The Templars and the Shroud of Christ (4 page)

The sudden death on 10 June 1879 of Monsignor Rosi
Bernardini, prefect of the Archive, had led to the choice of a successor who was not only a scholar but a major figure in contemporary Germany culture, Cardinal
Josef Hergenröther; years later, Ludwig von
Pastor, a famous historian specialising in the Papacy, was to call this nomination the dawn of a new age for studies on Catholicism and on Western civilisation.
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As soon as the Archives were opened, the Austrian historian Konrad
Schottmüller, a fellow-countryman of Joseph von
Hammer-Purgstall, started a work of several years’ duration, using modern historical methods to find and publish what he thought were the main records of the
trial against the Templars. His work was carried on in the early 1900s by Heinrich
Finke, and their overall result was the most complete and reliable edition of Vatican sources on the trial available to this day. Large-scale study of the documents relating to the Templars’
trial surely turned out to be a severe disappointment to many, when the first scholarly editions started placing in the public domain the contents of those ancient parchments once kept in the fortress of Castel Sant’Angelo: no trace could be found of the sensational revelations expected by some, but on the other hand, many truths thus far unknown came to light, making it at last possible to write the history of the
trial with accurate and modern criteria.

In 1978, Cambridge University Press published
The
Trial of the Templars
by
Malcolm Barber, which was to be the start of a new and very fertile season in this field of mediaeval studies. For the first time it was possible to follow the process of the
trial as a whole, thanks to the authentic documents. A few years later, in 1985, the Sorbonne historian Alain
Demurger published another fundamental text, titled
Vie et mort de l’Ordre du Temple,
which picked up the thread from
Barber and developed further aspects with the same scholarly rigour.

When the historian Peter
Partner published
The Murdered Magicians: The Templars and Their Myth
with the Oxford University Press, the world’s scholars were also given a clear account of how many
exoteric legends about the Templars had enchanted and animated intellectual and political groups for two centuries; sometimes by culture-driven suggestions, sometimes by downright conscious invention. The original documents, properly read and inspected, left no more space to those magic-tinged chivalric fancies that past writers had indulged, trying to interpret the history of the Templars in the light of caskets,
hieroglyphic writings, or dubious texts written at least 300 years after the end of the Order.

These three monuments of historical method and research would not allow the collective view of this ancient, notorious order of knights to stay the same. There was now certain evidence that the
trial had been nothing but a colossal, tragic conspiracy with political reasons and strong economic interests, though several points were still obscure; and that was pretty much the opinion clearly stated by a number of illustrious contemporaries, such as
Dante Alighieri, who saw one way or another, the unfolding of the
trial and bore witness to their views. The great Tuscan poet makes the founder of the French Royal House, Hugh Capet, say in so many words that (among the many crimes of his descendants)
Philip the Fair had destroyed the Templars for no other reason than greed.
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The brothers of the glorious Baussant

The order of the Temple was founded at the beginning of the 12th century. In the years that followed the First Crusade, a French knight called Hugues de
Payns, lord of a fief near the city of Troyes and vassal of the Count of Champagne, had brought together a few comrades in the city of Jerusalem, just taken back by Christians, founding a brotherhood of lay soldiers who lived as
lay people
with the Canons of the
Holy Sepulchre.

In 1119, a gang of Saracen robbers slaughtered a caravan of Christian pilgrims travelling to the Holy Places. The event had an enormous resonance; even in the distant lands of the West, Christian society wept over those unarmed, butchered travellers. The government of the Kingdom of Jerusalem were growing increasingly concerned over a problem that was to become chronic in the history of the Holy Land: the troops available were wholly inadequate to efficiently defend the country, so the population was under the constant threat of attack. It was maybe as a result of this tragedy that the following year, 1120, Hugues de
Payns and his comrades committed themselves before the Patriarch of Jerusalem to fighting in defence of Christian pilgrims. Having given up voluntarily the prosperity of their noble estate, and having embraced poverty as a mark of conversion to atone for their sins, Hugues de
Payns’
lay
knights had taken the name of “poor fellow-soldiers of Christ”; they lived on alms from the population, and wore clothes thrown away by others and, again, given to them as alms.
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A few years later, the group grew till they amounted to some thirty people. They were too many to remain with the Canons in the basilica of the
Holy Sepulchre, or it might be that the King of Jerusalem had felt the potential in the brotherhood and decided to take it under his wing; at any rate, the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ moved to a wing of the royal palace which the sovereign had earlier used as royal quarters.

