The Real History Behind the Templars

by Sharan Newman

  The dispute that followed Eskil’s imprisonment, which had little to do with him, escalated after the death of Hadrian. The struggle, which lasted for centuries between the papacy and the Holy Roman Emperors, caused two popes to be elected at the same time. The first, supported by Eskil, was Alexander III. The other, supported by the emperor and Denmark’s new king, Valdemar, was named Victor IV. Eskil didn’t want to have to choose between King Valdemar and the popes, and so he kept away from Denmark. He wandered about Europe and made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem at some point between 1161 and 1167. There he could have met the Grand Master of the Templars, Bertrand of Blancfort, but we have no record of such a meeting. It’s quite possible that Bertrand was not even in Jerusalem at the time of Eskil’s visit.24

  In 1177, Eskil resigned his bishopric and retired to become a monk at Clairvaux.25 He spent his last four years as a simple monk and often regaled the younger brothers with stories of his friendship with their founder, Bernard.26 He died there in 1181.

  While he admired Bernard greatly and chose to end his life at the monastery he founded, Eskil was friends with other monastic leaders, notably Peter, abbot of Celle in Champagne.27 He wrote to both of the abbots in friendship, asking for advice and sharing his problems and frustrations. They wrote him letters of support.

  So what has this to do with proving that there were Templars in Denmark? Nothing that I can see. Because Eskil and Bernard were friends, and Bernard was a supporter of the Templars, there was no reason for Eskil to establish the Templars in Denmark. Nor is there any indication that he did so.

  As I have already said, there is no sign at all of the Templars ever having had a commandery in Denmark. The Hospitallers had a Scandinavian province that was made up of Denmark and Norway but that order seems to have concentrated its efforts in the region on the hospital side rather than the military.28

  Well, it may have been that there were Templars in Denmark but that all the documents have been lost. So, let’s look at the physical evidence as presented by the believers.

  The churches on the island of Bornholm are indeed round. That is indisputable. We can see them, touch them, and walk around them. However, one can’t assume that because a church is round, it was built by Templars. For a time after the First Crusade there was a vogue for them all over Europe.

  The idea of building a church in the form of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem wasn’t new. A hundred years before the Templar order was founded, the Benedictine church at Saint-Benigne at Dijon was built with a round nave in imitation of the Holy Sepulcher, as were the churches at Lanleff, Saint-Bonnet-la-Rivière, Rieux-Minervois, and Montmorillon, all in different parts of France.29 In most of these churches, there are four or eight columns inside. However, “the churches on Bornholm have one central column. They are simply a different type.”30

  Even the Hospitallers built round churches.31If the churches on Bornholm are connected to any military order, it would make more sense that it would be the Hospitallers, whom we know were in Denmark, or even the Teutonic Knights. But that would ruin the hypothesis. For some reason, it has to be Templars or nothing.

  One shouldn’t try to build a very complicated theory based on the idea that Templars were in Denmark, because the basic premise is too shaky to support much of anything. It is based on a lack of understanding of historical data and many leaps in which the logic is not supported. I wouldn’t want to risk standing on it.

  One positive thing that has come out of this imaginative and unhistorical theory of Templars in Denmark is that it has made serious historians stop and say, “We know there is no evidence for Templars here, but why weren’t they in Denmark? What was different about Denmark (and all of Scandinavia) that this didn’t happen?” Since it takes much more time to do serious research than to build a castle in the air, few papers have come out on the subject yet, but I look forward to them.

  I wish I could believe that my explanations would clear up the confusion surrounding these very badly researched ideas about the Templars. But I don’t hold out much hope. What chance do plodding historians have against Mr. Haagensen and Mr. Lincoln, a filmmaker and a journalist, neither of whom seem to feel compelled to waste their time combing through dusty archives for proof?

