The Templars and the Shroud of Christ (2 page)

I

The mysterious idol of the Templars

Fascination of a myth

It was coming up to Christmas 1806. The French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte was camped with his army near the Polish castle of Pultusk, on the shores of the river Narew, some 70 kilometres north of Warsaw.

He was at the height of his power: one year earlier, his great victory at Austerlitz and the following treaty of Pressburg, had allowed him to extend his control to almost cover the whole of Europe.

That August, the Confederation of the Rhine had decreed at a gathering in Regensburg, the entrance of the various German states into the French political orbit, putting an end to the thousand-year history of the Holy Roman Empire.

Again, on 14 October, he had inflicted a morally and materially shattering defeat on the Prussian army in the neighbourhood of a town called Jena; now he was preparing to meet the Russian troops, who had enlisted to stop his worrisome advance into Polish land. They too, were to suffer a mighty defeat, just like Pultusk, on St. Stephen’s day (Boxing Day). But at this moment the situation was still serious, the French troops were frightened by the cold and lack of supplies; and yet the Emperor was taking a bit of time to deal with a matter that clearly concerned him.

The Emperor kept thinking of a tragedy titled
Les Templiers
, written by a fellow Frenchman called François
Raynouard, a lawyer of Provençal origin with a passion for history. The play covered the grim events of the
trial ordered by the King of France,
Philip IV the Fair, against the most powerful monastic and military order of the Middle Ages, the “Poor fellow-soldiers of Christ”, better known as the Templars. The tragedy described the unjust destruction of this order of knight-monks, who were also clever diplomats and expert
bankers, and in
Raynouard’s view, the innocent victims of the French King, who had treacherously assaulted them to make himself master of their wealth. The Emperor had not liked the play: first, because Napoleon, having crowned himself Emperor in Notre Dame Cathedral on 2 December 1804 in the presence of Pope Pius VII, saw himself as the moral heir of the charisma of the French sovereigns of the Dark and Middle Ages, along with the consecrated oil which, according to legend, had been miraculously brought down from Heaven by a white dove during the baptism of King Clovis. Napoleon found the cynical and cruel depiction of
Philip the Fair really out of place. Above all, though,
Raynouard had mercilessly disappointed the solid beliefs felt by a whole culture – of which Napoleon himself was an illustrious representative – about that celebrated order of monks who carried swords, so suddenly fallen from the height of power, wealth and prestige into ruin and the disgraceful charge of heresy. It was an adventurous story, full of mysteries and hints of dark things, and it was magnetically attractive to the rising romantic taste, glad to colour everything with touches of the irrational. The Emperor was a pragmatic spirit, and his interest in the affair was wholly different, however. The doom of the Templars had been, in its time, the herald of a clear political plan. And paradoxically it went on being so, although the issue was five centuries old.
[1]

That fanciful, nostalgic way of looking at the ancient military order had appeared in Europe in the early years of the 18th century, born of the encounter of a genuine desire to renew society with a not wholly objective reading of history. By the end of the 1600s all Western countries had a bourgeoisie that had grown rich on trade and the beginnings of industrial production, amassed genuine fortunes, and had their children given the best of education side by side with the children of the most ancient nobility. Wealthy and highly prepared, the members of this emergent social group felt ready to take part in the governance of the country, but rarely achieved it, because society was still structured in the ancient fashion, in a stiff and closed system that concentrated political power in the hands of the aristocracy. The heirs of fortunes built on degrading, plebeian “trade” could only hope to enter the elite by marrying the daughter of some illustrious and recently ruined house, ready to let its blue blood be diluted with fluids of humbler origin. After the wedding, the bridegroom would start living as his new friends and relatives did, and was absorbed into the system. The renewal of thought caused by the Enlightenment led this new emerging class to look for an independent way to gain power, a way that allowed them to work effectively to grow their societies and make them fairer. People looked back admiringly to the past of certain European regions such as Flanders, Germany, the French area, or England, where powerful corporations of merchants and artisans had been able to form and, through group solidarity, defend themselves against the arrogance of aristocrats. The corporations of builders who had raised great Gothic cathedrals such as Chartres, in particular, were suspected of owning scientific knowledge in advance of their age, and to have handed them down through the centuries under the most jealous secrecy. Legitimate historical curiosity mixed with the need to find illustrious origins, and in the early 18th century this brought about the formation of actual clubs, motivated by Enlightenment ideals yet certain that they were carrying on a hidden tradition of secret societies going all the back way to Biblical antiquity. Their name was taken from that of ancient guilds of master builders, in French
maçonnerie
– freemasonry. Eighteenth century society still had a passion for the concept of nobility, especially of ancient origins, as when in the midst of the Dark Ages the ancestors of the great dynasties had performed the deeds that would build a future of renown and privilege for their descendants. An immense fascination was attached to ancient orders of chivalry; even though the image was imprecise, they were seen as a kind of privileged channel, a fast track to the heights of society for persons of natural talent unlucky enough to be born outside the aristocratic caste. And the Templar order, the most famous and debated of them all, seemed to lie exactly where all these interests converged.

