The Death of Jacques de Molay

 

Awhile ago I listened to a fabulous book on the Templars by historian Barbara Frale, who spent years researching in the Vatican secret archives. Templars were not ordained to the priesthood but professed vows like monks. They were accused of heresy by King Philip IV of France. The Templars were absolved of the accusations of heresy by the Pope, only to be executed by King Philip. Philip wanted the wealth of the Templars and would stop at nothing to get it. The execution of the Templar Grand Master Jacques de Molay and his brethren was in violation of Church law, rather like the execution of St. Joan of Arc. When Jacques de Molay was bound to the stake on an island in the Seine near Notre Dame de Paris, he asked that his arms remain free. While burning, the Grand Master lifted his arms towards the spire of Notre Dame, offering his life to Our Lady, as once his order had been completely consecrated to her. From Dominic Selwood:

In Paris, King Philip immediately saw that the tide was turning against him, and that he needed to do something decisive. He therefore summoned the bishop of Sens and forced him to re-examine the Templars in his diocese. When 54 Templars insisted on their innocence, the bishop dutifully denounced them as relapsed heretics.

As Philip had known all along, a heretic who confessed was welcomed as a lost sheep, given penance, and reconciled to the Church. But if the penitent then slipped back into the heresy, he had rejected all grace, spurned salvation, and was a direct threat to Christian society.

On the 12th of May 1310, as Philip knew he would, the bishop of Sens burned the 54 Templars alive. This appalling cruelty gave Philip the shot in the arm he needed. The remaining Templar resistance petered out.

The sorry tale was drawing to a close. In October 1311, the long-awaited Council of Vienne opened to give final judgement. The evidence did not amount to much. The only Templars who had comprehensively confessed to Philip’s 127 charges were the ones tortured in his dungeons or those in territories loyal to him. There were virtually no confessions from abroad.

True to form, Philip showed up to threaten Clement with physical violence unless he shut down the Templars. There were protests from the other church delegates, who felt the Templars had not been given an opportunity to defend themselves. They also pointed to the suspicious similarity of the charges with those Philip had recently brought against the dead Pope Boniface VIII. None of this helped Clement, who threatened anyone who spoke further with excommunication.

Finally clear to impose Philip’s will, in March 1312, with Philip and his son flanking him, Clement issued the bull Vox in excelso. Citing the irreparable damage done to the Templars’ reputation, he pronounced judgement with a formula that completely sidestepped the question of innocence or guilt:

We suppress, with the approval of the sacred council, the order of Templars, and its rule, habit and name, by an inviolable and perpetual decree, and we entirely forbid that anyone from now on enter the order, or receive or wear its habit, or presume to behave as a Templar. (Vox in excelso)

It was over. All that remained was to tie up the loose ends. Templars who had confessed crimes were sentenced to imprisonment. Those who had remained silent were sent to other religious Orders.

To draw down the final curtain, on the 18th of March 1314 the four most senior living Templars were hauled to Paris. On a rostrum erected on the parvis before the great cathedral of Notre-Dame, they were publicly condemned to perpetual imprisonment. Hugues de Pairaud and Geoffroi de Gonneville accepted the sentences in silence. But Jacques de Molay and Geoffroi de Charney stunned the crowd by talking over the cardinals and professing their innocence and that of the Temple.

The electrifying news was rushed across the city to King Philip at the Louvre. Desperate to crush this dangerous new defiance, he abandoned all legal procedures and ordered the two old Templars to be burned without delay.

So as dusk fell and the canons of Notre-Dame lit the candles and incense for the lucernare before Vespers, the provost of Paris’s men torched two nearby pyres and sent de Molay and de Pairaud up in smoke alongside the canons’ prayers.

A royal chaplain eyewitness described de Molay’s last words (in verse):

“God knows who is in the wrong and has sinned. Misfortune will soon befall those who have wrongly condemned us; God will avenge our deaths. Make no mistake, all who are against us will suffer because of us. I beseech you to turn my face towards the Virgin Mary, of whom our Lord Christ was born.” His request was granted, and so gently was he taken by death that everyone marvelled. (Geoffroi de Paris)

Rumours began to circulate that, at the end, de Molay had also shouted out, summoning Philip and Clement to meet him within a year and a day before God, where they would be judged for their crimes. (Read more.)

