![]() ![]() Thus the last Master of the Knights of the Temple of Jerusalem was reduced to ashes. As the old men were roasted alive, they shouted their innocence and their love for Jesus Christ before falling silent. The King’s police seized the two knights and chained them to the stakes. I have no use for days of sorrow earned only by lies.” ![]() I shall not confirm a first lie with a second. “But my crime is this: that I confessed to malicious charges made against an order that is innocent so that I could escape further torture. “On this terrible day,” shouted de Molay, his gaze meeting the eyes of the crowd, “in my final hour, I shall let truth triumph and declare, before heaven and all the saints, that I have committed the greatest of all crimes.” The crowd pressed in. Then de Molay and Geoffrey de Charney of Normandy stepped forward. Two of the knights, eyes cast downward, mumbled their guilt. Five stakes piled high with brushwood and faggots awaited them if they did not. But mercy would yet be theirs if they repeated to the people of Paris the guilt they had confessed before the inquisition. ![]() In the end, Pope Clement V abolished the order.Īs a large crowd closed around the scaffold, the last Master of the Knights of the Temple of Jerusalem, 70-year-old Jacques de Molay, stood alongside three of his brothers in arms, listening as the papal legate read their crimes in horrible detail. After the arrests came seven years of inquisition, then hundreds and hundreds of public executions by burning. The things the knights confessed under torture defied belief: trampling and urinating on the Crucifix, secret rites of obscene kisses, sodomy, usury, treason, idolatry, heresy. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |