The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, mainly known as the Knights Templar, was a French military order of the Catholic faith, and one of the wealthiest and most popular military orders in Western Christianity. They were founded c. 1119 to defend pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem, with their headquarters located there on the Temple Mount, and existed for nearly two centuries during the Middle Ages.
Pope Benedict XII, born Jacques Fournier, was a cardinal and inquisitor, later head of the Catholic Church from 30 December 1334 to his death, in April 1342. He was the third Avignon pope and reformed monastic orders and opposed nepotism. Unable to remove his capital to Rome or Bologna, Benedict started the great palace at Avignon. He settled the beatific vision controversy of Pope John XXII with the bull Benedictus Deus, which stated that souls may attain the "fullness of the beatific vision" before the Last Judgment. Despite many diplomatic attempts with Emperor Louis IV to resolve their differences, Benedict failed to bring the Holy Roman Empire back under papal dominance. He died 25 April 1342 and was buried in Avignon.
Pope Clement V, born Raymond Bertrand de Got, was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 5 June 1305 to his death, in April 1314. He is remembered for suppressing the order of the Knights Templar and allowing the execution of many of its members. A Frenchman by birth, Clement moved the Papacy from Rome to Avignon, ushering in the period known as the Avignon Papacy.
Year 1307 (MCCCVII) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Julian calendar.
Pope John XXII, born Jacques Duèze, was head of the Catholic Church from 7 August 1316 to his death, in December 1334. He was the second and longest-reigning Avignon Pope, elected by the Conclave of Cardinals, which was assembled in Lyon. Like his predecessor, Clement V, Pope John centralized power and income in the Papacy and lived a princely life in Avignon.
The Avignon Papacy was the period from 1309 to 1376 during which seven successive popes resided in Avignon rather than in Rome. The situation arose from the conflict between the papacy and the French crown, culminating in the death of Pope Boniface VIII after his arrest and maltreatment by Philip IV of France. Following the subsequent death of Pope Benedict XI, Philip forced a deadlocked conclave to elect the French Clement V as pope in 1305. Clement refused to move to Rome, and in 1309 he moved his court to the papal enclave at Avignon, where it remained for the next 67 years. This absence from Rome is sometimes referred to as the "Babylonian captivity" of the Papacy.
Year 1309 (MCCCIX) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Julian calendar.
Year 1312 (MCCCXII) was a leap year starting on Saturday of the Julian calendar.
Year 1311 (MCCCXI) was a common year starting on Friday of the Julian calendar.
Philip IV, called Philip the Fair, was King of France from 1285 to 1314. By virtue of his marriage with Joan I of Navarre, he was also King of Navarre as Philip I from 1284 to 1305, as well as Count of Champagne. Although Philip was known to be handsome, hence the epithet le Bel, his rigid, autocratic, imposing, and inflexible personality gained him other nicknames, such as the Iron King. His fierce opponent Bernard Saisset, bishop of Pamiers, said of him: "He is neither man nor beast. He is a statue."
Jacques de Molay, also spelled "Molai", was the 23rd and last grand master of the Knights Templar, leading the order sometime before 20 April 1292 until it was dissolved by order of Pope Clement V in 1312. Though little is known of his actual life and deeds except for his last years as Grand Master, he is one of the best known Templars.
Geoffroi de Charney, also known as Guy d'Auvergne, was preceptor of Normandy for the Knights Templar. In 1307 de Charny was arrested, along with the entire Order of Knights Templar in France, and in 1314 was burned at the stake.
The Beguines and the Beghards were Christian lay religious orders that were active in Western Europe, particularly in the Low Countries, in the 13th–16th centuries. Their members lived in semi-monastic communities but did not take formal religious vows; although they promised not to marry "as long as they lived as Beguines", to quote an early Rule of Life, they were free to leave at any time. Beguines were part of a larger spiritual revival movement of the 13th century that stressed imitation of Jesus' life through voluntary poverty, care of the poor and sick, and religious devotion.
The Chinon Parchment is a historical document discovered in September 2001 by Barbara Frale, an Italian paleographer at the Vatican Apostolic Archive. On the basis of this document she has claimed that, in 1308, Pope Clement V absolved the last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, and the rest of the leadership of the Knights Templar from charges brought against them by the Medieval Inquisition.
The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Jerusalem, or Templars, was a military order founded in c. 1120.
Vox in excelso is a bull issued by Pope Clement V on 22 March 1312. The directives given within the bull were to formally dissolve the Order of the Knights Templar, effectively removing papal support for them and revoking the mandates given to them by previous popes in the 12th and 13th centuries.
In view of the suspicion, infamy, loud insinuations and other things which have been brought against the order ... and also the secret and clandestine reception of the brother of this Order; in view, moreover, of the serious scandal which has arisen from these things, which it did not seem could be stopped while the Order remained in being, and the danger to faith and souls, and the many horrible things which have been done by the very many of the brothers of this Order, who have lapsed into the sin of wicked apostasy, the crime of detestable idolatry, and the execrable outrage of the Sodomites ... it is not without bitterness and sadness of heart that we abolish the aforesaid Order of the Temple, and its constitution, habit and name, by an irrevocable and perpetually valid decree; and we subject it to perpetual prohibition with the approval of the Holy Council, strictly forbidding anyone to presume to enter the said Order in the future, or to receive or wear its habit, or to act as a Templar.
In 1307, members of the Knights Templar in the Kingdom of France were suddenly charged with heresy and arrested after their leader, Master Jacques de Molay, had recently come to France for meetings with Pope Clement V. Many, including their leader, were burned at the stake while others were sentenced to perpetual imprisonment. The events in France led to a series of trials in other locations, not all of which had the same outcome.
Faciens misericordiam was a papal bull issued by Pope Clement V on August 12, 1308, as part of the trial against the Knights Templar. It called for a new Ecumenical council to be held in 1310, and set out some structure for the collection of depositions from the arrested Templars.
The Crusades after the fall of Acre, 1291–1399 represent the later Crusades that were called for by papal authorities in the century following the fall of Acre and subsequent loss of the Holy Land by the West in 1302. These include further plans and efforts for the recovery of the Holy Land, the later popular Crusades, Crusades against Christians, political Crusades, the latter parts of the Reconquista, and the Northern Crusades. Crusades were to continue well into the fifteenth century and would include those against the Ottoman Empire.
The theme of recovery of the Holy Land was a genre in High–Late Medieval Christian literature about the Crusades. It consisted of treatises and memoranda on how to recover the Holy Land for Christendom, first appearing in preparation for the Second Council of Lyon in 1274. They proliferated following the loss of Acre in 1291, shortly after which the permanent Crusader presence in the Holy Land came to an end, but mostly disappeared with the cancellation of Philip VI of France's planned crusade in 1336 and the start of the Hundred Years' War between England and France the next year. The high point of recovery proposals was the pontificate of Clement V.
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