Grand Master of the Knights Templar

“ The Knights Templars, in an evil hour for themselves, resolved to spend their time of expectation in their numerous rich commanderies in Europe, where they had no employment but to collect their revenues and keep their swords bright; and it cannot but be supposed that they would thus be tempted into vicious and overbearing habits, while the sight of so formidable a band of warriors, owning no obedience but to their Grand Master and the Pope, must have been alarming to the sovereign of the country. ”

“ The Templars, notwithstanding their disasters, successfully defended all their strong fortresses in Palestine against the efforts of the Carizmians, and gradually recovered their footing in the Holy Land. The galleys of the Order kept the command of the sea, and succour speedily arrived to them from their western brethren. A general chapter of knights was assembled in the Pilgrim’s Castle, and the veteran warrior, brother William de Sonnac, was chosen Grand Master of the Order. ”

“ The mode of reception into the Order corresponded with the dignity and importance of the character of a Knight Templar. Though a noviciate was enjoined by the original canons, in practice it was dispensed with; the candidate was, after all due inquiry had been made, received in a chapter assembled in the chapel of the Order. All strangers, even the relatives of the aspirant, were excluded. ”

“ The conflict was so severe at this point, that the earth could scarcely be seen behind the spot occupied by the Templars, so completely was it covered with [415] arrows and javelins. The grand master of the Templars lost his life in the mêlée, and a great number of knights died in defending or avenging him. The prodigies of their bravery at last succeeded in arresting the progress of the enemy, and the last who fell in this hardly-contested battle had the consolation, when dying, to see the Saracens fly. ”

“ The ordinary business and the government of the fraternity in secular matters were conducted by the Master with the assistance of his particular chapter of the Latin kingdom, which was composed of such of the Grand Priors and chief dignitaries of the Temple as happened to be present in the East, and such of the knights as were deemed the wisest and most fit to give counsel. ”

“ In truth, the cavaliers were not guilty,—the brother hood was not suppressed,—and, startling as is the assertion, there has been a succession of Knights Templars from the twelfth century down even to these days; the chain of transmission is perfect in all its [Pg 40] links. Jacques de Molay, the Grand Master at the time of the persecution, anticipating his own martyrdom, appointed as his successor, in power and dignity, Johannes Marcus Larmenius of Jerusalem, and from that time to the present there has been a regular and uninterrupted line of Grand Masters. ”

“ Ferinsius le Mareschal, a secular knight, being examined, declared that his grandfather entered into the order of the Temple, active, healthy, and blithesome as the birds and the dogs, but on the third day from his taking the vows he was dead, and, as he now suspects, was killed because he refused to participate in the iniquities practised by the brethren. An Augustine monk declared that he had heard a Templar say that a man after death had no more soul than a dog. ”

“ It is highly honorable to all those worthy Knights, who with good faith and diligence, perform its many important duties. The honorable situation to which you are now advanced, and the illustrious office which you now fill is one that was much desired by the first noblemen of Italy, but ambition and jealousy caused his highness, Pope Alexander, to call on his ancient friend, the Grand Master of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, to guard his person and the Holy See, as those Knights were known to be well grounded in the faith, and zealous followers of the Lord. ”

“ Aware of the dangers to which his character and person would be exposed by pardoning the surviving Templars, the French Monarch commanded the Grand Master and his Brethren to be led out to a scaffold, erected for the purpose, and there to confess before the public, the enormities of which their Order had been guilty, and the justice of the punishment which had been inflicted on their brethren. ”

“ The Templars were bound to go to mass three times a week, and to communicate thrice a year; they wore a white robe symbolical of purity, to which Pope Eugenius III. added a red cross, to remind them of their oath to be always ready to shed their blood in defence of the Christian religion. Their rules were of great austerity; they prescribed perpetual exile, and war for the holy places to the death. The knights were to accept every combat, however outnumbered they might be, to ask no quarter, and to give no ransom. ”

“ An astonishing enthusiasm was excited throughout Christendom in behalf of the Templars; princes and nobles, sovereigns and their subjects, vied with each other in heaping gifts and benefits upon them, and scarce a will of importance was made without an article in it in their favour. Many illustrious persons on their deathbeds took the vows, that they might be buried in the habit of the order; and sovereign princes, quitting the government of their kingdoms, enrolled themselves amongst the holy fraternity, and bequeathed even their dominions to the Master and the brethren of the Temple. ”

“ Each province of the Order had a Grand Prior, who represented in it the Grand Master; each house had its Prior at its head, who commanded its Knights in war, and presided over its chapters in peace. In England, the Grand Prior sat in Parliament as a Peer of the Realm. To complete [Pg 22] this sketch of the Order, we may remark, that except Scandinavia, (for they had some possessions in Hungary,) there was not a country in Europe in which the lavish piety of princes and nobles had not bestowed on the Templars a considerable portion of the wealth of the state ”

