The same object, in all likelihood a reliquary of the founder, Hugues de Payns, was also seen in the Temple of Paris by brother Bartholomé Bocher of the Chartres diocese, who joined the order in 1270; according to him, the reliquary did not stay in that place, but was only carried there during special occasions, and was then taken off and put away elsewhere:
The Templar who welcomed him into the order showed him a certain head that someone had placed on the altar of that little chapel by the sanctuary and the vases with the relics; he was told that when he was in difficulties, he should call on the help of that head. Asked how that head was made, he answered that it looked like the head of a Templar, with the head cover and a hoary and long beard; but he could not tell whether it was made of metal, wood, bone or human flesh, and his preceptor did not explain whose head it was. He had never seen it before nor did he see it afterwards, although he must have been in that chapel at least a hundred times.[4]
There was a certain suggestive power about this tale, told in the Pope’s presence, as he had for the first time the opportunity to personally listen to the Templars after nearly a year of hearing accusations and dreadful rumours. The scene of that mysterious cult, emerging from the dark in the shaky light of candles, indubitably could not make a positive impression on him. But in and of itself, the witness was not very serious. The Templars paid special cult to their founder Hugues de Payns, revering him as a great saint during certain nocturnal liturgies, and exposed his head, whether mummified or naturally preserved, within a large and precious reliquary. Hugues de Payns had never been officially canonized, and to the Church of Rome he remained simply a conversus who had chosen to serve God in the same way as countless other unknown priests and monks. Hugues de Payns had never been raised to the honour of altars, and Clemens V, as a specialist in canon law, could not look kindly on such solemn veneration; but in the Middle Ages people used to regard some people as saints purely for their simple lifestyle, even during their lifetimes. As soon as they died, their bodies and the objects they had owned immediately became precious relics, people started coming to pray on their graves, asking for miracles and intercessions with God, without waiting for the Church to complete its long, prudent bureaucratic process. Saints were made by popular acclamation. When the rumour spread through Assisi that Francis was dying in the Porziuncola, the people started praying, waiting impatiently to be finally allowed to see and worship the stigmata on his body: this is a famous and peculiar case, but many more could be mentioned.[5]
The idea that contact with the body of saints had beneficent effects was certainly no mediaeval innovation. It belonged to the most ancient Christian tradition: the Book of Acts tells that people approached Paul as he was preaching, and the faithful would touch his clothes with silken handkerchiefs, because they were certain that they were making relics for themselves. The Apostle’s divine charisma passed from his body to clothes and kerchiefs.[6] It might be that their worship of their founder Hugues de Payns, whom they held to be a holy man, may have led Clemens V to admonish them to reduce the cult to more sober proportions; but it was very, very far from evidence of heresy. As a matter of fact, in the Cyprus interrogations, carried out by a commission of local prelates a thousand miles from Philip the Fair and his pressure, the Templars absolutely denied any charge to do with deviant behaviours or ideas where religion was concerned. Furthermore, many secular nobles, priests, and religious from other orders offered to testify, declaring that the Templars observed the cult with exemplary devotion. It seems that they practised very peculiar and beautiful liturgies of adoration of the Cross during Good Friday, in which others who were not Order members would also take part. A priest said that he would celebrate Mass in Temple churches, and had from time to time celebrated jointly with Order chaplains: the formulas of consecration of the Host were spoken exactly as required. A Dominican who often carried out religious service with the Templars said that he had heard many of them in Confession, both in Cyprus and in France, and none of them had heretical attitudes on their conscience.[7]
The charge of idolatry and disbelief in the Eucharist soon proved utterly hollow. And yet Guillaume de Nogaret and his assistants had gone about building it just as they had done with the other charges: the method of half truths. They had started from a core of actual facts, a breadcrumb of truth suitably amplified and distorted.
