Throughout his scholarly and informative book, Alvarez always referred to the Emperor of Ethiopia as ‘the Prester’ or as ‘Prester John’.52 I was also able to establish that much earlier than this – in 1352 – the Franciscan Giovanni de Marignolli, apostolic legate in Asia, had spoken (in his Chronica) of ‘Ethiopia where the negroes are and which is called the land of Prester John’.53 Similarly in 1328 a certain Friar Jordanus ‘Catalani’ had referred to the Emperor of the Ethiopiansi ‘quem vos vocatis Prestre Johan’.54 And, later, in 1459, Fra Mauro’s well regarded map of the then known world indicated a great city within the boundaries of present-day Ethiopia with the rubric: ‘Qui il Preste Janni fa residentia principal.’55
Surveying all the conflicting references before me I felt literally dazed: sometimes, it seemed, Prester John had been unambiguously located in Ethiopia; on other occasions he had been located in Ethiopia but spoken of as the ruler of the ‘Indies’; and sometimes he had been located in India itself – or elsewhere in the far east. Behind all this confusion, however, there seemed to be no doubt that the real Prester John, the source of all the myth-making, must all along have been the ruler of Ethiopia – the only non-European Christian kingdom that had existed anywhere in the world in medieval times, and therefore the only model that Wolfram could possibly have drawn on when he had talked of an ‘India’ being ruled by ‘Prester John’, the Christian son of Fierfiz and Rapanse de Schoye.
For a final and hopefully definitive word I turned to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which observed:
It is not improbable that from a very early date the title ‘Prester John’ was assigned to the Abyssinian king, though for a time this identification was overshadowed by the prevalence of the Asiatic legend. At the bottom of the double allocation there was, no doubt, that confusion of Ethiopia with India which is as old as Virgil or perhaps older.56
Significantly for my purposes, the Encyclopaedia concluded its entry with a reference to the exchange of letters between the Pope and Prester John that, as noted earlier, had taken place in the second half of the twelfth century:
However vague may have been the ideas of Pope Alexander III respecting the geographical position of the potentate whom he addressed from Venice in 1177, the only real person to whom the letter can have been sent was the king of Abyssinia. Let it be observed that the ‘honourable persons of the monarch’s kingdom’ whom the leech Philip had met with in the East must have been the representatives of some real power, and not of a phantom. It must have been a real king who professed to desire … the assignation of … an altar at Jerusalem. Moreover we know that the Ethiopic Church did long possess a chapel and altar in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.57
Indeed so. In fact, as I was soon able to ascertain, the chapel and the altar had first been granted to Ethiopia in the year 1189 – and not by the Pope (who by then was no longer in a position to distribute such favours) but by the Muslim general Saladin who had wrested Jerusalem from the hands of the Crusaders in 1187. Most important of all, these special privileges in the Holy Sepulchre had been obtained for the Ethiopian Orthodox Church as a result of a direct appeal to Saladin by no lesser person than the King of Ethiopia himself.58
These events had taken place just a decade before unknown stonemasons in northern France had left enigmatic representations of the Holy Grail, of the Ark of the Covenant, and of an Ethiopian Queen of Sheba in the north porch of Chartres cathedral – and also just a decade before Wolfram von Eschenbach had begun to write his Parzival. It seemed to me, moreover, that such coincidences were unlikely to be just coincidences. On the contrary, I now felt that the circumstantial evidence very strongly supported my hypothesis that the Chartres sculptures and Wolfram’s remarkable narrative poem had been explicitly created to serve as esoteric treasure maps. And, though not actually marked with an ‘X’, there seemed to be little doubt that the spot identified by these maps as the hiding place of the treasure could only be Ethiopia – the land of Prester John, the land that had provided the last resting place of the fictional Holy Grail, and thus (if my theory was correct) the land in which the Ark of the Covenant, the real object that the Grail symbolized, would be found.
Now, however, other questions presented themselves:
• How, in the late twelfth century, could information that the Ark might rest in Ethiopia possibly have reached a German poet and a group of French iconographers?
• What connected the former to the latter? – for they must have been connected in some way if they had both produced works of art encoding the same message.
• Finally, why should anyone have chosen to express the secret of the Ark’s location in a story and in sculptures? I had already concluded that this might have been done to ensure transmission of the secret to future generations. At the same time, however, the code used – particularly by Wolfram – had been exceptionally difficult to crack. I myself, with all the research resources of the twentieth century at my disposal, had only got as far as I had because I had been to Axum and had thus been predisposed to accept that the Ark might be in Ethiopia. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however, that advantage should not have been available to anyone. From this it followed that the hidden message of Parzival could not have been decoded in the medieval period at all – unless there had been people with access to some very special and privileged knowledge. Since there would have been no point in creating a code that no one could crack, it seemed to me logical to assume that such people must have existed. But who could they have been?
