Part III
In this part . . .
In this part, we pick up the cold trail of Templar fact, and follow it to the birth of Templar mythology. Jacques de Molay, the last Templar Grand Master, was burned at the stake seven centuries ago, and since that time, the legend of the mysterious Order has never died. Instead, it has merely changed shape to fit each new century and each new storyteller.
Chapter 7 takes a closer look at what we do know about the Templars after their fall, as well as what we think we might know, following the trail of myth to the land of hucksters and crackpots, and what they say they know. Chapter 8 examines the very real possibility that secret rituals of Freemasonry grew out of the surviving remnants of Templars on the run, and Chapter 9 takes a peek into other modern societies that claim a legitimate Templar lineage, as well as groups that have patterned themselves on the Order.
Chapter 7
In This Chapter
● Tracking Templar treasure
● Separating fact from fiction in Templar tales
● Analyzing the possible fate of the order
● Tying Templars to modern-day conspiracy theories
Legend has it that the end of the Knights Templar was only the beginning. Almost five centuries after the execution of the Templars’ last known Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, the French Revolution erupted.. King Louis XVI and his family were arrested and thrown into the dungeon built by the Templars so long ago. On January 21, 1793, King Louis was led to the guillotine in Paris’s Place de la Revolution, stripped of his honors and titles by the new Republic. Citizen Louis Capet was pushed against the bascule, and his body was tilted forward, face down. His neck was secured in the wooden lunette to hold it firm and straight. And then, to the cheers of the mob, the sharpened steel blade dropped, cleanly severing the former king’s head from his body with chilling efficiency.
When Louis’s head rolled into the basket, so the story goes, someone rushed forward from the crowd. Grabbing the head and holding it aloft, he yelled, “Jacques de Molay, thou art avenged!” The death of the Templars had finally been repaid by the death of the French monarchy.
Except that it didn’t really happen. The story wasn’t true, but it was important, because this was the dawn of the modern conspiracy-theory movement. And the Templars were smack-dab in the middle of it.
This chapter is a whirlwind tour through the surviving myths and legends of the Knights Templar. In most cases, we try to separate fact from plausible conjecture, wishful thinking, and four-alarm codswallop.
The Templar Fleet
The most common legend about the survival of the Templars has to do with their fleet of ships. The tale usually is spun that, when the knights were all arrested on Friday, October 13, 1307, King Phillip’s men rushed into the Paris vaults to find that the vast collection of loot stored there had been secretly spirited away. Phillip’s whole reason for seizing the knights had come to nothing. His evil plans were thwarted, and the knights sailed away from France with their treasure safely packed on their fleet of ships, which slipped from their moorings and vanished into the mists of time and legend. Golly.
Sailing up the Seine
Several books and many Web sites refer to a fleet of ships departing Paris on the night of October 12 laden with Templar treasure. The term ship may be more grandiose than you’re thinking. The Seine runs right through the heart of Paris. It flows northeast and spills into the western edge of the English Channel at Le Havre, but although it has been a commercial artery since Roman days, it is not deep enough to handle large ships. More important, the medieval city of Paris hugged the river, and the king’s palace was in the middle of it, on the island called the Isle de la Cite — a perfect vantage point for spotting any unusual dockside activity. And surely some civic-minded soldier or citizen who was preparing to help arrest the Templars on the 13th would have raised an alarm if they had noticed the ships trying to leave the day before.
La Rochelle
The most commonly touted escape route of the Knights has long been claimed to be the port city of La Rochelle, about 300 miles from Paris. During the trials, Jean de Chalon testified that Gerard de Villiers, Preceptor of the Paris temple, had fled the country with 50 horses and 18 ships. The Templars did indeed have ships, but again, surely someone on the king’s side, privy to the arrest order, would have noticed streams of Templars making their way to La Rochelle, as well as unusual activity on the docks around the Templar ships. There is no record of such a mass exodus.
The story of some massive Templar fleet leaving La Rochelle is certainly flawed, but that’s not to say that Templar ships couldn’t have set sail before October 13. The order had shipping interests all throughout the Mediterranean and up and down the Atlantic coast. One massive movement of ships would surely have been spotted, and the king’s officials notified. But a ship here, a galley there, some disguised knights hiring a merchant ship some other place, all managing to slip from their docks before the night of the arrest — these are all highly possible scenarios. But some estimate that 2,400 members of the order managed to flee the country. That’s an awful lot of men to just slip off in a dinghy or two.
So where'd they go?
Nevertheless, the Templar ships did go somewhere, even if it wasn’t overnight. There are no records of a large number of ships handed over to the Hospitallers (or snatched by Phillip, for that matter). The bulk of their navy was bottled up in the Mediterranean Sea, and ships for use there were not built for arduous voyages in the open Atlantic. They undoubtedly had ships at their headquarters in Cyprus, along with ports in Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal. But these were generally smaller transport vessels that hugged the coastline, without much provision for, well, provisions. Trips around the Mediterranean were kept pretty short, island hopping from Rhodes to Sicily to Cyprus and so on. And if a flotilla of fleeing Templar ships did try to pass westward through the straits of Gibraltar around the time of the arrests, someone would have seen them and it would have been reported to Spain or Portugal’s king, to the pope, or to Phillip himself. There were no such reports.
As for having 18 galleys that may have left from La Rochelle, history doesn’t back that up either. In shipping records from La Rochelle of the period, there is no record that the Templars had 18 galleys, much less that all 18 were at La Rochelle. Reports in the years leading up to the arrest seem to imply that the Templars (and the Hospitallers, for that matter) actually had very few large ships — some suggest no more than four — and hired more from merchant shippers when needed.
Still, the rumors persist that the knights packed their ships with gold and sailed away, never to be seen again.
Talking Treasure
Over the centuries, the legend of the Templars’ lost treasure has grown and taken some peculiar side trips. Visions of heaping chests of gold and jewels being smuggled out the night before their mass arrests are romantic, but is there any evidence to support such notions?
The surprise arrests happened only in France, and the intent of King Phillip was clearly to cut the head off of the Order by clapping its principal commanders in dungeons so fast that they would have no chance to flee or hide anything. And the story has circulated for centuries that the Paris treasury, in particular, was the prize that Phillip wanted most. But we examine that one in a little more detail.
Cold, hard cash
It has been said that Phillip saw the treasury when he had been hiding out in the Paris Temple after he had been chased through the streets by an angry mob. He had devalued the gold and silver coins by recasting them with less precious metal than their face value, and the economy was a mess. But what is curious about this contention is that Phillip’s own government was using the Paris Temple as its treasury, making the Templars the official government exchequers. The Templars were politically neutral, well defended, and considered to be scrupulously honest. The one thing that French kings could count on was that their crown jewels and silver and gold reserves were safe when they were in the Templars’ vaults.
But Phillip was quickly gaining a reputation as something of a ganef where money was concerned, and his most recent shenanigans with devaluing the currency were but one example. Shortly after the cowardly incident in the Templars’ basement, Phillip ordered a new official government treasury building to be constructed on the banks of the Seine, where the Louvre stands today. When it was completed, he had the bulk of the French holdings transferred from the Templar vaults to his own, where no one could keep tabs on it. All he left in the care of the Templars was enough reserves to be used to pay French troops, and he continued to allow the Templars to administer these accounts.
