The pope had specially reserved his judgment in the case of the grand master, Jacques de Molai, in that of the Visitor of France, and in those of the commanders of Guyenne and of Normandy. Several cardinals-legate, with some French bishops and doctors of the University of Paris, constituted the tribunal which was to pass the sentence in the name of the pontiff. After satisfying themselves that these four eminent knights had repeated their avowals before a second commission, the members of the tribunal, convinced of their guilt, caused a scaffold to be erected in front of Notre-Dame, and there, on Monday, March 18th, 1314, the four Templars were publicly condemned to imprisonment for life. On the scaffold the grand master and one of the others recanted their confession of guilt and protested their innocence. The cardinals, surprised at this recantation, committed the prisoners to the care of the provost of Paris, with orders to bring them before them the next day, when the tribunal had had time to deliberate on this fresh incident. But Philippe le Bel, learning what was taking place, hurriedly assembled his council, and had the grand master, and the other Templar who had similarly persisted in denying his twice-avowed guilt, burnt alive the same night. They underwent this horrible torture protesting their innocence to the last. The two remaining knights who had acknowledged their guilt were kept for some time in prison, but were afterwards set at liberty. [Illustration: Fig. 152.--Surrender of the Town of Montefrio, near Granada, in 1486. The alcids and Moorish chiefs, after the siege, delivering the keys of the town to Ferdinand the Catholic and Queen Isabella.--Bas-relief on the stalls of the choir of the high altar of the cathedral, carved in wood in the Sixteenth Century.] Other orders of knighthood, having more or less of a religious character, were founded in the Middle Ages, or during the Renaissance period: the principal were, in Spain, the Order of the Knights of Calatrava; in Germany, the Order of the Teuton Knights; the Order of the Golden Fleece in the Low Countries, in Spain, and in Austria; that of St. Maurice and St. Lazarus in Savoy; that of St. Stephen in Tuscany; and in France, those of St. Michael and of the Holy Ghost, which were merely honorary orders, although the first Order of the Holy Ghost, founded in 1352 by Louis d’Anjou, King of Jerusalem and Sicily, had for its object the re-establishment of an essentially military knighthood, as a means for bringing about a new crusade.