I did find one group of Europeans who fitted the bill perfectly. As part of the Crusading army of occupation they had maintained a massive presence in Jerusalem in the twelfth century: they had been there in 1145 when the Prester John legends had first begun to circulate, and they had still been there in 1177 when envoys of the King of Ethiopia had visited the Holy City seeking an altar in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Direct contact between Ethiopians and members of this European group would therefore have been perfectly possible.
The group in question was, moreover, highly secretive and made regular use of codes and ciphers in its far-flung international communications. It was, in addition, a group that had been involved with the evolution and dissemination of Gothic architecture in Europe (and quite specifically with the architecture and iconography of Chartres cathedral). Finally, and most importantly, it was a group that Wolfram von Eschenbach had several times mentioned by name – a name that I had also come across in connection with the curious Grail cup that the sculptors of the north porch of Chartres cathedral had placed in the left hand of their imposing statue of the priest-king Melchizedek59 (which, incidentally, was almost the only depiction of Melchizedek in the whole of medieval Europe60).
What then was the name of this strangely influential, powerful and widely travelled group?
Its full and formal title was the ‘Poor Knights of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon’61 – but its members were better known simply as ‘Templars’, or as Knights Templar. It was, fundamentally, a religious order, an order of warrior monks, and throughout much of the twelfth century it had its headquarters in Jerusalem on the site of Solomon’s Temple – the same site from which the Ark of the Covenant had inexplicably vanished in Old Testament times.
1 Ethiopian church painting showing King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. According to Ethiopian tradition their son stole the Ark of the Covenant from the Temple in Jerusalem and brought it to Ethiopia.
2 This painting, from Israel, depicts the veneration of the Ark of the Covenant in Old Testament times. Regarded as the sign and the seal of God’s presence on earth, the Ark was the most sacred relic of the ancient Judaic faith.
3 Main group of stelae at Axum.
4 Section of the fallen stele. At 500 tonnes in weight and more than 100 feet tall, it was the largest single piece of stone ever quarried in the ancient world.
5 According to Axumite traditions the powers of the Ark of the Covenant were used to raise up
this towering stele. It stands 70 feet tall and weighs 300 tonnes.
6 An Ethiopian painting depicting the late Emperor Haile Selassie, deposed in 1974.
7 A rebel wall poster showing the brutality of the Emperor’s successor, President Mengistu.
8 Falasha artefacts portraying the supposed bedroom scene between Solomon and Sheba. Haile Selassie claimed to be the 225th direct-line descendant of this union.
9 Falasha market woman.
10 In one of the island churches on Lake Tana a Christian priest stands guard at the doorway to the Holy of Holies.
11 Chartres Cathedral, France. One of the earliest and finest examples of the Gothic style of architecture that blossomed suddenly and mysteriously in the twelfth century AD.
12 Sculpture of Melchizedek, priest-king of ancient Israel, in the north porch of Chartres Cathedral, According to some authorities the cup in his hand is the Holy Grail and the object contained within it is a stone.
13 The Queen of Sheba (central of the three figures), her Ethiopian slave at her feet, in the north porch of Chartres Cathedral.
14 Tableau in the north porch of Chartres Cathedral depicting the removal, to some unstated destination, of the Ark of the Covenant – which is shown placed upon an ox-cart.
15 A section of the strange inscription beneath the Ark tableau.
Chapter 5
White Knights, Dark Continent
According to Emma Jung, analyst, lecturer and wife of the eminent psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, the way in which the literary genre of the Holy Grail appeared at the end of the twelfth century was both sudden and surprising. In an authoritative study of the Grail legend (which she undertook on behalf of the Jung Foundation) she argued that something of great significance must have lain behind this abrupt and dramatic materialization. Indeed she went so far as to suggest that in Chretien de Troyes’s Conte du Graal and Wolfram’s Parzival – the first two exemplars of the genre – it was almost ‘as if a subterranean watercourse had been tapped’.1 What might that ‘subterranean watercourse’ have been?
The answer, I thought, lay in the period of history in which the Grail romances began to circulate. This, after all, was the era of the Crusades – an era that had brought Europeans into close contact with Arab and Judaic culture for the first time and that saw the occupation of Jerusalem by Christian armies for eighty-eight years (from AD 1099 until the recapture of the Holy City by Saladin in 1187). It was in 1182 – the eighty-third year of the occupation – that Chrétien produced his version of the Grail story. And shortly after the fall of Jerusalem Wolfram von Eschenbach started work on his own Parzival.
