The Templars and the Shroud of Christ

by Barbara Frale

  By 1810, Napoleon had become the master of most of Europe, and he decreed that all the documents of conquered kingdoms, including the States of the Church, were to be taken to Paris to become part of the vast Central Archive of the Empire. So it was that the colossal bulk of papers accumulated by the Popes were packaged up and set into motion towards France. Thanks to the esoteric tradition that had been growing, the arrival of the documents concerned with the trial of the Templars was surrounded by great expectations and even by a morbid kind of curiosity: those papers, kept safe for so long within the mighty walls of the Vatican, would certainly have revealed disconcerting facts. It was widely and largely correctly believed that the papal archive had always been Secretum, that is reserved to the Roman curia, and that no outsider would ever have been allowed a view of them. A kind of frenzy arose among the French officials charged with the expedition; it seemed clear that the truth about that obscure and complicated affair would have appeared, whole and inviolate, to the first man who could lay his hands on the minutes of the trial. Monsignor Marino Marini, personal manservant of the prefect of the Vatican Archives, had plenty of trouble with certain generals who insisted on opening particular crates of documents even before the convoy left Rome; and while the pragmatic Miollis was looking for the Bull of Excommunication against Napoleon, intending to quietly get rid of a most uncomfortable fact, Baron Étienne Radet was poking around elsewhere, eager to lay his hands on the trial of the Templars.

  Even after the fall of Napoleon and the restoration of the monarchy, when the papal archive was allowed to return home, Monsignor Marini was still fighting to prevent the new government from “carelessly” keeping a number of documents of the highest historical interest, including the Inquisition’s trial of Galileo Galilei and the trial of the Templar Order. He only got them back by a crafty suggestion: he saw fit to point out to the new government that the actions of Philip the Fair threw a decidedly nasty light on that very image of French monarchy that they intended to rehabilitate. It was therefore rather better, ultimately, that they should go back to the Vatican Archives, which were then closed to the public.[14]

  The Duc de Richelieu felt it wiser to yield to the Holy See’s complaints, as well as to Monsignor Marini’s witty arguments; but he looked surely on with great regret as the documents of the Templar trial, which Raynouard had meanwhile studied without finding the hidden truths, left Paris to return at last to the safe recesses of the Vatican, where the mysteries of Baphomet and many other demons would have been hidden away for heaven knew how many more centuries. And yet what really happened was that on 10 December 1879, the brand new register of requests to consult the Vatican Secret Archive recorded its first request. Over the course of the centuries, many people had been given special permission to visit the great palace where the documents of the Popes’ thousands of years of history were kept; but only then were scholars first allowed regular and continuous access to the precious papers.[15] From the middle of the 19th century, historical studies had made a quantum leap, because the general trend of thought, thanks in part to the rising tide of Positivism, had lost the taste for irrationalism that had fascinated early Romanticism, in favour of a much more realistic approach. Palaeography and diplomatics – the disciplines that teach to decipher the complex writings of the past and to reliably distinguish genuine from false documents – had been taking giant strides. This was the start of a brilliant cultural period, which witnessed the systematic publication of many mediaeval sources, no longer by private and sometimes amateurish learned gentlemen, but by professional historians who produced systematic collections valid to this day, such as for instance the German-area Monumenta Germaniae Historica, which among other things, contains many edicts of Charlemagne and an enormous number of immensely important texts from the Holy Roman Empire.

  Between 1841 and 1851, the French historian Jules Michelet published, in an equally authoritative and prestigious series – Collection des Documents inédits sur l’Histoire de France – the contents of an ancient register from the reign of Philip the Fair, which was then preserved in the Royal Library of Paris, and some other similar documents; it was an excellent edition for its time, which finally gave a scholarly picture of some of the most important documents of the trial against the Templars. The Michelet edition is still in use, although it is not widely known that its main item, the minutes of the long trial that took place in Paris between 1309 and 1312, comes from a copy that the King had made for his own Chancellery, while the original, which had been sent to the Pope, is in the Vatican Archives and still unpublished. The documents show no trace of Baphomet, of the magic Gnostic caskets, and of the other dark mysteries that people connected with the Templars; nor would a character like Michelet’s, or the earnest spirit of the historical collection, have allowed such fantasies. Even popular contemporary culture had noticeably matured, so that themes that had been so fashionable 20 years earlier may no longer have interested people; and it was exactly thanks to that improvement in historical method that Pope Leo had made the anything but easy decision to open the gates of the Secret Archives.

  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.[16] 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. [17]

  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.[18]

  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.[19]

  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”.[20]

  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.[21]

  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.[22] 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.[23] 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.[24] 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.[25] />
  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.[26]