When the mass arrests happened, Phillip had given strict orders for the arresting officers to take an inventory of every Templar commandery, preceptory, farm, vineyard, or hut, so a snapshot record would exist of all their holdings. If he was going to steal from them, he wanted to know exactly what he was getting. But when they came to the Paris Temple, the vast treasure Phillip had seen was gone. Supposedly. We have no one’s word but a greedy, crooked French king’s that the Templar treasury was empty. Moreover, the survey concluded by Phillip in 1308 revealed that the Templars’property was “unkempt and ruinous,” with no evidence of wealth or luxuries. The Templars lived the life of peasants.
Yet, shortly after the arrest of the Templars, Phillip again recalled all the gold and silver coins and had them recast with the proper weight of metal. And all this happened shortly after he had built a new treasury and arrested the Templars. More important, there was no independent accounting or security watching over that new treasury.
Remember that when the trials ended and the pope dissolved the Templar Order, he decreed that their property would be handed over to the Hospitallers. Phillip certainly knew that that day would come, and the last thing he would have wanted was to hand over piles of loot. The vast majority of the Templar wealth was in property, not liquid assets, and Phillip couldn’t hide castles, vineyards, and houses. But he certainly could have hauled gold, silver, and cash out of the Paris Temple across the way to his own treasury, and claimed that the Templars had fled with it. Consider this: After finding the “treasure” missing, Phillip certainly didn’t put out an APB for it, close the borders, call out the navy, and give chase. And with all the torturing of knights going on in dungeons across France, the one question no one put to them was, “Where’s the swag?” Possibly because Phillip knew right where it was all along.
Treasure more mystical than cash?
So, what if we’re not talking about treasure in the sense of gold bars and silver coins. What if the real treasure of the Templars was more mystical, mythical, and magical?
Some people have long contended that the Templars had discovered esoteric knowledge in the Holy Land that revealed the secrets of life, the universe, and everything. They believe that the first nine long years the Templars spent in relative obscurity after their founding were consumed by digging under the Temple Mount, the site of King Solomon’s Temple, where they found the Ark of the Covenant, mystical scrolls, the head of Christ or John the Baptist, the Holy Grail, or other equally exciting items. Others have claimed that the Templars were in possession of Gnostic knowledge, and certain “secret” gospels left out of the Bible. More recent claims have been made that the Templars possessed evidence of certain mysteries, the most recent being The Da Vinci Code's central thesis that Jesus had been married to Mary Magdalene.
One curious supposed clue appears in Chartres Cathedral in France. The Templars had close ties to Chartres, which they had helped to construct.
At Chartres is a column carved with an unusual scene of the Ark of the Covenant, loaded on a cart, obviously being transported somewhere. Over the years, some have claimed that this single carving depicts the original Knights Templar who started the order in Jerusalem, after discovering the Ark buried under the Temple Mount and moving it to France. This particular legend goes on to say that the Templars knew in advance of their pending arrest in France in 1307, and sent the Ark away. They took it, so the tale goes, to Scotland, where it was eventually buried beneath Rosslyn Chapel. (Of course, the Chartres carving may just be depicting Moses hauling the Ark around in a wagon, too.)
The Scottish Legends
In 2001, Arthur Herman wrote a delightful book called How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe s Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It. Face it: Scottish people believe this is all true. And so it goes with the Templar myths of Scotland. Many legends about Scotland and the Templars exist, and certain folks believe every single one of them.
The legend goes that the Templar fleet set sail from La Rochelle and made its way around England and to the coast of Scotland, near Argyll, by some accounts. The Templars, now under threat of excommunication by the pope, needed asylum, and Scotland was the logical choice. King Robert I (“The Bruce”) was at war with England and had himself been excommunicated by the pope for murdering a Scottish nobleman in 1306. England sought to absorb Scotland, while Robert the Bruce was determined it be an independent nation.
You say Sinclair, I say Saint-Clair
The common family name that runs throughout the Scottish Templar theories is Saint-Clair, or Sinclair, and it gets very confusing, mostly because so many of them are named William or Henry (showing an almost criminal lack of family imagination). Originally from Normandy, they have been a powerful and influential clan throughout Scottish history—even Shakespeare's Macbeth features the Earl of Caithness, a Saint-Clair, as a powerful Scottish laird. Here's the breakdown:
● William "The Seemly" Saint-Clair was granted the area around Roslin in 1057.
● Henri de Saint-Clair, First Earl of Roslin, fought in the first Crusade with Godfroi de Bouillon, and with Hughes de Payens, the founder of the Knights Templar. It is also claimed that Hughes visited Roslin, Scotland, in 1126, and was given the land to build the first Templar preceptory outside of the Holy Land at Ballontrodoch, known later as Temple.
● Sir William Saint-Clair (1260-1303) was the first Baron of Roslin.
● Sir Henry Saint-Clair (?—1330), was Sir William's eldest son, and a friend of Robert the Bruce.
● Another Sir William Saint-Clair (1300—1330) was Henry's son, who was slain by the Moors in Spain in 1330 as he tried to head for the Holy Land to bury the heart of Robert the Bruce. This Sir William was married to Isabel, daughter of Malise, Earl of Strathearn, Caithness, and Orkney. It is this William Saint-Clair who is alleged by some to have been the last Grand Master of the Templars. But if he had actually been a member of the order, why did he and his brother Henry both testify in a Scottish trial against the Templars that they had heard suspicious rumors about the order's "secret" initiations?
● William and Isabel's son was another Henry Saint-Clair, First Earl of Orkney (1345-1400). It was this Henry who has been claimed to have explored Greenland and North America with the Venetian Antonio Zeno (see "Henry Saint-Clair and the Zeno Narrative," later in this chapter). He is sometimes referred to as Prince Henry I of Orkney, and is actually believed to have died in 1400 fighting the English, and not in Greenland as has been suggested.
● His son, Henry Saint-Clair, Second Earl of Orkney (1375-1422), served as Lord High Admiral, and later, Lord Chancellor, of Scotland. For a time, he was protector of the young James Stuart, who would become King James I of Scotland. It is through this connection that a supposed Templar and Masonic link is made to the Stuart line of kings and pretenders.
● Henry's son, William Saint-Clair, First Earl of Caithness, 3rd Earl of Orkney, and Baron of Roslin (1404-1480), was the builder of Rosslyn Chapel, which began in 1440.
● A later William Saint-Clair of Roslin is claimed in 1602 as the "hereditary Grand
Master Mason of Scotland" by several stonemason lodges. It turns out he wasn't the best role model — he seems to have almost immediately skipped off to Ireland over an alleged affair with a local milkmaid. His son, yet another William Saint-Clair, was claimed by the stonemasons again almost 30 years later as their hereditary Grand Master, in a bit of power politics. The Masons wanted a patron with royal favor, but King Charles I declined to officially name Saint-Clair as the protector of their guild.
● And, just to add to the confusion, in 1736 one more William Saint-Clair of Roslin (17001778) was named as the first Grand Master of the Freemasons' new Grand Lodge of Scotland. He accepted the honor, and then signed away any hereditary claim to the position in favor of elected officers. Nobody gets out of a job that easily. They turned around and elected him to the position for life. Interestingly, he wasn't a Freemason when he was contacted with the offer and had to be initiated as a Mason before he could accept the job. When he died, he was the last Saint-Clair to be buried in the subterranean vaults of the chapel — so far.
