Pope Clement V passed papal bulls dissolving the Templar Order, confiscating their lands, and labeling them heretics.

The Beguines and Beghards of Germany were condemned as heretics, while the council forbade marriage for clerics, concubinage, rape, fornication, adultery, and incest.

In the early 14th century, Philip IV of France urgently needed money to continue his war with England, and he accused the Grand Master of the Templars, Jacques De Molay, of corruption and heresy.

[citation needed] The arrests of the Knights Templar, coupled with the defiance of the Colonna cardinals and Philip IV against Pope Boniface VIII, convinced Clement V to call a general council.

[a][5] The opening of the Council was delayed, giving time to the Templars to arrive so they could answer the charges put against them, and was not convened until 16 October 1311.

The great princes, including the rulers of Sicily, Hungary, Bohemia, Cyprus, and Scandinavia, as well as the kings of France, England, and the Iberian peninsula, had been invited.

[6] The main item on the agenda of the Council not only cited the Order of Knights Templar itself, but also "its lands", which suggested that further seizures of property were proposed.

Clement was forced to adopt the expedient of suppressing the Order of Knights Templar, not by legal methods (de jure), but on the grounds of the general welfare of the Church and by Apostolic ordinance (per modum provisionis seu ordinationis apostolicae).

The Pope then presented to the commission of cardinals (for their approval) the bull to suppress the Templars in Vox in excelso (A voice from on high), dated 22 March 1312.

[16] Prior to the Council, Ubertino da Casale, formerly a friar at Santa Croce, Florence,[17] protested that only a few brethren were following the Rule of Saint Francis.

[21] In 1312, the Council and Clement's papal bull, Ad nostrum qui,[22] condemned the Beguines and Beghards movement, a group of laymen and laywomen that lived in semi-monastic communities,[23] as heretical.

[8] In response, the papal vice-chancellor suggested to the Aragonese delegates that the Catalans, now located in Thebes and Athens, should march through the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia to attack the Muslims in the Holy Land.

[29][30] Philip died 29 November 1314,[31] but the crusading tithe instituted by the church had been spent by the reign of Charles IV of France.

[40] In 1312, in anticipation of a revised version of the Council being drafted at the time, Clement ordered that copies of the Vienne decrees that were then in circulation be recalled or burned.