Secretum Templi (Collection) Facsimile Edition

The Secretum Templi ("secret of the temple") collection comprises single-sheet documents, a roll, and codices (some of a single or multiple unbound gatherings), all relating to the history of the Christian military order of the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon—the Templars—established to protect Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land. The bound codex in the collection is a copy of the Rule of the order in its expanded Old French version, and many of the documents are transcripts of the testimony of members of the order in Spain and France as they came under scrutiny in the early fourteenth century. There is also a cache of letters from fourteenth-century members of the order.

By the early fourteenth century, the Templars had become very wealthy, and—probably hoping to seize some of that wealth—Philip IV (1268-1314), King of France, spread rumors about the knights that led to arrests and a papal inquiry into their activities, both in France and elsewhere.

Letters to a King

Nineteen of the fifty-four letters in the collection are addressed to James II (d. 1327), King of Aragon, from Jacques de Molay (d. 1314), the last Grand Master of the order. The interrogation documents mostly take the form of folded sheets of parchment or paper, but the record of the questioning of the Templars and Castile and León is in the form of a roll (Vatican City, Archivum Secretum Vaticanum, A.A. Arm.D 220).

A Lost Copy of the Rule

The collection includes a late thirteenth-century copy (Dijon, Archives de Côte d'Or, MS H 111) of the Old French Rule of the Templars. The French version (ca. 1138) was a translation and expansion of the original Latin rule, approved at the Council of Troyes in 1129. The text continued to be modified over the centuries by the addition of the so-called hierarchical rules. The Dijon manuscript includes some (but not all) of the added rules.

A Rediscovery of the Twenty-First Century

One document in the collection (Vatican City, Archivum Secretum Vaticanum, A.A. Arm.D 217), sometimes called the "Chinon Parchment, " was unknown to historians until its rediscovery in 2001. It records the depositions taken in August 1308 of many of the order's highest-ranking leaders (including Grand Master Jacques de Molay), who were held at the French royal castle at Chinon.

Out of the Archives

The documents are preserved in the Archivum Secretum Vaticanum and two archives in Barcelona: the Archivo de la Corona de Aragón and the Archivo Diocesano. The copy of the Rule, which entered the Archives de Côte d'Or from the Grand Preuré de Champagne at Voulaines, was stolen in 1985.