Battle of Bannockburn
The legendary tale of the Templars in Scotland always leads to the story of the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. Robert the Bruce’s troops met King Edward Il’s advancing English forces at a stream called Bannock Burn in what was the decisive victory for the Scots in their first war of independence. The Bruce’s Scottish forces of less than 9,000 men, armed mostly with spears, were heavily outnumbered by Edward’s 2,000 men on horse and 16,000 foot soldiers. The legend goes that at a crucial point in the battle, out of the woods rode a fierce contingent of mounted Knights Templar, dressed in white, who turned the battle in Robert the Bruce’s favor and forced Edward and his troops to flee back to England. And there was much rejoicing.
It is a romantic tale, but a highly unlikely one. The Templars had not been on a major field of battle since the fall of Acre in the Holy Land in 1291; they had essentially lived quiet lives across Europe until their arrests in 1307.
Even if you believe that large numbers of Templars really were hiding out in Scotland, the battle-trained fighting men from the Holy Land were, frankly, a little long in the tooth after more than 20 years of inactivity to be donning their chainmail and riding into battle.
Of course, one variation on the tale includes the use of the Ark of the Covenant as a weapon of mass destruction. This particular legend claims that the aging knights used the secret, sacred, and divine powers contained in the Ark, which they had smuggled from Jerusalem to France, and then to Scotland, to defeat the overwhelming English army.
An account written shortly after the battle really identified these mysterious Scottish troops who came out of the woods as something of a rabble of untrained and unarmed scavengers, and not a highly trained and disciplined legendary army of warrior monks. Robert the Bruce was a master of guerilla tactics in the field and had told this motley collection of miscreants to assemble in a clearing behind the woods, hidden from the view of the English troops. They fashioned spears and made flagpoles and pennants to look like fresh troops. Then at the moment when the English were trapped between advancing Scots forces, the woods, and a creek, Robert called for this group to run screaming out of the woods to give the illusion of a flanking attack.
The trick worked, and the English fled the battlefield.
Still, believers in the Templars’ exploits at Bannockburn have their own explanation. The Templars were hiding in secret, fearing for their lives that unsympathetic Catholics would rat them out. Robert the Bruce was excommunicated and was a sharp enough leader to gratefully accept any military help he could get in his fight for Scottish independence. He was also sharp enough to know that, after the war, he would need to make nice with the Church again, so it would be pretty foolish to publicly acknowledge that he’d given safe haven to the dissolved Templars. Therefore, after the war was over, using the talents of his friend Sir William Saint-Clair (1300-1330), Freemasonry was created in Scotland as a society for the Templars to safely provide cover for their mutual protection. That’s the legend, anyway.
Rosslyn Chapel
A little chapel just south of Edinburgh, Scotland in the little village of Roslin is ground zero in the legends of Templars in Scotland. The Collegiate Chapel of St. Matthew, better known as Rosslyn Chapel, was built as a private place of prayer and burial for wealthy families. Scotland has several of them, so from that perspective, it is not unique. It was conceived and started by William Saint-Clair (or Sinclair, depending on the source) in 1446, and was intended to be a small chapel attached to a larger structure. In fact, the old foundations to the unbuilt cathedral that was planned still lie buried in the grass outside. It took some 40 years to complete.
Figure 7-1: Rosslyn Chapel, ground zero of Templar mythology.
Inside, the chapel is a wonder of the sculptor’s art. Nearly every column, cornice and cranny of the building is carved in some decorative way. The Saint-Clairs were wealthy and spared little expense.
Over the years, literally reams of paper and ink have been spent on placing Rosslyn Chapel at the center of a dizzying array of theories about the Knights Templar and what they possessed, and perhaps buried, in its crypts. Many people are convinced that Rosslyn was built by the Templars and contains some kind of secret within its walls and carvings. And most of it starts with a burial stone in the chapel, marked “William Sinclair, Knight Templar.”
William Sinclair’s grave: A Knight Templar?
The problem is that there is precisely zero evidence that William Sinclair, Third Earl of Orkney and Baron of Roslin, was, in fact, a Knight Templar at all, or even that this is his stone. The burial marker is an old one, true, but the words Knight Templar were not added to it until the 1800s. And the burial marker itself, which depicts the carving of a knight’s sword, is small and in keeping with other markers across Scotland that were used for children, not adults. The addition of a sword to it often meant that the grave was the child of a knight. There is no real way of knowing just which of the many William Sinclairs it referred to. Those trying to make the case for the chapel being a Templar building presume it was the William who built it, but he was a pretty important Scottish Lord and would have undoubtedly been placed in the crypt in the floor, instead of the smaller area where this marker appears — if he was buried in the chapel at all.
A pagan tempte
Much is claimed about the literally thousands of carvings throughout the chapel as being “Templar,” “Masonic,” or “pagan.” Researchers have stared at the carvings of Rosslyn for centuries and imprinted on them their own interpretations. Templar theorists always concentrate on the same handful of carvings, desperate to make a Templar connection. One in particular shows a knight on a horse, and it is often claimed that there is a second knight on the horse with him, proving it to be Templar. But the actual carving clearly shows that the second figure is walking behind the horse. Worse, it is pretty clear that the carving has been altered at some point. Many scholars believe it once showed St. George slaying a dragon, and that the dragon was chipped away to make it more “Templar-esque.”
Another altered carving deals with the supposed Masonic connection to the chapel: a face, said to be the allegorical figure of the Masonic character Hiram Abiff, with a gash over his forehead, as is described in Masonic ritual. The problem is that the gash in the carving’s forehead wasn’t there until the 1800s. Prior to that, for a time, a slash was painted on in red, and before that, the figure had no “wound” at all.
Yes, there are demons and “green men” and many strange images to be found in Rosslyn Chapel, but it is by no means unique in Scotland or anywhere else in Christian countries, in terms of hundreds of carved, decorative, or allegorical figures.
The subterranean secrets
It has long been alleged that the real secrets of Rosslyn Chapel lay in its columns, crypts, or other subterranean caverns. The Apprentice Pillar, in particular, has been said to be hiding . . . something inside. The preserved head of Christ is one of the more common conjectures.
Rosslyn was built as a private chapel for the Saint-Clairs, and one of the principal uses of private chapels in the Middle Ages was for burying their dead. Anyone who has visited the larger cathedrals in Europe knows that the stone floors cover a minefield of luminary corpses. Churches, large and small, are built over a crypt (a basement used specifically for burying people). Rosslyn Chapel is no different. Periodically, the floor stones are lifted away to allow caskets to be lowered in and mourners to bid their last farewells. The last time this happened in Rosslyn Chapel was in 1778, for the burial of one of many the Saint-Clairs named William. Dozens of people descended into the vault below the floor, where they found caskets and bones from previous interments, not treasure. Of course, there are certainly other places under the floor that no one has seen for centuries.
Over the years, many claims have been made about doing deep-ground radar and ultrasound scans of Rosslyn’s floors to search for the buried treasure of the Templars. Sometimes, they have been permitted, but mostly they are not. The chapel itself is under the protection of the Rosslyn Chapel Trust, and the crypt is protected by the common law right of sepulchre, which is the doctrine that says human remains should remain undisturbed, apart from the most unusual circumstances. Scottish law would certainly frown on widespread burrowing in the basement.
