* List of the stories he appears in : - D 2001-024 : "The Crown of the Crusader Kings", from 2001, by Don Rosa.

 

* His biography :
     Jacques de Molay was born in Besançon, France, in 1243, in a noble but poor family.
   In 1265, in Beaune, France, he joined the Knights Templar, an order founded in 1128 to keep the Holy Land of Palestine and settled in Paris in 1140, and then fought in Syria. In 1291, after the loss of Palestine, the Knights were driven from the Holy Land by the Saracens, and de Molay took his few remaining knights to the Island of Cyprus. In 1298, he was made Grand Master od his Order.
   In 1307, he was summoned in France by Pope Clement V and King Philip IV to discuss new crusades and effect a union between the rival Templars and Hospitallers.  Molay asked the pope to investigate certain spurious accusations of blasphemy and sodomy that had recently been made against his order.
   On October 13, 1307, King Philip IV suddenly arrested and interrogated every Knight Templar in France, de Molay and his sixty friends among them. Under horrible tortures, de Molay confessed that some of the charges brought against the order ( for instance, to deny Christ and to spit upon the crucifix) were true, but de Molay rejected a charge of sodomy. In 1309 and 1310, de Molay appealed for a personal judgment by the pope, but Clement decided to suppress the order in 1312.
   On March 18, 1314, de Molay was led out before the people to publicly confess his and the order's sins. After he heared the sentence of the judges, which were a perpetual imprisonment, he recanted his earlier confessions and said the only crime he was guilty of was lying about his Brethren to relieve his own tortures, and so, as a final punishment, he was burned as a relapsed heretic.
   His last words were said to have been "Pope Clement! King Philip! Within one year, I summon you to a tribunal before the Judgment seat of God, where you will get the retribution you deserve! Damned! Damned! All damned until the thirteenth generation of your races !"
   The malediction worked : Clement V died on April 20, 1314 from suffocation, and Philip IV died on November 27, 1314, from a cerebral ictus, and his three sons died within 12 years, without letting any male descendant, and so ending the Capetian dinasty...
 

* His place in the Barks/Rosa stories universe :
    In "The Crown of the Crusader Kings", his shadow is seen, arrested by Philip Le Bel's men's while the whole history of the Templars is told, and especially the day of October 13, 1307, when they were arrested.
   Don Rosa named another character of the same story, the French Monsieur Molay, of the International Monetary Council, after him, former bank of the Templars, after him, meaning he's a descendant of him, which would be hard, as I learnt in my researches that Jacques de Molay was probably homosexual but we're not told whether de Molay is his *direct* ancestor (we're not even told that hr is an ancestor, and neither that the unnamed character's silhouette who appear in the story is the real Jacques de Molay, but after Don Rosa has been asked if Monsieur Mollay was descendant of Jacques de Molay, the Templar who was sentenced to death in Paris, he answered "That's correct, I named him after the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar. Some readers have asked me why I did not make it clear that he was
a descendant of that Master -- because I sometimes put little hidden pearls into the story details to allow an astute reader to discover them on their own."). Another unnamed Templar appears on a panel, who also looks like a Mollay/de Mollay, and is probably a descendant too...

M. Molay, Jacques' descendant

probably another descendant of Jacques

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