Concomitantly, King Philip IV of France (Philip the Fair) was laying the foundations of his plan to suppress the Templars. Philip was motivated by several factors. As the most powerful monarch of his time, Philip believed that it was his privilege, not the Knights Templar, to determine the direction of the next Crusade. But Philip lacked the necessary men, and especially the necessary funding for such a venture. The prevailing thinking of the day was to either consolidate the Orders of Knights Templar and the Hospitalers or to create a third Order to supplant them. Philip wanted to be the leader of that third Order, particularly since he had once applied to the Templars as a postulate and been rejected (Baijent, Leigh, and Lincoln, 1982, p. 49).

Barber, M. (1978). The trial of the Templars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Martin, E. (1978). The trial of the Templars. London: George Allen & Unwin.

The trial of the Templars occurred in two phases. The ordinary Knights were judged by provincial councils. The leadership of the Knights, including De Molay, were reserved for judgment by a papal commission. Preliminary inquiries for most of the Knights were accompanied by the cruelest methods of torture in order to extort confessions. The secrecy of the Templars' rites was used as a tool against them, giving Philip's group the opportunity to infer from this mystery the most monstrous of accusations. The Templars were accused of spitting upon the Cross, of denying Christ, of permitting sodomy, of worshipping an idol, all in the most impenetrable secrecy: "the fantasies which were produced by some suspects in order to satisfy the inquisitors who had placed them under torture or mental pressure were then taken up by the prosecution and elaborated into new charges against other suspects, who then produced new fantasies, and so on" (Partner, 1990, p. 78). Although there was a great lack of evidence, the Templars' aloofness and steadfastness for maintaining secrecy worked against them.