We still regard these claims with skepticism. Let’s say for a moment that, buried in the vaults of Rosslyn Chapel, next to the moldering bones of the Clan Sinclair’s loved ones, are the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant, or the head of Christ. These are the most sought-after relics of faith the world has ever known, eluding millions of people for centuries. Unlike Dan Brown’s Mary Magdalene/Jesus bloodline story, their discovery really would shake things up. If the Scottish authorities or the Saint-Clair/Sinclair family truly believed there was a chance of their being down there, wouldn’t they have fired up the backhoe decades ago and gone digging?
So, why Rosslyn?
We come back to why Rosslyn Chapel is the center of attention to begin with. It is no mere coincidence that the tales of the Templars fleeing to Scotland after the arrests in France in 1307 were unheard of before the late 1700s, and the reason they began then is because of the growth of Freemasonry (see Chapter 8). The evidence is very compelling that much of the lore of the Templars in Scotland came from Freemasons in the late 1700s and early 1800s who were creating mythical origins for use in their lodges. The Scottish lodges were in a philosophical battle with their English counterparts over who had the first, most authentic Masonic rituals and practices. And if the Scots could prove they were the oldest, with the most impressive historical pedigree, they’d show those uppity English Masons who was who.
The English Masons claimed they were descended from stonemasons, so the Scots manufactured a Templar origin, and the large, old, and famous Saint-Clair family was easy to add legendary feats to. Yet, when the Saint-Clairs employed Father Richard Augustine Hay to research and write the family history in the early 1700s, there was no mention of any Templar or Masonic connection to them whatsoever. The whole Scottish Templar/ Freemason legend doesn’t appear in full form until a book by a Scottish Freemason named James Burnes in 1830. The Templar claim for Rosslyn Chapel, and most of the Scottish legend, we are sorry to say, is most probably a Victorian Masonic myth.
Templars Part Deux: Return of the Living Knights
The most likely scenario as to the fate of the Templars is also the most commonly overlooked one. We were strolling through London’s Inns of Court one afternoon, after having just left the Temple Church, when we struck up a conversation with an elderly barrister on his way to his office. The topic of the Templars and their treasure came up, and he started to chuckle, as though he’d had this same conversation with every starry-eyed tourist who wandered through his neck of the woods. “Come now,” he said. “Anyone with a brain knows they went to Spain and Portugal.”
The Iberian Peninsula, made up of Spain and Portugal, was a hotbed of Templar activity long before their arrests in France. The Muslim Moors had overrun both countries, and the Christians were being pushed north and east. Refer to the map in Chapter 2 and you can easily see why there was a panic. Muslim forces were all across North Africa, squeezing westward along the edge of Constantinople, and pushing across Gibraltar into Portugal and Spain. Christian Europe stared at infidel Muslims all around the shoreline of the Mediterranean, with no one but Italy and France able to hold out.
Portugal and the Order of Christ
Just a year after the Templars’ official formation at the Council of Troyes in 1128, Portugal came to a sobering conclusion. If the rest of Europe wanted to go to the Holy Land to fight infidels, more power to them. But the Moors were streaming in through Europe’s side porch in the west and no other countries seemed to be interested in helping. Portugal’s Queen Teresa devised a cunning plan. She turned over a large tract of land, the town of Fonte Arcada, to the new Knights Templar, if they would come and defend Portugal from the Moors.
Throughout the 1100s, the Templars had stunning success against the Muslims in Portugal, and a grateful government kept handing over larger properties to them as payment. It was a good deal — no cash out of pocket, and if the Templars built commanderies on these properties, there would always be Templar Knights around to defend the country. Their castle at Tomar today still stands and is a magnificently preserved Templar fortress (see Chapter 16).
In 1307, King Dinis of Portugal got the arrest orders for the Templars living in his realm and ignored them, at first. The order did not come from the pope, but in the form of a letter from King Phillip of France. Only when Pope Clement finally issued the arrest order did Dinis comply. Instead of turning the knights over to the Church, he conducted his own investigation of the
order, and found absolutely no merit to the charges against them (which was the same result in every other country in which they were tried). The king and the Portuguese knights, however, faced a dilemma. The pope subsequently dissolved the Templar Order, so they couldn’t go on living as Templars. The king’s answer was to create a new order, the Order of Christ. Castles, chapels, farms, and other property formerly belonging to the Templars, Dinis proclaimed, had only been loaned to them, and really belonged to the Portuguese crown. After he had told the pope to go pound sand, the king simply handed the properties over to the new order.
Their prowess on the sea became legendary. Portugal’s greatest hero, Prince Henry the Navigator, in the 15th century, was a member of the order. And when the Italian Christopher Columbus got money from the Spanish king and queen to bankroll his voyage westward into uncharted waters in his search for a shortcut to the Orient, the crew he hired were Portuguese members of the Order of Christ. The sails of his ships were even decorated with what looks for all the world to be Templar crosses. (For more about the Order of Christ, see Chapter 9.)
Spain and the Order of Montesa
The Moors didn’t let bothersome things like borders hinder them, and they had advanced well into Spain by the time of the formation of the Templars. The Spanish used the tern Reconquista for their campaigns to push the Muslims back across the Straits of Gibraltar, and the Templars assisted in Spain as they did in Portugal. In return, large land grants were given to them — principally, the kingdom of Aragon was turned over to the order. By the time of their fall, the Templars had massive holdings across Spain.
When the Templars were dissolved by Pope Clement V, their property was to be handed over to the Knights Hospitaller. As in other countries outside of France, the Templars in Spain had been found innocent of wrongdoing, and it seemed startlingly unjust for them to lose their holdings. So, as in Portugal, at the request of King James II of Aragon, a new order was created in 1312, the Order of Montesa, made up of Spanish Templars located primarily in Aragon and Valencia. It remained a largely autonomous order until it was combined with other chivalric orders in Spain in 1739.
The Hospitallers
The thousands of members of the Templar order who had not been arrested, or who had been found innocent of wrongdoing, were eventually given a place to go. When Pope Clement V dissolved the Order of the Temple, members of the order were given the option of joining the Knights Hospitaller. (For more about the Hospitallers, see Chapter 9.)
Switzerland
Authors Alan Butler and Stephen Dafoe’s book The Warriors and the Bankers presents a different theory about the Templars, and perhaps even their treasure. They do not point to the Templar fleet, nor do they envision a mass exodus to Scotland. Anyone who’s ever seen The Great Escape knows that the simplest way to hide 2,400 men is to put them in street clothes, and send them off walking in plain sight, preferably to Switzerland. Likewise, it makes far more sense that escaping Templars took what gold and silver that was easily transportable, divvied it up, and made their way not to the sea, where Phillip’s men would be looking, but eastward to the mountains of Switzerland.
Fascinating and compelling bits of evidence support this theory.
● The time period roughly corresponds with the founding of the states, or cantons, in Switzerland. Even the official history of the country is hazy about its origins.
● Switzerland butts up against the eastern border of France, and was, therefore, convenient for fleeing Templars to stroll into.
● If the Templars were forewarned of the arrests, it makes that much more sense that they may very well have sent their treasury toward the forbidding mountains of the Alps, instead of coastal ports where every local official could see, and report, their activities. Such reports were never made.
● There are legends in Switzerland of knights dressed in white who assisted the Swiss in fighting off foreign invaders.
