We begin this century talking about the last of the Templars (noble knights who protected the Pope and the pilgrims, on the way to and from the Holy Land). In this century, they were persecuted and taken to the Inquisitorial Tribunal by the French king, Philip IV. They had as their leader Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Order of the Templars. At the beginning of this order, the leader was Hugh de Payens, and it was he who established the bases of this Military Order that protected pilgrims in the East.

After an inquisitorial process and some years of torture, having to retract in forced confessions, Jacques de Molay was burned alive, as a heretic, on October 13, 1307, on a Friday the thirteenth!

From there came the legendary Friday the 13th, the day when everything bad happens, day of curses, of fears. Day on which the last Knights Templar, or Knights of Christ, were burned at the stake.

There are many interesting things that are known in relation to the Templars. In vain were all the false narratives already mentioned in past centuries, created by Philip IV, the Fair, against them, to incriminate them and take possession of their goods. They had the opposite effect, because they ended up immortalizing them within History. They said that they had mystical knowledge, being accused of practices not accepted by the religion of the time.

The image of the Templars passed into History as being holders of knowledge and sacred cults, which remained preserved despite the destruction of the order to which they belonged. Their headquarters was at the top of Mount Moriah, where today stands the Mosque of Omar (Dome of the Rock), located in the Old City of Jerusalem.

Because of this, they said that they had found the Ark of the Covenant, that they had entered through the underground of the temple and that they found treasures. There was much speculation about the Templars, in this time, but none of these assumptions are considered true.

However, an important fact we need to remember. There was a period, before all this happened, in which Portugal needed the help of the Templars to fight against the so-called Moors, who had invaded and dominated its territory. The Templars then sent a regiment to fight and help Portugal, managing to succeed and expel the Moors from Portuguese lands.

Because of this, Portugal created a kind of moral debt with the Templars. These debts were usually paid with donations. The crowns of Europe made donations and, often, quite large ones, to the Templars, in the understanding that they were the ones who protected travelers. With this they ended up becoming very rich.

When this persecution of the Templars happened, causing the death of Jacques de Molay, those who survived looked for a place where they could take refuge, going to shelter in Portugal. Because of this old moral debt with the Templars, the Portuguese crown gave them full protection, only imposing two conditions.

1- It was necessary that they change their name, they could no longer be called Templars, because it would be a risk for Portugal, which could be persecuted for giving shelter to this order condemned for heresy.

2- That all the technology, all the money and all the knowledge that the Templars possessed would pass into the hands of the Portuguese crown. And so it was done. So, they gave up all this technological knowledge and fortune that they possessed, and settled in Portugal. There was no longer the Order of the Templars, but rather, the Order of Christ, giving rise to the great navigations.

Thus it is explained how an unexpressive country, without technology, backward in all senses, was the “spearhead” in terms of navigation. This happened because they received the figure of the Templars. They created the School of Sagres and boosted the navigations, giving rise to the discovery of Brazil.

When the last Templars were persecuted, among them their chief Jacques de Molay, this one, before being burned alive, uttered a curse against his executioners, saying: “I did nothing of what they accuse me and you will pay for doing this to me”. In less than a year, Pope Clement V died, and Philip IV, the Fair, himself also.

Historians say that in the French Revolution, in 1789, when Louis XVI, who was from the same dynasty as Philip IV, the Fair, was guillotined, a beggar who passed by the scene said: “Long live Jacques de Molay! He is being avenged today, when the last king of France loses his head!”. On that day the entire dynasty of France fell.

From 1309 to 1377, the papacy resided in Avignon, in the south of France and not in Rome. This period, known as the “Avignon Captivity”, occurred due to instability in Rome and the strong influence of the king of France, Philip IV, who appointed as pope Clement V. From him, there were six successors who governed the Catholic Church in France, for almost seventy years. All of them French Popes.

It was a period of many crises, much turbulence, much fighting among the cardinals, about how the destiny of the Church would be. There was interest from the French cardinals and the nobility in bringing everything to France, that is, it was not only a religious power of the Church, it was a political, territorial power. A Church that meddled within the customs of the time.

Within the Catholic Church there are no positions for women, but some of them the Church recognizes as having much contribution, whether in the matter of faith or in its own orthodoxy. We then had an Italian mystic, called Catherine of Siena (Doctor of the Church), who from a very young age was known as one who had the gifts of the Holy Spirit, who spoke with Jesus.

She said that Jesus made requests to her such as: that she fulfill the Gospel, so that people would be more united, that they would love each other more and that the Avignon Captivity, this deviation of the Church, only served for Christianity to become disunited. “My disciples will be known by how much they love one another”, Gospel of John, 13:35.

She then began the task of convincing the authorities of the Church to move the papacy to Rome, because Christ spoke to her, she saw Him, and He asked her for unity and love. And she managed that, in 1377, the seat of the Church returned to Rome. She pacified the divergences.

She also had the stigmata of Jesus (mediumistic phenomenon of physical effects) in her hands and feet, just like Francis of Assisi and others. This is due to the degree of communion with Christ being so great that the form of this manifestation occurs through stigmata in the hands and feet. Where the hands and feet of Christ were nailed on the cross, the stigmata are formed, and there remain the marks and even bleed.

After this papacy of Avignon, the Church had another very troubled period, when the Western Schism occurred, between 1378 to 1417. Upon arriving in Rome, the religious asked themselves why this was happening, because they had different structures, cardinals who followed the French Church and others who followed the Church of Rome. There was no chance of joining. This Schism, then, divided the Church between Rome and France.

With this Schism, some Councils arose to try to unify the Catholic Church. And it was in a Council, held in a neutral city, Pisa, that it was decided that they would elect a Pope who was neither from Rome nor from Avignon. It would be a Pope of Pisa, who would unify the Church.

