Two And in the spring days of 1291 death came. hundred thousand troops from the east and the south gathered around the doomed walls under the command of the Sultan Aschraf Khalil. Of the motley hordes of Christians within the gates, all who could fled to the ships which rode at anchor in the great harbour. But under the leadership of Guillaume de Beaujeu, Grand-Master of the Temple, some 1,200 soldiers, the knights of the two military Orders, and their armed companies, remained to defend this their last stronghold. The annals of the siege have been left, with their legends of heroic incidents, of undermined towers, of broken fortifications, of breaches where man by man stood and fell, checking for a while, as one to a hundred, the onsurging myriads of the besiegers; of Henry, King of Jerusalem, who fled by night, of the handful of Hospitallers who sought a swift dying, charging into the very camp of the enemy. Then figure after figure vanishes from the scene. Guillaume de Beaujeu, the hero of the Cursed Tower, toils no more night by night with his own hands to replace the stones dislodged during the day's assault. Slain with a poisoned arrow, he at length takes his well-earned rest. And the seven survivors of the gallant band of Hospitallers have embarked, not, as we may well believe, for any fear of death, for the serene shores of the island of Cyprus. , Acre indeed is lost, for the key to it is in the hands of the foe. But some few hundred Templars still garrison its inner citadel, the Bourg of the Temple, for in battle 'none may "turn him back; and the fellowship are minded to observe the Rule to the letter. The sequel was strange enough. On the threshold of the last refuge of the Christians the Sultan paused; the Templars, with all refugees there harboured, shall depart in safety. The conditions are accepted, and a guard of Moslems are admitted within the Bourg. But the infidel soldiery lay hands on the women, and the Templars' swords avenge the violence. Vowed to accept no service at a woman's hands, they may yet accept death for a woman's sake. For some few days they still hold the Tower, then, once more assaulted by the enemy's host, the undermined walls fall, burying in one grave the knights, their assailants, and those few nameless women whose honour has been bought with so dear a price. The siege of Acre closes the record of the Templars as the knights militant of Palestine. Jerusalem was irrevocably lost, the Holy Land was delivered over to the infidel. The Order -numbering, it is said, some 15,000 knights *—remained scattered throughout Europe, soldats délaissés, sentinelles 'perdues.' With the trail of past splendours, the glories of battles lost or won, with the vast treasures accumulated from the spoils of the East and the bequests of Western piety, with immense revenues and wide domains, it readjusted its existence to new conditions, while the close consolidation of its internal organisation, with the widely spread influence of its affiliated secular associates, made it a power to be feared and conciliated in every land. Its centre and treasure house was Paris. The precincts of the Temple' occupied one-third of the city, with privileges and immunities which presented a barrier to the encroachments of royal or civic authority. As a military order it was independent of the nationalities among which it was domiciled. As a religious order it was independent of the secular law. Exempted from episcopal discipline by the prerogatives bestowed by successive pontiffs, it was estranged from ecclesiastical Catholicism. As a spiritual aristocracy and as an aristocracy of birth it was alienated from the parochial priesthood, who could not share its prerogatives, and from the mendicant orders-then at the apogee of their fame-whose recruits were drawn from all ranks and classes. Isolated likewise from ties of natural relationship by their monastic vows, the knights formed a caste and a race apart. In their isolation lay the germ of their destruction, and the day of wrath found them forsaken of all men. Their pride was a proverb in all lands. My covetousness,' so ran Coeur de Lion's traditional bequest, 'I leave to the Cistercians; my lusts to the priest'hood; to the Templars my pride.' Comme ils se passaient 'de femmes, ils se passaient aussi de prêtres ... ils se 'passèrent de Dieu encore.' Their god, Michelet adds, was their Order, while the veneration still yielded to them by the lower classes of the populace tended to increase the venom of their rivals and antagonists. Yet it is neither in their position as a military brotherhood whose swords had lost in mercenary warfare the consecration of their aim, nor yet in their annals as degenerate ascetics of relaxed discipline and doubtful morals, that the riddle lies which gives to the history of their abolition its singular interest. For the ruin of the Militia Christi was due, not to their violation of their original Rule, nor even primarily to the alleged infamy of individual associates of * Ferrati Vicenza, quoted by Mill, 'Hist. of the Crusades.' their fellowship, but was compassed and sealed by the charge, deadly indeed in the fourteenth century, of secret apostasy from the faith of which the members of the Order had been for one hundred and seventy years the most loyal defenders and the most valiant champions. In 1307 the storm broke. Philip the Fair-'le Roi des légistes'—'la mala pianta' of Dante's visions, had yet time by one last sombre misdeed to prelude, or it may be foredoom, the extinction of his line. His powerful adversary, Pope Boniface, the friend of the Order, was dead. Philippe, par 'la grâce de Dieu Roi des Français, à Boniface, prétendu 'souverain pontife, peu ou point de salut,' so Philip had phrased his missive to the Pope, and when Nogaret and his band brutally assailed the old prelate at Anagni, they could count upon Philip to endorse their deed. In 1305 (after the brief pontificate of Benedict XI.) Philip was able to raise his nominee Bertram de Got * [Clement V.] to the papal dignity -a dignity which