● The flag of Switzerland features a Templar cross in white on a red field, just the opposite of the order’s white tunics with red crosses. Several cantons featured flags with the same motif.
● The Swiss have always been tolerant of different religions, in a way similar to the Templar behavior when dealing with the Muslims, Jews, and Cathars.
● The Templars were the bankers of Europe, inventing the concepts of international transfers of money, checking accounts, safe-deposit boxes, and other revolutionary concepts that would not appear again until Italian bankers later copied their methods. Likewise, Switzerland has been renowned for its banking prowess, combined with strict confidentiality.
A curious site to explore in Switzerland is the French-speaking village of Sion in the Valais canton. Named after the French word for Zion, the Holy Land, it seems almost tantalizingly ready-made as a Templar town.
The Greatest Templar Myths
The tales of the Templars in Scotland are just the tip of the iceberg when telling tall tales of the Templars. Here are some of the more popular ones.
Templars possessed the Ark of the Covenant
In the Book of Exodus, God tells Moses to build an ark — the sacred box that would hold the tablets of the Ten Commandments. Moses is told the exact measurements and materials to use, and after it was completed, the power it contained was so awesome that it had to be transported wrapped in a veil, animal skins, and blue cloth.
The Ark is a supremely dangerous artifact. Moses’s sons Abuhu and Nadab are struck dead by simply looking into it. Its power parts the Jordan River and burns a path through thorns and fallen trees; sparks fly from it to kill scorpions and serpents. At the Battle of Jericho, Joshua has the Ark carried around the city seven times, and its power causes the walls of the fortress to collapse.
(Of course, if you saw Raiders of the Lost Ark, you know all this stuff.)
According to 1 Kings 8:6-9, the Ark was placed in King Solomon’s Temple, until Jerusalem was plundered by the Babylonians. It is at this point that the fate of the Ark gets lost in myth. Most historians believe it was carried off to Babylon and destroyed, but many legends abound as to its true hiding place.
A longtime tradition in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church claims that Prince Menelik I, who was supposed to have been the son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, carried it off to Ethiopia. (The Ethiopian Orthodox Church contends that it does, indeed, have the Ark, and that it’s kept under constant guard in the Chapel of the Tablet at the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Axum.)
A different variation on the tale is that the Templars found the Ark and took it to Ethiopia themselves. This one says that while white people were rarely seen in sub-Saharan Africa prior to the mid-1400s, the Ethiopians have a legend that a group of “fair-haired” men came to Axum and used the power of the Ark to magically raise a 78-foot-tall obelisk, the tallest solid granite object ever quarried. And, just maybe, those fair-haired men were the Templars.
Unfortunately for those who believe this tale, the obelisk was carved in the fourth century, 800 years before the Templars appeared.
Another legend involving the Templars says that the original members of the order discovered the Ark while digging under the Temple Mount in the first few years of their formation, and that a carving on a column in Chartres Cathedral in France shows the knights moving it from Jerusalem to France on a cart. The column is in what is known as the North Porch, and the Latin inscription below it enigmatically reads, “Hic Amititur Archa Cederis,” meaning “Here things take their course: Through the Ark thou shall work.” Most historians debunk this claim, saying that the carving merely shows another claimed fate of the Ark, being smuggled to Egypt during the reign of King Manasseh (2 Chronicles 33), where it was placed into the Well of Souls. Again, Indiana Jones fans take note.
And, of course, there is again the tale that it is, in reality, buried in Rosslyn Chapel’s underground vaults, after being moved there from France when the Knights were tipped off about their pending arrests. Again, there is nothing but wishful thinking going on here. No one has conclusively seen the Ark of the Covenant since King Nebuchadnezzar’s troops sacked Jerusalem in 587 b.c.
A Templar connection to the Shroud of Turin
In the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Turin, Italy, is an artifact that has excited the world for more than 600 years, the Shroud of Turin. It is a linen cloth that appears to have been used to wrap the body of a man who had been crucified, and ghostly images appear of a man with a bearded face. In spite of almost immediate pronouncements by the Catholic Church that it was a fake, the faithful believed that the image was of Jesus, and they continue to believe this today. Chemical analysis and carbon dating techniques used in 1988 provided results that the markings were paint and that the cloth dated from about the 14th century, but those results were almost immediately called into question. The Shroud is, today, the property of the Vatican, which has always refused to declare it to be the authentic image of Christ.
The Knights Templar are implicated in the Shroud’s history in a couple of ways:
● The Shroud was in the possession of the family of Geoffroy de Charney, Templar Preceptor of Normandy, who was burned at the stake along with Grand Master Jacques de Molay in 1314.
● Geoffroy’s nephew, Geoffri de Charney, apparently had the Shroud, and upon his death, his widow, Jeanne de Vergy, first displayed it in public in 1357.
● If the Templars had the Shroud in their possession, it is possible that it was part of the fabled treasure discovered under the Temple Mount.
It is also possible that it and the image found on it are connected to another artifact that has been said to have been in the hands of the order. Author Ian Wilson has claimed in The Shroud of Turin: Burial Cloth of Jesus? that the Templars may have found the preserved head of Jesus, and that the Shroud was used to wrap it. In which case the Shroud really would authentically reveal the face of Christ. But the Shroud depicts the whole body of a man, about 6 feet tall, and not just a head.
Robert Lomas and Christopher Knight, on the other hand, believe that the Shroud, in fact, displays the face and features of none other than Jacques de Molay. They make the argument in their book The Second Messiah that the last Grand Master of the Templars was tortured before his execution, that the Shroud displays the blood of his wounds, and that the long hair and beard fit his description. Further, using the carbon dating results from a 1988 test of fabric from the Shroud, which place its origin between 1260 and 1380, the time frame fits the period of de Molay’s imprisonment and torture. They conclude that the Shroud was wrapped around de Molay after he had been brutally worked over but was still alive.
A completely different theory should interest fans of The Da Vinci Code. Clive Prince and Lynn Picknett’s book, Turin Shroud: In Whose Image?, makes the claim that the image was actually a hoax created by none other than Leonardo da Vinci himself, possibly using an unknown, primitive photographic chemical process and a pinhole camera.
Templars discover America!
There is absolutely no evidence that the Templars had known about the Americas in the 13th and 14th centuries, but that hasn’t stopped the speculation that they did. Various researchers have claimed that the Templars had based much of their wealth on Aztec gold and silver. Aztec tales abounded of a “great white god” from the East who had come to bring civilization to them. But there is no archeological evidence of any European presence in the region prior to the Spanish conquistadors. And that “great white god” stuff was ancient history to the Aztecs by then. That they meant “Templars” is highly unlikely.
Authors Tim Wallace-Murphy and Marilyn Hopkins (and several others) have advanced the notion that, while the order flourished, the Templars ventured across the North Atlantic, following a similar path as the Vikings, and traded with the Native American population of northeastern Canada. After the dissolution of the order, the Templars moved to Scotland, so the legend goes, and the Saint-Clair (or Sinclair) family became their protectors. And this is where the tale of the Templars discovering America really kicks in.
Henry Saint-Clair and the Zeno Narrative
In 1396, so the legend goes, the Earl of Orkney, Henry Saint-Clair, went into partnership with a Venetian merchant family known as the Zenos. Saint-Clair is said by some to have made two trips across the North Atlantic almost a full century before Columbus. Based on a document called the Zeno Narrative, the Sinclairs and the Zenos hoped to establish colonies in the Americas, away from the influence and reach of the Catholic Church.
