THREE
Lost artefacts of the Dome of the Rock
On 15 July 1099 a heavily armed group of Norman knights forcibly entered the sacred Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem to interrupt the midday prayers of its Muslim occupants. The unarmed worshippers surrendered, but within twenty-four hours all had been slaughtered. The treasures of the Holy Sepulchre were then ransacked.1 Although no inventory of the contents exists, it is widely held that the Crusaders laid claim to a priceless collection of hidden artefacts intimately associated with both the Old and New Testaments of the Holy Bible. From this terrible episode emanate not only the ongoing conflict between the two great parallel religions of Islam and Christianity, but the baffling sagas of the Ark of the Covenant, the Spear of Destiny, the True Cross, and the Holy Grail, all of which have been linked in rumour and fiction, at one time or another, with Rosslyn Chapel. So how on earth does the sacking of a mosque 3,000 miles away come to have anything to do with Rosslyn Chapel, let alone Scotland?
The Dome of the Rock, the site of a temple built by King Solomon of Israel, around 9 BC, remains to this day a sacred place of pilgrimage for Muslim and Christian alike. It sits astride Mount Moriah in Jerusalem: the stone summit that features in both the Holy Bible and the Koran; the plateau upon which Abraham, father of the Hebrew race, was ordered to sacrifice one of his sons, Isaac or Ishmael, depending upon which faith he adhered to. It was also said to have been the outcrop from which Ishmael’s descendant, Mohammed the Prophet, ascended to heaven. All of this appears very far removed from the Rosslyn Estate of the St Clair family, until it emerges that Edgar Atheling, brother of Scotland’s Queen Margaret, had, in 1098, taken part in the siege of the Byzantine city of Antioch,2 and that Henry St Clair, the son of his friend William the Seemly, had accompanied him. In all probability they would have witnessed first hand and might even have participated in the attack on the Dome of the Rock, an exercise which reverberated around Christendom like a thunderclap. So what exactly did the Crusader knights find within the Holy Sepulchre of the Dome of the Rock? Why were the spoils of their sacrilege rumoured to be more priceless than gold?
For a start, King Solomon’s Temple was built to house the Ark of the Covenant, the gold-encrusted chest said to have been designed to the specification of God. In the traditions of Judaism, there is no greater treasure, but, amazingly, nobody knows for certain what became of it or its contents, the two stone tablets inscribed with His ‘Law’ and ‘Testament’, known as the Ten Commandments and considered the most potent symbols of the Old Testament. A tradition exists that Menelik, a shadowy natural son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and therefore ancestor of the Lions of Judah, rulers of Ethiopia, spirited this greatest of treasures away. But nobody knows for sure, and, as at Rosslyn, the answer to the ongoing hypothesis surrounding its whereabouts in Ethiopia is shrouded in uncertainty. Its traditional home, the church of St Mary of Zion at Aksum, remains fiercely guarded and visitors are turned away.
An alternative notion, of course, is that Joseph of Arimathea, the rich Israelite who, on the evidence of the Bible, was Jesus’s uncle and who took possession of the body of his nephew following the Crucifixion, exported the Ark and Holy Grail to Glastonbury in England.3 Another claim is that they were shipped to Languedoc in southern France by the Knights Templar, and thereafter to Scotland, where they lie to this day within the vaults of Rosslyn.
Or is the Holy Grail, as is suggested in The Da Vinci Code, not a drinking vessel at all, but the bloodline of Jesus himself? And are his descendants by his mistress, Mary Magdalene, still to be found living in Roslin village, where they were eventually sent for their own protection? The sheer audacity of The Da Vinci Code’s reasoning is as absurd as it is compelling. However, it has to be acknowledged that, collectively, such questions create one of the Western world’s greatest puzzles; the stuff of romance, legend, and outrageous exploitation. In comparison, other holy artefacts pale into insignificance.
Two millennia after the Crucifixion, pieces of the Holy Sponge employed to wash the body of Christ on the Cross, can still be inspected in the Basilica of St John Lateran and the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, at Santa Maria in Trastevere, at St Mary in Campitelli, and at St Jacques de Compiegne in France. As recently as 1993, the alleged foreskin of Jesus, apparently removed following his ordeal on the Cross, was paraded through the streets of Calcata in Italy.
