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Liber XXV · Secret Societies

Liber XXV · Secret Societies · Chapter V: Templar Legends

Jacques de Molay: The Last Templar Grand Master and His Legend

Jacques de Molay, last Grand Master of the Knights Templar: his career, the 1307 arrests, trial, burning in Paris in 1314 and the legends that followed.

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Jacques de Molay (c. 1240/1250–1314) was the twenty-third and last Grand Master of the Knights Templar. Arrested with his brethren on the orders of King Philip IV of France in October 1307, he confessed under pressure, later retracted, and on 18 March 1314 was burned alive in Paris after publicly declaring the order innocent. His death closed the history of the Templars and opened a long afterlife of legend, from the curse he supposedly laid on king and pope to his role as a martyr-hero in Masonic and occult orders.

Early Life and Career in the Templar Order§

Very little is known of Molay's youth. He was probably born in the 1240s or early 1250s at Molay in the county of Burgundy (Franche-Comté), into a family of the lesser nobility; the exact date is not recorded, and estimates rest on his own testimony at the trial that he had been a Templar for about forty-two years. He was received into the order at Beaune around 1265 by Humbert de Pairaud, a senior official, in the presence of Amaury de la Roche, master of the order in France.

The Templars he joined were at once a religious order bound by vows of poverty, chastity and obedience and a professional military force defending the crusader states. Molay served in the East, and by the late 1280s he held a position of some responsibility. In 1291 the Mamluk sultan al-Ashraf Khalil took Acre, the last great crusader city on the mainland, and the Templar Grand Master Guillaume de Beaujeu died in its defence. His successor Thibaud Gaudin died soon after, and around 1292 Molay was elected Grand Master. The background to the order is told in our guide to Templar legends and history.

Grand Master in Cyprus, 1292–1306§

As Grand Master, Molay governed an order that had lost its reason for existing in the eyes of many Europeans. Its headquarters moved to Cyprus, and Molay spent much of the 1290s travelling in the West to secure supplies, privileges and support from the pope and kings. He took part in attempts to coordinate with the Mongol Ilkhanate against the Mamluks around 1300, and the Templars held the small island of Ruad (Arwad) off the Syrian coast until its fall in 1302.

In 1306 Pope Clement V summoned Molay and the Hospitaller Master to France to discuss a new crusade and a proposal to merge the two military orders. Molay wrote memoranda arguing for a large general crusade and against the merger, which he thought would damage both orders. Historians have often judged these documents conservative and unimaginative, and Molay has been described as a capable soldier but a poor politician; others point out that his room for manoeuvre was very small. He arrived in France late in 1306 or early in 1307, apparently unaware of how dangerous the rumours about his order had become.

The Arrests of 1307 and Molay's Confessions§

On Friday 13 October 1307 royal officers arrested the Templars across France, Molay among them, in Paris. The charges, drawn from the testimony of former members and royal agents, included denying Christ and spitting on the cross during reception, indecent kisses, permitting sodomy and venerating an idol. On 24 and 25 October Molay appeared before an assembly of university masters and clergy and admitted that he had been made to deny Christ and spit near the cross at his own reception, though he denied other charges. His confession, circulated by royal propaganda, was a disaster for the order, since many brothers followed their leader's example.

Molay's later conduct was uncertain and shifting. In December 1307, before cardinals sent by the pope, he is reported to have retracted, claiming his confession had been extracted by fear of torture. In August 1308 papal envoys questioned him and other leaders at the castle of Chinon and, after hearing their confessions and requests for pardon, absolved them. The record of that hearing, known as the Chinon Parchment, was identified in the Vatican Archives by Barbara Frale in 2001 and published in facsimile in 2007. It shows that the pope's representatives treated the leaders as penitent sinners rather than convicted heretics, though it did not stop the proceedings.

Before the papal commission§

In November 1309 Molay appeared before the papal commission investigating the order as a whole. He said he was a simple, unlettered knight who could not conduct a legal defence, asked to be judged by the pope himself, and made a short statement praising the Templars' churches, almsgiving and willingness to die for the faith. His refusal to lead a defence left the task to braver or more legally skilled brothers such as Pierre de Bologna, whose efforts collapsed in 1310 when the archbishop of Sens had fifty-four Templars burned as relapsed heretics.