The building stood near some ruins which were identified as the remains of the ancient Temple of Solomon; so people started calling them
Militia Salomonica Templi
, or even
Milites Templi
, and later, more commonly, Templars.
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Hugues de
Payns and his companions had taken the three
monastic vows of poverty, obedience and chastity before the Patriarch of Jerusalem; without being ordained priests, which would have been incompatible with the profession of arms which was at the heart of their mission, they were members of a kind of brotherhood in the service of the
Holy Sepulchre, and had achieved a Church dignity comparable with that of the many lay-brother monks who, without becoming priests, lived out their lives of penance and prayer in the convents of the various religious orders. It may have been this special vocation of theirs which suggested to
Baldwin II, King of Jerusalem, the next step: if the brotherhood had become a genuine order of the Church of Rome, with all the exemptions and privileges that went with that, the new body would have been free from possible external interests. It would have been a mighty resource for the defence of the Holy Land.

The project faced many difficulties. In the thousand-year history of Christianity, the profession of arms had never had a favourable press, and some of the ancient Fathers of the Church even regarded soldiering as an offence against God. To deal with the issue, the greatest mystic of the time,
Bernard, the Abbot of Clairvaux, was called upon. Some scholars hold that he was related to the family of Hugues de
Payns. The King of Jerusalem seems to have written a letter to him, asking him to patronise the new order’s birth and work out a special religious rule in which service to God “should not be in contrast with the noise of war”.
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In 1126 or 1127, Hugues de
Payns left the East and travelled to Europe to canvass his project with the various feudal lords and find new followers. He also met the celebrated abbot, who had thus far proved deaf to his prayers; it may have been then, speaking in person with the head of the religious brotherhood, and hearing from his own lips of the difficulties faced by the Christians in Jerusalem, that
Bernard reconsidered the King’s proposal. He realised that the military activity of these monks, if restricted purely to the defence of pilgrims and of other defenceless Christians, could be seen as a good thing, and very useful for the kingdom in the Holy Land. From then on, the abbot threw the whole weight of his authority behind the establishment of the new order.
Bernard explained his great enthusiasm for the new project in a treatise titled
De Laude Novae Militiae
, in which the Templar Knight was celebrated as a warrior
saing
. He also brought in other religious celebrities of the time, such as the aged and venerated Stephen
Harding, who had written rules for important monastic foundations; he gained the Papacy’s support through the help of
Aymeric of Burgundy, head of the Papal chancery and right-hand man of Pope
Honorius II. Thanks to his precious patronage, in January 1129, during an ecumenical council held in Troyes, the Papal legate, Cardinal Matthew of Albano, granted pontifical approval to the new order of the Templar militia, and approved its rule in the Pope’s name. A fine recent book by
Simonetta Cerrini gives a clear account of the genuine spirit of the Templar rule, and the context of its approval.
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The brothers of the Temple lived in communities separate from the world, and divided their time between prayer and armed service in defence of the Christian population. They were divided in two main groups: the
milites, those who had received the investiture as knights, who wore white clothes as a mark of purity and perfection, and the
sergeants, who had to be satisfied with darker clothes and carried out essentially working tasks. Their popularity and protection from rulers made the order a mighty institution, and their power grew in time, thanks to the special immunities they received: in 1139, Pope
Innocent II, a disciple of St.
Bernard, granted the Templars a privilege titled
Omne Datum Optimum
, which lay the groundwork for the Order’s
independence from any lay or ecclesiastical authority. This was later strengthened by several successive concessions, which made the Templars a wholly autonomous body, subject only to the authority of the Pope.
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In 1147, Pope
Eugenius III decreed that the Templar habit was to carry a red cross as a distinctive sign, in memory of the blood that the warrior monks shed in defence of the faith.
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To be brief, the new Order adopted the principle of
ora et labora
which regulated the life of all Benedictine monasteries, but in this case the manual labour carried out by the Temple monks took the form of military activity. Barely 30 years from its foundation, the Order had grown so swiftly that it was necessary to divide its establishments into a number of provinces, and its development continued throughout the twelfth century. By about 1200, the Temple was present in the whole Mediterranean basin, from northern Europe to Sicily, and from England to Armenia, with hundreds of properties including fortresses, commands and landed estates of various kinds. The provinces were under the control of a general overseer called the Visitor, who was charged – exactly – with visiting the various regions of the Templar world and refer back to the Grand Master and to the General Chapter of the order, who met once a year. By the end of the 1200s there actually were two Visitors, one for the East and the other for the West.
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The Templars were admired for their reputation as heroes of the faith, envied for their riches and the many privileges bestowed on the Order, and they also had a considerable religious charisma in contemporary society: their leaders were regarded as highly authoritative experts in recognising genuine relics, of which the order had a vast store. It is legitimate to wonder on what basis their contemporaries developed this view, or else how the Templars went about distinguishing the authenticity of such objects. They certainly were greatly helped by their profound knowledge of the eastern world, in which the Order had been born; but according to some sources, it seems that the Order’s priests used relics of Jesus because their sacred power strengthened the force of prayer during exorcisms.
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The
warriors of the Temple were subject to a strict military discipline that made them, when the time to fight came, a tight force with great capacity for coordination. Their military skills went with a great deal of
esprit de corps
which the rules tried to encourage in every way, and the obedience to a most rigid code of honour from which no deviation was allowed. Their
flag was the glorious banner called the
Baussant
because it was half white, half black, the symbol of Templar pride and excellence. Together with the fighters of the other great military religious order, the
Hospitallers
, they were the backbone of the Christian armed forces in the Holy Land; but there was an important difference between the two orders. While the Temple was from the beginning an institution designed for the military defence of the Holy Land, the Hospital of St. John had been born as a brotherhood to care for sick pilgrims, and had only later become also a military order for the defence of the realm.
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Losing the Sepulchre, losing honour

