Vox in excelso: how Portugal's Templars became the Order of Christ

On 20 March 1312 Philip IV of France went to Vienne, a city on the Rhône where Pope Clement V had been holding a general council of the Church for five months. First on its agenda was the Order of the Temple, the military order of knight-monks whose members Philip had arrested across France four and a half years earlier.2 sources2 sources

The council was not doing what the king wanted. By the pope's own account, most of the cardinals and four-fifths of the prelates chosen to study the case, in every nation, wanted the order to be allowed to defend itself, and held that it could not be condemned for heresy on the evidence so far. In February the pope had bargained in secret with Philip's envoys, without consulting the council. In March Philip held an assembly of his kingdom at nearby Lyon.1 source1 source

Two days later, on 22 March 1312, Clement gave a commission of cardinals the bull that ended the order. Like all papal bulls it is known by its opening words, Vox in excelso, “a voice from on high”. The council approved it at its second session, on 3 April.2 sources2 sources

The wording was careful. The pope did not find the order guilty. He abolished it as an act of government, because its good name was ruined and, he wrote, no good person would want to join it any more. The fate of its surviving members and of its estates, given over the centuries for the defence of the Holy Land, he reserved for later decisions. In Portugal those decisions would take seven years and produce a new order.2 sources2 sources

The Templars reached Portugal almost as soon as the order spread west. On 19 March 1128 Countess Teresa, widow of Count Henry of Portugal, gave them the castle of Soure, south of Coimbra, on the open frontier with the Muslim south. Three months later her son, Afonso Henriques, defeated her supporters at São Mamede and took power. He confirmed the gift in 1129 or 1130.1 source1 source

The order fought in Afonso Henriques's wars, perhaps for the first time in his army at the capture of Santarém in March 1147, and he rewarded it with land and churches. The Templars rebuilt old castles and built new ones to hold the frontier and to settle the empty country around them, granting charters to attract settlers: Redinha in 1159, Tomar in 1162, Pombal in 1174, Castelo Branco in 1213.1 source1 source

The man most linked with them is Gualdim Pais. Born around 1118, he spent five years in the East, where he took part in the capture of Ascalon in 1153, and became master of the Templars in Portugal on his return in 1156. His mastership, which lasted until his death in 1195, was the order's high point in the kingdom.1 source1 source

In 1159 Afonso Henriques gave the order the castle of Ceras and a large territory reaching from the Mondego to the mouth of the Zêzere. Ceras was in ruins. Witnesses questioned in 1317 said the master left it for a nearby site because it was a better hilltop and had better water. Work on the castle of Tomar began on 1 March 1160, and an inscription dates its keep, the oldest in Portugal, to that year.1 source1 source

Tomar became the Templars' headquarters in Portugal. Inside its walls they built the Charola, a round church modelled on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Their castles brought in ideas from the crusader fortresses of the East, among them the alambor, a sloping stone apron at the foot of the walls. Soon after Tomar was finished, in 1171, they built Almourol on a rocky island in the Tagus, to control a ford and the road north to Coimbra.2 sources2 sources

On 13 October 1307 Philip IV had the Templars of France arrested. They were accused of denying Christ and spitting on the cross when they were received into the order, among other crimes, and many, including the grand master, Jacques de Molay, confessed. The pope took over the case and asked other kings to arrest the knights in their own lands.3 sources3 sources

King Dinis of Portugal had moved first. The earliest Portuguese document about the Templars' property is dated 18 August 1307, two months before the arrests in France. On 3 January 1308 Clement wrote to Dinis that the grand master and the knights of France were in prison and asked him to do the same. There is no record that he did. Before 4 February 1308 the Portuguese master, Vasco Fernandes, and the commanders of Pombal and Soure had left the kingdom, officially to answer the charges before the pope.2 sources2 sources