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Color Revolution: Thune and Johnson Built the Runway for a One Party State

 From Amuse on X:

On April 17, 2026, the veteran Democrat strategist James Carville and the longtime journalist Al Hunt sat down for their Politicon podcast and described, on the record, the architecture of a one party American state. A listener had asked a hypothetical. Hunt answered that the first order of business after a 2027 Democrat Congress would be to “hold Trump as accountable as they possibly can.” Carville went further. On day one of unified Democrat control, he said, “they should make Puerto Rico [and] D.C. a state, and they should expand the Supreme Court to 13. Fuck it. Eat our dust.” Then came the sentence that should be read aloud in every Republican campaign office in the country. “Don’t run on it. Don’t talk about it. Just do it.”

That sentence is the thesis of this essay. Everything that follows is commentary on it.

Consider first what an ordinary political promise looks like. A candidate announces a program, explains its tradeoffs, and asks voters to ratify it. The ratification is the mandate, and the mandate is the moral basis on which the program moves. Carville has proposed the opposite. He is instructing Democrat candidates to run on grievance, on tariffs, on the cost of eggs, on the 2026 slogan he has suggested, “We demand a repeal,” and then to execute, in office, a structural program the candidates deliberately concealed from the voters. An intelligent reader may ask whether this is really so different from ordinary political surprise. Politicians disappoint voters all the time. The difference is scale. What Carville described is not a broken campaign promise. It is a coordinated remaking of the constitutional order, executed behind a campaign designed to prevent voters from weighing in on it. The deception is not incidental to the program. It is the program’s operating assumption.

Now consider what the program is. Nine pillars can be extracted from Democrat statements on the record, and each one, considered in isolation, would be a generational fight. Considered together, they are a color revolution.

The first pillar is a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Hunt’s phrase, “hold Trump as accountable as they possibly can,” has a specific vehicle behind it. In October 2020, Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s former Labor Secretary, called for a post Trump commission that would name every official, politician, executive, and media figure whose conduct “enabled this catastrophe.” Senator Elizabeth Warren has floated a version. In February 2026, John Kenneth White of Catholic University published a column in The Hill invoking Nelson Mandela’s 1995 South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission as the explicit model. Readers are told the South African TRC was a neutral reconciliation mechanism. It was not. It was a state commission empowered to establish an officially sanctioned national narrative, and that narrative became the moral scaffolding for black economic empowerment laws that the South African Institute of Race Relations, the Tax Foundation, and the Cato Institute have all documented as a codified regime of race based discrimination. A 1998 study by South Africa’s own Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation found that most surveyed victims believed the TRC had failed to produce reconciliation but instead solidified government control of the ‘truth’ and the narrative. That is the template. An American TRC would haul sitting Republican officials, conservative judges, and possibly Supreme Court Justices before televised hearings to extract confessions or condemnations, codify those moments into a federal record of Republican wrongdoing, and use that record as the permission structure for the prosecutions, the statutes, and the purges that follow. The goal is not truth. The goal is compliance. (Read more.)

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Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia

 From The Collector:

Over 6,000 years ago, along the banks of the mighty Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, civilization took its first teetering steps towards glory. Mesopotamia, within the Fertile Crescent that stretched from these rivers to Egypt, has been called the Cradle of Civilization for good reason. It was here that the Sumerian culture flourished, followed by the Akkadians, the Babylonians, and the Assyrians, all intriguing societies in their own right. And all were nourished by the geography of the land and the rich soil it provided. This geography and the vicissitudes of the rivers shaped daily life, demanding co-operation on a massive scale, and fostering the birth of civilization. From kings and gods to the merchants, farmers, and laborers, all had their role to play.

The origin of the Sumerians is a debated topic, but by the Late Chalcolithic Era, they had established several city-states in Lower Mesopotamia, which continued to grow and evolve into the Bronze Age. No longer small settlements, these cities had centralized governments, organized religion, access to developed trade networks, and social hierarchies that reflected the move from Neolithic settlements to fully fledged civilizations.

These Sumerian cities followed similar themes in their culture and construction. At the center of each city was a ziggurat, a huge pyramidal temple dedicated to the city’s patron god or goddess. Surrounding each ziggurat was a large complex that housed the city’s priests and religious elite. Temples also served as banks and conducted trade, providing valuable services to the city’s residents, in addition to their religious endeavors. (Read more.)

 

From The Greek Reporter:

Sumerian civilization appears to have been established in southern Mesopotamia around 4000 BC, while some historians place it as far back as 5000 BC. Established in the Fertile Crescent between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in modern-day Iraq, Sumer was the first urban civilization in the region. From early on, they had developed skills in farming and raising cattle. They also wove textiles and were skilled carpenters and pottery makers. More importantly, Sumerians are credited with inventing the wheel around 2500 BC. Mesopotamians are noted for developing one of the first written scripts around 3000 BC in the form of wedge-shaped marks pressed into clay tablets. This cuneiform script was also adapted and used for roughly two thousand years by surrounding peoples. (Read more.)

