Holy Blood, Holy Grail (59 page)

Arianism had all but displaced Roman Christianity. And though it was officially condemned again in 381, it continued to thrive and gain adherents. When the Merovingians rose to power during the fifth century, virtually every bishopric in

Christendom was either Arian or vacant.

Among the most fervent devotees of Arianism were the Goths, who had been converted to it from paganism during the fourth century. The Suevi, the

Lombards, the Alans, the Vandals, the Burgundians and the Ostrogoths were all Arian. So were the Visigoths, who, when they sacked Rome in 480, spared

Christian churches. If the early Merovingians, prior to Clovis, were at all receptive to Christianity, it would have been the Arian Christianity of their immediate neighbours, the Visigoths and Burgundians.

Under Visigoth auspices, Arianism became the dominant form of Christianity in Spain, the Pyrenees and what is now southern France.

If Jesus’s family did indeed find refuge in Gaul, their overlords, by the fifth century, would have been the Arian Visigoths. Under the Arian regime, the family is not likely to have been persecuted. It

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would probably have been highly esteemed and might well have intermarried with Visigoth nobility before its subsequent intermarriage with the Franks to produce the Merovingians.

And with Visigoth patronage and protection, it would have been secure against all threats from Rome. It is thus not particularly surprising that unmistakably Semitic names Bera, for instance occur among Visigoth aristocracy and royalty. Dagobert II married a Visigoth princess whose father was named Bera. The name Bera recurs repeatedly in the Visigoth Merovingian family tree descended from Dagobert II and Sigisbert IV.

The Roman Church is said to have declared that Dagobert’s son had converted to Arianism,z and it would not be very extraordinary if he had done so.

Despite the pact between the Church and Clovis, the Merovingians had always been sympathetic to Arianism. One of Clovis’s grandsons, Chilperic, made no secret of his Arian proclivities.

If Arianism was not inimical to Judaism, neither was it to Islam, which rose so meteorically in the seventh century. The Arian view of Jesus was quite in accord with that of the Koran. In the Koran Jesus is mentioned no less than thirty-five times, under a number of impressive appellations including “Messenger of God’ and “Messiah’. At no point, however, is he regarded as anything other than a mortal prophet, a forerunner of Muhammad and a spokesman for a single supreme God. And like Basilides and Mani, the

Koran maintains that Jesus did not die on the cross, “they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him, but they thought they did. “I The Koran itself does not elaborate on this ambiguous statement, but Islamic commentators do. According to most of them, there was a substitute generally, though not always, supposed to have been Simon of Cyrene.

Certain Muslim writers speak of Jesus hiding in a niche of a wall and watching the Crucifixion of a surrogate which concurs with the fragment already quoted from the Nag Hammadi Scrolls.

Judaism and the Merovingians

It is worth noting the tenacity, even in the face of the most vigorous

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persecution, with which most of the heresies and especially Arianism insisted on Jesus’s mortality and humanity. But we found no indication that any of them necessarily possessed any first-hand knowledge of the premise to which they so persistently adhered. Still less was there any evidence, apart from the Nag Hammadi Scrolls, to suggest their awareness of a possible bloodline. It was possible, of course, that certain documents did exist documents akin to the Nag Hammadi Scrolls, perhaps even genealogies and archives. The sheer virulence of Roman persecution might well suggest a fear of such evidence and a desire to ensure that it would never see the light. But if that was the case, Rome would appear to have succeeded.

The heresies, then, provided us with no decisive confirmation of a connection between Jesus’s family and the Merovingians, who appeared on the world stage some four centuries later. For such confirmation we were obliged to look elsewhere back to the Merovingians themselves. At first glance the evidence, such as it was, seemed to be meagre. We had already considered the legendary birth of Merovee, for example child of two fathers, one of whom was a mysterious aquatic creature from across the sea -and guessed that this curious fable might have been intended simultaneously to reflect and conceal a dynastic alliance or intermarriage.

But, while the fish symbolism was suggestive, it was hardly conclusive.

