Under torture, the Templar Grand Master himself, Jacques de Molay, confessed — though it is likely that his confession was fabricated or at least added to, since he was dumbfounded when it was read out to him. When he tried to mount a defence on behalf of the Templar Order, he was told that "in cases of heresy and the faith it was necessary to proceed simply, summarily, and without the noise of advocates and the form of judges"*. Since all of the Order's assets had been seized there was in any case no way for him to mount an effective defence. By asking to do so he invited death at the stake, as a number of churchmen pointed out at the time.
After years in prison and unknown amounts of torture he confessed in exchange for the promise of a sentence of perpetual imprisonment. The sentence was to be delivered in public, but did not go as planned. As an expert on the Inquisition, put it:
Quote: "The cardinals dallied with their duty until 18 March 1314, when, on a scaffold in front of Notre Dame, Jacques de Molay, Templar Grand Master, Geoffroi de Charney, Master of Normandy, Hugues de Peraud, Visitor of France, and Godefroi de Gonneville, Master of Aquitaine, were brought forth from the jail in which for nearly seven years they had lain, to receive the sentence agreed upon by the cardinals, in conjunction with the Archbishop of Sens and some other prelates whom they had called in. Considering the offences which the culprits had confessed and confirmed, the penance imposed was in accordance with rule—that of perpetual imprisonment. The affair was supposed to be concluded when, to the dismay of the prelates and wonderment of the assembled crowd, de Molay and Geoffroi de Charney arose. They had been guilty, they said, not of the crimes imputed to them, but of basely betraying their Order to save their own lives. It was pure and holy; the charges were fictitious and the confessions false. Hastily the cardinals delivered them to the Prevot of Paris, and retired to deliberate on this unexpected contingency, but they were saved all trouble. When the news was carried to Philippe he was furious. A short consultation with his council only was required. The canons pronounced that a relapsed heretic was to be burned without a hearing; the facts were notorious and no formal judgment by the papal commission need be waited for. That same day, by sunset, a pile was erected on a small island in the Seine, the Isle des Juifs, near the palace garden. There de Molay and de Charney were slowly burned to death, refusing all offers of pardon for retraction, and bearing their torment with a composure which won for them the reputation of martyrs among the people, who reverently collected their ashes as relics."
(Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages Vol. III, NY: Hamper & Bros, Franklin Sq. 1888, p. 325)
Jacques de Molay and Geoffroi de Charney were roasted alive, slowly, over a smokeless fire. (A document known as the Chinon Parchment, discovered in September 2001 by Barbara Frale in the Vatican Secret Archives, confirms that Pope Clement V knew Jacques de Molay and other leaders of the Order to be innocent as early as 1208).
Templar assets were divided up between Church and State, and interest in the fates of individual Templars immediately subsided.
The activities of the Medieval Inquisition were so terrible that the memory of them has survived throughout Europe to the present day. Some Christians acknowledge that the Inquisition was one of the most sinister that the world has ever known, and now attribute its work to satanic forces. On the other hand there are many others prepared to defend its record.
The Spanish Inquisition The Medieval Inquisition was established in Barcelona in 1233. Five years later its authority was extended to Castile, Leon and Navarre. This was essentially an extension of the Inquisition established to extirpate the remnants of Catharism. Over 200 years later another inquisition was to appear : the Spanish Inquisition. Their Roman Catholic Majesties, Ferdinand and Isabella, established it in 1479, with the explicit sanction of Pope Sixtus IV, who in 1483 also confirmed the Dominican friar Thomas de Torquemada as Grand Inquisitor for Aragon and Castile. The Inquisition was initially directed against Jewish and Muslim converts who were suspected of returning to their own religion, and thus being guilty of apostasy. (Many had converted to Christianity only under threat of death.)
The first European who regularly smoked tobacco, Rodrigo de Jerez, a crewman on the Santa Maria was imprisoned by the Spanish Inquisition for his "sinful and infernal" habits, because "only Devil could give a man the power to exhale smoke from his mouth." He was released seven years later, after smoking tobacco had become popular.
The process was much the same as that of the Medieval Inquisition, and indeed was deliberately modelled on it. It too was manned mainly by Dominicans. They copied the methods of arrest, trial, punishment, staffing, and procedure, even down to the blessing of the instruments of torture. Llorente, vicar-general to the bishop of Calahorra and historian of the Inquisition, computed that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burnt at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321.
[Cont'd]