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My Lagan Love

Where Lagan stream sings lullaby 
There blows a lily fair 
The twilight gleam is in her eye 
The night is on her hair 
And like a love-sick leánan sídhe
She has my heart in thrall 
Nor life I own nor liberty 
For love is lord of all.  

Her father sails a running-barge 
'Twixt Leamh-beag and The Druim; 
And on the lonely river-marge 
She clears his hearth for him. 
When she was only fairy-high 
Her gentle mother died; 
But dew-Love keeps her memory 
Green on the Lagan side.  

And often when the beetle's horn 
Hath lulled the eve to sleep 
I steal unto her shieling lorn 
And thru the dooring peep. 
There on the cricket's singing stone, 
She spares the bogwood fire, 
And hums in sad sweet undertone 
The songs of heart's desire  

Her welcome, like her love for me, 
Is from her heart within: 
Her warm kiss is felicity 
That knows no taint of sin.
And, when I stir my foot to go, 
'Tis leaving Love and light
To feel the wind of longing blow 
From out the dark of night.  

Where Lagan stream sings lullaby 
There blows a lily fair 
The twilight gleam is in her eye 
The night is on her hair 
And like a love-sick leánan sídhe
She has my heart in thrall 
Nor life I owe nor liberty 
For love is lord of all. 

(from an old Irish song)
A beautiful rendition, HERE, HERE and HERE.

To quote from Mary O'Hara's notes on this song, from her book A Song For Ireland:

The leánan sídhe (fairy mistress) mentioned in the song is a malicious figure who frequently crops up in Gaelic love stories. One could call her the femme fatale of Gaelic folklore. She sought the love of men; if they refused, she became their slave, but if they consented, they became her slaves and could only escape by finding another to take their place. She fed off them so her lovers gradually wasted away - a common enough theme in Gaelic medieval poetry, which often saw love as a kind of sickness. Most Gaelic poets in the past had their leanán sídhe to give them inspiration. This malignant fairy was for them a sort of Gaelic muse. On the other hand, the crickets mentioned in the song are a sign of good luck and their sound on the hearth a good omen. It was the custom of newly-married couples about to set up home to bring crickets from the hearths of their parents' house....

Waterhouse's "Hylas and the Nymphs"

 

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Eating the Elephant One Bite at a Time

 From Tierney's Real News:

Trump has always been honest about what he values: battlefield presence, TV “central casting” presence, and the ability to sell his strategies to the public and keep the base fired up.

Pam Bondi did her job — she empaneled grand juries, put boots on the ground in Florida, and set the stage for the prosecutions Trump wanted to see. Ultimately, her track record in cases is the best the DOJ has seen in 50 years. But she never really learned how to play the media board. She is better in a courtroom than on TV.

Bondi is good at the mechanics of the job. She lined up cases. She did her best to put the right prosecutors in place. She cleared the way for the kind of RICO‑style grand conspiracy work now targeting figures like John Brennan. In that sense, she was the perfect rook: you move her straight into the right squares and then let someone else handle the finishing moves.

Trump loved Pam Bondi enough to put her in the Attorney General’s chair, but he also found out she’s not built for the TV war — so he’s moved her to the private sector, where she can amplify his message like Dan Bongino is doing right now - rather than slow‑walk it from inside the DOJ. Remember, President Trump said nobody knows how someone will perform until they are tested. Correct!

Now Tulsi Gabbard, Todd Blanche, Kash Patel, and Joe diGenova are lining up the pieces for what could be the biggest legal reckoning in the deep state’s history.

Trump still loves her, but he’s not blind. He knows that if you’re going to run the Justice Department in a hyper‑visible political war, you need someone who can show up on TV, talk directly to the camera, and keep the Fox‑News‑and‑talk‑radio‑aligned audience engaged. That’s not Bondi’s strength. That’s Blanche’s role now.

Her move to the private sector could be a lot more useful than harmful. She can go out and talk, write, build a media presence, and operate like Dan Bongino — not from inside the bureaucracy, but as an outside voice that amplifies what the administration is doing. That’s often more powerful than a hesitant, over‑cautious mouthpiece in a government chair. (Read more.)

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Romans, Not “Byzantines”

 From Medievalists:

Few historical civilizations suffer from a greater identity mismatch than the Byzantine Empire. To modern readers, “Byzantine” conjures images of decadence, intrigue, and a shadowy afterlife of ancient Rome. Yet to the people who lived in the empire we now call Byzantine, this label would have been meaningless. They did not call themselves Byzantines. They did not believe they lived in a successor state. They were Rhomaioi—Romans—and their empire was the Roman Empire.