The Zeno Narrative is derived from letters between real brothers from Venice — Antonio, Carlo, and Nicolo Zeno — and was published anonymously in 1558. In it, a voyage is described by Nicolo Zeno in 1385 from Venice to England and Flanders, in which he claimed to have been shipwrecked on a large island called Frislanda, a mythical place complete with a mythical prince. Referred to in the narrative as Prince Zichmni, Nicolo claims to have undertaken voyages to what is presumably Greenland for him over the space of two decades. At the end of the tale, after encountering strange and exotic people and places, Prince Zichmni remains in Greenland, starting a settlement called Trin.
True believers say that Prince Zichmni is in reality the Earl of Orkney,
Henry Saint-Clair, and that the giant island nation of Frislanda is actually the smallish Orkney Island off the coast of Scotland — curious, because Nicolo described an island larger than Ireland. The Zeno Narrative comes complete with a map, but although portions of it and the narrative sort of match up with Iceland, Scotland, and other North Sea and North Atlantic geography, the glaring flaw is that the mythical Frislanda doesn’t.
Beginning in the late 1700s, a series of authors began making convoluted attempts to explain how Zichmni and Saint-Clair are one and the same. In the 1870s, a geographer named Richard Henry Major took up the Sinclair cause and the Zeno Narrative; his fiddling is the principal source of the nonsense. There had never been any suggestion in any record of the family history that Henry was an explorer of any kind, nor that he had ventured far from Orkney or Scotland at any time in his life, but that never kept a good myth down. Major took huge leaps of imagination, not to mention outright fabrication, in his mistranslation and interpretation of the narrative, forcing it to fit the Henry Saint-Clair mold.
Saint-Clairs and Sinclairs around the world were ecstatic. Here was “proof” that the Saint-Clairs, descended from the Knights Templar, builders of Rosslyn Chapel, founders of Freemasonry in Scotland, had also been the “discoverers” of America, a hundred years before that upstart Columbus.
New Zealand resident Roland Saint-Clair wrote a glowing “biography” of Henry, calling him an “Orcadian Argonaut.” Thomas Sinclair in Chicago started a “Society of Sancto-Claro” and made announcements about Henry’s fame as the “discoverer of America” as a counterpoint to the Columbian Exposition that was celebrating the 400th anniversary of Columbus. Never
mind that, even if Henry really had sailed across the North Atlantic and established a colony at Tinn, it was Greenland, not America. Pesky details, we know. So, others have added further conjecture to the tale, claiming Saint-Clair explored into Nova Scotia, and as far south as what is now Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
The Zeno Narrative has been debunked as a hoax by scores of researchers, and it has been shown to have actually been copied from Columbus’s own descriptions, and others, of Mexico and the Caribbean islands, with some artful name changes. And the accompanying map was apparently copied from a chart made in 1539. Finally, Nicolo Zeno has been conclusively placed in Italy during the period he was supposed to have been sailing and exploring. Court records show that he was less than heroic, being convicted of embezzlement in 1396 and imprisoned for five years.
Author Andrew Sinclair today continues to cling to the story and has claimed that the mythical expedition was a secret mission of Templars, Gnostics, and Freemasons to establish a religious and military empire in the New World, with Venetian cooperation. Most historians, geologists, and archeologists place little credence in the theory. Well, okay — none, really. But there are some curious items that have been linked to the tale: the Westford Knight and the Newport Tower. And, of course, Rosslyn Chapel.
The Westford Knight
Located near the town square in Westford, Massachusetts, is a slab of rock that is purported to have been carved with the image of a Knight Templar, holding a sword and a shield. Most who have examined the rock say that it appears to have been a combination of natural erosion lines with a “punchcarving” of a sword hilt, while the shield has been painted on recently. True believers say it was placed along a popular path for tribal traffic in the late 1300s by Henry Saint-Clair’s expeditions. Archeologists say that’s nonsense. It was more than likely buried under a hillside at that time, and the sword carving was made in the 1800s by a pair of boys. The Templars themselves had not existed as an order for almost 100 years at the time of Saint-Clair’s alleged expedition, so the question is obvious: Why would anyone take the time to carve a 12th-century image of a knight on a rock when there was no real connection to them to begin with?
The Newport Tower
A little bigger and a lot more enigmatic is a round, stone tower in Newport, Rhode Island. At first glance, it certainly looks like the ruins of a medieval European tower. And without a great leap of imagination — if you believe that post-trial Templars were stomping around the New England coast three centuries before it became New England — it may even look like a round Templar church.
Of course, the Newport Tower has looked like other things to other researchers too, depending on their personal pet theory — everything from a Viking observatory, to a Portuguese or Irish signaling tower, to a 14th-century Scottish church, which would place it right up Henry Saint-Clair’s bailiwick.
Of course, like the Westford Knight, the Newport Tower is only “near” Saint-Clair’s mythical settlement in Greenland, in the same way that Miami is “near” Las Vegas, but who cares when trying to shore up a good myth? Naturally, the fable has been altered to suit the “evidence,” and enthusiastic Templar fans have claimed that Saint-Clair explored as far south as Nova Scotia and, just so he could build this tower, Rhode Island.
Unfortunately, what it looks most like is exactly what local folklore has claimed for centuries: a windmill, patterned after an almost identical structure in Chesterton, England, and built in 1675 by Rhode Island’s first governor, Benedict Arnold (not the famous Revolutionary War turncoat of the same name). Arnold was originally from the area around Chesterton, and it has long been said that he patterned the Newport windmill after the one he saw back home in his youth. Some researchers have discounted this theory, saying the Chesterton windmill hadn’t yet been constructed when Arnold was in the area, so controversy remains.
A-maize-ing Rosstyn Chapel “evidence"
It is hard to pick up a book that talks about Scotland’s Rosslyn Chapel without encountering an almost breathless description of an archway decorated in carvings that “proves” the Sinclairs came to America and returned with knowledge that no one else could have had when the chapel was built in 1446. The “proof” is a decorative band of carvings that are usually described as “corn” or “maize” plants, and aloe vera — vegetation that existed at the time only in the Americas. There’s only one way that the carvings could have gotten there: Henry Saint-Clair and his Templar explorers had to have gone to America and seen them!
In Greenland? Forgive us, logic returned for a second. But again, the question arises: If you believe the Zeno Narrative, what was corn or aloe vera doing in Greenland for Henry Saint-Clair to find it there — especially given that any backyard gardener can tell you that Greenland is a lousy place for a cornfield? Of course, no one can say when those particular carvings were made, apart from the certainty that they wouldn’t have been put in until the building itself was completed. And there’s also the possibility that they are just carvings of wheat, lilies, and strawberries, in which case all of this is just huffing and puffing.
Oak Island money pit
In 1795, three young men were exploring the miniscule Oak Island off the coast of Nova Scotia, when they noticed a block and tackle dangling from a tree over a low spot in the ground. To them, it had all the look of an arrangement used for burying something heavy underground. So they started digging. Thus began what remains one of the most frustrating and tantalizing mysteries of the last 200 years.
Two feet down, they came across a series of flat stones, of a variety not found on the island. At 10 feet, they hit wooden planks. Certain that they were onto something big, they continued digging, only to hit more log platforms at 20 and 30 feet. Frustrated and confronted with an excavation problem far beyond their means, they left the island. But the Tale of the Pit lived on.
