Vatican presents Templar book

2007-10-25 21:10

Vatican City - Medieval cloak-and-dagger buffs eager to pour over the details of the trial that banished the Knights Templar to history's mysterious mists can now do so, provided they can fork out €5 900.

The Vatican on Thursday presented 799 copies of the book Processus contra Templarios, or the Trial against the Templars, containing a replica of a 14th Century document chronicling the trial which absolved the warrior-monks of much of the evil-doing attributed to them.

Of the 800, leather-bound copies published, one has been gifted to Pope Benedict XVI while the remainder are priced at €5 900 apiece.

Inside punters will find the copy of the Act of Chinon - a parchment dated 1308 and rediscovered in 2001 in the Vatican's Secret Archives where it had been mislaid for centuries.

In the Act of Chinon, the then Pope Clement V absolves the Templar leaders - most of whom had by that time been tortured an executed under the orders of France's King Philip IV - the Vatican said.

Known for fighting skills

Clement also concluded that the order's initiation ceremony involving the "spitting on the cross", "denying Jesus" and the kissing of the lower back, navel and mouth of a fellow-Templar did not constitute serious blasphemy.

Members of the Order of the Knights Templars, founded in the aftermath of the First Crusade of 1096 to ensure the safety of Christians pilgrims journeying to the Holy Land, were initially known for their fighting skills.

But in time their wealth and power grew as did rumours about their rituals and customs, the latter fuelled by the Templars' sworn secrecy.

Philip IV, also known as The Fair, was heavily indebted to the Templars and needing money to finance his war with the English, ordered mass arrests against members of the order in 1307.

Following the trials in France in which scores of confessions - many of them extracted through torture - of heresies committed by Templars were presented, Clement V instructed Christian monarchs in Europe to arrest all Templars and seize their assets.

Sodomy, blasphemy and witchcraft were among the crimes for which scores of Templars were burnt at the stake.

Immoral conduct

Clement finally dissolved the order in 1312, but the myths surrounding the Templars have lived on, most recently in Dan Brown's best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code and the Hollywood blockbuster based on it.

Still, the Vatican says the Act of Chinon shows that Clement believed members of the order may have been guilty of some immoral conduct, but not blasphemy. He also believed the order could continue operating albeit with some reforms.

However, this never happened as Clement "unable to oppose himself to the will" of Philip, the Vatican said. - Sapa-dpa

- SAPA