His legs are fastened in an iron frame. The soles of his feet are slathered with a
thick layer of grease, after which the roasting begins. He screams in pain as his interrogators
use pincers to place hot coals within his already burned toes. If the victim doesn’t die,
he’ll end up like the others: insane. And what is the reason for this odious
torture you might ask? The answer is the man has been accused of heresy.
Was he a heretic? Well, let’s just say after days of torture,
he might have confessed to anything, but as you’ll see today, perhaps the Knights Templar,
once heroes of the highest degree, were the victim of a terrible conspiracy.
Or maybe they were devil worshipping cultists- and that’s what we’ll investigate in this show.
The foot roasting thing was indeed real. It was actually just one of many tortures that
some of the Knights Templar themselves endured- tortures as we said, that drove some insane. On
top of foot roasting, they were also deprived of sleep, starved, and some were subjected to
the dreaded strappado. You probably don’t know what that is, but you will soon enough.
First of all, some of you might be wondering who the Knights Templar were.
They were formed as a Roman Catholic military order back in the 1100s. These “fearless
warriors of Christ” were a super-elite fighting force, knocking down and slaughtering anyone
who stood in their way or wasn’t exactly a big believer in Christianity. Basically,
they were God’s army, at least in the eyes of the Catholic church, which stood behind them and
backed them up…At the beginning at least. As well as a fighting force, these people
became extraordinarily wealthy. Sure, some of them were good with a sword, but many of them
were also nobles who were better at counting coins than they were at counting severed heads.
At one point, only 10 percent of them were actual combatants, while the others were just
powerful men with bags full of gold. Founded in Jerusalem in 1118,
they fought in what is called the “Crusades.” These were religious wars that went on from
1095 to 1291. In Jerusalem, the Holy Land, the Templars battled with those fighting for
the Islam faith, but all over Europe and beyond, they fought people accused of heretical beliefs.
The Holy Land was conquered by a Muslim Arab army in the 7th century,
thereby taking it from the Christians. The Christians wanted it back, and that’s why
the “First Crusade” happened. More crusades came after, and more power
was accorded to the Templars, as well as money. As tends to happen when you accrue massive wealth,
at some point someone will want to take your power away. In the case of the Knights Templar,
this person was King Philip IV of France. Not surprisingly,
when he started saying all manner of bad things about the Templars, he owed them tons of money.
In the beginning, there were just seven knights, headed by a French knight from Champagne,
named Hugues of Payns. He and the other knights swore to serve the church
and while doing that live a simple life. Since they helped take Jerusalem back
from the Muslims and kept on protecting Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem from harm,
they received many donations. This helped grow the order, with many of the knights seeing
that they could do pretty well from collecting donations of land and cash. At the same time,
they used that cash to build a stronger army. We won’t go into their long history of many,
many battles. We think you get the picture. This band of men grew exceptionally wealthy. They
invested their cash, and they got into a form of banking. The majority of them hailed from France,
but there were Templars in other countries such as England and Germany. With businesses here,
there and everywhere, they’ve been called the world’s first multinational corporation.
They’d often sign up in their 20s on the promise of adventure and a stable living. While the
actual knights might have only numbered in the hundreds, when they went to battle they did so
sometimes with a large infantry they’d raised, as well as mercenaries. Mercenaries didn’t get
many of the perks the Templars did, so while they fought side-by-side they got
their pay and were happily sent on their way. When a new Templar joined up, they swore obedience
to the top dog, called the Grand Master. They also swore to serve God and do so while living a simple
life without many of the worldly pleasures that people enjoyed, including the company of women.
But don’t let the poverty thing fool you. To become a member, you almost
always had to have connections and money. As one historian said, “The first Templars swore
oaths of chastity and poverty, but the only people that need to swear an oath of poverty
are those who aren't poor to begin with.” It was actually all these rules and codes of
conduct that ruined them. Such rules would sound to some people like a kind of secret society,
and back in those days, the church could become quite suspicious of secret pacts made by men.
The rules included taking that vow of poverty, but they also dictated what they wore,
what they ate, where they slept, whom they socialized with. At one point it’s said
they had hundreds of such rules. Here are some examples, in translation to English:
“It should be sufficient for you to eat meat three times a week, except at Christmas,
All Saints, the Assumption, and the feast of the twelve apostles. For it is understood that the
custom of eating flesh corrupts the body.” “We prohibit pointed shoes and shoe-laces
and forbid any brother to wear them… For it is manifest and well known that these
abominable things belong to pagans.” “We prohibit and firmly forbid any
brother to recount to another brother nor to anyone else, the pleasures of the flesh.”
“No craftsman brother, neither one from the prison, nor any other, should strike a slave in
such a way that he places irons round his neck without permission if he has deserved it; none
should put him in a pillory nor pierce him with a sword without permission, but he should beat him.”
These went on and on and on, and the more rules there were, the more
mysterious the Templars became to outsiders. That's why when some people thought they had
gotten too big for their boots, there was an excuse to go after them. Maybe,
it would be easy enough to convince some people that part of their rituals
included getting a bit too close to the devil. King Philip IV of France had heard rumors that
there was corruption with the Knights Templar, while other people just worried about their
power and the fact they pretty much acted as they wanted. The king, being in debt after his war with
England, seized on the opportunity to discredit the Templars. It’s also said they lent him five
hundred thousand livres for his sister’s dowry. On September 14, 1307, a secret order was given
by the king to arrest all Knights Templar in France. Pope Clement V, who let’s remember was
the real boss in town, didn’t know about this and was apparently angered at first.