Similarly the subsequent pact between Clovis and the Roman Church made considerably more sense in the light of our scenario; but the pact itself did not constitute concrete evidence. And while the Merovingian royal blood was credited with a sacred, miraculous and divine nature, it was not explicitly stated anywhere that this blood was in fact Jesus’s.

In the absence of any decisive or conclusive testimony, we had to proceed cautiously. We had to evaluate fragments of circumstantial evidence, and try to assemble these fragments into a coherent picture.

And we had first to determine whether there were any uniquely Judaic influences on the

Merovingians.

Certainly the Merovingian kings do not seem to have been anti-Semitic.

On the contrary they seem to have been not merely tolerant, but downright sympathetic to the Jews in their domains and this despite the

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assiduous protests of the Roman Church. Mixed marriages were a frequent occurrence.

Many Jews, especially in the south, possessed large landed estates. Many of them owned Christian slaves and servants. And many of them acted as magistrates and high-ranking administrators for their Merovingian lords. On the whole the Merovingian attitude towards Judaism seems to have been without parallel in Western history prior to the Lutheran Reformation.

The Merovingians themselves believed their miraculous power to be vested, in large part, in their hair, which they were forbidden to cut.

Their position on this matter was identical to that of the Nazorites in the Old

Testament, of whom Samson was a member. There is much evidence to suggest that Jesus was also a Nazorite. According to both early Church writers and modern scholars his brother, Saint James, indisputably was.

In the Merovingian royal house, and in the families connected with it, there were a surprising number of specifically Judaic names. Thus, in 577, a brother of King Clotaire II was named Samson. Subsequently one Miron ‘le

Levite’ was count of Besalou and bishop of Gerona. One count of Roussillon was named Solomon, and another Solomon became king of Brittany. There was an Abbot Elisachar -

a variant of “Eleazar’ and “Lazarus’. And the very name “Merovee’ would seem to be of Middle Eastern derivation.”

Judaic names became increasingly prominent through dynastic marriages between the Merovingians and the Visigoths. Such names figure in Visigoth nobility and royalty; and it is possible that many so-called

“Visigoth’ families were in fact Judaic. This possibility gains further credence from the fact that chroniclers would frequently use the words “Goth’ and “Jew’ interchangeably. The south of France and the Spanish marches the region known as Septimania in Merovingian and Carolingian times contained an extremely large Jewish population. This region was also known as “Gothic’ or “Gothic’, and its Jewish inhabitants were thus often called “Goths’ an error which may, on occasion, have been deliberate. By dint of this error,

Jews could not be identified as such, save perhaps by specific family names. Thus Dagobert’s father-inlaw was named Bera, a Semitic name.

And

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Bera’s sister was married to a member of a family named Levy.S

Granted, names and a mystical attitude towards one’s hair were not necessarily a solid basis on which to establish a connection between the

Merovingians and Judaism. But there was another fragment of evidence which was somewhat more persuasive. The Merovingians were the royal dynasty of the Franks a Teutonic tribe which adhered to Teutonic tribal law. In the late fifth century this law, codified and couched in a Roman framework, became known as Salic Law. In its origins, however, Salic Law was ultimately Teutonic tribal law and predated the advent of Roman

Christianity in Western Europe. During the centuries that followed it continued to stand in opposition to the ecclesiastical law promulgated by

Rome. Throughout the Middle Ages it was the official secular law of the

Holy Roman Empire. As late as the Lutheran Reformation the German peasantry and knighthood included, in their grievances against the Church, the latter’s disregard for traditional Salic law.

There is one entire section of the Salic Law Title 45, “De Migrantibus’

which has consistently puzzled scholars and commentators, and been the source of incessant legal debate. It is a complicated section of stipulations and clauses pertaining to circumstances whereby itinerants may establish residence and be accorded citizenship. What is curious about it is that it is not Teutonic in origin, and writers have been driven to postulate bizarre hypotheses to account for its inclusion in the Salic

Code. Only recently, however, it has been discovered that this section of the Salic Code derives directly from Judaic Laws More specifically, it can be traced back to a section in the Talmud. It can thus be said that Salic

Law, at least in part, issues directly from traditional Judaic law.

