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Two men in the flames on an island in the Seine. Retracting a confession extracted under torture made a man a relapsed heretic.

At dawn on Friday 13 October 1307, sealed orders that had gone out weeks earlier were opened across France simultaneously, and royal officers arrested every Knight Templar they could find. The order had been founded in 1119 to protect pilgrims on the roads of the Holy Land and had become something nobody planned: a multinational bank. Templars held deposits, moved money between kingdoms on paper so travellers did not carry gold, managed estates, and lent to monarchs. One of the monarchs was Philip IV of France, who had already expelled the Jews and seized their assets, debased his coinage, and taxed the clergy, and who owed the Templars a great deal of money. The charges were spectacular and unfalsifiable: denying Christ, spitting on the cross, obscene initiation rites, worshipping an idol called Baphomet that nobody could ever produce. Confessions arrived quickly, because the men were tortured; the Templars in England and Aragon, where torture was initially not applied, largely confessed to nothing. Many who confessed later retracted, and under the procedure of the day retracting made you a relapsed heretic, which carried the fire. Fifty-four were burned outside Paris in a single day in 1310. Pope Clement V, resident at Avignon and dependent on French support, dissolved the order in 1312 without formally condemning it, and handed most of its property to the Knights Hospitaller, though France took its cut in expenses. The last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, had been in a cell for seven years when he was brought out onto an island in the Seine in March 1314, retracted everything, and was burned that evening. The story that he summoned pope and king to meet him before God within the year is a later embroidery, but both were dead within eight months, which is why the story exists. A document found in the Vatican archives in 2001, the Chinon parchment, shows Clement had absolved the leadership of heresy in 1308 while dissolving the order anyway on grounds of scandal. The illumination here comes from a French chronicle made within a century of the fire: the executioner leaning on his rake, two men in the flames, and along the top edge the spectators standing with their arms folded.