Understanding how Byzantines saw themselves is more than a matter of semantics. It reshapes our understanding of medieval history, Roman continuity, and the profound cultural divide between Eastern and Western Europe. The Byzantine self-image as Roman endured for more than a thousand years, surviving language change, religious transformation, territorial loss, and even the fall of Rome itself. (Read more.)

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Mystery of a 17th-Century Portrait

 

 From ArtNet:

It is not known when the painting entered the collection of the Sidney family, which has lived at Penshurst Place since Tudor times. However, it was first recorded at the family home in 1743 and has been on public display since 1947.

The NPG’s senior curator for research, Charlotte Bolland, has described the painting as “an incredibly early” full-length depiction of a person of African heritage in England. She told ITV that portraits were typically reserved for elite subjects “who were interested in conveying messages about themselves.” She described the portrait as particularly “ambitious and unusual” in its presentation of two young boys side-by-side.

Conservators have lifted layers of discolored varnish from the canvas, allowing the work to “really come to life,” said Bolland.

A deeper investigation into the portrait has so far included both a technical analysis, including examining pigments and using radiography to look beneath the surface, and extensive archival research to try and find hints about who the two boys might be. Speaking to the BBC, Bolland described the work as “a real collaborative effort.” Dress historians, hunting historians, and genealogists are among the experts who will weigh in. (Read more.)

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Why America is at War with Iran

 From Culturcidal:

America’s entanglement with Iran really started when they elected a prime minister who soon thereafter nationalized their oil industry, which the British then controlled. We tried to mediate the issue between the countries, but we were closer allies with Britain and soon began to fear that Iran was going to drift toward the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. During the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviets treated the whole planet like pieces on a chessboard, this drove a lot of our foreign policy decisions. In this case, it prompted us to partner with Britain and help the Shah of Iran, who was already part of the government, to take FULL CONTROL of the country.

The Shah was friendly to us. He also wanted to Westernize Iran and make it into a regional power. He had some success on this front. Economic conditions improved rapidly, he gave women the right to vote (although voting for everyone was limited), their military became stronger, and things were going in the right direction in Iran in many respects.

That being said, the Shah was a dictator and would still throw you in prison if you stood against him. This led to the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

Although many groups across Iran helped to get rid of the Shah, ultimately, the religious crazies led by the Ayatollah Khomeini ended up in charge. As it turned out, they were more oppressive than the Shah, more murderous, and the rapid improvement of Iran that happened under the Shah dramatically slowed down and even regressed in many ways. (Read more.)

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That Vulgar Necklace

 Marie-Antoinette was the victim of the entire debacle. From Country Life:

The story begins in 1772, when Louis XV commissioned an enormous diamond necklace for his maîtresse-en-titre, Madame du Barry. For 200,000,000 livres (about £12 million today), the royal jewellers Boehmer and Bassenge were to create a rivière consisting of 647 flawless, perfectly matched diamonds; a necklace so heavy that it would have to have diamond streamers down the back to prevent the wearer from toppling forward.

In 1774, Louis XV died. Undeterred, Boehmer and Bassenge completed the necklace and, in 1778, just after war had been declared on Britain, offered it to Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. For whatever reason — Thomas Carlyle quotes the queen as saying ‘We have more need of seventy-fours [ships] than necklaces’ — she refused it.

For the next two years, Boehmer and Bassenge hawked the necklace around the royal courts of Europe without success. In 1781, following the birth of the dauphin, they again tried to sell it to Louis XVI — and again were rebuffed. This was the year in which Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy, an impoverished and unscrupulous young woman, began to insinuate herself into royal circles by pretending to be one of Marie Antoinette’s closest confidantes. In 1783, she achieved her greatest social success when she was taken up by Cardinal de Rohan — nearly twice her age, extremely wealthy and, frankly, not that bright.

De Rohan had lost all chance of preferment, having publicly insulted Marie Antoinette’s mother. He yearned to be accepted back at court and de Valois offered to carry a letter of apology to the Queen. The forged response de Valois brought back was, unsurprisingly, encouraging. Further forged letters convinced de Rohan that the Queen was in love with him and that he should give money to de Valois, which he did. Her problem now was that the cardinal kept pressing for a meeting with sa Majesté. How relieved de Valois must have been when she encountered a prostitute, Marie Nicole Leguay d’Oliva, who bore an uncanny resemblance to the Queen and was willing, for a fee, to take part in a practical joke. (Read more.)

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