The Burning of the Grand Master of the Templars, in the Chroniques de France
Jacques de Molay and a second Templar burned on an island in the Seine in March 1314, illuminated some seventy years later in the Chroniques de France ou de St Denis (British Library, Royal MS 20 C vii, f. 48r). Both men had retracted their confessions the same day.
The order was founded about 1119 to protect pilgrims on the road to Jerusalem, was given a rule by the Council of Troyes, and became within a century the richest and most heavily armed religious corporation in Europe — exempt from tithe, answerable only to the pope, holding castles from Portugal to the Jordan. It was destroyed in seven years by a French king who owed it money and a pope who could not afford to refuse him. See the warrior-monks who ruled the crusades.
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