Primary-Source Investigations
Friday the 13th: The Debt Cancellation
Archives nationales de France, series KK. Comptes du Trésor, 1299–1307. Maubuisson. September 14, 1307.
I have the receipts. Philip IV of France, le Bel, signs a sealed order at the royal château at Maubuisson on September 14, 1307. It goes to every royal bailli and sénéchal in the kingdom. The order directs simultaneous dawn arrests. It specifies the date. It targets every member of the Order of the Temple resident in France. It commands the impoundment of every Templar property, commandery, and treasury within French territory.
Malcolm Barber, The Trial of the Templars, second edition, Cambridge University Press, 2006, chapter 2, provides the standard modern treatment. I pulled it through the pipeline. It passed the gate. The source is named. The archive is public. The date is certain.
The order opens with this language: Chose amère, chose lamentable, chose certes horrible à penser, terrible à ouïr, détestable crime, œuvre exécrable, chose presque inhumaine, assurément étrangère à toute humanité…
A bitter thing, a lamentable thing, a thing certainly horrible to contemplate, terrible to hear, a detestable crime, an execrable work, an almost inhuman thing, assuredly foreign to all humanity…
Thirty-seven words of moral horror. The sentence continues for another hundred and twelve words before reaching the arrest directive. I counted them. I sat here at 2:15 AM with a French-English dictionary and I counted them because the machine requires the claim to be precise.
At the date of the order, the royal treasury of France was held on deposit at the Paris Temple. Philip IV had debts to the Order of the Temple. These debts were incurred during his wars against England, Flanders, and the papacy itself. The sums are reconstructed from the Comptes du Trésor for the years 1299 through 1307, preserved at the Archives nationales de France, series KK. The reconstruction is not contested. The debts were real. They were large.
The arrests occurred at dawn on Friday, October 13, 1307.
This is the origin of the superstition. You have heard it your entire life. You have never been told where it came from. Now you have been told. The superstition is not about bad luck. The superstition is about what happens when a sovereign owes money to an entity that is too powerful to be refused and too dangerous to be paid.
Royal inquisitors administered torture during the interrogations. This produced the confessions the chancellery required. They were confessions of apostasy, of spitting on the cross, of idolatry, of sodomy, of the worship of a head called Baphomet. A substantial portion of the arrested Templars recanted these confessions as soon as they left the torture rooms. The recantations carried no weight. The chancellery had what it needed.
The Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, was held for seven years. He was burned alive on the Île des Javiaux in the Seine on March 18, 1314. Geoffroi of Paris, chronicler at the royal court, noted that de Molay cried from the pyre a curse upon Philip IV and Pope Clement V. He summoned both to meet him before the judgment seat of God within the year. Clement V died on April 20, 1314. Philip IV died on November 29, 1314.
On March 22, 1312, the apostolic bull Vox in excelso was issued. Pope Clement V, at the Council of Vienne, formally suppressed the Order of the Temple. The Latin text is in the Acta Concilii Viennensis, Vatican Apostolic Archive, Reg. Avin. 48.
The bull did not adjudicate the Order guilty. It suppressed the Order by apostolic provision, citing scandal as the irrecoverable ground. The bull did not try the Order. It dissolved it.
The Order's holdings were transferred by that same bull to the Knights Hospitaller. The French holdings, however, remained under royal custody. They served to discharge the Crown's prior debts to the Order.
Read that sentence again.
The Crown's debts were discharged using the Order's own assets. The Crown had seized those assets under a legal process the Pope himself declined to adjudicate on the merits.
That is how it is done. It was done that way in 1307. The same people wrote the debt instruments. They wrote the arrest orders. They wrote the suppression bull. They wrote the asset-transfer decrees. Different signatures. Same drawer.
I see this structure repeat.
The designated external party varies. The procedure does not.
Primary sources: Archives nationales de France, Comptes du Trésor, series KK (1299–1307); Malcolm Barber, The Trial of the Templars, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2006), ch. 2; Acta Concilii Viennensis, Vatican Apostolic Archive, Reg. Avin. 48 (Vox in excelso, 22 March 1312); Geoffroi of Paris, Chronique (1314).