the transference of the Pope's residence to Avignon rendered in the matter of authority a sinecure. With Clement, whose concurrence was essential to his purpose, a docile if reluctant instrument in his hands, Philip perpetrated his crime. The riches of the Templars were immense. Philip, le faux monnayeur,' in whom 'avarice had subdued to itself the blood of the Capets,'t was the debtor of the Order, whose wealth he had long coveted, and 'he could not get the honey unless he burnt the bees,'‡ therefore the Order must be suppressed. But there was then no precedent for the suppression of a religious order, and the atrocities he was about to commit with a callous ferocity, hardly surpassed by the savage barbarities of the Albigensian crusade, demanded a pretext and a justification, lest the formidable pity of the populace, by whom the Templars were venerated, should frustrate the royal scheme. estrange the sympathy of Christendom, no less than to mask the nature of his crime, he framed his indictment upon a deliberate groundwork of calumny. The Templars were the sworn defenders of religion, Philip denounced them as enjoining and enforcing by the very institution of their Order the formal renunciation of the Christian faith with every circumstance of sacrilegious rite and profane ceremony. The Templars were honoured in Syria, dreaded by the *The 'shepherd without law.' Dante, 'Inferno.' To 'Turks,' as Guiot, the troubadour satirist of the morals of other religious communities, wrote. They must be held up to infamy and contempt. Sins against man and God must be brought to their charge; Philip denounced them as enjoining and enforcing the formal violation of the moral law, by a secret system of terrorism, upon each initiate of the confraternity. In such an indictment, brought against the Order itself, that the known innocence of individuals might not be adduced as justification, Philip proved himself in advance of his time by conforming to its superstitions and credulities.* During the years that followed the evacuation of Palestine the general attitude of religious thought in Europe was such as might readily confirm such accusations. Neither censures nor persecutions had availed to eradicate Gnostic doctrines, in their last recrudescence of Manicheism, from the Christianity of medieval Europe. During the two centuries 'preceding the fall of the Templars it was eagerly embraced ' in France. At its source in Syria it had doubtless 'carried away as large a portion of the inquiring spirits of the Temple as it was intoxicating in Italy and France,' King† avers, although he acknowledges its connexion with the Order to be one of the most difficult problems of history.' And with the spread of Gnostic doctrine arose the suspicion of the revival of practices based upon the symbolic rites of Eastern and Egyptian mysteriessuspicions, be it remembered, which the first converts of orthodox Christianity did not escape, and which throughout the history of religion have been continually incurred by suppressed sectaries of Gnostic or other origin. The early Christian Church had, in truth, itself adopted many ceremonies associated with pagan creeds. The primitive 'Christians used several of the terms employed in heathen 'mysteries, and proceeded so far as even to adopt some of the ceremonies of which these renowned mysteries con'sisted,' Mosheim states, and it is probable that other orgiastic rites, likewise borrowed from the mysteries of Greece and Egypt, but unappropriated by the Church at large, were observed by various individual bodies of both primitive and medieval Christians; for while the Latin Church developed its system of the authoritative definition of dogma, the minds of men as persistently, and perhaps in † Gnostics. *See Raynouard. corresponding ratio, set forth upon new or retraced old byways of forbidden thought. The chivalry of the Temple more especially invited suspicion, both from the tolerant spirit exhibited by the Order with regard to Eastern religions and from the strict secresy the rule enjoined in the observation of the initiatory rites, which King asserts were 'faint traditions of the penances or "tortures" exacted 'from the neophyte in the Mithraic cave.' Von Hammer in Germany,* Edward Clarkson in England,† have detected evidence of the Templars' secession from orthodox Christian faith and practice in the Order's assumed possession of Gnostic gems, and in the sculptures and architecture of their churches. More recently M. Jules Bois ‡ has classed them unconditionally, with many other sectaries suspected of kindred opinions, with 'les Albigeois, les Parfaits, les 'Croyants, les Bons Hommes .. les Albigeois qui ' reçurent une initiation filtrée du Temple;' while in referring to the Albigensian massacres he adds: Les Templiers se taisent, tristes et méfiants. . . . Eux ils 'dédaignent l'occident chrétien. N'ont-ils pas touché les Chamites, là-bas, au Saint-Sépulcre, qui ne leur a appris que la mort du Christ et non pas sa résurrection ? Le Christ est mort, crachons sur le Christ; et ils 'crachent sur le Christ. . . . Les Templiers nourrissent 'l'orient dans leur cœur sombre.' Michelet also, in his 'Sorcière,' appears in more than one sentence to endorse an adverse verdict with regard to the morals of the Temple Knights, which, logically considered, seems to imply, if not their total repudiation of Christian faith, at least their adoption of exotic beliefs. In his history, nevertheless, he exonerates the Order as essentially an order of symbolists, a confraternity of mystics. There was, he says, a significance in their very name. 'L'Eglise est la maison du Christ, le Temple celle du • Saint-Esprit. L'idée du Temple, plus haute et plus 'générale que celle même de l'Eglise, planait en quelque 'sorte par-dessus toute religion. L'Eglise datait, le Temple 'ne datait pas.' And they perished, he adds, referring to the special charge that the brethren caused the cross to be trampled upon and profaned-a charge which drew upon them the execration of all Christendom-as symbolists by |