But it happened anyway, and on October 13, the king’s soldiers rounded up all
the Templars they could find. The pope then changed his stance, and on November 22,
he issued a papal decree that stated all European monarchs by order of the church must seize the
lands of the Templars. This order went out to England, Germany, Italy, Iberia, and Cyprus.
Grand Master Jacques de Molay was arrested, as were many others.
If this sounds like a conspiracy to take riches off people, it will seem more like that soon.
The charges at first were heresy. One document says the Templars did
these things during the initiation ceremony: “When professing, the brothers were required
to deny Christ, to spit on the Cross, and to place three 'obscene kisses' on the lower spine,
the navel and the mouth; they were obliged to indulge in carnal relations with other members
of the order, if requested; and finally they wore a small belt which had been
consecrated by touching a strange idol, which looked like a human head with a long beard.”
Hmm, worshiping idols. That was a bit of no no in those days, because false idols were
often presumed to be related to the devil. Then on August 12, 1308, another charge read that
they worshipped a kind of cat and a three faced figure. Importantly, no objects or drawings of
these idols were ever produced during the trials. The thing is, when your feet are being roasted
and you haven’t slept for a week, a person tends to do what is asked of him. The main
trial in France consisted of 138 men, and all of them admitted their guilt. One man,
who remains unnamed, was tortured and said during a ceremony he was told, “Adore this
head. This head is your God and your Mahomet.” Some scholars have now said perhaps Mahomet was
Muhammad, but when the new recruits were told to worship Mahomet it could have been in the context
of them being taken prisoner by the Muslims. Maybe it was a kind of capture and interrogation
exercise similar to what special forces go through these days as part of their training.
When you consider that some of the knights were tortured with what’s called the “strappado”
you can understand why they would confess to such things.
The torture consisted of tying a person’s arms around their back and then fastening
their wrists to a rope. That rope would then be lifted, with the injury often
being the dislocation of the shoulders. The pain would have been incredibly intense,
especially if the rope was jerked around a bit. At first, the men said that their confessions
had not been made after torture, but importantly, some of them later
said that actually they had been tortured. Let’s take the case of Grand Master Jacques
de Molay. Not only had he been on bad terms with the King, but historians now say that
Molay seemed to think he didn’t have to answer to anyone, not even the pope. He was also very rich,
and the king wanted Molay’s wealth, as well as all the other Templar’s wealth,
to become part of the royal treasury. On October 24, royal agents at the University
of Paris tortured Molay. There is a sketch showing that he was subjected to foot roasting.
You won’t be surprised to hear then, that he confessed. He admitted that part of the
Templar’s initiation ceremony consisted of “denying Christ and trampling on the Cross.”
Then in December, two cardinals visited Molay in Paris at the behest of the pope.
The pope wanted them to hear Molay’s side of the story. That’s when Molay retracted his confession.
This went back and forth. Another time, the cardinals asked Molay if he was guilty of the
accusations, but this time the King’s men were also in the room. Surprise, surprise,
Molay now said he was guilty again. Later, he retracted that confession another time.
Meanwhile, lesser Templars had already confessed and were subsequently burned at the stake.
54 were executed in France, while others in Europe were subjected to torture and
eventually killed. In some countries, the Templars managed to evade execution, but spent the rest of
their lives in prison. Some were acquitted, but their land and wealth was confiscated.
Molay was finally executed, too. By this time, he might have been glad to get it over with.
In March 1314, he and another Templar, Geoffroi de Charney, were sent to the
scaffold. An account of the execution states: “By sunset, a pyre was erected on a small island
in the Seine, the Ile des Juifs, near the palace garden. There de Molay, de Charney, de Gonneville,
and de Peraud were slowly burned to death, refusing all offers of pardon for retraction,
and bearing their torment with a composure which won for them the
reputation of martyrs among the people, who reverently collected their ashes as relics.”
Many people were naturally suspicious that both these men, as well as all the other Templars who
were tortured and killed, were innocent of any crime. People saw it for what it was:
The church and state conspiring to take those men’s wealth and destroy the Templar order.
In fact, there was a wide-held belief that killing the Templars created a curse on the conspirators.
That’s because Pope Clement died from a terrible disease just over a month after the execution and
the king died from a cerebral stroke while hunting just a few months later. His sons and heirs died
young and didn’t have any male children, thereby ending his natural male blood line.
Rumors throughout Europe said that the Templars might have had a crooked trial down on Earth,
but the real trial was one up in heaven where God looked unfavorably on the king and the pope.
Not many modern scholars will tell you they think the Templars actually performed devilish
rituals. While they might have taken advantage of their position, they were certainly no more
unethical than the church or the state. As one historian said about the trials,
“These people were looking for anything that could be used against the Templars, but the
researchers found very little — we can see this from the records of the Templars' trials in 1307.”
Before he died, Pope Clement disbanded the organization and
so that was the end of the Templars, although a few hundred years later,
Freemasonry would get off the ground and have its own strange secret initiations
and codes of conduct. These were based on what the Templars did.
Now you need to watch “What Did The Mysterious Secret Society Of Freemasons Actually Do.” Or,
have a look at “Illuminati vs Bilderberg Group - How Do They Compare (Secret Society Comparison)”