Hidden History: Lost Civilizations, Secret Knowledge, and Ancient Mysteries (44 page)

The exterior of the Temple Church, London.

The Knights Templar was a powerful order of crusading warriormonks founded in Jerusalem in A.D.
1118, ostensibly to protect Christian
travelers in the Holy Land. For almost
two centuries the Templars enjoyed a
considerable reputation as ferocious
warriors, and became the epitome of
the Crusader, with their famous white
mantle emblazoned with the red
Templar cross. What is perhaps less
known about the Templars is that
their exploits in the Holy Land were
financed by wealth accumulated in

Europe, through the purchase and sale
of land, and what was, in effect, the
first banking network the world had
ever seen. The violent destruction of
the Templar Order, probably due to a
conspiracy between the French King
Philip IV and Pope Clement V, has
given the Templars a mythical aura.
They have been linked with almost
everything mystical, from the establishment of Freemasonry to the quest
for the Ark of the Covenant. What is
the true story behind their foundation
and demise?

Originally. the Templars were a
group of nine knights led by Hughes
de Payens, a nobleman from the Champagne region of northeastern France,
who offered their services to King
Baldwin II of Jerusalem, after the recapture of the city from the Muslims
during the First Crusade in 1099. The
Knights Templar were established as
a strict religious-military order, committed to poverty, chastity, and obedience, and the protection of pilgrims
traveling to the Holy Land after the
Conquest. In A.D. 1118 King Baldwin
granted one wing of the Temple Mount
in Jerusalem, a palace purportedly
built on the foundations of the Temple
of Solomon, to the Templars to use as
their living quarters. It is from this
association that the Templars became
known as the Poor Knights of the
Temple of Solomon. The Templars received the church's official sanction at
the Council of Troyes in 1128 and had
their rules of conduct established by
their patron abbot, the French St. Bernard of Clairvaux. Hughes de Payens,
the first Grand Master of the Order,
visited England in 1128 to raise money
and find recruits for the Templars, and
thus began the history of the English
Knights Templar. In 1130 de Payens
returned to Palestine at the head of
300 knights, drawn mostly from France
and England; in the same year Bernard
of Clairvaux wrote "In Praise of the
New Knighthood" to de Payens, a letter voicing his suport for the Order.
This letter was to have a profound effect on the Templars, as it quickly circulated through Europe, influencing a
number of young men to join the Order, or donate land and money to their
cause.

The Templar Order was organized
in the same way in every country. Each
had a Master of the Order for the
Templars in that land. The first recorded Master in England, for example, was Richard de Hastyngs in
1160. De Hastyngs and every other
Master was subject to the Grand Master, who retained that position for life,
and was responsible for organizing the
Order's military exploits in the Holy
Land as well as their commercial dealings in Europe. The details of how one
was initiated into the Order are obscure, in fact, this is one factor that
worked against the Templars later in
their history. It is known that apart
from swearing to the vows of poverty,
chastity, piety, and obedience, prospective members had to be of noble
birth and willing to relinquish all material goods, signing their entire
wealth over to the Order. As soldiers,
the Knights Templar swore never to
surrender to the enemy. A glorious
death on the battlefield fighting for
God (against what they saw as the
forces of evil) ensured that the knight
would ascend directly to heaven. This
fight-to-the-death attitude, along with
their rigorous training and strict discipline, made the Templars a feared
enemy on the battlefield.

The Knights Templar soon gained
the backing of the Holy See and the
monarchies of Europe. In England,
King Henry II granted the Templars
land across the country, including extensive holdings in the Midlands. At
the end of the 12th century, in an area
between Fleet Street and the River
Thames in London, the English
Templars built their headquarters, the
Temple Church (or the Round Church), constructed on a design based on the
Church of the Holy Sepulchre in
Jerusalem. There was a compound attached to the church that contained
residences, military training facilities,
and recreational grounds. Members of
the Order were not allowed to travel
into the city of London without permission from the Master of the Temple.

In the year 1200, Pope Innocent III
issued a Papal Bull, which declared
that all persons and goods within
Knights Templar houses were immune from local laws. What this really meant was that the Templars were
exempt from taxation and tithes; this
was a vitally important point in the
rapid accumulation of wealth the Order enjoyed. Through their massive
holdings in Europe, the Templars
amassed enough wealth to pay the
large sums required to outfit their soldiers and support staff in the Holy
Land. Numerous fortifications were
erected at strategical points throughout the Holy Land, using money acquired through donations and their
vast commercial enterprises in Europe
(which included the buying and leasing of land and property and the lending of money). Nevertheless, in spite
all these efforts, the bloody military
struggles of the Templars against the
numerically superior forces of Islam
were to prove ultimately unsuccessful.
In 1291, the remainder of the Templars
were annihilated by more than 10,000
Mamluks at the city of Acre, in Western Galilee. With this defeat, the Christian hold on the Holy Land ended, and
people in Europe began to doubt
whether it was still God's will to send
knights out to fight against Islam. With
the Crusades over and the the Holy

Land lost, many also began to question
what purpose the Knights Templars
served now that the reason for their
existence was gone. The wealth and
power enjoyed by the Order, with its
exemption from taxes and huge landholdings throughout Europe, made
them many-and often dangerousenemies. In the end, this was to be
their undoing.

