Answerable Only to the Pope: Omne datum optimum

On 29 March 1139, Pope Innocent II signed a document that made the Knights Templar untouchable. Not by any king. Not by any bishop. By almost anyone with authority in Christendom except the man who signed it.

The document was a papal bull. Its name, taken from its opening words, was Omne datum optimum. "Every good gift," lifted straight out of the Epistle of James (James 1:17). Fitting, because the bull was a gift like few religious orders had ever received. In a handful of clauses it lifted the Templars clean out of the ordinary chain of command and set them under the Pope alone.

That single decision made them one of the most powerful institutions of the age. It also made them one of the most resented. Both things came from the same page.

What the bull actually granted

Strip away the Latin and Omne datum optimum did five concrete things.

First, it took the order under direct papal protection. The Templars now answered to Rome, not to the local church hierarchy they happened to be standing in.

Second, it exempted them from the authority of local bishops. A bishop normally ran everything spiritual inside his diocese. Not Templar houses. Those were carved out.

Third, it freed them from paying tithes, the church tax that every other landholder owed. Worse, from the bishops' point of view, the bull eventually let the order collect tithes for itself.

Fourth, it granted the Templars the spoils of war taken from Muslim enemies. Plunder became legal, sanctified income. Hold that clause for a minute, because it tells you what kind of order this was, and what its theology assumed.

Fifth, and this was the sharpest cut of all, it allowed the order to have its own priests. Templar chaplains were admitted into the order, wore its habit, and answered to the Grand Master and the Pope. Not to any bishop. The Templars now had their own clergy inside their own walls, beyond the reach of the local church.

Read those five together and you see the shape of the thing. A fighting brotherhood with its own money, its own priests, its own courts of appeal running straight to Rome, and no local authority able to tax it, discipline it, or tell it no.

Notice what the fourth clause takes for granted. Sanctified plunder assumes a sanctified war. The papacy of this era had built a theology where killing the right enemy could be an act of devotion, and Bernard of Clairvaux had written it up for the Templars a few years earlier (that is post 2). I admire the discipline this order was built with. The premise underneath the spoils clause, that God blessed the taking of an enemy's goods by the sword, was not the gospel, and it is worth naming as the error it was.

The bulls that followed

Omne datum optimum was the foundation. Two more bulls built on it within six years.

In 1144, Pope Celestine II issued Milites Templi, "Soldiers of the Temple." It ordered the clergy of Europe to protect the order and urged the faithful to give to it. It also let the Templars take up their own collection once a year, even in a district that lay under interdict, meaning a place where normal church services had been shut off as punishment. When everyone else's collection plate went dark, the Templars' could still pass.

In 1145, Pope Eugenius III issued Militia Dei, "the Knighthood of God." This one filled in the physical infrastructure. It confirmed the order's right to build its own oratories, its own places of worship, and to have its own cemeteries where members and their households could be buried. A Templar could now be born into the order's spiritual care, worship in its chapels, and be buried in its ground, without a diocesan bishop touching any of it.

Popular summaries sometimes blur which bull granted which right, and the medieval copies themselves were reissued and expanded over the years, so the tidy list is a little messier than it looks. The scholarship, Malcolm Barber's work above all, treats these three bulls as a package that, taken together, gave the order a range of privileges almost no other religious body enjoyed. The direction is not in doubt. Each bull pushed the Templars further outside the ordinary structures of the medieval Church.

A transnational order under no local crown

Step back and picture what this produced by the middle of the 1100s.

The Templars held land and houses across France, England, Iberia, Italy, the German lands, and the Holy Land. In every one of those places, the local rules that bound everyone else bent around them. A French bishop could not tax the Templar commandery in his diocese. An English lord could not haul the local Templars into his court the way he could his other tenants. The order moved men, money, and goods across borders that stopped ordinary people cold.

Only one authority sat above them. The Pope. And the Pope was in Rome, or wherever the papal court happened to be that decade, which for most Templars meant hundreds of miles and many weeks away.

On paper, they were accountable. In daily practice, the man who could actually check them was too far off to see what they did on any given Tuesday.

The resentment this bred

Privilege that comes out of someone else's pocket makes enemies. The Templars' privileges came out of a lot of pockets.

Bishops lost revenue and authority in one stroke. The tithe exemption took money they had counted on. The order's own chaplains took souls, and the fees and influence that came with them, out from under diocesan control. Complaints from bishops about Templar privileges run through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This was not a minor irritation. It was a standing grievance among exactly the men who ran the Church at ground level.

Secular rulers had their own version of the same resentment. A king likes to know that the powerful, wealthy, armed brotherhood operating inside his borders answers, in the end, to him. The Templars did not. They answered to a foreign pope. For a suspicious king short on cash, an order that was rich, heavily privileged, and loyal somewhere else was a temptation and a threat at the same time.

That resentment did not destroy the Templars in 1139, or 1145, or for a long time after. But it never went away. When King Philip IV of France finally moved against the order in 1307, he was reaching for a target that generations of bishops and princes had already learned to dislike. The privileges that made the Templars strong had also made them isolated, and isolated is easier to knock down. That takedown is post 9 in this series.

What's a myth here

The pop-culture version says the Templars answered to nobody, a law unto themselves, a shadow power. That overshoots. They were formally and genuinely subject to the Pope, and popes did direct them, reprimand them, and use them. The accurate picture is narrower and more interesting: the Templars were exempt from every nearby authority and subject only to a distant one. Not lawless. Just beyond the reach of anyone close enough to watch them. That gap between who technically governed them and who could actually see them is the whole story, and it is not the same as "accountable to no one."

What a man can take from this

The Templars were not unaccountable. That is the part worth sitting with. On paper they had the highest accountability available in their world. The Pope himself. And it still was not enough, because the Pope was in Rome and the sin was in the commandery, and no authority that far away can correct what it never sees.

That is the trap, and strong men walk into it more than weak ones do. You climb, you build something, you become the guy other people answer to. Slowly the number of people who can tell you no drops to zero. You still have accountability on paper. A statement of faith. A God you pray to. A "the Lord is my judge" you say and half mean. And like the Templars, you mistake a distant authority for a present one.

Scripture is blunt about where that goes. "He who separates himself seeks his own desire, he quarrels against all sound wisdom" (Proverbs 18:1). Not might. Breaks out. The man with no one close enough to check him does not stay level. He drifts, and because no one near him can say the hard word, the drift compounds until it is a cliff. God is not far off, but He gave you brothers on purpose, because a warning you can hear from across a table lands in a way a conviction you can talk yourself out of at midnight never will. "In abundance of counselors there is victory" (Proverbs 11:14).

Here is the sharp end. A man who answers to no one nearby becomes two things at once. A tyrant, because unchecked strength curdles. And a target, because everyone can see he stands alone, and alone is where men get taken down. The Templars were both. Do not be either.

So name it this week. Not "I have accountability" in the vague way. Name the actual men. Who has permission to look at your money, your marriage, your phone, your temper, and tell you that you are wrong. If the honest answer is no one, that is the finding, and it is more dangerous than you think. Pick one man this week. Give him the standing to say no to you, and mean it when he does. "Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another" (Proverbs 27:17). You cannot sharpen a blade with a Pope in Rome. You need someone at the table.

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Part of The Knights Templar: A Complete, Historically Accurate History. Previous: The Rule and the Sales Pitch, Bernard of Clairvaux at Troyes. Next: Inside the Order, Ranks, Mantles, and Daily Life.