Jacques de Molay (est. 1244–5/1249–50 – 18 March 1314) was the 23rd and officially last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, leading the Order from approximately 1292 until the Order was dissolved by order of the Pope in 1312.
He is probably the best known Templar, along with the Order’s founder and first Grand Master, Hugues de Payens (1070-1136). His goal as Grand Master was to reform the Order, and adjust it to the situation in the Holy Land during the waning days of the Crusades.
With no crusader states remaining to protect, and with other problems surfacing, the right of the Order to exist had come into question. King Philip IV of France, deeply in debt to the organization, had De Molay and many other French Templars arrested in 1307 and tortured into making what is generally believed to have been mainly false confessions. When De Molay later retracted his confession, King Philip IV of France had him burned at the stake on the Île des juifs,next to the Ile de la cite an island in the Seine river in Paris, on 18 March 1314.
Jacques de Molay was born into, most likely, a family of minor nobility, as most of the Templar knights were, at Molay (Haute-Saone) in the county of Burgundy, at the time ruled by Otto III.
He was received into the Order at Beaune by Humbert de Pairaud, the Visitor of France and England in 1265. Independently of Guillaume de Beaujeu, who was elected grand master in 1273, Jacques de Molay went to the East (Outremer) around 1270. He spent all his career as a Templar in the East.
After the Fall of Acre in 1291, the Franks who were able to do so retreated to Cyprus, which became the headquarters of the dwindling Kingdom of Jerusalem. Templars there included Jacques de Molay and Thibaud Gaudin, the 22nd Grand Master. During a meeting assembled on the island in the autumn of 1291, J. de Molay spoke and pointed to himself as an alternative and reformer of the order. Gaudin died around 1292, leaving the mastership open for Jacques de Molay, as there were no other serious contenders for the role at the time.
Once elected, the rapid establishment of the command of the order was meant to deal with the most serious matters first. Both Cyprus and the Cilician Kingdom of Armenia were under the threat of an attack from the Mamluks. In spring 1293, De Molay began a tour of the West to try and gain more support for a reconquest of the Holy Land. His goal was to strengthen the defence of Cyprus, and rebuild the Templar forces. However, European support for the Crusades had dwindled, and there was talk of merging the Templars with one of the other military orders, the Hospital. The Grand Masters of both orders opposed such a merger, but pressure increased from the Papacy.
De Molay held two general meetings of his order, at Montpellier in 1293 and at Arles in 1296, where he tried to make reforms. He also developed relationships with European leaders such as Pope Boniface VIII, Edward I of England, James I of Aragon and Charles II of Naples.
In the autumn of 1296 de Molay was back in Cyprus to defend his order against the interests of Henry II of Cyprus, which conflict had its roots back in the days of Guillaume de Beaujeu.
From 1299 to 1303 de Molay promoted cooperation with the Mongols against the Mamluks. The plan was to coordinate actions between the Christian military orders, the King of Cyprus, the aristocracy of Cyprus and Little Armenia and the Mongols of the khanate of Ilkhan (Persia).
In 1298 or 1299, Jacques de Molay halted a further Mamluk invasion with military force in Armenia. However, when the Mongol khan of Persia, Ghâzân, defeated the Mamluks in the Battle of Wadi al-Khazandar in December 1299, the Christian forces were not ready to take full advantage of the situation.
In 1300, Jacques de Molay and other forces from Cyprus put together a fleet of 16 ships which committed raids along the Egyptian and Syrian coasts. The force was commanded by King Henry II of Jerusalem, the king of Cyprus, accompanied by his brother, Amalric, Lord of Tyre the heads of the military orders, and the ambassador of the Mongol leader Ghazan. The ships left Famagusta on July 20, 1300, to raid the coasts of Egypt and Syria: Rosette, Alexandria, Acre, Tortosa, and Maraclea, before returning to Cyprus. The raids along the way were directed by Admiral Baudoin de Picquigny, and when the raids took place at Alexandria, they were able to free Christian prisoners who had been captive since the Fall of Acre in 1291.
The ships then returned to Cyprus, and prepared for an attack on Tortosa in late 1300. De Molay and other Cypriots sent a joint force to a staging area on the island of Ruad, from which raids were launched on Tortosa. The intent was to establish a bridgehead to await assistance from the Mongols, but the Mongols failed to appear in 1300. The same happened in 1301 and 1302. In September 1302 the Templars were driven out of Ruad by the attacking Mamluk forces from Egypt, and many were massacred when trapped on the island. Ruad was lost in the Siege of Ruad on September 26, 1302, and when Ghâzân died in 1304, Jacques de Molay’s dream of a rapid reconquest of the Holy Land was destroyed.
In 1305, the newly elected pope Clement V asked the leaders of the military orders for their opinions concerning a new crusade and the merging of the orders. Jacques de Molay was asked by the Pope to write two memoranda, one on each of the issues, which he did during the summer of 1306. On 6 June, the leaders were officially asked to come to Poitiers, where the Pope had his seat, to discuss these matters. The meeting at Poitiers was delayed due to the Pope’s illness, unbeknownst to de Molay, who had already left Cyprus around 15 October. De Molay arrived in France in late November or early December, but nothing is known of his activities during the first five months of 1307.
