The Templars: The Rise and Fall of God's Holy Warriors

by Dan Jones

He crucified his own troops for marching out of line and trampling crops. If his military commanders irked him he either killed or banished them, and castrated their children.

Crotchety but acute, Gregory’s displeasure was easily aroused, and during the course of his papacy he aimed it at heretical students in Paris, pagans in the Baltic and even cats, whom he suspected of being incarnations of Satan.

He died having offended the church so consistently that he had been excommunicated four times and had led many churchmen to the conclusion that he was the devil incarnate.