In 1187 the Sultan of Egypt,
Saladin, who had managed to unite Muslims into a single front against the crusader states, annihilated the Christian army at a place called the Horns of
Hattin. All captured Templars and
Hospitallers were slaughtered, several fortresses fell to the Muslims; Jerusalem was lost, and the
Holy Sepulchre was lost to the Christians for good, save for a brief spell in the time of the Emperor
Frederick II, who made a special agreement with the Sultan al-Kamil that seemed like treachery of a kind to many.
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The
loss of Jerusalem was a colossal injury to the Templar Order, born exactly to defend the Holy Land. Historians have abundantly documented its grave material losses; but there may yet be more to say about what we would call today the troops’ morale. The Templars had an extremely close bond with the tomb of Christ; just in that ultimately sacred place, the ideal and material centre of Hugues de
Payns’ first brotherhood had been born. Losing the Sepulchre meant losing their own honour. At the beginnings of the 13th century there was a great collective movement to restart the Crusade and recover the Holy City, and Pope
Innocent III, who felt very strongly on this matter, tried to help the military orders, who were on their knees after
Saladin’s victory. Between 1199 and 1203, a new expedition to the East was set up, under the leadership of the city of Venice and of some great French barons; but once it had reached
Constantinople, the crusader host took advantage of the grave political decline of the Byzantine Empire, whose immense wealth excited the crusaders’ greed. Though excommunicated by
Innocent III, what was to be the
fourth crusade for the recovery of the
Holy Sepulchre turned into an ugly bloodbath at the expense of fellow-Christians, even though their Church was supposed to have broken away from Rome with the schism of 1054. The Venetians, who had driven the shift of object from Jerusalem to the wealth of Byzantium, shared the immense loot of the city – incalculable amounts of precious metals, artworks, unique relics – with the French, and they also partitioned the territories of the former empire, creating a new Latin empire of the East. The event left a dark shadow over the image of crusading in general; it had become clear that some ideas no longer had the same hold over people’s hearts, that political and economic interests stood now above everything else. From then on, Christian society started doubting whether it would ever be able to really retake the
Holy Sepulchre.
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