Monks Gone Wild!
When a good brother goes criming
There are bad apples in every profession, and the monastic one is no different. It is, however, particularly wild when a monk goes bad. He just has so much space to do all of the crimes.
The following entries are three examples from the Middle Ages of monks going full crime lord on everyone.
Brother Pirate
Eustace Busket was born somewhere near Boulogne around 1170 CE. He became a Benedictine monk at St. Samer Abbey sometime before 1190.
After this, he took up the position of seneschal (person who administers the castle and fief on the lord’s behalf) for the count of Boulogne, Renaud de Dammartin.
Then things went off the rails: in 1204, Dammartin accused him of messing up, so Eustace did the rational thing and fled. Dammartin took his lands, so Eustace again did the rational thing and burned down two mills and turned pirate.
He entered the history books as the Black Monk and served King John (of Robin Hood fame) by taking a fleet to raid Normandy. But then he raided English coastal villages, and John had to give him a talking to.
The Black Monk turned French in 1212, and he led his ships in the Battle of Dover. He became such a menace to the English that when they finally cornered him in 1217 and found him hiding in the ship’s bilges, they ignored his attempts to bribe them and told him to pick his execution site. He was beheaded in July of 1217.
Templars Murdering For the Lulz
The Knights Templars were warriors, but they were also monks that took vows of chastity and all that jazz. One of the rules these monk-knights were supposed to follow was to not kill or cause to be killed their fellow Christians.
As a Medievalist.net article notes, this rule was repeated so often that one suspects the Templars murdered many Christians.
In one case, a Brother Paris and two coworkers offed some Christian merchants in Antioch.
Why?
Well, they said that ‘sin’ made them do it, which is the medieval equivalent of ‘whoops, guess I forgot.’
Brother Paris and his bros were kicked out of their Templar house and publicly flogged in all the cities the Templars held. The head of the house stuck them in Chateau Pelerin, and there the murdering monks died.
Hospitaller Lord of Crime
The Knights Hospitallers were in the same position as the Templars except that they became a hotbed of political intrigue while they held the island of Rhodes in the 1300's.
One sign of this was a Brother Bertrin of Gagnac. In 1381, Bertrin was accused of drowning the senior knight of the Spanish contingent of Hospitallers. He tried to shift the blame to his agents and the local master, but no one could find enough evidence to pin it on them.
This didn’t dampen Bertrin’s ambition, and he sued to become the head of the Hospitaller Priory of Toulouse in May of that year. This turned out to be a bad plan for him, as the court opened an investigation into his past behaviors.
These behaviors included abandoning his post in Cyprus and embezzling a ton of money when he was in Kos. (This isn’t mentioning the unsolved murder of the Spanish guy, of course, but…keep that in mind.)
In November of 1381, the courts found Brother Bertrin totally guilty on all counts. As punishment, they were going to kick him out of the Hospitaller club.
There was a whole ceremony involved in the expulsion, and during the ceremony, Bertrin launched himself at the 70-year-old Hospitaller Master with a knife and tried to kill him. Fortunately, his brother knights got in the way and shanked Brother Bertrin instead, who died of his wounds.
In Conclusion:
When monks go bad, they go really bad.