Taking a lead from the Holy Roman Emperors, the German Chancellor Adolf Hitler genuinely believed that he who held the Spear of Destiny, the holy lance which pierced the side of Jesus on the Cross, had the power to conquer the world, and that losing it meant instant destruction. Following the annexation of Austria, his first initiative was to remove what remains of it from its display case in Vienna’s Hofburg Museum, which is situated in a former Habsburg palace. In homage to Richard Wagner’s 1882 opera,Parsifal, the spear was sent to Nüremburg, a mediaeval merchant city favoured by the Nazis as their spiritual centre.
For the Führer, however, the Spear of Destiny represented another, less obvious, but more spiritually immediate, association. At least two thirds of the generals of the Third Reich were of East Prussian blood and were therefore descendants of the Order of the Teutonic Knights,4 a spin-off from the traditional guardians of the Dome of the Rock, the Knights Templar. When the Spear of Destiny fell into the hands of the invading American army, Adolf Hitler committed suicide, although, of course, this is purely coincidental. Or was it?
It is intriguing to view a twentieth-century tyrant in the light of this superstitiousness, but in the mediaeval world, the ownership of a holy reliquary was the enjoyment of Divine Grace. When Princess Margaret Atheling arrived in Scotland in 1068, her most prized possession was a fragment of the True Cross set within an ebony crucifix richly ornamented in pure gold, about an ell long (approximately 45 inches). This was no bauble but a substantial object, considered to be a dowry beyond price.
Christian tradition says that the True Cross is that upon which Jesus Christ was crucified at Golgotha. A further embellishment is that it was hewn from the Tree of Jesse, named after the father of the biblical King David, which sprang from the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. In the decades following the Crucifixion, the site of the Holy Sepulchre was covered over by a Temple of Venus, part of the Emperor Hadrian’s reconstruction programme. Three centuries later, the Frankish/Roman Emperor Constantine, newly converted to Christianity, had the site uncovered, at which time, it is said, the True Cross was, amazingly, retrieved along with two other crosses. Also unearthed were nails believed to have been those which held Christ on the Cross, and Constantine’s mother, Helena, had them taken to Constantinople where they were incorporated into the emperor’s helmet and the bridle of his horse.
Once identified – by the enactment of a healing miracle, of course – the Cross of the Saviour was enshrined in a covering of silver and committed to the care of the Bishop of Jerusalem. Whether the story of the finding of the True Cross is based on fact or political expediency, the building of the basilica, the Royal House of the Holy Sepulchre was definitely completed during this century, and, more significantly, fragments of the True Cross are known to have been in general circulation throughout Christian Europe at the time. Around AD 455, the Patriarch of Jerusalem sent a piece to Pope Leo I. Two centuries later, another portion was taken to Rome by the Byzantine Pope Sergius I. Towards the close of the Middle Ages, the Protestant reformer John Calvin remarked that there were so many churches claiming to have a piece of the True Cross that they must have had enough wood to fill a ship.5
Given the ravages and uncertainties of time, I think it remarkable that anything at all, true holy relic or impostor, survived the successive waves of pillaging that took place for more than a millennium after the death of Christ. During the seventh century Jerusalem was plundered first by the Persians, then by soldiers of the Roman emperor Heraclius. It was next over-run by Islam, and, although religious tolerance generally prevailed, holy reliquaries were considered idolatrous. In 1009 the remainder of the True Cross was hidden by a group of Christians and survived undiscovered until Jerusalem was taken by the Crusaders ninety years later. What they found then was a small fragment of wood embedded in a substantial golden cross, not dissimilar to the one brought to Scotland by Queen Margaret, a gift from her cousin King Andrew of Hungary, and yet another that was in the possession of the Royal House of Wales.
In 1187, Jerusalem was taken back by the Muslim warrior Saladin. This Ayyubid Sultan of Egypt was unlike anything the Crusaders had hitherto encountered. A brilliant general, he was both an astute and educated man, and when he entered Jerusalem on the twenty-seventh day of the Islamic month of Rajab not a building was looted and not one person harmed. In conquering the Holy City, however, Saladin also took possession of the remainder of the True Cross of Jerusalem. Within a decade it too had disappeared.6
Which, of course, only served to enhance the reputation of the reliquary brought to Scotland a century earlier by Queen Margaret. In the Scots tongue, this priceless artefact became known as the Holy Rude, and, following her death, was revered with deep devotion. Jealously guarded as one of the Crown Jewels of Scotland, the great abbey church of Holyrood in Edinburgh was especially built to house it. Over the following centuries, it would be carried off to England twice. On both occasions, members of the devoutly Catholic St Clair family of Rosslyn would play a part in its return, safekeeping, and its subsequent disappearance.