Dinis's attention was on the order's property. Until then he had favoured the Templars: he took them under his protection in 1279 and confirmed their privileges in 1285. Now a commission of men loyal to him, including the archbishop of Braga and the bishop of Lisbon, ruled between 1307 and 1310 that their castles had been royal gifts and belonged to the Crown. The Templars protested that the judges were not impartial.2 sources2 sources

On 27 November 1309 the Crown took Soure, Pombal, Ega and Redinha, and in January 1310 an inquiry examined Idanha-a-Velha and Salvaterra. The other Iberian kings feared that Templar lands would pass to the Hospitallers, the military order of St John of Jerusalem, and leave their control. On 21 January 1310 Fernando IV of Castile proposed a pact to defend the Templar properties in both kingdoms against all claimants. Dinis accepted on 14 April, and James II of Aragon joined on 17 August 1311.3 sources3 sources

The Templars of the peninsula fared far better than their brothers in France. Church councils in Castile in April 1310 and at Salamanca that October, with the bishop of Lisbon among those present, found them innocent on most charges but left the final word to the pope. In France many knights went to the stake, some as late as 1314.2 sources2 sources

Vox in excelso reserved the Templars' people and property for the pope. On 2 May 1312 the bull Ad providam gave the property to the Hospitallers, with one exception: the Templar lands in the kingdoms of Castile, Aragon, Portugal and Majorca, which the pope kept for his own later decision. The envoys of the Iberian kings at Vienne had argued for this. A bull of 6 May let former Templars be judged by councils in their own provinces, with pensions for those cleared and for those who confessed.3 sources3 sources

The exception did not give the lands to Dinis. They were Church property and could not simply pass to a king. On 23 August 1312 Clement wrote to the Iberian rulers asking what they meant to do with the Templar estates, and gave them until 1 February 1313 to answer. The rulings of the king's commission were never approved in Avignon.2 sources2 sources

Dinis built his case. In April 1314 his inquirers took 25 questions to Soure, Castelo Branco, Montalvão and Nisa, designed to show that the Templars' lands had always been royal gifts. The witnesses were mostly laymen, clerics and the order's servants, with a few former brothers. One, André Gonçalves of Pombal, had been at Acre when it fell to the sultan of Egypt in 1291. Clement died that month, on 20 April, and the papacy stayed empty until John XXII was elected on 7 August 1316.3 sources3 sources

Not everyone obliged. At Castelo Branco, Gil Fernandes Barreto said he was the king's man and would tell what he knew, which was more than the articles contained, only when he saw a letter or a sure message from the king. Paula Pinto Costa reads the inquiry as history written to order: the questions were framed to get the answers the Crown wanted.2 sources2 sources

The danger to the Crown was real. In 1317 John XXII granted Tomar itself, the Templars' old headquarters, to a cardinal, Bertrand de Montfavez, to hold in commendam, drawing its income. A protest was lodged on 21 December 1317 in the name of Dinis's heir, Prince Afonso, who was already in open conflict with his father. It set out the Crown's case that the Templars had held their castles only in return for military service, and that the castles still belonged to the king.2 sources2 sources

There was a precedent next door. On 10 June 1317 James II of Aragon, Dinis's brother-in-law, had obtained a new military order, Montesa, in Valencia in the same circumstances. On 14 August 1318 Dinis gave power of attorney to two envoys at Avignon: João Lourenço de Monsaraz, a knight, and Pedro Peres, a canon of Coimbra cathedral.2 sources2 sources

They succeeded. On 14 March 1319, in the bull Ad ea ex quibus, John XXII created the Militia of Jesus Christ, which he called a pugillum Christi, a “fist of Christ”, to resist the Muslims who raided the south of the kingdom and to win back lost lands. It would follow the rule of the Castilian order of Calatrava, under the oversight of the Cistercian abbot of Alcobaça. Its seat would be Castro Marim, a hilltop castle in the Algarve that watched the land border with Castile and the coast.3 sources3 sources