The Burning of Jacques de Molay in 1314§

At the Council of Vienne in 1312 Clement V suppressed the order by the bull Vox in excelso, not by condemning it but by "apostolic provision", and the bull Ad providam transferred its property to the Hospitallers. The fate of the four senior leaders held in France was reserved to the pope, who delegated it to a commission of cardinals.

On 18 March 1314 Molay, Geoffroy de Charney, preceptor of Normandy, Hugues de Pairaud, visitor of France, and Geoffroy de Gonneville were brought onto a scaffold before the cathedral of Notre-Dame to hear their sentence of perpetual imprisonment. Pairaud and Gonneville accepted it. Molay and Charney, to the dismay of the cardinals, declared that the order was holy and innocent and that their only guilt was in having betrayed it by false confessions. As relapsed heretics in the eyes of the law, they were handed to the royal authorities, and Philip IV had them burned that evening on a small island in the Seine near the royal palace, generally identified with the Île aux Juifs, now absorbed into the western tip of the Île de la Cité. A plaque near the Pont Neuf marks the place.

A contemporary verse chronicle attributed to Geoffroi de Paris describes Molay going to the stake calmly, asking to face the cathedral and to have his hands free to pray. Witnesses were reportedly impressed by the composure of both men, and some onlookers are said to have gathered their ashes as relics.

The Curse of Jacques de Molay§

Pope Clement V died on 20 April 1314 and Philip IV on 29 November of the same year, after a hunting accident or stroke. The coincidence gave rise to the legend that Molay, from the flames, had summoned both to appear before the judgement of God within the year. The idea that a dying victim summoned his persecutors to divine judgement was a familiar medieval motif, and versions of the story attached to Templars appear in chronicles from the decades after 1314, but the dramatic speech often quoted today is a later literary elaboration.

The legend was extended to the Capetian dynasty itself, whose direct male line ended in 1328, and it was popularised for modern readers by Maurice Druon's historical novel series Les Rois maudits (The Accursed Kings, 1955–1977). Historians treat the curse as legend; it is nevertheless an important part of how Molay has been remembered.

Molay in Freemasonry and Occult Legend§

In the eighteenth century, as Masonic higher degrees multiplied, several systems adopted Templar themes. The Rite of Strict Observance, organised in Germany by Karl Gotthelf von Hund in the 1750s, claimed that Templar knights had survived the suppression and passed on their secrets in hidden succession. The French Ordre du Temple, founded around 1804 by Bernard-Raymond Fabré-Palaprat, displayed the so-called Larmenius Charter, which claimed that Molay had transmitted his office to a successor named Jean-Marc Larmenius; historians regard the document as an eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century fabrication. These claims are discussed further in our guide to initiatory orders.

Molay also became a figure in political conspiracy theories. In 1796 Charles-Louis Cadet de Gassicourt published Le Tombeau de Jacques Molai, arguing that a secret Templar society had plotted for centuries to avenge Molay on the throne and the papacy, culminating in the French Revolution. A popular anecdote that a voice cried "Jacques de Molay, you are avenged" at the execution of Louis XVI in 1793 is unsupported. Such stories fed into the anti-Masonic writings examined in our article on secret society conspiracy myths.

A more benign legacy is DeMolay International, a youth organisation for young men founded in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1919 by the Freemason Frank S. Land. It uses Molay as an example of loyalty and integrity and is closely associated with Freemasonry, though it is not itself a Masonic lodge.

Frequently asked questions§

When and where was Jacques de Molay burned?§

He was burned on the evening of 18 March 1314 in Paris, on a small island in the Seine near the royal palace, usually identified with the Île aux Juifs, now part of the western end of the Île de la Cité. A few older accounts give a slightly different day, but 18 March is the date most historians accept.

Did Jacques de Molay really curse the king and the pope?§

There is no reliable contemporary record of a curse spoken at the stake. Because Clement V and Philip IV both died later in 1314, chroniclers and later writers developed the story that Molay had summoned them to God's judgement, a familiar medieval motif. Historians treat it as legend.

Was Jacques de Molay guilty of heresy?§

Most modern historians think the charges against the Templars were largely or wholly unfounded and that confessions were obtained through torture, threats and pressure. The Chinon Parchment shows that papal envoys absolved Molay in 1308, and he died after declaring the order innocent.

What is DeMolay International?§

DeMolay International is a character-building organisation for young men aged roughly twelve to twenty-one, founded in 1919 by Frank S. Land in Kansas City. It is named after Molay as a model of fidelity and is sponsored by Freemasons, but members are not Masons.

Sources and further reading§