Intuitions
In 1978, Ian Wilson published an essay titled The Turin Shroud: The Burial Cloth of Jesus Christ? It was a well written and a rather well researched book, following the story of the Shroud over almost 2,000 years, from Gospel descriptions to the latest scientific investigations from 1973. Out of this broad panorama, the author dedicated a chapter of some 15 pages to the investigation of a rather bold theory of his: there was in the history of the Shroud a “hole”, an empty space of about a century and a half (from 1204 to 1353) during which this object seems to disappear from historical sources. On the basis of evidence drawn both from documents and from objects the Templars had owned, the author maintained that the mysterious “idol” worshipped by the Templars was in fact the shroud kept at present in Turin, folded on itself and kept in a container designed to show only the face. The theory made a great impression, because in its light several obscure points in the story of the Templars also became easily understandable; Wilson, however, did not specialise in this subject, knew only the most famous sources on the trial, and much precious data escaped him. In any case, those 15 pages contained an intuition of immense historical interest, and left the scholarly community with a burning curiosity that the few bits of evidence used could not possibly satisfy. In recent years, the sources on the trial against the Templars have been investigated both in much greater depth and more systematically than had been the case in the past, and this has led us to bring to light historical truths that once seemed dubious, out of focus, indeed shadowy. Can they also tell us something about the relationship between the Templars and the Shroud? Luckily, yes, quite a bit; thanks mainly to some testimonies left as it were “hidden” in an authentic document little known to the experts. A document that seemed to have little to offer to the study of the political and judicial aspects of the trial, but that could not matter more in the study of Templar spirituality. Templar experts barely mention these facts in their studies, and the same happens in another area that has been investigated by scientific methods for over a century: that is, sindonology, the complex of studies about the Shroud of Turin. I think it better to show the reader this new evidence from Templar matters by discussing it on its own, that is, without reference to Wilson’s theory: this is to avoid that two strands of argument should superimpose themselves on each other, and condition each other. We shall therefore see the bare sources, just as they appear to the researcher who first reads them, without influences gained from reading other studies. Later the material will be compared with Wilson’s intuitions and we can verify what historical scenario arises from it.
Throughout the second phase of the trial against the Templars, the one which took place after summer 1308 when the investigations were being carried out by diocesan bishops, the investigators began to be certain that the Templars’ “head” was in fact the reliquary of some saint, and started asking clear-headed questions to this purpose. A significant case is that of sergeant Guillaume d’Erreblay, a sometime almsgiver for the King of France, who was questioned by the commission of bishops who managed the Paris investigation in 1309-1311. This man had often seen a handsome reliquary in silver used in the normal Temple liturgies, exhibited to the veneration of the faithful who came to pray in the Order’s churches. Some said that it was the reliquary of the Eleven Thousand Virgin companions of St.Ursula who were martyred in Cologne, and that was what he too had used to believe. However, after the arrest, and under the psychological power of the prosecution, it occurred to him that there were many odd things: for he seemed to recall that that reliquary had a monstrous aspect, with two faces, ev
en, of which one had a beard.[8] A modern historian will suspect that the witness has been badly affected by the context of the trial, to the point of talking nonsense: how could anyone exhibit to the veneration of the faithful the portrait of a girl saint – with two faces, and a beard besides? In fact, this Templar must have described two different objects. It was only from other brothers that he heard of the reliquary of the Eleven Thousand Virgins, while what he saw himself with his own eyes may indeed have had two faces. His description is identical to the miniatures painted by the painter Matteo Planisio on the manuscript Vaticano latino 3550, where the Creator is shown with two faces, one bearded and masculine (the Person of the Father) and one of an adolescent youth (the Son), who may well look like a woman’s. The superb Neapolitan miniature is one instance, who knows how many similar objects existed in mediaeval churches.
The commissioner bishops took the statement and immediately ordered a check; it was thus found that the Temple of Paris really did hold a reliquary with the bones of one of the Eleven Thousand Virgins, but that far from being monstrous; it was handsome and represented a perfectly normal young woman’s face.