  1Vivian Etting, “Crusade and Pilgrimage: Different Ways to the City of God,” in Medieval History Writing and Crusading Ideology, ed. Tuomas M. S. Lehtonen and Kurt Villads Jensen (Helsinki: Finnish Literary Society, 2005) p. 187. “However the [Hospitaller] Order had no military functions in Denmark and the competing Order of the Knights Templars [sic] was never established in Scandinavia.”

  2Elring Haagensen and Henry Lincoln, The Templars’ Secret Island (Barnes and Noble, 2002).

  3Ibid., p. 29.

  4www.newadvent.org/cathen/02498d.htm

  5Haagensen and Lincoln, p. 29.

  6Ferdinand Lot and Robert Fawtier, Histoire de Institutions Françaises au Moyen Age, Tome II, Institutions Royales (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958) p. 486.

  7Achille Luchaire, Institutions Française (Paris, 1892) pp. 201-2.

  8Georges Duby, France in the Middle Ages 987-1460, tr. Juliet Vale (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) p. 285.

  9Haagensen and Lincoln, p.153. At least Mr. Lincoln now knows that Godfrey of Bouillon was not king of France, as was stated in one of his earlier books (The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail ). Bravo!

  10Clairvaux was founded in 1115. See Louis J. Lekai, The Cistercians: Ideas and Reality (Kent State University Press, 1977) p. 19.

  11Haagensen and Lincoln, p. 30.

  12Brian Patrick McGuire, The Difficult Saint (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1991) p. 126, quoting Lauritz Weibull.

  13Ibid., p. 109. For more on the cathedral schools, see C. Stephen Jaeger, The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe 950-1200 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994).

  14Ibid., p. 110.

  15Brian Patrick McGuire, The Cistercians in Denmark (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1982) p. 40.

  16McGuire, Saint, p. 110.

  17Anders Bergquist, “The Papal Legate: Nicholas Breakspear’s Scandinavian Mission,” in Adrian IV: The English Pope (1154-1159), ed. Brenda Bolton and Anne J. Duggan (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2003) p. 41.

  18There are many examples, but the one I know best is the 1148 Council of Rheims, during which the archbishop of Tours demanded primacy over the bishopric of Dol. But that’s a subject for another book and probably not one that would interest anyone but die-hard students of ecclesiastical government.

  19I. S. Robinson, The Papacy 1073-1198 (Cambridge University Press, 1990) p. 467.

  20Bergquist, p. 42.

  21McGuire, Saint, p. 110.

  22Johanis Mabillon ed., Sancti Bernardi Opera Omnia Vol. I (Paris, 1889) col. 948. “Eskilum non-modo archiepiscopum Lundensem in Danis, sed et primatem Succiae et decretoAdriani IV papae fuisse lego.”

  23Robinson, pp. 466-70; Bergquist, p. 47.

  24Please see chapter 15, Grand Masters 1136-1189, for more about Bertrand.

  25McGuire, Saint, p. 111.

  26Geoffrey of Auxerre, “Bernardi Abbatis Vita I,” in Mabillon, Vol. IV, cols. 2229-30.

  27Mabillon, Vol. 1, col. 948.

  28Helen Nicholson, The Knights Hospitaller (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2001).

  29Henry de Curzon, La Maison du Temple de Paris (Paris, 1888) p. 87.

  30Prof. Kurt Villads Jensen, private correspondence, October 10, 2006.

  31Nicholson, p. 7.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  The Templars and the Shroud of Turin

  As far as I can tell, the Templars became attached to the story of the Shroud of Turin through a coincidence. Since the shroud has become part of the lore of the Templars we’ll need to go over the history of it, as far as is known. I have no intention of exploring what the shroud is or how, when, and where it was made, only the way the Templars were brought into its orbit.

  In the thi
rteenth century, the Church of St. Marie de Blakerne in Constantinople claimed to have the burial shroud of Jesus. I haven’t been able to find out how they got it or when but it was there in 1204 when the Fourth Crusade decided to bypass the Holy Land and conquer Constantinople instead. According to Robert de Clari, a chronicler and participant in the crusade, “There is another church that is called Madam Saint Mary of Blakerne, where the sydoine which Our Lord was wrapped in was. Every Friday it would raise itself upright so that one could see well the figure of Our Lord; but there is no one, not Greek or French, who knows where the sydoine went when the city was taken.”1

  I must admit that this is the sort of information that makes a novelist’s eyes light up. A missing relic, stolen in the midst of war: where could it have gone? The possibilities are endless.

