Now since this ceremony was secret, and since no one but a Templar could state what exactly occurred during it, it was possible to levy almost any charge against the Order. If the members denied it the Inquisition could always say that they were lying. On the other hand it was not difficult to extract whatever confession was required by the use of torture. The Inquisition anticipated the trials, the practices, and even the public confessions of Soviet Russia, by many centuries.

The main charges against the Templars were that during the initiation ceremony the candidate was asked to deny Christ thrice, to spit three times upon a crucifix, and to give a triple kiss to the officer admitting him—on the buttocks, on the genitals, and on the mouth. They were also accused of worshipping a mysterious deity, Baphomet, and of indulging in homosexual orgies. The truth or falsehood of the charges against the Templars has long been debated, but the question is one that will never be resolved: no one can rely upon statements extracted under torture, particularly when the instigator of the charges is known to have had so much to gain by the confiscation of the Templars’ lands and money. Nevertheless, it is not impossible that some of the accusations were true. The triple denial of Christ may have been a means, in that simple age, of impressing upon the novice that his dedication to the Order was total, and that it even came before the Founder of the Church which the Order was designed to serve. The anal and genital kiss is a common enough charge against those accused of black magic and witchcraft. The charge of sodomy levelled against the Templars—a sin for which in the Church canon the penalty was death—may possibly be taken seriously. Homosexual relations have always been accepted without much difficulty in the East, and the Templars like all the other Latins in Outremer were heavily conditioned by the prevailing atmosphere of the Moslem world that surrounded them. Then again, although like the Knights of St John they had taken the vows of chastity, they were not priests, but arrogant, warlike young males. From the Spartans to the Prussians, homosexuality has always been prominent in warrior castes. In 1312 the Order of the Temple was suppressed and its last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, was burnt two years later at the stake, while the other chief officers were sentenced to life imprisonment. If Philip’s objective had been to secure all their wealth for himself he largely failed, for, except for their property and lands in Castile, Aragon, Portugal and Majorca, all the possessions of the Templars were transferred by papal bull to the Order of St John. In the end the Hospitallers were the main ones to benefit from the demise of their great rivals.

The Teutonic Order had a quite different fate reserved for it. The last of the military Orders to be formed, the Teutonic Order had begun like the Hospitallers as a nursing service with a hospital in Jerusalem. It had then become dominated by its militant arm, After the expulsion of the Christians from Outremer the Order found a new purpose in Europe by becoming the spearhead of the German colonisation of Prussia. The territories that they carved out of pagan Prussia—where they immediately established churches as well as castles—were automatically surrendered to the Pope. He in his turn handed them back to the Order as a fief. Since the Order was engaged in Christianising the heathen, their warfare in Prussia was regarded as a Crusade. Ultimately the Teutonic knights, forgetting almost entirely their original hospitaller function (and even their crusading zeal), were to become a purely politico-military organisation administering vast estates in the newly conquered territory. They represented the first impulse of that German Drang nach Osten which was to end so disastrously many centuries later in Hitler’s invasion of Russia. The Order itself to all intents and purposes came to an end in 1410 when it was overwhelmed at Tannenberg in East Prussia by King Ladislaus of Poland.

The years from 1291 to 1310 which the Hospitallers spent in Cyprus were characterised at first by a loss of purpose and next by a growing realisation that if the Order was to survive it must change its character. After a number of other minor campaigns similar to their raid into Egypt and Palestine it seems to have dawned upon them that their future lay not so much as a military arm but as a naval one. They were now islanders, and the only possible way whereby they could carry on the war against the Moslems was by sea. As early as 1300 there is a reference to a small fleet belonging to the Order. The title Admiratus—Admiral—appears in a deed a year later. It is true that the Knights had owned ships before this, but these seem to have been mainly transport vessels used for bringing troops and stores to Palestine. These they still needed and they used them in Cyprus to bring men and merchandise from Europe to their headquarters at Limassol.