From legend to politics

Maybe the scientific knowledge that had allowed the great cathedrals to be built was the same with which the legendary Phoenician architect
Hiram had constructed in Jerusalem the most celebrated building in all of history, the Temple of Solomon. The temple was not only a colossal piece of architecture, it was the holy place built to contain the Arcane Presence, the Living God, and as such was not supposed to be touched except by the hands of those initiated into the highest mysteries. It was imagined that
Hiram’s ancient teachings had reached the European Middle Ages at a particular time, when the westerners had reached Jerusalem with the
First Crusade (1095-1099), establishing a Christian kingdom in the Holy Land. And the history of the Middle Ages and of the crusades in the Holy Land featured a particular presence that had even drawn its name from that of Solomon’s Temple: the
Militia Salomonica Templi
, better known as the Order of Templars. Founded in Jerusalem, immediately after the
First Crusade, to defend pilgrims to the Holy Land, the Templars had experienced a practically unstoppable growth, that had made it, barely 50 years after its foundation, the most powerful military religious order in the Middle Ages; until it had been overwhelmed, about two centuries later, by a mysterious and grim affair of heresy and dark magic that had ended with the death by burning of its last Grand Master.
[2]

Celebrated intellectuals of the time, such as
Dante Alighieri, had accused the Templar
trial, without mincing their words, of being essentially a monumental frame-up ordered by the French King
Philip IV the Fair who wished to take over the order’s patrimony, most of which lay in French territory. But already in the 16th century, some lovers of magic such as the philosopher
Cornelius Agrippa had raised the possibility that the order might practice strange and hidden rites, rites celebrated by the dim light of candles, where mysterious
idols and even black cats would appear.
[3]

There was no clear idea of what role the Pope, then the Gascon
Clemens V (1305-1314) had played in the affair. This man seemed ever hesitant, ever supine before royal will; and yet he had dragged on the
trial of the Templars over no less than seven years, practically until his death, which took place only a month after that of the last Templar Grand Master. Many sources now readily accessible were then unknown, but even those that were known were studied with methods wholly different from today’s.

History was treated as a literary endeavour, or a pastime meant to entertain and to enlighten the spirit. Therefore facts were selected from the past according to whether any moral teaching could be got from them, or whether they could stimulate the imagination like an adventure novel.