  Robert de Clari also mentions the veil of Veronica, on which Jesus is supposed to have wiped his face on the way to Calvary, and a holy loincloth that a tilemaker loaned to Jesus for the same purpose. The image on the loincloth had miraculously transferred itself to one of the tiles, which was also kept. Along with these relics from Constantiople were the head of John the Baptist, some pieces of the True Cross, the Crown of Thorns, the tunic Jesus wore while carrying the cross, two of the nails, and a vial of his blood.2 Some of these would later appear in France in the possession of King Louis IX. He built the Church of Ste. Chapelle to house them. But the holy shroud and the holy loincloth and tile seem to have vanished.

  There doesn’t seem to be any mention of the shroud again until the middle of the fourteenth century, when a knight named Geoffrey de Charny may have owned it. He was an important figure in the early battles of what would turn out to be the Hundred Years’ War.3 He also joined a crusade to Smyrna in Turkey in 1345, an experience he did not enjoy.4 Later he became a charter member of the short-lived Company of the Star, a group of knights close to the king of France, John II.5 Charny was killed at the Battle of Poitiers on September 19, 1356.6 In between his military exploits, he managed to write three treatises on chivalry. He also had a chapel built on his land at Lirey for the purpose of celebrating masses for the souls of his family and as a family cemetery.7

  Now, in all his petitions to have his church built and in his own writings, Geoffrey de Charny never mentioned that he had a holy shroud. But, as soon as he had died, his son, also named Geoffrey, began to show the shroud to friends, neighbors, and paying guests as an object of veneration, always taking care not to say that it was the actual burial cloth of Jesus. The local bishop tried to get him to stop doing this, certain that the shroud was a fake. Eventually, he succeeded.

  No one mentioned the Templars. There was no reason to. The Templars did not take part in the Fourth Crusade. They did not believe in fighting other Christians—at least, that was what they told the organizers of the crusade, and I think they probably meant it. They were far too busy at the time fighting the heirs of Saladin and must have been irked that the crusaders were looting the Greek Empire instead of helping them.

  It’s possible that Geoffrey de Charny bought the shroud as a souvenir when he was in Turkey, not believing that it was genuine, but rather a full-body icon. Whether his son knew this or not is impossible to say.

  So why are the Templars connected to the shroud? It all has to do with the coincidence that the Templar Visitor of Normandy, Geoffrey of Charney, who was burned at the stake just after Jacques de Molay, has the same name as the first owner of the shroud. The two Geoffreys may have been related but there is no evidence for this.

  That didn’t stop a twentieth-century author, Ian Wilson, from deciding that, not only were the two men connected but that the shroud also originally belonged to the Templars.8 This is an example of taking one fact, that the two men have the same name, and then creating an entire scenario based on no evidence whatsoever.

  There are several problems with Wilson’s theory.

  I’ve already pointed out that the Templars weren’t in on the looting of Constantinople. That’s the first problem. However, if somehow they did get something that they thought was the sydoine there is no way they would have kept it a secret. As I have pointed out, the Templars were constantly short of cash and relics were big business. The relics they did have were displayed, such as the head of Virgin Number 58 at the Paris commandery or the cross made from a tub that Jesus had once bathed in.9

  Wilson says that the shroud and the veil of Veronica were confused and they were the same thing.10 Then he says that the shroud, or maybe images of it, were what the Templars were accused of worshipping at their trial.11Considering the number of imaginative descriptions made by the Templars of the head they were supposed to worship, that doesn’t work. But also, if they had a genuine relic of the Resurrection, doesn’t it stand to reason that they would say so? The idea that this would be a secret makes no sense in the framework of the medieval world, or the modern one for that matter.

