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The Templar Trials: Did the System Work?

Principal Fellow, Department of History, University of Melbourne, Victoria 3052, Australia

The author directs attention to the very element of arbitrariness which the inquisitional procedure implied. Besides the given fact that the French King Philip 'le Bel' had political as well as material reasons to urge the papacy to act against the Order of the Templars, she suggests that the church institutions had sufficient cause to investigate what appeared to be a serious case and hold hearings. Thus this essay studies two hearings (Abruzzi; Cyprus) which so far have escaped the scrutiny of historians. Although the trials in general were held with enormous personal expenditures and by obviously careful observation of procedural rules, the 'system did not really work'; it was undermined by the dynamics of a legal instrument (that is, torture), which in the end was based on the use of violence.

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