What was known of this Pontiff, whose lay name was Bertrand de Got, was that he had been born in France, that he had started the Papal exile in Avignon and that he had released Guillaume de
Nogaret – the true “evil spirit” of
Philip’s reign, whom the King used for his most shameless actions – from excommunication. The King of France had been victorious in every confrontation with papal authority and even in the matter of the Templars’
trial, many facts seemed to indicate that the Church had easily bent to the sovereign demands. But there was another fact that made minds lean towards this idea, a fact that had nothing to do with historical studies proper, but could have a major effect. The Church’s attitude in the early 1700s was hugely cautious towards the aggressively rising new Enlightenment ideas; ideas that intended to promote a renewal of thought and of many social dynamics. At the root of this rejection lay several factors. Many of the high prelates who had leading roles in the hierarchy came from the same noble houses that managed secular power, and had a similar mentality and the same way of looking at the world. The Church had always been exempt from the social conditions that dominated the centuries, in the sense that it was possible to reach the height of spiritual and temporal power with one’s own natural qualities, however humble one’s origins. Many of the most famous Popes were from decidedly poor families; we just have to think of the legendary
Gregory VII, who as a child had had to work as a porter, or the recent
John XXIII, who came from a large peasant family who were not always certain where the next meal would come from. This, at least, was the theory, since in fact things were often very different: the immense patrimonies connected with so many church positions made them very desirable prey for the nobility, who, by placing their younger sons within the hierarchy, could insure a privileged life for them without making a dent in the family capital. The highest point of corruption in this sense had taken place in the Renaissance, when it had become the practice to actually sell the most important posts, such as bishoprics, the richest abbotships and the title of Cardinal.
[4]

The scandals, and the impossibility of swiftly reforming such customs, had raised political as well as religious protests, and had resulted in the Protestant schism. At the beginning of the 1700s, no less than two centuries after
Luther’s protest, the violent polemics raised by Protestant thought in the 1500s and 1600s had hardly died down. The Papacy was accused of having trapped mankind in a network of inventions set up for its own advantage, built upon the only real weave of Christian doctrine – the primitive Church. A school of historical studies had been set up in Magdeburg in Germany for the purpose of showing up the whole endless queue of falsehoods that were believed to have been piled up by the Catholic Church over 1,000 years for the sole purpose of bending the faithful to its own material interests. Its members, called the
Centuriators of Magdeburg from the name of their published works (The Centuries) had indubitable intellectual qualities, and even if they had stuffed their writings with considerable amounts of imagination, they gave plenty of trouble to generations of Catholic scholars.
[5]

In short, the wounds opened by
Luther’s mighty schism were far from closed, and any innovation that seemed to place the well–established and reassuring Catholic tradition of thought in any doubt seemed the flag of yet another onslaught.
Galileo Galilei had been among the most illustrious victims of this reaction. The tendency quickly established itself to see the Church as an ally of that oppressive secular power that needed to be overthrown, and several Freemason groups took a strongly anti-clerical tinge that they had not had at their start. From the idea that reason was the favoured, if not the only way to improve human life, there developed progressively a near-divine concept of intellect itself: reason as the spark of divinity entrusted to man by God. God himself was pure reason, praised as the Grand Architect who had built the universe. The mysteries whereby the highest builder had raised the cosmos called back to mind those by which another architect of legend,
Hiram of Phoenicia, had built the Temple in the Holy City Jerusalem. Solomon, to whom divine wisdom had granted measureless wealth, had raised the temple, and the temple brought back to mind the Templars, also destroyed because they owned fabulous wealth, and possibly – everything seemed to prove it – possessors of
Hiram’s secrets. That same Catholic Church that seemed then to be in the way of any progress however small was nothing else but the heir of the mediaeval Papacy; an institution that had covered up for centuries the fragile bases of its historical claims by unleashing its most terrible weapon, the Inquisition, against those who held the proofs that could unmask it.

All these diverse ideas, born independently of each other but within the same context, ended up merging, and their outlines adapted till they fitted each other like the pieces of a complicated picture puzzle. From simple victims of
raison d’etat
and of
Clemens V’s political weakness, the Templars became bit by bit the unlucky heroes of a wisdom many thousands of years old, older and higher than Christianity, that could have spread progress and social welfare, but had been sacrificed to destroy the unjust privileges of an institution everlastingly allied with absolute power and its manifold abuses. Templarism, that is a highly-coloured, romantic view of the old order, projected in the social reality of the 1700s, became so compulsively fascinating a phenomenon as to take a protagonist’s role in the history of European popular culture; but there were serious differences in the shape taken by the phenomenon in different countries. If in France the Templars appeared as champions of free thought against the oppression of the twin dinosaurs of the ancient regime – Crown and Church – in Germany to the contrary studies on the Templars were promoted exactly to strike at those very radical and subversive groups whom they inspired.