  One of the more surprising theories that has grown out of connecting the shroud to the Templars suggests that the image on the cloth is actually Jacques de Molay.12 This was made, not surprisingly, by two Masons, neither of whom is a historian.

  They base this conclusion on a series of suppositions.

  The first assumption is that Jacques was tortured by the inquisitors in an imitation of Christ’s passion. Afterward, the bleeding Grand Master was placed on a shroud because, “like the Jerusalem Church before them and Freemasonry after them, the Templars kept a linen shroud to wrap the candidates for senior membership.”13

  They did? I can’t find anything about this in the Rule or in the various records of the interrogations. I’d love to know where it says this but, unfortunately, the authors don’t cite their source.

  The book presents a gruesome scenario, complete with illustrations, on how Molay must have been tortured. Oddly, this imagined torture corresponds exactly to the wounds on the image on the shroud. However, there is a problem with this, too. (Actually, there are a lot of problems but I’ll go with the most obvious.) First of all, there is no record anywhere of a person being tortured by the Inquisition in imitation of Christ. This would not only be blasphemy but it would also elevate the status of the accused, making his suffering seem equal to that of Jesus. More importantly, the authors state that Jacques de Molay showed the marks of torture when he came before the masters of the University of Paris. Jacques de Molay did not take off his shirt to show how he had been tortured, as the book says, nor did he make the speech the authors quote.14 They quote it, by the way, not from the records of the trial, but from a translation made in a book called Secret Societies of the Middle Ages. The author is that well-known figure Anonymous.

  According to the records, Jacques never said that he was tortured. He said he had been starved and threatened with torture. When he rolled up his sleeve before the masters of Paris, it was to show them how thin he had become.15

  That leads me to the most compelling reason to think that, whatever the shroud is, it’s not a portrait of Jacques de Molay. The image on the Shroud of Turin is of a tall and fairly robust young man with long hair and a beard. Now, after some time in prison, Jacques could have let himself go a bit, not trimming his beard or cutting his hair. But Jacques de Molay was in his late sixties, if not older.16 He had been starved. Looking at the image on the shroud, even with the best intentions, I can’t see that the man there is an emaciated seventy-year-old.

  Finally, another theory on the Shroud of Turin that has received some notice is that of Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince. At first it seems safely free of the Templars. They think that the shroud was painted by Leonardo da Vinci.17

  But you know, they just couldn’t keep the Templars out of it, even though Leonardo lived over a century after the dissolution of the order. They base the Templar connection not on primary research but on another popular book, The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail. This book is based on, among other things, a hoax and forged documents. I have seen these documents and they are riddled with inaccuracies
and mistakes.18

  Again the authors add the Templars to the mix by continuing the assumption that the Geoffreys of Charney and Charny are connected and adding them to the family tree of the rulers of the Latin kingdoms and thence to the Templars again. There is no documentation for this and it doesn’t agree with known genealogies of the families.

  I don’t really care what the Shroud of Turin is. I just think that it’s time we left the Templars out of the arguments. The poor guys have had enough.

  1Robert de Clari, “La Conquêt de Constantinople,” in Historiens et Chroniquers du Moyen Age ed. Albert Pauphilet (Paris: Gallimard, 1952) p. 78, “un autre des moustiers, que on apeloit madame Sainte Marie de Blakerne, où li sydoines là où Nostre Sire fu envelopés, y estoit, qui chascun vendredi se dressoit tous drois, si que on y povoit bien voir las figure Nostre Seigneur; ne ne seut on onques, ne Grieu ne François, que cist sydoines devint quant la ville fu prise.”

  2Ibid., p. 67.

  3Richard W. Kaeuper and Elspeth Kennedy, The Book of Chivalry of Geoffroi de Charney: Text, Context and Translation (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996) p. 5.

  4Ibid., p. 7.

  5Ibid., pp. 14-15.

  6Ibid., p. 17.

  7Ibid., p. 38.