The result was that there were three Popes, in the period from 1378 to 1417. We had a French Pope, from Avignon, an Italian Pope, from Rome, and another Italian Pope, from Pisa. A very confusing period, with many Popes, for the number of faithful that existed at the time. And having unified the Church again was a miracle, because everything that divides has difficulty joining again!

This century saw the birth of two great Emissaries of Christ. One, in the former Republic of Czechoslovakia, called Jan Hus. And the other in England, John Wycliffe.

John Wycliffe was a great personality of Great Britain. Seeing all this conflict of the Church, because of the Schism and the three Popes, he came to the conclusion that it had lost itself. The crusades occurred, the Inquisition, the Avignon Captivity and, finally, the great Western Schism, that is, “a lot of perfume and little essence”.

He asked himself: “What was the Church doing in favor of Jesus, of His Gospel?”. Until then, the Church did not have a Bible in the language of the people, it sold indulgences (forgiveness) to have money. With this, they created a table of forgiveness for each type of sin committed. John Wycliffe was outraged with all this.

He also questioned submission to the Pope and to temporal power. For him, they should be submissive to Jesus. He created a motto for his own life: “Sola scriptura”. He would follow the Scriptures and Jesus. And the first thing he did was translate the Bible into English.

In 1382, the first Bible in the English language appeared. This Bible provided the English with the possibility of its reading and study. The masses were celebrated with the priest at the altar, facing the Blessed Sacrament, with his back to the faithful, and it was celebrated in Latin, that is, nobody understood anything.

For John Wycliffe this made no sense, and it was necessary to convert the text to English, to simplicity, so that the faithful would understand it. He ended up becoming very remarkable for his personality, for his charisma. People began to follow him, they came to be called Lollards (people who lived complaining, talking), because he spoke and questioned a lot, lived correcting what he thought was wrong, unnecessary. He was one of the precursors of the reform that would happen in the 16th century. The reform only existed because John Wycliffe existed...

A very important detail needs to be mentioned about his life. He died of natural causes, however, at the Council of Constance (1414 to 1418), it was declared that he needed to be judged by the Inquisition. And he was, even after dead, condemned as a heretic. His remains were exhumed, burned and thrown into a river.

The Bible of John Wycliffe was entirely handwritten because the printing press had not yet been created. Surprising! He influenced some young people of the time. One of them, Jan Hus, we will speak about in the next century. He will continue the thought of John Wycliffe. He will foster, within the space where he lived, discussions about the improprieties of the way Christianity was being conducted by its leaders.

This century is known as the century of the Black Death, or Bubonic plague (disease transmitted by the rat). Many people died, about one third of the population of Europe was decimated, thus changing its psychic structure.

Hygiene conditions, at that time, were very precarious. There were no medicines. People had no idea how diseases occurred, that an animal like the rat could contaminate them, through something invisible to the naked eye, by the consumption of some food. There was no sewage system and even personal hygiene was not practiced, because, according to our research, people bathed only three times a year. In short, they had no notion of the risk they ran.

These diseases that happened were understood as lack of prayer. So, the people gathered to pray and the contamination spread... The clergy, with this, was very pressured, because the people understood that the priests were not fulfilling their role of protecting them from the demon that caused the plagues. The bubbles burst all over the body and they thought that if they did a bloodletting in these wounds, improvement would be obtained. But, exactly the opposite happened, because it was (as we know today) something highly infectious. The Black Death caused very large and painful swellings and there was nothing that could be done at that time: death was certain. The misfortune lasted from 1347 to 1352, approximately.

“Now Inês is dead.” This expression was born in this century and it is a fact, not a legend, that appears in the book of Camões. There was in Portugal a prince called Dom Pedro I (not the emperor of Brazil who, upon returning to Portugal, became Dom Pedro IV).

Marriages at that time were arranged by parents to unite kingdoms. Dom Alfonso, father of Dom Pedro I, had a wife brought from Spain for his son, called Constança. In her entourage, however, among the maids, there was a young woman called Inês de Castro and Dom Pedro I fell in love with her. Even so, he married the one indicated by his father. Soon after the marriage, Constança died.

Then, the prince married again, in secret, with Inês, and they had three children. The father, when he found out, did not accept that his son had married a lady-in-waiting and became deeply revolted. He waited for the son to leave the farm where they lived, in the city of Coimbra, and ordered her to be killed. She was thirty years old.

When Dom Pedro I returned and realized what had happened, he wanted to declare war against his father. His mother, however, asked him to honor him, because soon he would die and he would be the new king. Two years later, Dom Alfonso died and, when his son became the new king, the first thing he did was order the killing of those who had killed Inês de Castro. For this reason, he was considered a just king.

Later, in a bizarre decision in the eyes of History, he ordered that they go to the tomb of Inês de Castro to exhume her, that they make a funeral procession and that she be brought to the throne of Portugal, because the king was her husband and she was the queen. He ordered that they place the crown on what remained of her body and said that she was the queen of Portugal. In the core of his pain and for the love that had united him to her, he enthroned her as the dead queen of Portugal. From this came the expression: “Now Inês is dead”.

They were buried side by side in the Monastery of Alcobaça, known for the narrow door that leads to the refectory. A curiosity: they are buried on the side of the Church, in a vertical sense and facing each other, because, according to the traditions of the Catholic Church, when there is the resurrection, when Jesus returns and they resurrect, they will be able to see each other, in the first moment of return to life...

At the end of this century, a war began between France and England, which lasted more than a century. It was important, because it witnessed the end of feudalism: the king was in clear decline and the nobles became strong.

A young, impressive figure will arise in the next century, who will end this war...