At that point, the designated guardian of the Order’s goods after the arrest, a certain Guillaume Pidoye, who held the crates containing the relics found in the Templar mansion of Paris, was called to the hearing. The guardian was ordered to take to the trial every object shaped as a head, whether of wood, or metal, that was found in that building; he then handed over to the Commissioners a large, handsome gold-plated silver reliquary that represented a girl. Inside they found bones that seemed to be part of a skull, sewn in a white linen cloth and then placed in another red cloth. Along with the cloth there was a small ticket that said “testa LVIII M”: the head seemed to belong to a girl child and some said they were relics of one of the Eleven Thousand Virgins. Since the guardian stated that there was no other head-shaped object, the Commissioners summoned Guillaume d’Erreblay and showed him the reliquary: but the Templar said it was not the same, and that he doubted he had ever seen that one in the Temple’s mansion.[9]
To discover that the Templars’ mysterious head was in fact a silver reliquary weakened the prosecution’s structure of accusations, since it roused suspicions that the other charges against the Templars could be the result of similar distortions. It is however true that the commissioners noticed that the order had peculiar liturgies and cults which the brothers did not clearly understand. Sergeant Pierre Maurin had been inducted into the Order by Grand Master Thibaut Gaudin in about 1286, in a room of the great Templar mansion of Château-Pélerin in the Holy Land; on that occasion he was shown no simulacra of any kind, but he became very curious when he was handed the little linen strand, which he had the duty never to take off although nobody seemed clear on just what it was for. When two or three years had gone, one day, while he was in Château-Pélerin he found out from fellow brother Pierre de Vienne that a mysterious cult object was preserved in the central treasury of the Temple in Acre, and that this object was in the shape of a head; all the Templars’ linen strands were consecrated by touching this head. The reliquary was said to contain remains from the head of St. Blaise or of St. Peter; but from that day on he started feeling strong unease and no longer wanted to wear the strand on his body.[10]
On the other hand, the treasurer of the Paris Temple, Jean de la Tour, saw a portrait painting on a board that was hung in the Order’s chapel near the central crucifix. He could not find out who the person represented was, and he thought that it must be the image of some saint: he was however certain that the man could not be a Templar, for he did not wear the typical Templar dress. Anyway it was certainly not monstrous, and though he refused to worship it, the sight of it caused no kind of fear.[11]
The trail of the male portrait, with the figure of a man whose identity was unknown to the Templars themselves, is surely the most interesting; it seems to point straight to the notion of a most sacred figure, worshipped by the Templars with the highest devotion, even though only a very few among them know who he is, and in fact he is not easy to recognize: those who saw him have trouble describing him. What is it?
A man’s image on a cloth
The records of the interrogations carried out on the Templars jailed in Carcassonne in the winter of 1307, that is a few months after the arrests, has survived in a single document kept in the Paris National Archives: a copy on paper made to be sent to Philip the Fair. The material is much darkened and is not in a good state of preservation, but it is perfectly readable to anyone who is familiar with the sources of the trial against the order of the Temple. Early in the 20th century, Heinrich Finke tried to publish it, but found it exhausting and finally made a somewhat questionable decision to transcribe into his edition of Templar trial documents only the few passages he had identified. These were bitten-off chunks of sentences, stitched together with dotted lines to indicate the many things he had not managed to read. These brief gobbets of Latin in the middle of a flow of academic German form a bizarre linguistic patchwork: the whole thing is most remote from the norms of today’s historians and really quite enough to confuse anyone. That may be why this has been so far practically ignored by historians as a source. I have presented and discussed this source, along with many others, in my doctoral thesis in history at the University of Venice (1996-1999), when I was collecting all surviving evidence from the trial to make a systematic analysis of the data and compare them with each other. Its content struck me immediately as of immense interest, because I think that, together with so much other data, it proves that the mysterious idol of the Templars was a very famous object with a well-defined identity. It was effectively a portrait, but the least that can be said is that it was not just any portrait.