Several years later, a group of investors financed a return to the island and began digging again. At 90 feet, they supposedly discovered something truly enigmatic: a stone, written in a simple code that said “Forty Feet Below Two Million Pounds Are Buried.” Instead, what was found was a series of booby traps — horizontal shafts that flooded the pit with seawater, preventing further exploration until more sophisticated methods could be found.
Over the years, six men have been killed and millions of dollars have been spent attempting to excavate the Oak Island Money Pit, and the bottom has never been reached. A few tantalizing items have been retrieved — links from a gold chain, scissors, a sheet of iron, an unreadable piece of parchment. But the excavation is such a mess today from the many attempts to find the treasure that the original shaft location has been lost, and little about the accounts of what has really been found there can be believed.
Wild theories have been proposed over the years as to the source of the treasure (if there really is one down there), including the pirate Blackbeard or Captain Kidd’s respective stashes, pre-Revolutionary French or English payroll trunks, Spanish treasure, and, of course, the requisite lineup of UFO theories. One particularly convoluted and hilarious claim says that bottles sealed in mercury are buried in the pit, containing the proof that Francis Bacon actually wrote the plays of William Shakespeare. Undoubtedly, Jimmy Hoffa is down there as well.
But the one theory that continues to resurface is that it is the location of the lost treasure of the Templar fleet. The pit was alluded to in the opening minutes of the film National Treasure (2004), as a temporary location of the loot hidden by the Templars and protected by the Freemasons.
Author Steven Sora’s Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar postulates a two-fer theory — that the treasure was at one time buried in the crypt of Rosslyn Chapel, but the loyal Catholic Sinclair clan dug it up and brought it to Oak Island to keep it out of the hands of Protestant forces in 1545. (Here’s another clue for you: Nova Scotia is Latin for “New Scotland”!)
The Wood’s Hole Oceanographic Institute made a brief study of the pit in the 1990s, and made the pronouncement that the flooding was a natural phenomenon caused by hollow limestone cavities that permeate the island, and not from some carefully installed booby trap. But the team managed to discover little else. Enthusiasts said that an underwater video shot with a remote camera in 1971 revealed submerged trunks, tools, and human bones, but the Wood’s Hole scientists, looking at the same tape, saw only mud.
Legends, claims, and counter-claims abound, and true believers contend that the pit could have been dug only by expert engineers, like the Templars. Many companies have been organized over the years to drill and explore the pit, including one with a famous investor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (whose membership in the Freemasons, linked with the Oak Island pit, has provided heaps of fodder for conspiracy theorists). But in more than 200 years, nothing of substance has ever been found. Still, just what were all those underground platforms doing down there? (We talk about the Oak Island money pit, along with many more possible Templar treasure spots in Chapter 17.)
The Templars Survived!
We discuss some of the more modern chivalric organizations that claim some kind of connection with the medieval Templars in Chapter 9. But for them to claim a connection, there has to be something to base it on. Again, legends of the order took on a life of their own, almost immediately after their execution.
Whether it is true or not, one tale says that, after the fire had consumed the bodies of Jacques de Molay and Geoffroy de Charney, someone quietly waded into the ashes and retrieved the bones of the Grand Master. They would, so the story goes, show up again almost 500 years later.
The Larmenius Charter
Certain branches of the Ordo Supremus Militaris Templi Hierosolymitani (OSMTH; see Chapter 9) contend that they are the direct descendents of the original Knights Templar, and the proof they use is a document called the Carta Transmissionis, or more commonly, the Larmenius Charter. It is said to have been written in the Knights Templar codex used to encode their secret documents and banking paperwork.
The story goes that the Templar’s Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, prior to his execution in 1314, verbally handed over the succession of his office to Father Jean-Marc Larmenius, a Palestinian-born Christian who had joined the order in its final years. After the mass arrests of the Templars and their dissolution by Pope Clement V, Larmenius supposedly called together the remnants of the order at a secret meeting in 1324. At that meeting, he provided these brave, surreptitious knights with the Charter of Transmission, a document that provided a plan of succession for the survival of the order. The OSMTH has based their claim of succession on this document.
The charter (which is actually in the hands of the Freemasons and is available for inspection at Mark Masons Hall in London), is indeed written in a cipher code, and when translated, is in Latin, as one would expect a document from a 14th-century Catholic order of monks to be. But it is not in the ecclesiastical form of Latin typically found in religious documents of the period. Instead, it is polished, formal, and quite scholarly — a little too scholarly, in fact. Most serious researchers have concluded it is a forgery from the 17th or 18th century. It was written by someone with a good understanding of Templar and Masonic lore, but in the sort of Latin used in universities of the time, not medieval Latin.
The charter contains a list of signatures of the supposed successors to the position of Grand Master since Larmenius, written in their own blood. Critics have suggested that, because one in particular, Bertrand du Gueselin, was known to be illiterate, anything more than an X would have been suspicious, although he may have known how to sign his own name, or someone else may have signed it to cover the embarrassing shortcoming of illiteracy.
The document allegedly reemerged in 1804 in the hands of Dr. Bernard Raymond Fabre-Palaprat, the court doctor of Napoleon Bonaparte. In addition, Palaprat also came across a copper box that contained Templar documents with supposedly authentic seals, Jacques de Molay’s sword, and best of all, the actual charred bones of the Old Grand Master himself.
Some researchers have suggested that it was actually forged by a colleague of Dr. Fabre-Palaprat, a certain Dr. Landru. Indeed, as time wore on, Palaprat continued to “find” more items. While rooting around in a Paris bookstall, he “stumbled upon” a Greek manuscript, called the Leviticon. (Lucky guy. All we ever stumble upon in Paris bookstalls are 1960s paperbacks about mad-eyed socialists and old copies of Paris Match with Marilyn Monroe on the cover.) This book described the beliefs of the Templars as being both Gnostic and Johannite (see the “Gnostics and Johannites” sidebar in this chapter). Palaprat began to introduce the Johannite teachings of the Leviticon into the “newly revived” Order of the Temple, but most members seemed disinterested in — or offended by — the philosophy, and the Order soon split apart over the controversy.
One interesting side note of the Larmenius Charter is a passage that specifically condemns “Scotch Templars” as “deserters of the order,” and “despoilers of the dominions of the militia.” If the Larmenius Charter is genuine, it seems to rebuke the Templars who supposedly fled France for Scotland. If it is a fake, it seems to be a trump card added to denounce the Masonic Templars in Scotland in order to make this newly “revived” order seem more authentic.
You make the call.
Gnostics and Johannites
The term Gnosticism comes up a lot in modern-day speculation of the Knights Templar. Gnosticism was partly a pre-Christian concept that transformed into a full-fledged movement up through the Christian Church of the second century a.d. For the purpose of this brief explanation, we're very generic, but bear in mind that Gnosticism is a generic term that covers a wide variety of beliefs. There is no one, single Gnostic Church.
The core of Gnosticism teaches that God is infinite and incomprehensible to humans. God created the cosmos but left the smaller jobs, like the creation of Earth, to a lesser divinity, known as the Demiurge. Because God did not create Earth, but allowed a lesser and flawed divinity to do so, the world is likewise flawed. In addition, beings called Archons preside over the material world, and they are not always benevolent. In more recognizable Christian terms, the Demiurge is comparable to Satan, and the Archons are angels and demons. As a result, Gnosticism's overarching philosophy is one of dualism, that good and evil, right and wrong, light and darkness, are in constant battle for supremacy on Earth.