And this in turn suggests that the Merovingians under whose auspices Salic

Law was codified were not only versed in Judaic law, but had access to

Judaic texts.

The Principality in Septimania

Such fragments were provocative, but they provided only tenuous support for our hypothesis that a bloodline descended from Jesus existed in the

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south of France, that this bloodline intermarried with the

Merovingians and that the Merovingians, in consequence, were partly Judaic. But while the Merovingian epoch failed to provide us with any conclusive evidence for our hypothesis, the epoch which immediately followed it did. By means of this “retroactive evidence’ our hypothesis suddenly became tenable.

We had already explored the possibility of the Merovingian bloodline surviving after being deposed from its thrones by the Carolingians. In the process we had encountered an autonomous principality that existed in the south of France for a century and a half a principality whose most famous ruler was Guillem de Gellone. Guillem was one of the most revered heroes of his age. He was also the protagonist of the Willehalm by Wolfram von

Eschenbach, and is said to have been associated with the Grail family. It was in Guillem and his background that we found some of our most surprising and exciting evidence.

At the apex of his power Guillem de Gellone included among his domains north-eastern Spain, the Pyrenees and the region of southern France known as Septimania. This area had long contained a large Jewish population.

During the sixth and seventh centuries this population had enjoyed extremely cordial relations with its Visigoth overlords, who espoused Arian

Christianity so much so, in fact, that mixed marriages were common, and the words “Goth’

and “Jew’ were often used interchangeably.

By 711, however, the situation of the Jews in Septimania and north-eastern

Spain had sadly deteriorated. By that time Dagobert II had been assassinated and his lineage driven into hiding in the Razes the region including and surrounding Rennes-leChateau. And while collateral branches of the Merovingian bloodline still nominally occupied the throne to the north, the only real power resided in the hands of the so-called Mayors of the Palace the Carolingian usurpers who, with the sanction and support of

Rome, set about establishing their own dynasty. By that time, too, the

Visigoths had themselves converted to Roman Christianity and begun to persecute the Jews in their domains. Thus, when Visigoth Spain was overrun by the Moors in 711, the Jews eagerly welcomed the invaders.

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Under Muslim rule the Jews of Spain enjoyed a thriving existence. The Moors were gracious to them, often placing them in administrative charge of captured cities like Cordoba, Granada and Toledo.

Jewish commerce and trade were encouraged and attained a new prosperity.

Judaic thought coexisted, side by side, with that of Islam, and the two cross-fertilised each other. And many towns -including Cordoba, the Moorish capital of Spain were predominantly Jewish in population.

At the beginning of the eighth century the Moors crossed the Pyrenees into

Septimania; and from 720 until 759 while Dagobert’s grandson and great-grandson continued their clandestine existence in the Razes

-Septimania was in Islamic hands. Septimania became an autonomous Moorish principality, with its own capital at Narbonne and owing only nominal allegiance to the emir of Cordoba. And from Narbonne the Moors of

Septimania began to strike northwards, capturing cities as deep into Frankish territory as Lyons.

The Moorish advance was checked by Charles Martel, Mayor of the Palace and grandfather of Charlemagne. By 738 Charles had driven the Moors Narbonne, to which he then laid siege. Narbonne, however defended by both

Moors and Jews proved impregnable, and Charles vented his frustration by devastating the surrounding countryside.

By 752 Charles’s son, Pepin, had formed alliances with local aristocrats, thereby bringing Septimania fully under his control. Narbonne, however, continued to resist, withstanding a seven-year-long siege by Pepin’s forces. The city was a painful thorn in Pepin’s side, at a time when it was most urgent for him to consolidate his position.

He and his successors were acutely sensitive to charges of having usurped the Merovingian throne. To establish a claim to legitimacy, he forged dynastic alliances with surviving families of the Merovingian royal blood. To further validate his status he arranged for his coronation to be distinguished by the Biblical rite of anointing