The next day the pope named the first master: Gil Martins, until then master of the order of Avis. The master owed the king an oath of loyalty, but the bull stated that the oath gave Dinis no rights over the order's property. The new order received everything the Templars had owned. Four places were named and could never be given away: Castelo Branco, Longroiva, Tomar and Almourol.2 sources2 sources

On 24 June 1319 Dinis signed the castles over. In the charter he admitted that the sentences against the Templars had been unjust, said he wished to clear his conscience, and called the Order of Christ a reform of the Temple. Soure, Pombal, Ega, Redinha, the two Idanhas, Salvaterra, Segura, Proença and Rosmaninhal passed to the new order.3 sources3 sources

The handover took months. Gil Martins swore his oath of loyalty to the pope, before the king, on 18 November 1319. Two days later the master and his brothers signed a receipt for the property; Rossi Vairo reads the same act as also giving the king the incomes of the old Templar estates. On 26 November, in houses at Santarém that had belonged to the Temple, the order issued its first ordinance. Its master admitted in another document that he did not know where all the property was.2 sources2 sources

Some Templars joined the new order. Their last master, Vasco Fernandes, had been arrested in Castile by Fernando IV, who seized 50,000 torneses the master had lent to the order of Alcántara. On 23 August 1321 John XXII told Gil Martins to receive him into the Order of Christ and give him a commandery, and he seems to have held Montalvão until his death around 1323. The statutes of 1321 set the new order's strength at a minimum of 86 brothers, 71 of them knights.2 sources2 sources

Castro Marim was poor and remote, and the brothers did not stay. A master moved the convent to Tomar without papal permission. Sources disagree on when: the Presidency's history of the order gives 1356, the Torre do Tombo 1357, and the heritage service's study “after 1366”. Statutes issued with papal authority ratified the move only in 1449.4 sources4 sources

In 1420 Pope Martin V made Prince Henry, the son of João I later known as Henry the Navigator, its administrator, and the order's income helped pay for his voyages of discovery.2 sources2 sources

The papacy tied the order to the new lands. On 13 March 1456 Calixtus III's bull Inter caetera gave the Order of Christ spiritual jurisdiction over the lands from Cape Bojador through Guinea and beyond. The order's cross went up on the sails of Portuguese caravels and became one of the best-known national symbols.2 sources2 sources

Then the order became the Crown's. Manuel, its governor since 1484, became king in 1495 and was the first king to be its master. In 1551 Pope Julius III's bull Praeclara clarissimi joined the masterships of the military orders to the Crown for good. At Tomar, Manuel added a nave to the Charola, built between 1510 and 1515, with the carved window of the chapter house that is now read as a symbol of the maritime expansion.3 sources3 sources

The Order of Christ still exists, as an honour. The Republic abolished the old orders on 15 October 1910 and restored this one on 1 December 1918, to reward services to the country or to humanity. It now goes to holders of the highest offices of state, such as former prime ministers and presidents of parliament, and on state visits to the spouses of foreign heads of state and sometimes to the heads of state themselves.1 source1 source

The Templars' buildings have lasted too. The Convent of Christ at Tomar, which grew around their castle over seven centuries, was inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List in 1983. The state took the whole complex back in the mid-1980s, after a politician, Costa Cabral, had bought part of it at auction in 1835.1 source1 source

Legend has grown around them. Paula Pinto Costa notes that the stigma against the Templars in the 1310s was a French affair: late medieval Portuguese documents mention the link between the Temple and the Order of Christ without embarrassment, and most of the speculation came with Romantic writers much later. In her reading, the Order of Christ was created above all to hold a patrimony. It inherited the Templars' castles and revenues, while its early statutes said almost nothing about its religious life.1 source1 source

Even the roll of Templar masters in Portugal is disputed. Lists drawn up by chroniclers and historians run from 11 to 33 names, partly because some add the masters who governed Castile and León as well as Portugal.1 source1 source