For Christian Gnostics, Christ is seen as an emissary from God, who possessed esoteric knowledge and passed it on to a select few. One of the most pervasive themes running through Gnosticism is that it's almost a kind of secret society itself — a very few, learned adepts have the inner knowledge of how to eventually escape the evil world of the Demiurge. It cannot be studied or learned. It is knowledge of true enlightenment that can only come from divine revelation to the individual — hardly the far more inclusive message of Christianity. For this reason — and others — Gnosticism came into conflict with the Catholic Church on many occasions. (We talk more about Gnosticism in Chapter 14.)
Johannites were a particular sect of Gnostics who rejected the belief that Christ was the Messiah. They believed that John the Baptist, not Jesus, was sent by God with esoteric knowledge of redemption, and they defended this belief by saying that John was performing baptisms before the beginning of Christ's ministry. Some claimed that Jesus could not (and, indeed, did not) perform any miracles until after John was killed, when he inherited John's special powers. Others simply regarded Jesus as a heretic and a pretender, while John was the true Son of God.
Because the biblical account of John's death concerns his beheading by King Herod, no shortage of relics attributed to John are floating around the Holy Land. No fewer than three heads around the world are venerated as John's, and a veritable bone pile of hands, arms, and skull pieces are in Egypt, Rome, Syria, Turkey, and England. It should not be surprising that the Templars were reputed to have been in possession of a head of John, and many have claimed that they were Johannites because of it. The south of France was a home for a large percentage of Templars, and they were sympathetic to this popular local heresy. Tales during the trials in France were told of the Templars worshiping a head, and by embellishing the charge to make it the head of John the Baptist, the accusation became just that much more believable. Such claims have never been substantiated.
In this same French hotbed of heresy, the most prominent sect of Gnostics was called the Cathars. They were very much in sympathy with the Johannites. The Cathars' principal stomping ground was the region of southwestern France, Toulouse and the Midi, smack-dab in Templar territory. The Catholic Church undertook a 20- year military campaign to wipe out the Cathars between 1209 and 1229, called the Albigensian
Crusade. Like the Templars, the Cathars came to their end by fire — the Inquisition burned them as heretics, with the last executions ending almost a century later. It should be noted that the Templars, although well represented in the Languedoc countryside, refused to take part in the persecution and destruction of the Cathars. Curiously, like the Templars, a legend has long circulated that the Cathars had a treasure that was secretly smuggled out of the area from their last stand at Montsegur. Some versions of the story say it was the Holy Grail.
Several modern speculative books regard the document as legitimate, and use it to bolster some of their theories, as in Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas’s The Second Messiah and Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince’s The Templar Revelation. Other respected researchers in medieval history, and the Templars in particular, regard it as drivel and a forgery.
The Priory of Sion
We discuss the Priory of Sion in conjunction with the legend of Rennes le Chateau in Chapter 11, but we briefly mention it here as well.
The legend goes that the Prieure de Sion was a secret society founded in 11th-century France to preserve the secret of Christ’s alleged marriage to Mary Magdalene, as well as the bloodline of their descendants (see Part IV of this book for the various windings of this story). Where the Templars enter the tale is the theory that the order was created as a military arm of the Priory. Dan Brown alleges in The Da Vinci Code that the Priory of Sion was a real organization, but most researchers agree that it is a modern-day hoax, started in the 1950s.
Rex Deus
Latin for “King God,” Rex Deus is purportedly a European branch of royalty descended from the biblical King David and High Priest Aaron of ancient Israel, who have somehow managed to trace and preserve their bloodline for almost three millennia. A variation on the Priory of Sion theme, Rex Deus members are supposedly the keepers of the true secret knowledge of Judaism and Christianity.
They’re connected to the Templars by an allegation that Rex Deus directed the order to excavate the Temple Mount, where they discovered the treasure of Solomon’s Temple. They knew where to tell them to look, of course, because their relatives buried it there to begin with.
Of course, famous international kook David Icke has a different variation on this ancient royal bloodline idea. He believes they are actually shape-shifting alien reptile-humanoids, and every powerful figure — from George W. Bush and Queen Elizabeth II to the Rothschild banking family — regularly feasts on rodents when no one is looking.
Templars spawn the modern-day conspiracy theory
The Templars were implicated in the beginning of the modern conspiracy-theory movement, and it happened at the end of the French Revolution. Whereas the American Revolution was essentially decided on the battlefield, the French Revolution limped to an end by running out of citizens to kill. The French had started by seeking to replace the notion of the divine rights of kings and popes with freedom and the rule of law. But within a very short period of time, the wholesale carnage inflicted on France by its successive waves of revolutionaries led more and more people to the guillotine. Legend tells us that they killed aristocrats. The fact is that they killed everybody — pathetic and dispossessed prisoners, priests and nuns, the middle class, opposition politicians, and anyone whose name began with the letter d. Eventually, of course, they ran out of victims and started killing one another.
When the blood stopped flowing and the dust settled, France was in ruins. The shame of the survivors over what had happened during the Terror sent them looking for someone left alive to blame, and they settled variously on the Freemasons, the Illuminati, and, somewhat inexplicably, the Templars.
In 1791, a man named Cadet de Gassicourt wrote a book called The Tomb of Jacques Molay, in which he described a secret plan by the surviving Grand Master to exact revenge against the French monarchy and the Catholic Church, and the Revolution was the culmination of the plot. De Gassicourt’s theory was that the Templars had done just what the Scottish Masons were claiming in the late 1700s — they had gone underground and resurfaced as the Freemasons. He contended that a small core of just eight members of an inner circle of Templars/Masons sparked the Revolution.
In 1797, John Robison, a Scottish inventor (of, among other items, the siren) penned Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Freemasons, Illuminati and Reading Societies in which he blamed the Freemasons of France and a small, long-defunct group called the Bavarian Illuminati for the Revolution. Strangely, Robison was a Freemason himself. He wrote the book specifically to point out the differences between what went on in sane and noble British lodges, versus the radical nutcase Jacobin Masonic lodges on the Continent. Unfortunately, Robison’s motives were lost on a Frenchman seeking refuge in England named Abbe Augustin Barruel.
Barruel was a former Jesuit priest and an abbot, and between 1797 and 1798 he published a massive four-part tome called Memoirs: Illustrating the History of Jacobinism. The book was a raging success all across Europe, and was one of the most widely read books of the 19th century. In it, Barruel carefully laid out a massive conspiracy of Freemasons, the Illuminati, and the French Philosophes (a group of 18th-century French Enlightenment intellectuals). Of course, those he implicated were influenced by — you guessed it — a rogue’s gallery of anti-Catholic Gnostics, Cathars, Martinists, and the Knights Templar.
No matter how methodical and detailed Barruel’s memoirs may have been, he was factually incorrect when it came to pointing fingers at the men he believed were the Masons who caused the French Revolution. But facts never got in the way of a good conspiracy theory. Unfortunately, his book is still often quoted today as a reputable source by modern conspiracy theorists who believe that the Freemasons and the Illuminati somehow control the world, and that, somehow, it all started with the Templars.