March 18, 1314, Jacques de Molay, the 23rd and last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, was sentenced to death together with Geoffroi de Charney. They were burned at the stake on the Ile des Javiaux near the middle of the Seine River in Paris, France.
The Knights Templar had amassed a great deal of wealth and influence and thus became targets of retribution, both by the ruling classes of France led by King Philip IV and the Catholic Church headed by Pope Clement V.
Trumped-up charges of sodom... moreMarch 18, 1314, Jacques de Molay, the 23rd and last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, was sentenced to death together with Geoffroi de Charney. They were burned at the stake on the Ile des Javiaux near the middle of the Seine River in Paris, France.
The Knights Templar had amassed a great deal of wealth and influence and thus became targets of retribution, both by the ruling classes of France led by King Philip IV and the Catholic Church headed by Pope Clement V.
Trumped-up charges of sodomy and blasphemy were brought against the religious order and Molay and several other Knights were arrested and made to confess to these crimes. They were most likely tortured by Inquisitors hired by the pope. The French king himself had borrowed a great sum of money from the Knights Templar and saw this as an opportunity to confiscate the massive amount of wealth and land they possessed.
Continuing to protest his innocence even while on the smoldering pyre, Molay is said to have shouted out as he was about to be executed, "From this your heinous judgement to the living and true God, who is in Heaven", warning the Pope that, within a year and a day, he and King Philip IV would be obliged to answer for their crimes in God's presence.
Lo and behold, Philip and Clement V both died within a year of Molay's execution; Clement succumbed to a long illness on 20 April 1314, and Philip died due to a stroke while hunting. Then followed the rapid succession of the last Direct Capetian kings of France between 1314 and 1328, the three sons and a grandson of Philip IV. Within fourteen years of the death of Molay, the 300-year-old House of Capet collapsed.
In September 2001, Barbara Frale found a copy of the Chinon Parchment in the Vatican Secret Archives, a document which explicitly confirms that in 1308 Pope Clement V absolved Jacques de Molay and other leaders of the Order including Geoffroi de Charney and Hugues de Pairaud. She published her findings in the Journal of Medieval History in 2004. Another Chinon parchment dated 20 August 1308 addressed to Philip IV of France, well known to historians, stated that absolution had been granted to all those Templars that had confessed to heresy "and restored them to the Sacraments and to the unity of the Church.
