When several Knights Templar were burned at the stake for heresy in 1314, legend has it they screamed out a curse against the villainous lawyer who convicted them.Eight days later, he died.
They begged God to prove their innocence by taking the pope within 40 days.
Thirty-three days later, Pope Clement V died too.
Eight months after that, the French king who had coveted their money also passed away, and all his sons succumbed within 14 years, ending the royal family's 300-year reign.
So did the Templars really worship idols, spit on the crucifix and sodomize each other, as the French king claimed? Or did they just fall victim to his desperate greed, as a recently discovered parchment suggests?
In 2001, a second-year student of ancient documents at the Vatican stumbled across the Chinon chart, a 58-by-70 centimetre parchment misfiled in the secret archives for 400 years.
"I thought I was dreaming," Barbara Frale told the Citizen in an e-mail. "It took six months for me to fully grasp that it was real."
Frale, who is writing a book about her find, says the document shows that Pope Clement V did not excommunicate the Templar leaders, but absolved them of heresy and brought them back in the church. Rumours about sodomy and idolatry were simply misunderstood military hazing rituals.
"Historians had concluded that the Templars were innocent, but most people still thought they were heretics, occultists and the like," she wrote to the Citizen. "Now we have definitive proof. The Templars were not heretics. The order, which was a military brotherhood, simply practised a secret ritual that was grossly misunderstood and misinterpreted."
Late last year, the Vatican produced 800 limited edition copies of her find, with a full-size reproduction of the parchment, a Latin translation, a historical commentary written by Frale, and three replicas of medieval church seals. Ottawa's Saint Paul University has purchased No. 302 for its renowned rare book library at a cost of $8,000.
Many historians have pilloried Pope Clement for selling out the Templars to the French king. But in her commentary, Frale argues the pope was no toady. He was a subtle thinker who had to "run with the hare and hunt with the hounds" to keep the church from splitting apart.
"He preferred subtle ploys to resounding strategies and his slow, hushed tactics obtained far from minor results in one of the most difficult situations in the long history of the church," writes Frale.
The Knights Templar began in the 11th century as a unique order of high-born military monks commissioned to fight Holy Wars against the Muslims and protect pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land. In Jerusalem, they were centred at what was believed to be King Solomon's Temple - hence, the name 'Templars'.
In 1291 the city of Acre, on the Mediterranean coast of present-day Israel, fell to the Muslims, and in 1303 the Crusaders lost their remaining holdings in the Holy Land. People became disenchanted with the Templars and accused them of growing soft and corrupt.
Rumours circulated that they had strange initiation rites in which novices had to deny Christ three times, spit on the cross three times, strip naked and kiss their superior on the lower back, navel, and lips. If required, the rumour went, the initiates had to submit to sodomy.
The whispering fuelled anti-clerical feelings already rife in France. King Philip had loathed the previous pope, Boniface. It was a fundamental power struggle between kings and clergy, but the immediate irritant was the issue of funding for France's wars against Britain. Boniface had to back down from his refusal to let France tax the clergy but he didn't stay down for long. In 1302, he issued a papal bull stating "for every human creature it is essential for their salvation to be subject to the authority of the Roman Pontiff."
Philip responded to this affront by seizing Boniface and brutalizing him for several days, relenting only at the insistence of angry townspeople. The pope never recovered and died several weeks later.
His successor Clement V seemed to be Philip's man - he even moved the papacy to France.
Philip still needed money, so in 1306 he devalued the French currency. Parisians rioted, and the king fled to a Templar stronghold to take shelter. According to some reports, he found the answers to his prayers there: room after room of ready cash. All he had to do was destroy the order.
Clement promised the king he would look into the rumours about the Templars but, before he could proceed, Philip ordered all the Templars in France arrested and their property seized for the crown. Confessions were extracted by torture, thereby presenting Clement with a fait accompli.
Frale wrote in an academic paper for The Journal of Medieval History that the king made sure the Templar "confessions" were widely circulated and forged documents purportedly from the pope, so that any attempt to defend the Templars would make the church look like it was defending corruption.
Philip relented slightly, agreeing to administer the Templar property apart from his own, and arranging for 73 members to travel to Poitiers where the pope could interview them. But he held the leaders at the castle of Chinon, saying they were too sick to travel.
The document found by Frale shows that in 1308 the pope deputized three of his most trusted cardinals to go see these leaders, almost in secret, and hear them out. The Templars justified their rituals saying the renunciation of Christ was simply to give them practice should they be captured in battle by the Muslims. Stripping naked and kissing the superiors at the base of their spine, navel and on the mouth, was meant to show obedience.
Frale says that Clement saw "they were surely so tainted by bad habits that they needed reform, but they could not be considered heretics."
However, Clement disbanded the Templars at the Council of Vienne in 1312.
Malcolm Barber, an internationally-recognized expert on the Templars, said the Chinon chart didn't offer any surprises, exactly.
"Scholars had some documents describing the downfall of the Knights Templar and the trials that sent them to the stake, but they had lost track of this one . . . since the 17th century," he said from his office in Britain. "So it's not new information, but it's nice to have."
The rediscovery has been something of a mixed blessing.
In Spain, a group claiming to have descended from the Templars has begun legal action demanding that the Vatican recognize that more than 9,000 properties and assets worth $160 billion were lost when the church disbanded the ancient order of knights. Last fall, a British order of Templars that also claims direct descent from the original Knights Templar called on Pope Benedict XVI to apologize.
Saint Paul's may be Canada's only copy and one of only seven or eight in North America.
Despite the price tag, said librarian Andre Paris, "I was afraid we might not get it."
Frale went on to get her PhD at the University of Venice and is now a historian on staff at the Vatican Secret Archives. Her book, The Templars: The Secret History Revealed is to be published by Arcade in January. Her publishers advertise it as "an explosive new history of the medieval world's most powerful military order, the Templars - and the momentous discovery that finally allows the full story to be told."
"The revelations will be extremely interesting," Frale told the Citizen. "For now, I can't say a word."
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