The Templar Heresy

Author’s note

I’m a novelist by profession, which means I’m a professional liar — my short job description is that I’m paid to make up stuff — but I have always believed that the best fiction has a grounding in fact. It’s far easier to construct a story around real events, though sometimes the truth and the fiction inevitably become somewhat blurred. This short author’s note should help separate the one from the other.

In global religious terms, the Mandaean faith is insignificant, with only perhaps 70,000 followers still remaining worldwide, and until the Iraq war of 2003, the vast majority of them lived in southern Iraq. Today this number has dropped to an estimated 5000 in this region of the country, and it is believed that most of the remainder are now living in Iran and northern Iraq.

The Mandaeans followed a Gnostic religion — just like the Greek word gnosis, the Aramaic word manda translates as ‘knowledge’ — that would undeniably have been regarded as the wildest heresy by the early Christian church. They believed in the reality of many of the Old Testament figures, people like Adam and Noah, and especially revered John the Baptist, while at the same time utterly rejecting Moses, Abraham and particularly Jesus Christ. They spoke a dialect of Eastern Aramaic known as Mandaic, and were probably of Semitic origin.

Bearing in mind that in mediaeval times a person could be labelled a heretic simply for worshipping God and Jesus in a way that was not approved of by the Church, anyone following the Mandaean religion would have been seen to be completely beyond the pale, and it is therefore unsurprising that they have remained one of the most private and secretive of all religious sects. Virtually all the information about them has been obtained by outsiders.

The concept of baptism was, and is, central to their faith and followers of this belief system are more commonly known in the Middle East as the Subba, a name that derives from another Aramaic word that refers to baptism. The place where the Mandaeans worship is known as a mandī, and would normally be built beside a river to facilitate baptism (maṣbattah), though where this was impossible a ritual bath would be constructed inside the mandī.

The description of the formation of the order of the Knights Templar, the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon (the Pauperes Commilitones Christi Templique Salomonici) is as accurate as the historical record will permit, bearing in mind that the events described took place almost one millennium ago. As far as can be established, the original nine knights were linked by either blood or marriage, and their ostensible purpose in travelling to Jerusalem was to protect the pilgrims on the roads of the Holy Land, a task that would have been manifestly impossible for such a small number of warrior monks, no matter how well trained, fearless and dedicated they might have been.

And, as far as can be gleaned from the historical record, for the first nine years of the existence of the Order, none of the members made the slightest attempt to do anything of the sort. Instead, having somehow managed to persuade King Baldwin II of Jerusalem to grant them accommodation in the lavish quarters of the Al Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount in 1120, they apparently rarely ventured outside. This notable absence from their alleged primary purpose led to any number of subsequent conspiracy theories, and it seems to have been generally accepted that they spent most of their time excavating the ground that lay beneath their feet. A number of Templar relics were later found in the hidden rooms below the Temple Mount, and we know for a fact that they made use of some of the chambers that lay within it, most particularly the large space that became known as Solomon’s Stables, which they used to accommodate their horses.

In those first years, the Order was notably impoverished — indeed, one of the symbols used to represent the poverty of the Knights Templar was the image of two men riding one horse, the implication being that they could not afford a horse each — and relied upon donations to survive.

However, that changed very quickly once the Order was officially recognized and endorsed by the Roman Catholic Church in about 1129, an endorsement that was gained suspiciously rapidly bearing in mind the tiny size of the Templar organization at that time. This endorsement was followed only ten years later by the proclamation of the Omne Datum Optimum papal bull. It exempted the Templars from obeying any local laws, meaning that members of the Order could cross any border into any country, were not required to pay any taxes to anybody, and were subjected only to the authority of the Pope himself.

By any standards, this was an extraordinary piece of legislation, and there appears to have been no particularly obvious reason why it should have been granted by the pontiff. It is therefore not beyond the bounds of possibility that the first members of the Knights Templar did spend years excavating the Temple Mount and in doing so found something, the mere existence of which was sufficient to terrify the Pope into granting whatever the Templars wanted.

Unfortunately, the chances are that we’ll never know the truth of this suggestion, or what this powerful object — assuming that they did find something — might have been.

The arrests of the Knights Templar in France and other countries, on the instructions of Philip the Fair, took place on 13 October 1307. The claim often made is that these arrests came as a complete surprise to the Order, and that the operation was entirely successful. However even the most cursory examination of the surviving evidence suggests that this was not the case.

The Knights Templar organization was one of the richest and most powerful entities then in existence, far more wealthy than many countries and a majority of European monarchs. But it had a problem — it did not have a secure base, a big enough piece of territory that it could occupy and control and which it could defend against its enemies. Instead, it had a number of small strongholds, like the Paris Preceptory, but every one of these was entirely surrounded by the territory of another nation. The Order was literally surrounded by potential or actual enemies on all sides.

The Templars would have tried to remain as well informed as possible about the intentions of the rulers of these territories. They would have employed spies at court or paid informers. And an operation as big as the arrest of the Templars could never have been kept completely secret. Too many people, in too many different countries, were involved. So almost certainly the arrests did not come as a surprise to the Order, but because of the circumstances, even knowing — perhaps in considerable detail — what was about to happen, there wouldn’t been very much that they could have done about it.

