Record of the Interrogation of Thirteen Templars of the Bailliage of Caen, 1307
The written record of thirteen Templars questioned at Caen in 1307 by four Dominicans commissioned by Guillaume de Paris, inquisitor of France, alongside two royal commissioners. Confessions gathered on parchment like this were the evidence laid before the Council of Vienne — and they were taken under a procedure that included torture.
Vox in Excelso dissolved the Templars in 1312 without convicting them. That distinction rests on documents like this one. From the arrests of October 1307 the French crown assembled interrogation records across the kingdom, conducted jointly by inquisitors and royal officers, and it was the accumulated weight of those confessions — not a verdict — that Clement V cited when he suppressed the order by administrative decree rather than by judgment. Many were later retracted. The record is Paris, Archives nationales, J 413 no. 20, supplied to Wikimedia Commons by the Archives nationales. See the papal bull that dissolved the Knights Templar.
Public domain — source (Wikimedia Commons). Free to reuse under the stated licence.