“ Few, if any, of the old Knights who belonged to the Order in its palmy days are now alive. One of the last of these was the Chevalier Grěche, who died at Malta in 1838, where he had continued to linger amid the scenes of his Order's former greatness and glory. He was of a French family, and, it is said, spoke French of the time of Louis XIV. He was page to the last Grand Master at Malta, in which capacity there is a full-length portrait of him in the palace of a Portuguese Knight. ”

“ It was said that the great hidden treasure is guarded by an immense serpent, which, when any one was so foolhardy as to attempt its recovery, blew out his candles and then devoured him at leisure. On the night before Maundy Thursday, at the hour of twelve, the master knight, clad all in his Templar's armor regalia, and bearing the scarlet cross upon his breast, rides the ruins with his cohort: but to no one save a true and devout Catholic was this vision vouchsafed, so it was said. ”

“ Enthusiasts in religion or politics are supported by the consciousness of rectitude, and bear up against privations or torture in firm reliance on the favour of the Divinity, or the praise and esteem of a grateful and admiring posterity. But the great majority of the Templars were far from being such characters; they were illiterate knights, who had long lived in luxury and indulged in arrogance; they knew themselves to be objects of dislike to many, and felt that their power was gone. ”

“ The Master, Philip of Naplous, resigned his authority after a short government of three years, and was succeeded by Brother Odo de St. Amand, a proud and fiery warrior, of undaunted courage and resolution; having, according to William, Archbishop of Tyre, the fear neither of God nor of man before his eyes. [76]
The Templars were now destined to meet with a more [Pg 61] formidable opponent than any they had hitherto encountered in the field, one who was again to cause the crescent to triumph over the cross, and to plant the standard of the prophet upon the walls of the holy city. ”

“ On the fixt day she seeks the temple, dight
With precious jewels and with goodly gear;
Where her lord's tomb, befitting such a knight,
Built by her order, two fair pillars rear.
The holy office there, with solemn rite,
Is sung, which men and women troop to hear ”

“ Templar replied, “You see us externally, but not internally; take heed what you do; but I shall say no more;” and the deponent further declares, that on another occasion the said Master William entered into the Temple Hall, and found there an old Templar, who was playing at the game called Daly; and the old Templar observing that there was no one in the hall besides himself and the said Master William, said to the latter, “If you enter into our order, it will be the worse for you.” ”

“ A chosen band of knighthood, admitted by a special initiation, their honor is their best possession. One mean device, one coward's trick, one unfair blow, and the whole brotherhood of these Knights Templars is disgraced. They live to battle with oppression and with wrong. ”

“ For more than a hundred years the Templars had been one of the wealthiest and most influential factors in European politics. If we confine our attention to the East, we realize but a smallPower and Influence of the order. part of their enormous power. Two Templars were appointed guardians of the disputed castles on the betrothal of Prince Henry of England and the French princess in 1161. Other Templars were almoners of Henry III of England and of Philip IV of France. One grand master was godfather to a daughter of Louis IX ”

“ The proud and powerful Knights Templars were succeeded in the occupation of the Temple by a body of learned lawyers, who took possession of the old hall and the gloomy cells of the military monks, and converted the chief house of their order into the great and most antient Common Law University of England.
For more than five centuries the retreats of the religious warriors have been devoted to “the studious and eloquent pleaders of causes,” a new kind of Templars, who, as Fuller quaintly observes, now “defend one Christian from another as the old ones did Christians from Pagans.” ”

“ Though no sworded foe might outskill them in the fence, yet the work of luxury crawled beneath their guard, gnawing the core of knightly troth, nibbling the monastic vows, till at last the monk’s austerity relaxed to wassailing, and the sworn knights-bachelors grew to be but hypocrites and rakes.
But for all this, quite unprepared were we to learn that Knights-Templars (if at all in being) were so entirely secularized as to be reduced from carving out immortal fame in glorious battling for the Holy Land, to the carving of roast mutton at a dinner-board. ”

“ Medieval chivalry, in its first bloom, was bound to blend with monachism. From this union were born the military orders of the Templars, of Saint John, of the Teutonic knights, and also those of Spain. Soon, however, or rather from the very beginning, reality gives the lie to the ideal, and accordingly the ideal will soar more and more towards the regions of fantasy, there to preserve the traits of asceticism and sacrifice too rarely visible in real life. The knight-errant, fantastic and useless, will always be poor and without ties, as the first Templars had been. ”

“ Often they stayed to look on the church, the church of the Knight Templars, those terrible and mysterious knights who, with crossed legs for sign of mission, and with long swords and kite-shaped shields, lie upon the pavement of the church. ”

“ The Templars soon became, in fact, the most distinguished of the Christian warriors. By a rule of their Order, no brother could be redeemed for a higher ransom than a girdle or a knife, or some such trifle; [6] captivity was therefore equivalent to death, and they always fought with Spartan desperation. The Bauseant was always in the thick of the battle; the revenue they enjoyed enabled them to draw to their standard valiant secular knights and stout and hardy footmen. ”