The Fourteenth century
We begin this century speaking of the last Templars (noble knights who protected the Pope and the pilgrims on the going and on the return to the Holy Land). In this century, they were persecuted and taken to the Inquisitorial Tribunal by the French king Philip IV. They had as 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 the pilgrims in the East.
After an inquisitorial process and of years of tortures, being obliged to retract himself in forced confessions, Jacques de Molay was burned alive as heretic, on the day 13 of October of 1307, a Friday thirteen!
From there arose the legendary Friday the 13th, the day in which everything bad happens, day of curses and of fears. The day in which the last Knights Templar, or Knights of Christ, were burned at the stake.
There exist many interesting things known regarding the Templars. It was in vain 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. Such accusations had opposite effect, for they ended up immortalizing them in History. It was said that they possessed mystical knowledge, being accused of practices not accepted by the religion of the time.
The image of the Templars passed to History as that of holders of knowledge and sacred cults, preserved despite the destruction of the order to which they belonged. Their headquarters was at the top of Mount Moriah, where today is found the Mosque of Omar (Dome of the Rock), situated in the Old City of Jerusalem.
Because of this, it was said that they would have found the Ark of the Covenant, that they had entered through the undergrounds of the temple and discovered treasures. There was much speculation about the Templars in this period, but none of these hypotheses is considered true.
However, an important fact needs to be remembered. There was a period, before all this to occur, in which Portugal needed the help of the Templars to war 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 expel the Moors from the Portuguese lands.
In function of this, Portugal created a kind of moral debt with the Templars. These debts generally were paid with donations. The crowns of Europe made contributions, many times voluminous, to the Templars, understanding that they protected the travelers. With this, they ended up becoming very rich.
When happened the persecution to the Templars, culminating in the death of Jacques de Molay, the survivors sought a place where they could take refuge, going to shelter themselves in Portugal. Due to this ancient moral debt, the Portuguese Crown gave them total shelter, imposing only two conditions:
A) It was necessary that they change of name; they could no longer be called Templars, for this would represent a risk for Portugal, that could be persecuted for giving cover to an order condemned for heresy.
B) That all the technology, all the money and all the knowledge that the Templars possessed pass to the hands of the Portuguese Crown.
And thus it was done. They gave up all this technological knowledge and the fortune that they possessed and established themselves in Portugal. There was no longer the Order of the Templars, but rather the Order of Christ, giving beginning to the great navigations.
Thus it is explained how a relatively small country, without great technological tradition and backward in various senses, became the “tip of the spear” of navigation. This occurred because it received the influence of the Templars. They created the School of Sagres and propelled the navigations, contributing to the discovery of Brazil.
When the last Templars were persecuted, among them their leader Jacques de Molay, this one, before being burned alive, cast a curse on his executioners, saying: “I did nothing of that which they accuse me and you will pay for doing this to me.” In less than one year, Pope Clement V died, and Philip IV himself, the Fair, also.
Historians tell that, in the French Revolution, in 1789, when Louis XVI, belonging to the same dynasty of Philip IV, the Fair, was guillotined, a beggar who passed by the place said: “Long live Jacques de Molay! He is being avenged today, when the last king of France loses the head!” On that day fell an entire dynasty of France.
From 1309 to 1377, the papacy resided in Avignon (Avinhão), in the south of France, and not in Rome. This period, known as “Avignon Captivity”, occurred due to the instability in Rome and to the strong influence of the king of France, Philip IV, who supported the election of Pope Clement V. From him, there were six successors who governed the Catholic Church in France during almost seventy years. All were French popes.
It was a period of many crises, turbulences and disputes among the cardinals about how would remain the destiny of the Church. There was interest of the French cardinals and of the nobility in bringing everything to France, that is, it was not only about religious power, but also political and territorial. It was a Church that interfered deeply in the customs of the time.
Within the Catholic Church there are no positions for women, but some of them are recognized as figures of great contribution, whether in the question of faith, whether in the orthodoxy itself. We had, then, an Italian mystic called Catherine of Siena (Doctor of the Church), who since very young was known as someone who possessed the gifts of the Holy Spirit and said to speak with Jesus.
She said that Jesus made requests to her: that she fulfill the Gospel, so that the people be more united, that they love more and that the Avignon Captivity, this deviation of the Church, served only to disunite Christianity. “My disciples will be known by loving much one another” (Gospel of John, 13:35).
She began, then, the task of convincing the authorities of the Church to transfer again the papacy to Rome, for she affirmed that Christ spoke to her, she saw Him, and He asked her for union and love. And she managed that, in 1377, the seat of the Church return to Rome. She pacified the divergences.
She also presented the stigmata of Jesus (mediumistic phenomenon of physical effects) in the hands and in the feet, just as Francis of Assisi and others. This would occur due to the degree of communion with Christ being so great that such manifestation arose by means of stigmata. In the places where the hands and the feet of Christ were nailed on the cross, marks were formed that even came to bleed.
After the papacy of Avignon, the Church lived another quite troubled period, when occurred the Western Schism, between 1378 and 1417. Upon arriving at Rome, many religious questioned the reason of the change, for there had already been formed distinct structures: there were cardinals who followed the French Church and others who followed the Church of Rome. There did not seem to be possibility of reconciliation. This Schism, then, divided the Church between Rome and France.
With this Schism, there arose some Councils to try to reunify the Catholic Church. And it was in a Council realized in Pisa, city considered neutral, that it was decided that they would elect a pope that was neither from Rome nor from Avignon. It would be a pope from Pisa, that would unify the Church.
