How did King Philip of France manage to make such damning accusations against the Knights Templar leading to their arrest in 1307? The answer is that his chief minister Guillaume de Nogaret sent spies into the organisation to gather information. These were his so-called “moles” who worked undercover to expose the knights!
According to a French historian, Alain Demurger, who is an expert on the Templar trials – an envoy of the King of Aragon who attended one of the judicial hearings against the Templars at Poitiers in 1308 heard about these spies.
FIND OUT MORE: Were the Templars innocent or guilty?
He wrote a report for his master (Aragon is in modern day Spain by the way) in which he detailed how 12 spies had been sent by De Nogaret to infiltrate the Knights Templar. These spies were instructed to “boldly do what they were told and then leave”.
They fed salacious details about Templar rituals and sexual practices back to De Nogaret – and then quit the Knights Templar before the secret arrest warrants were opened across France. There is, of course, no written evidence from De Nogaret or anybody around him about this operation – so we know about it only through the testimony of the Aragonese envoy.
DISCOVER MORE: The Templars and the Cathar heretics
Evidence for spies sent into the Knights Templar
The other sources of evidence used by those prosecuting the Knights Templar were individuals who had left the order for one reason or another, possibly harbouring some grievance. And those who were tortured into making lurid confessions they often then tried to retract. Men, as Shakespeare once noted, will say anything when stretched on the rack.
We will never know the identities of the spies unless something turns up in the Vatican archive – which is always a possibility.
4 thoughts on “Spies who infiltrated the Knights Templar”