ITALY/VATICAN: Knights Templar win heresy reprieve after 700 years

The Vatican is about to disclose secret documents proving that the medieval fighting order, the Knights Templar, had been cleared from all accusations of heresy by the Pope - documents apparently overlooked by the French King Philip IV who burnt many templars at the stake for their supposed crimes. The Knights Templar, the medieval Christian military order accused of heresy and sexual misconduct, will soon be partly rehabilitated when the Vatican publishes trial documents it had closely guarded for 700 years. A reproduction of the minutes of trials against the Templars, "'Processus Contra Templarios -- Papal Inquiry into the Trial of the Templars'" will finally be available in a book soon to be released at the end of October. Only 799 copies of the book will be published by the Vatican Secret Archives in collaboration with Italy's Scrinium cultural foundation at a rather original price tag of 5, 900 euro per book. The epic comes in a soft leather case that includes scholarly commentary, reproductions of original parchments in Latin, and -- to tantalise Templar buffs -- replicas of the wax seals used by 14th-century inquisitors. "Finally, seven centuries after the events this very important document containing the absolution of the Knights Templar can see the light" said Rosi Fontana, a publicist working on the project on behalf of the Vatican's Secret Archives. "Pope Clement V absolved the Knights Templar from the accusation of heresy in 1308" Fontana told Reuters ahead of the official presentation of the work on October 25. The Templars, whose full name was "Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon", were founded in 1119 by knights sworn to protecting Christian pilgrims visiting the Holy Land after the Crusaders captured Jerusalem in 1099. They amassed enormous wealth and helped finance wars of some European monarchs. The Templars went into decline after Muslims re-conquered the Holy Land at the end of the 13th century and were accused of heresy by King Philip IV of France, their foremost persecutor. Their alleged offences included denying Christ and secretly worshipping idols. The most titillating part of the documents in the book is the so-called Chinon Parchment, which contains phrases in which Pope Clement V absolves the Templars of charges of heresy, which had been the backbone of King Philip's attempts to eliminate them. The parchment, also known as the Chinon Chart, was "misplaced" in the Vatican archives until 2001, when a scholar stumbled across it realising it had been catalogued incorrectly. "The Knights Templar were not ordered to dissolve their order but they had real difficulty in putting the order together again after they were absolved. They had no funds anymore, they had been partly physically destroyed and partly psychologically destroyed. So the order didn't have the ability to reassemble at that time and it has never been reassembled since" Fontana said. Many scholars have depicted the trials against the Templars between 1307 and 1312 as a battle of political wills between Clement and Philip of France. Despite the pontiff's absolution, the Templar order never reassembled after the trial. Their belongings were often handed over to other orders and institutions, as in the case of their former headquarters on Rome's Aventine hill that today belongs to the order of Maltese Knights.

ITN Source | October 12, 2007

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