The result was that there came to exist three popes in the period from 1378 to 1417. There was a French pope, from Avignon; an Italian pope, from Rome; and another Italian pope, from Pisa. It was an extremely confusing period, with popes too many for the quantity of faithful that existed in the time. And the fact of the Church having been reunified later was almost a miracle, for everything that divides has difficulty to unite again.
This century saw the birth of two great emissaries of Christ: one, in the ancient region of the current Czech Republic, called Jan Hus; and the other, in England, John Wycliffe.
John Wycliffe was a great personality of Great Britain. Observing all this conflict in the Church, caused by the Schism and by the three popes, he arrived at the conclusion that it had lost itself. There occurred the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Avignon Captivity and, finally, the great Western Schism. In other words: much perfumery and little essence.
He asked himself: “What is the Church doing in favor of Jesus and of His Gospel?” Until then, the Church did not possess a Bible in the language of the people and sold indulgences (pardons) to raise money. With this, they came even to create tables of pardon for different types of sins. John Wycliffe was indignant with all this.
He also questioned the submission to the pope and to temporal power. For him, men should be submissive only to Jesus. He created, then, a motto for his own life: Sola Scriptura. He would follow the Scriptures and Jesus. And the first thing that he did was translate the Bible to English.
In 1382, there arose the first Bible in English language. This translation provided to the English the possibility of reading and study of the Scriptures. The masses were celebrated with the priest turned to the Most Holy, with his back to the faithful, and in Latin; that is, practically nobody understood what was being said.
For John Wycliffe this did not make sense. It was necessary to convert the text to English, bringing it to simplicity and allowing that the faithful understand it. He became very known for his personality and charisma. The people began to follow him and came to be called Lollards (people who lived complaining and questioning), for he spoke much, criticized excesses and pointed that which he considered wrong or unnecessary. He was one of the precursors of the Reformation that would happen in the 16th century. The Reformation only existed because John Wycliffe existed...
A very important detail about his life needs to be mentioned. He died of natural causes; however, in the Council of Constance (1414 to 1418), it was decided that he should be judged by the Inquisition. And he was, even after dead, condemned as heretic. His mortal remains were unearthed, burned and thrown into a river.
The Bible of John Wycliffe was totally handwritten, for the press had not yet been created. Surprising! He influenced some young people of his time. One of them was Jan Hus, of whom we will speak in the next century. He would give continuity to the thought of John Wycliffe, fomenting, in the environment in which he lived, discussions about the improprieties of the form how Christianity was being conducted by its leaderships.
This century is known as the century of the Black Death, or bubonic plague (disease transmitted by rats). Many people died: about one third of the population of Europe was decimated, altering deeply its social and psychological structure.
The conditions of hygiene in that time were very precarious. There were no medicines. The people did not have the smallest notion of how the diseases occurred, nor that an animal such as the rat could contaminate them by means of something invisible to the naked eye, through the consumption of contaminated foods. There did not exist sewage system and not even personal hygiene was practiced regularly. According to our researches, one took bath only some times per year. In short, there was no consciousness at all of the risk that was run.
These illnesses were understood as lack of prayer. Then, the people gathered to pray, and the contamination increased even more. The clergy was very pressured, for the people believed that the priests were not fulfilling their role of protecting them from the demon that provoked the plagues. The bubbles appeared through all the body and it was imagined that, by performing bloodletting in these wounds, there would be improvement. However, occurred exactly the contrary, for it was — as we know today — something highly infectious. The Black Death caused enormous and painful swellings, and nothing could be done in that time. Death was practically certain. The misfortune lasted approximately from 1347 to 1352.
“Now Inês is dead.” This expression was born in this century and it is a historical fact, not a legend, registered in Portuguese literature and immortalized by 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).
The marriages in that time were arranged by the parents to unite kingdoms. Dom Afonso, father of Dom Pedro I, sent to bring from Spain a wife for his son, called Constança. In her entourage, however, among the ladies of company, 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, upon discovering, did not accept that his son had married a lady of company and became deeply revolted. He waited that the son leave the farm where they lived, in the city of Coimbra, and ordered to kill Inês. She had only thirty years of age.
When Dom Pedro I returned and took knowledge of what occurred, he wanted to declare war against his own father. His mother, however, asked that he honor him, for soon he would die and he would become the new king. Two years later, Dom Afonso died and, when the son assumed the throne, the first thing that he did was to order the execution of those who had participated in the death of Inês de Castro. For this, he became known as a justicier king.
Afterwards, in a decision considered bizarre to the eyes of History, he ordered that they remove Inês de Castro from her tomb, perform a funeral procession and conduct her to the throne of Portugal, for, being he the king and her husband, she was the legitimate queen. He ordered to place a crown on that which remained of her body and declared officially that Inês was the queen of Portugal. In the core of his pain and for the love that united them, he enthroned her as dead queen of Portugal. From there arose the expression: “Now Inês is dead”.
They were buried side by side in the Monastery of Alcobaça, also known by the narrow door that leads to the refectory. There is an interesting curiosity: their tombs are not placed parallel, but positioned one facing the other. According to the traditions of the Catholic Church, when the resurrection occurs and Jesus returns, upon awakening to life again, they will be able to see each other at the first instant...
At the end of this century began a war between France and England that lasted more than one hundred years. It was an important event because it witnessed the gradual end of feudalism. The power of the kings found itself in frank decline, while new political and economic forces began to arise.
This long war became known as the Hundred Years' War and marked deeply the European History.
It also prepared the scenario for the emergence of an extraordinary young woman who, in the following century, would perform a decisive role in its outcome.