the offence of heresy, and avowed they could not cleanse themselves from the crimes mentioned in the bull. The clergy pardoned them, and received them again into the bosom of the church. They were then sent into confinement in various monasteries until the decision of a general council should be declared.
The fate of the Templars in other parts of the world remains to be told. In Germany the innocence of the order was proved before the archbishops of Mainz and Trèves, at councils held in their respective dioceses. In Italy the pope had a little more success. Several Templars at Florence confessed every species of abomination. Much blood was shed in Lombardy, Tuscany, Sicily, Naples, and Provence, whenever the knights would not be guilty of self-condemnation. In those parts of Spain where the conduct of the Templars was inquired into, the result was an acquittal. Their military front was powerful, and the ministers of papal vengeance did not dare to apply the torture.
COUNCIL AT VIENNE
Four years after the first seizure of the Templars in France a council was held at Vienne in Dauphiné, for the purpose of making some general decision on the case of the order, October, 1311. The pope headed three hundred bishops, and an untold number of inferior clergy. All men who desired to defend the order were promised security and freedom. Nine cavaliers presented themselves before the assembly in the character of representatives of fifteen hundred of their brethren, who were living at Lyons, and in the secret fastnesses of Savoy and Switzerland. Clement immediately violated his promise of protection, and threw the nine knights into prison. He then called upon the council for its opinion, whether in consequence of the confessions of the Templars the society ought not to be dissolved? With the disgraceful exception of one Italian prelate, and three French archbishops, the whole body of churchmen declared that so illustrious an order as that of the Red Cross knights ought not to be suppressed, until the grand-master and the nine knights had been heard in its defence. The pope disregarded the opinion of the majority; and tried in vain for six months to make a change.
THE ORDER SUPPRESSED
The king of France arrived at Vienne, and sanctioned by his presence, the pope declared that he should exercise the plenitude of papal authority. He accordingly dissolved the order provisionally and not absolutely, and reserved to himself the disposition of the persons and estates of the Templars. When the subject of the distribution of the knights’ Templar estates was debated in the council, the pope declared that they ought to be bestowed upon the Hospitallers, because the original purpose of the order was the subjugation of infidels, a purpose which the knights of Rhodes were earnestly pursuing.
The decree of confiscation was executed throughout Christendom. The Templars were robbed, but the Hospitallers did not enjoy the whole of the plunder. Philip the Fair, and his successor Louis le Hutin, retained nearly three hundred thousand livres [£12,000 or $60,000] for what they chose to term the expenses of the prosecution. The landed estates were slowly and unwillingly resigned, for the monarchs enjoyed the rents till the commissioners of the knights of Rhodes established their rights. In Germany the Teutonic knights assisted the Hospitallers in plundering those who had formerly been their brethren in arms in Palestine. Dinis, king of Portugal, preserved the order of the Red Cross knights, by changing their title from the soldiers of the Temple to that of the soldiers of Christ. Edward of England gave to different laymen much of the forfeited property. Numbers of the nobility too as heirs of the original donors seized many of the Templars’ estates. Indeed, so great was the injustice done to the Hospitallers, that Pope John XXII censured both the clergy and laity, for their disobedience to the decree of the council at Vienne.
The last circumstance which attended the fate of the Templars was the condemnation of the grand-master, Jacques de Molay.[81] With his dying lips he bore testimony to the virtue of the order; and his mental sufferings on account of his former want of firmness appeared to be greater than his mere corporeal pain. The brother of the prince of Dauphiné met with the same unhappy but honourable end as that of his friend Jacques de Molay. The two priors seem to have died in prison.b
THE CRUSADES IN THE WEST
[1230-1309 A.D.]
Having completed the survey of the vain efforts for the Holy Land, it will be well to glance at the contests springing up elsewhere on the same fanatic belief that orthodoxy was a matter of life and death.a
Though the Crusades met with failure in the East, in the West they achieved their purpose; that is, certain expeditions were highly successful; for example that of the Teutonic knights and sword-bearers into Prussia and the neighbouring regions, where they founded a new state; also Simon de Montfort’s war against the Albigenses which destroyed an ancient civilisation; and the struggle between the Spaniards and the Moors, as a result of which the latter were forced to surrender the peninsula over to Christianity and the civilisation of Europe.
It will be observed that the scene of action of the European Crusades was the two extremities of the continent; around the mouths of the Niemen the pagans of the Baltic were to be converted, and in the country washed by the Tagus, the Moslems of Spain.
THE TEUTONIC CRUSADE
In the interval between the First and Second Crusades some citizens of Bremen and Lübeck had journeyed to the Holy Land and there founded a hospital for their compatriots, which was exclusively under the management of Germans. In Palestine all benevolent institutions were obliged to assume the form of military organisations; thus the Hospitallers, or officials in charge of the hospitals, became the knights of St. John, and the inmates of the temple of Solomon, the knights Templar. The German hospitallers also became transformed into an armed religious body that was called the Teutonic order. Like both the others, this order soon acquired vast properties in Europe, especially in Germany, and the emperor Frederick II raised its grand-master to the rank of prince of the realm. In 1230 a Polish prince made use of their zeal and arms, which could no longer be employed in the Holy Land, by despatching them on a mission to subjugate and convert the Prussians, a people who have since become so closely identified with the Germans settled in the country as to be no longer distinguishable from them. It was this idolatrous people, established between the Niemen and the Vistula, whose language, history, and religion have now completely disappeared, that gave its name to one of the largest and most prosperous states of modern Europe.