I therefore found it difficult to resist the conclusion that these early recensions of the Grail romance must have been based on something that had happened – or on material that had come to light – during the period that Jerusalem had been under the full control of European forces. I looked very carefully at the text of Parzival to see whether there was any evidence to support this conjecture and discovered that Wolfram had on several occasions made mention of a mysterious source named ‘Kyot’ – a man, he said, whom he had relied upon heavily for his information and who fortunately had been:
a baptized Christian – otherwise this tale would still be unknown. No infidel art would avail us to reveal the nature of the Gral and how one came to know its secrets.2
This was by no means the only place in Parzival where the German poet had hinted that there might have been more to his Grail than at first met the eye. I was already satisfied that this ‘something more’ could well have been the Ark of the Covenant – the real object that lay behind the beautiful fictional symbol. Now as I studied the widely scattered references to ‘Kyot’ it occurred to me that this shadowy figure, whose identity was never clarified, could have been the source who had introduced Wolfram to the secret of the Ark’s hiding place in Ethiopia. Referred to at one point as ‘Kyot, who sent us the authentic tale’,3 he was clearly very important. But who was he?
There were few obvious clues in Parzival itself. Here Kyot was spoken of as a ‘Master’4 and there it was suggested that his mother tongue had been French.5 But beyond such hints there was very little to go on. I therefore turned to the literary scholars and found that several of them had identified Kyot quite specifically with a twelfth-century French poet, Guyot de Provins, who had made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem shortly before the recapture of the Holy City by the Saracens6 – and who had also been attached for a while to the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa.7
This latter fact caught my eye because I knew that Frederick – like Wolfram – had been a German by birth (before his election as Emperor in 1152 he had been Duke of Swabia8). And I also knew (see previous chapter) that this same Frederick had been one of the two monarchs specifically named amongst the various Christian kings to whom the ‘letter of Prester John’ had been addressed in the year 1165.
Investigating further I then learned something else – something that turned out to be of major importance: Guyot/Kyot had been closely associated with the Knights Templar9 who, according to Emma Jung’s study, ‘were considered to be the guardians of Solomon’s Temple’.10 I also knew that it was from Solomon’s Temple that the Ark of the Covenant had mysteriously disappeared in Old Testament times. I was therefore excited to discover that, in Parzival, Wolfram had described the guardians of the Grail as ‘Templars’11 and had referred to them, flatteringly, as:
a noble Brotherhood … who, by force of arms, have warded off men from every land, with the result that the Gral has been revealed only to those who have been summoned to Munsalvaesche to join the Gral Company.12
Were Wolfram’s ‘Templars’ the same as the famous military order of that name?
I found that the word translated into English as ‘Templars’ had, in the Middle High German of Parzival, been Templeis.13 Amongst the scholars there was some debate about what exactly had been meant by this. The consensus, however, was that the term was ‘an obvious variant of the regular forms templarius, templier, Eng. Templar’14 and that Wolfram’s ‘Order of Knighthood dedicated to the service of the Gral’ could therefore be ‘identified with the order of the Knights Templar’.15
I then remembered that one of the guidebooks I had used on my visit to Chartres cathedral had spoken of ‘Wolfram von Eschenbach, who is said to have been a Templar – though there is no proof of this’.16 On further investigation I was able to establish that there had indeed been persistent rumours to this effect.17 I also learned that several well respected scholars had suggested that the German poet might himself have paid a visit to the Holy Land whilst writing Parzival.18
Digging for hidden treasure?
I had been intrigued by Emma Jung’s assertion that the Templars in Wolfram’s time ‘were considered to be the guardians of Solomon’s Temple’. I had not understood why this should have been so. However, when I began to research the order, I discovered that it had derived its official title (‘The Poor Knights of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon’) from the fact that its Jerusalem headquarters had been located on the summit of Mount Moriah – where Solomon’s Temple had stood until its destruction by the Babylonians in 587 BC. That Temple had been built in the tenth century BC and its explicit – indeed its only – purpose had been to serve, as the Bible put it, as ‘an house of rest for the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord’.19
By identifying themselves with Solomon’s Temple, therefore, it seemed to me that there was a very real sense in which the knights had also identified themselves with the Ark of the Covenant. And my feeling that this was so strengthened as I began to investigate the curious history of the order.
The Templars, I learned, had been founded by nine French noblemen who had made their way to the Holy Land in AD 1119 – twenty years after Jerusalem had been captured and occupied by the European powers. The twelfth-century historian, Archbishop William of Tyre, noted that ‘foremost and most distinguished’ amongst these nine men ‘were the venerable
Hugh de Payens and Godfrey de St Omer.’20
On checking further I discovered something interesting. Hugh de Payens, who was in fact the first Grand Master of the Order,21 had been born in the village of Payens, eight miles north of the city of Troyes in the old French county of Champagne.22 Moreover it seemed that the nine founders were all from the same region.23 In this there were several coincidences:
1 Chartres, with its great cathedral, had – in both the twelfth and thirteenth centuries – been a dominion of the Counts of Champagne.24
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