In the second half of May he was in Poitiers attending the meeting with the Pope. The Grand Master came into conflict with Philippe IV because he rejected the idea of merging the two orders into one with Philippe as leader (Rex Bellator, or War King). This made more difficult the Pope’s problem with the King, who wanted at all costs to condemn the memory of Boniface VIII. Also, it furthermore thwarted the attempts to get a new crusade on its way. These conflicts were weakening the Templar Order along with something that would turn out to be far more serious, something Jacques de Molay had discovered during his journey through France: scandalous and perverse rumours and whispers about the order had begun to surface. The king and his councillors, among them Guillaume de Nogaret, exploited this weakness.
Jacques de Molay spoke with the king in Paris on June 24, 1307 about the accusations against his order and was partially reassured. Returning to Poitiers, he asked the pope to set up an inquiry to quickly clear the order of the rumours and accusations surrounding it. When the pope announced that an inquiry would be convened 24 August, the king acted decisively. On 14 September, in the deepest secrecy, he sent out his orders throughout all of France which resulted in mass arrests of Templars and confiscation of their possessions on Friday, October 13, 1307. Jacques de Molay was arrested in Paris, while he was planning to attend the funeral of Catherine of Valois.
During forced interrogation by royal agents on October 24, Jacques confessed that the Templar initiation ritual included “denying Christ and trampling on the Cross”. He was also forced to write a letter asking every Templar to admit to these acts. Under pressure from Philip IV, Pope Clement V ordered the arrest of all the Templars throughout Christendom.
The pope still wanted to hear Jacques de Molay’s side of the story, and dispatched two cardinals to Paris in December 1307. In front of the cardinals, de Molay retracted his earlier confessions. A power struggle ensued between the king and the pope, which was settled in August 1308, when the king and the pope agreed to split the convictions. Through the Bull Fasciens misericordiam the procedure to prosecute the Templars was set out on a duality where the first commission would judge individuals of the order and the second commission would judge the order as an entity. In practice this meant that a council seated at Vienne was to decide the future of the Temple, while the Temple dignitaries, among them Jacques de Molay, were to be judged by the Pope. In the royal palace at Chinon, Jacques de Molay was again questioned by the cardinals, but this time with royal agents present. He returned to his admissions made in 1307. In November 1309, the Papal Commission for the Kingdom of France began its own hearings, during which de Molay again recanted, stating that he did not acknowledge the accusations brought against his order.
Any further opposition by the Templars was effectively broken when the archbishop of Sens, Philippe de Marigny, sentenced 54 Templars to be burnt at the stake on 10-12 May 1310. At the Council of Vienne on 22 March 1312, the order was abolished by papal decree. Almost two years later, on March 18, 1314, three cardinals sent by the pope sentenced the Temple dignitaries Jacques de Molay, Hugues de Pairaud, Geoffroy de Charney and Geoffroy de Gonneville to life imprisonment. Realizing that all was lost, Jacques de Molay rose up and recanted. Along with Geoffroy de Charney, he proclaimed his order’s innocence, before challenging the king and pope to appear before God before the year was out. Philip ordered both to be burned at the stake. On the eve of 18 March 1314, Jacques de Molay and Geoffroy de Charnay were taken to the Isle des Juifs, now incorporaed into the Île de la Cité, where they were executed.
Order of the Temple Grand Masters
- Hugues de Payens (1118-1136)
- Robert de Craon (1136-1147)
- Everard des Barres (1147-1149)
- Bernard de Tremelay (1149-1153)
- André de Montbard (1153-1156)
- Bertrand de Blanchefort (1156-1169)
- Philippe de Milly (1169-1171)
- Odo de St Amand (1171-1179)
- Arnold of Torroja (1181-1184)
- Gérard de Ridefort (1185-1189)
- Robert de Sablé (1191-1193)
- Gilbert Horal (1193-1200)
- Phillipe de Plessis (1201-1208)
- Guillaume de Chartres (1209-1219)
- Pedro de Montaigu (1218-1232)
- Armand de Périgord (1232-1244)
- Richard de Bures (Disputed) (1244/5-1247)
- Guillaume de Sonnac (1247-1250)
- Renaud de Vichiers (1250-1256)
- Thomas Bérard (1256-1273)
- Guillaume de Beaujeu (1273-1291)
- Thibaud Gaudin (1291-1292)
- Jacques de Molay (1292-1314)
In 2002, Dr. Barbara Frale found a copy of the Chinon Parchment in the Vatican Secret Archives, a document which explicitly confirms that Pope Clement V absolved Jacques de Molay and other leaders of the Order in 1308. This includes Geoffroy de Charney and Hugues de Pairaud. She published her findings in the Journal of Medieval History in 2004.
In 2007, the Vatican Secret Archives published a limited-edition book containing the full transcripts of the confessions and trials under the title of “Processus Contra Templarios”.
