‘Although we were hardly able to bring our mind to believe what was being said at that time’, wrote Clement V in a letter to Philip IV on 24 August, 1307, ‘since it seemed almost totally incredible and impossible, since then we have heard several strange and unheard-of rumours about them, and so are obliged to harbour doubts; not without great bitterness, sorrow and turmoil in our heart we are forced to act on the foregoing, doing whatever reason demands, on the advice of our brothers’. Indeed, when the accusations against the Templars became public knowledge at the time of their arrests in France just under two months later, contemporaries were as amazed and troubled as the pope. Even after nearly seven centuries historians continue to share their perplexity. At first sight, the accusations against the Templars do seem ‘incredible and impossible’; yet, in the face of the huge stack of detailed confessions amassed by the inquisitors in France, many have since felt ‘obliged to harbour doubts’.

The trial provokes a range of fundamental questions: most obviously, why were the Templars arrested, and what motivated the parties involved? Such questions inevitably lead to consideration of the state of the Order and its situation in 1307: were the Templars actually guilty of all or some of the heresies and transgressions of which they were accused or, even if the accusations were wide of the mark, was the Order nevertheless in a decadent internal state, or at least in need of reform in ‘its head and members’, as Philip IV later claimed was the case with the Hospitallers? These questions exercised contemporaries as much as ourselves, but as we are looking at the trial through a longer perspective, we have raised further questions, perhaps less evident to those who lived through it. Most importantly, how far was the trial the consequence of the wider context of the early fourteenth century?