In fact, the indications are that they did a fair amount, because the number of Templars arrested in France was only a tiny fraction of the total known complement of the Order in that country. It is also known that when Philip’s soldiers opened up the Templars’ strong rooms in the Paris Preceptory, the vast quantity of treasure that the king had seen there just a few months earlier had somehow vanished. Some assets were left, obviously, but nothing like the amount of bullion and coin that Philip had counted on finding to clear his own enormous debts.

Exactly where that treasure went, and how it was removed, has never been explained convincingly, and it is quite possible that somewhere in France, or indeed in another country entirely, there may well be a sealed and long-forgotten vault within which the priceless Templar treasure still lies hidden. This is one of the central mysteries about the Knights Templar, which has kept people intrigued about them for centuries.

When the Templar Order was purged and the Knights and Sergeants arrested in 1307, one of the charges brought against them was that of heresy, specifically that they worshipped an idol, apparently a disembodied head, which they referred to as Baphomet.

The name Baphomet predates the Templars by over twenty years. It was referred to in a letter written in 1098 by a Crusader named Anselm of Ribemont, and was used to apparently describe an idol or deity venerated by the Muslim opponents of the Crusaders. The derivation of the name does imply that it was probably both Arabic and Muslim: a chronicler of the First Crusade described the mosques as Bafumarias, and there is a suggestion that the word ‘Baphomet’ was the term used by the often illiterate Crusaders to mean ‘Mahomet’, more properly known as ‘Muhammad’. There are no references to either the word or to any kind of an idol in the Templars’ own Rule, the very specific and rigorous code of ethics and behaviour that governed their lives, or in any surviving contemporary documents, and most of the information about the object has been derived from the records of the Inquisition.

These are frequently contradictory and incomplete. The information was obtained from men under the most brutal torture, where they would simply tell their inquisitors what they thought they wanted to hear, irrespective of the veracity or otherwise of what they were saying.

Some accounts described Baphomet as a severed head, others as a cat, and still others as a head with three faces. It has been reasonably well established that the Templars did own a number of relics, and that these included heads of various sorts, some actual skulls apparently having been removed from the bodies of dead saints, one for example was claimed to be that of St Euphemia, and another being the skull of Hugues de Payens, one of the founders of the Templar order. Other heads had apparently been carved out of wood and presumably had a purely symbolic significance.

It has been claimed by a number of researchers that the Templars, despite being an order of warrior monks endorsed by the Pope, were not actually Christians, in that they were required to trample and spit upon the cross and to deny Christ during their initiation ceremony. These accusations first saw the light of day after Philip the Fair of France had seized all the members of the Order he could lay his hands on, and had then begun levelling charges against them. However, these were almost precisely the same charges that he had earlier made against Pope Boniface VIII, which gives these accusations very little integrity.

But despite the likelihood that these accusations had no basis whatsoever in reality, it is still probable that the Knights Templar weren’t Christian but Johannite — meaning followers of John the Baptist — in their religious beliefs. Though this cannot be absolutely proven, there are a number of pointers.

First, a very large number of churches and chapels known to have been built by the Templars were originally dedicated to John the Baptist, rather than Jesus Christ or one of the Apostles, which was more usually the case. Second, one of the prevalent symbols associated with John the Baptist is the Lamb of God, the Agnus Dei, and this image is often found on Templar flags and seals, as well as forming a part of the decoration of Templar buildings, frequently in association with carvings of severed heads.

One of the most convincing pieces of circumstantial evidence is the seal of the Templar Master of England, which included the Agnus Dei image, while the counter-seal displayed the image of the head of John the Baptist together with the legend ‘I am the guarantor of the lamb’. If the Order had been a normal Christian organization, this would have been a most unusual choice of both images and wording.

There is another oblique reference to the Templars and the Agnus Dei that can still be seen all over Britain. In 1393, King Richard II passed a law that required all inns and public houses to display a sign identifying themselves to the largely illiterate populace as places where alcohol was sold. One common sign is the ‘Lamb and Flag’, a direct reference to the Knights Templar, the lamb being their symbol and the flag the Beauseant, their vexillum belli or battle flag. And, slightly more gruesome, the pub names ‘The Saracen’s Head’ and ‘The Turk’s Head’ are reminders of the likely result of an Islamic warrior encountering the Templars in battle.

And if it is assumed that the Templars did worship John the Baptist, and we take into account the references to them worshipping a head, it is not too big a leap of conjecture to suggest that they may have possessed — or they may have believed they possessed — the head of the prophet. This may well have been their Baphomet, and it is this assumption which has formed an important part of the plot of this novel.

Both of these buildings exist and are exactly as described in the pages of this novel, with two single exceptions.

First, the cistern that supplied drinking water to the defenders of Shobak Castle is located precisely where I described it, as is the access to the underground staircase that leads from the castle down to it. However, actually descending the staircase is not quite as easy as it appears to be in this book, so if you visit Shobak, please don’t expect that you’ll be able to retrace Bronson’s steps!

Second, the location and interior decoration of the Église Saint-Christophe des Templiers is accurate, and it is just as bizarre, mysterious and largely inexplicable as I have suggested. However, the crypt and the concealed doorway that I have described at the end of the book are entirely the products of my own imagination.