In October 1307, King Philip IV
(the Fair) of France had all the
Templars he could find in the country
simultaneously arrested and imprisoned. Philip also seized all the
Templar property and possessions,
accusing the entire Order of a variety
of heretical crimes, including spitting
and tramping on the cross, homosexuality, and the worshipping of idols. A
number of the Templars were subsequently tortured by Inquisitors until
the required confessions were extracted, and they were then executed.
It is highly unlikely that confessions
obtained under such conditions had
any basis in truth. In 1314, the remaining Templar leaders, including the last
Grand Master Jacques de Molay, were
burned at the stake in front of Notre
Dame Cathedral on the he de la Cite,
an island in the river Siene in Paris.
Apparently, before becoming enveloped by the flames, de Molay is said to
have prophesied that Philip IV and his
co-conspirator, Pope Clement V, would
be dead within the year. Whether de
Molay made this prophecy or not, it is
true that both men died within a year
of the Grand Master's execution. With
the death of de Molay, the turbulent
200 year existence of the Knights
Templar ended. This, at any rate, is
the conventional story.

Templars being burned at the stake. Illustration from an anonymous chronicle, From the
Creation of the World until 1384.

Other European monarchs remained unconvinced of the Templars'
guilt, even after Pope Clement V, under the influence of Philip, officially
disbanded the Order in 1312. In England, though many Knights were arrested and tried, the majority were
found not guilty. Some escaped to Scotland, at the time under the control of
the excommunicated Robert the Bruce,
and were therefore unaffected by the
Papal Bull outlawing the Order. Many
theories have been put forward to explain why Philip IV instigated this vicious attack on the Templars. Most
researchers agree that the king sought
to deprive the Templar's of their
wealth and power, and appropriate it
for himself by whatever means necessary. However, it is not clear just how
much of the Templars' wealth Philip
was able to lay his hands on.

The sudden end of the Knights
Templar and the (apparently) complete disappearance of the Order and
its assets has fueled a large amount of
legend and extreme theories. While it
is true that the Templars were partly
absorped into other Orders (such as
the Knights Hospitaller) it is not clear
what became of the estimated 15,000
Templar Houses, their fleet of ships,
their vast archive detailing their business holdings and financial transactions, and the Templars themselves.
There were tens of thousands of
Templars across Europe, only a small
proportion of whom were tortured
and executed. What happened to
the rest? In England, the county of
Hertfordshire allegedly became a
sanctuary for fugitive Knights from
all over Europe. The town of Baldock
in Hertfordshire was founded by the Templars, and from 1199 to 1254 it had
been the Order's English headquarters. It is certainly plausible that after the official censure of the Order,
the Templars continued as normal, but
met in secret in hidden rooms, cellars
and caves. Royston Cave in Hertfordshire, located at the crossing of
two Roman roads (the Icknield Way
and Ermine Street) may have been one
such Templar meeting place. The cave
has a number of medieval carvings on
the walls, many of them Pagan, but also
figures thought to be St. Catherine, St.
Lawrence, and St. Christopher. Support for the theory that Royston Cave
was used by the Templars comes in the
form of the similar carvings at the Tour
de Coudray in Chinon, France, where
(in 1307) many Templars were imprisoned before their execution.

Another theory is that the
Templars who escaped to Scotland after their persecution established
Scotch Rite Freemasonry. Apparently
John Graham of Claverhouse, the first
Viscount Dundee (killed at the Battle
of Killiecrankie in 1689) was found to
be wearing a Templar cross beneath
his armor. Some researchers believe
that the Freemasons of the late 17th
century were the Knights Templar
under a new name.

Other legends hypothesize on the
nature of the alleged treasures of the
Templars. As the Order occupied the

Temple Mount in Jerusalem for a long
period, it has been suggested that the
Knights undertook their own excavations at the site, and perhaps uncovered the Holy Grail, the Ark of the
Covenant, or even fragments of the
True Cross. One legend says that the
Order found the Holy Grail beneath
the Temple Mount and brought it with
them to Scotland in the early 1300s.
Apparently the Grail remains there today, buried somewhere beneath
Rosslyn Chapel, a 15th Century
church in the village of Roslin,
Midlothian.