The Templar brother Guillaume Bos, received about 1297 in the Templar command of Perouse near Narbonne, was shown an “idol” of peculiar shape, a very different image from the others, which were mostly reliquaries worked in bas-relief. It was a kind of monochromatic drawing, a dark image on the light background of a cloth that seemed to his eyes like cotton cloth (signum fustanium):
and immediately a kind of drawing on a cloth was taken to the same place and spread out in front of him. Asked whose figure it represented, he answered that he was so astonished at what he had been told to do that he could hardly see it, nor could he distinguish very well what person was represented in the drawing; it seemed to him, however, to be made of white and black, and he paid it worship.[12]
Jean Taylafer, heard in Paris during the long inquiry of 1309-1311, saw the same kind of object: it also was a kind of drawing with an ill-defined shape, made of a tint that seemed reddish to him, and he could only distinguish the image of a face that had the natural dimensions of a human head. Like Guillaume Bos, he could not be sure whether it was a painting or not, but in that case too it was an image made from a single colour. Another Templar called Arnaut Sabbatier, on the other hand, said explicitly that he had been shown the whole figure of a man’s body on a linen cloth, and the was ordered to worship him three times, kissing his feet (quoddam lineum habentem ymaginem hominis, quod adoravit ter pedes obsculand).[13]
The document is authentic, and, in spite of its less than perfect condition, the passage can clearly be read. Unless we reject the reality of the historical source, it shows that some Templars in southern France were shown an “idol” identical to the Shroud of Turin, which is exactly a linen cloth showing a man’s image. Nor can there be any doubt that the figure contained the entire body, not just the head; the witness says in so many words that the Templars worshipped him by kissing his feet. Nobody can deny that the Shroud, if seen for the first time by someone who has no idea what it is, will seem just like some kind of imprint or large, ill-defined stain over a long piece of linen, a clear imprint with no holding line or contour, showing the features of a man’s body. It is a characteristic of the image that it becomes visible or invisible according to the distance fro
m which it is seen, which immediately reminds us of Templar witnesses who remembered that the idol “appeared and disappeared” suddenly. There really are many clues to suggest that the various descriptions of the Templar idol are nothing but an account of the Shroud of Turin, rendered in an imprecise and fragmentary manner by persons who could only look at it for a short time, most often in a container that only showed its head; we should not forget that the Templar ceremonies took place in the earliest hours of the morning, before the Sun had yet risen; so this object was seen, practically speaking, in dark rooms, and above all without the faintest idea of what it was. Arnaut Sabbatier’s evidence, on the other hand, describes explicitly an obstension (a religious exhibition or display) of the actual Shroud, when the cloth was fully unfolded to show the image of the whole body. It also describes a precise liturgy of worship which involves a threefold kiss on the mark of the feet; curiously enough, the same gesture, offered with the highest devotion, by St. Charles Borromeo and his company of priests during their famous pilgrimage on foot from Milan to Turin to see the Shroud in October 1578. The Jesuit Francesco Adorno, who went with St. Charles and wrote an account of events, knew perfectly well what he was going to see, and yet stated that he was completely astonished and as if dumbstruck before the cloth: the same kind of emotion described by so many Templars in the trial. Indeed, the Jesuit had already seen a fine copy of the Shroud, made by order of its owner, Duke Emmanuel Philibert of Savoy. Yet the original was something else: the picture on the cloth of Turin left the impression of a living, suffering man giving up his last breath.[14] The Templars worshipped the Shroud in the same way as St. Charles Borromeo did three centuries or so later, at least those among them who had the privilege to contemplate the original relic and not one of the many copies scattered around the commands of the Order. According to Adorno, St. Charles and a few others also kissed the wound in the side, besides those of the feet; and by the regretful tone easily felt in his words, one can guess that he did not have that great privilege. As of now, we don’t know whether the Templars used to kiss the side as well; the monk who left his account of this cult was fairly low in Templar hierarchy, and everything leads me to think that the privilege of kissing the wound in the side would be, if anything, kept for the highest dignitaries.
The Templars and the Shroud of Christ Page 8