Jacques De Molay

***Jacques de Molay was born in Besanon, France, in 1244, in a noble but poor family. In 1265, in Beaune, France, he joined the Knights Templar, an order founded in 1128 to keep the Holy Land of Palestine and settled in Paris in 1140, and then fought in Syria. In 1291, after the loss of Palestine, the Knights were driven from the Holy Land by the Saracens, and de Molay took his few remaining knights to the Island of Cyprus. In 1298, he was made Grand Master od his Order. In 1307, he was summoned in France by Pope Clement V and King Philip IV to discuss new crusades and effect a union between the rival Templars and Hospitallers. Molay asked the pope to investigate certain spurious accusations of blasphemy and sodomy that had recently been made against his order. On October 13, 1307, King Philip IV suddenly arrested and interrogated every Knight Templar in France, de Molay and his sixty friends among them. In 1309 and 1310, de Molay appealed for a personal judgment by the pope, but Clement decided to suppress the order in 1312. On March 18, 1314, de Molay was led out before the people to publicly confess his and the order's sins. After he heared the sentence of the judges, which were a perpetual imprisonment, he recanted his earlier confessions and said the only crime he was guilty of was lying about his Brethren to relieve his own tortures, and so, as a final punishment, he was burned as a relapsed heretic. His last words were said to have been "Pope Clement! King Philip! Within one year, I summon you to a tribunal before the Judgment seat of God, where you will get the retribution you deserve! Damned! Damned! All damned until the thirteenth generation of your races !" The malediction worked : Clement V died on April 20, 1314 from suffocation, and Philip IV died on November 27, 1314, from a cerebral ictus, and his three sons died within 12 years, without letting any male descendant, and so ending the Capetian dinasty...***