First Templar Nation

by Freddy Silva

  That the relationship proved advantageous in the development of the Cistercian ideal is an understatement. The Order made its greatest impression in Portugal by raising the largest concentration of monasteries anywhere in Europe.22 Within a few years of settling at Alcobaça, the monks were already trading a surplus with Lisbon. In half a decade their extensive knowledge of plant varieties and agronomy made a formerly destitute region bloom. They organized mining, the smelting of iron, planted extensive orchards, organized boat building and fisheries and the drying and salting of cod (creating that most national of Portuguese dishes, bacalhau). Their recipes for preserves and cured hams and sausages would not only become staples of the Portuguese diet, they also would survive into the twenty-first century, along with their hand-blown Atlantis crystal, still to this day a product of international repute.

  Cistercian monks.

  Panel in Alcobaça showing monks arriving from Clairvaux, marking the site with rope, in the shape of the constellation of Virgo, the divine virgin.

  The foundation of the Cistercians’ success was firmly supported on a humane platform that must have seemed totally alien in medieval Europe. They outlawed slavery, paid fair wages to laborers and toiled beside them in the fields, opened free schools, fed the hungry, sheltered the dispossessed, educated the young, and cared for the elderly. They also honored the divine feminine and granted equality to women. The Muslim theologian and mystic Al Ghazahli compares the doctrine of the Cistercians to that of Islam’s own esoteric brotherhood, the Sufi: “Their science has for its object the uprooting from the soul of all passions, the extirpation from it of vicious desires and evil qualities, so that the heart may be detached from all that is not God, and give itself for its only occupation, meditation on the Divine Being.”23

  But the story of how the Cistercians and the Knights Templar came to be so instrumental in the foundation of Europe’s first independent nation-state is not complete without highlighting the involvement of the third part in this holy trinity—the Ordre de Sion, particularly the figure who was perhaps the most influential in carrying out this great work, a man whose footprint is so large yet paradoxically so little is written of him, possibly because he preferred it that way and probably because his involvement in something as sensitive as nation-building was designed to remain low-key: the mysterious Prior Arnaldo da Rocha.

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  1147. APRIL. BRAGA. THE MYSTERIOUS PRIOR ARNALDO IN HIS NEW ABODE . . .

  The bill of sale for a riverside house outside the city, on the slopes of Mount Ferrocan, is from Dona Sancha Viegas and sons, given to “Petrus Arnaldo, a Friar of the Temple.”1 No one earned this bucolic setting more than he.

  Born in Santarém to the de la Roche family of Burgundy,2 Arnaldo da Rocha sailed to Jerusalem with Count Dom Henrique to rendezvous with Godefroi de Bouillon, became prior of the Abbey de Notre Dame du Mont Sion, and continued as such well into the mid-1120s.3 He is credited as one of the founders of the Knights Templar in Jerusalem and with introducing them into Portugale.4

  His name appears on two documents cosigned with Hugues de Payns expressing continuing cooperation between their respective organizations.5 At the express orders of the Grand Master himself, he returns to Portugale in 1125 bearing the additional title of Procurator,6 and together with four other Templar knights he is instructed to create a home for the Order and “establish a Portuguese crown.”7 This coincided with the Templars discovering something of monumental importance, which concluded their digs inside Temple Mount.

  He is present at the start of the drive toward Portuguese independence, arranging properties and accepting donations on behalf of the Templars. Then, for the best part of thirty years, this man of obvious high rank and reputation takes a humble back seat to three successive Templar Masters in Portugal yet continues to work behind the scenes. Why should such an extraordinary individual remain virtually incognito during a nation’s formative years?

  Frustratingly little documentation survives concerning this most influential of figures. Whenever Prior Arnaldo steps into the limelight he does so fleetingly, as though engaging in subtle diplomacy. Given how he presided over an equally mysterious and close-knit group secreted behind a fortified basilica on Mount Sion, perhaps it is hardly surprising he should have conducted his work in the same manner upon returning to his native country, the timing of which coincides with the knighting of Afonso Henriques at Zamora. (Was he present at the ceremony?)

  Were Countess Tareja’s frantic renegotiations in granting the property of Souré to the Templars a mark of his influence? Paranoid sovereigns did not hand over territory and strategic castles unless they implicitly trusted the people with whom they were dealing, and Arnaldo, with established family ties in and around the Portuguese court, confidante of her late husband and relative of Bernard de Clairvaux, clearly was a man of unimpeachable reputation. If ever there was a diplomat so centrally placed between so many factions, Prior Arnaldo was the prime candidate, the central pillar of the entire operation.

  There is a further point. The Templars were obviously involved in a geopolitical design, and as such, they would hardly publicize it openly. The influence of a foreign organization on sovereign soil, let alone the idea of nation-building, is a subtle affair; it is an exercise in forging friendships and invisible alliances. That French knights, Procurators, and Masters moved into Braga is one thing (given the Burgundian heritage of the Count of Portugale, this would hardly have raised eyebrows), but Arnaldo was Portuguese from a Burgundian family and a clergyman. The late Templar researcher André Paraschi was succinct on this hypothesis: “The installation in the country of the Order of the Templars needed to be a subtle affair, for it would have been a difficult task to achieve by anyone already invested with obvious authority such as a regional Master.”8

  Paraschi goes on to suggest that Prior Arnaldo was the undocumented Templar Master in Portugal ever since their domicile was established in Braga, shortly after his return from Mount Sion in 1125: “He was the mastermind of the Order’s expansion and consolidation in the Peninsula . . . work which had to be done with patience and secrecy, far from the eyes of the profane world.”9

  Arnaldo’s governance assumes a mysterious, transcendental cohesion not unfamiliar to anyone involved with esoteric movements.10 To all intents and purposes the figures he surrounded himself with were engaged in a theocratic democracy; even the actions of people recruited into the Templar Order suggests the brotherhood was guided as though by a ministerial college.

  Shortly after Afonso Henriques donates the ecclesiastic properties of Santarém to the Templars, Arnaldo da Rocha once again comes back into the limelight and, acting as a Procurator of the Order, accepting and supervising large donations in this territory.11 Then in 1157, upon the death of the Templar Master Hugh Martin, he finally—and it would seem, reluctantly—accepts the title of Master.12

  But his tenure as the fourth Master of the Knights Templar in Portugal is brief, less than a year in fact, and he spends much of it grooming his successor, a knight he had known as a young man in Braga and who’d shared his adventures in Jerusalem—Gualdino Paes—as though the prior of Sion was steering this young knight on an important course of action.

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  1119. TEMPLE MOUNT. A TUNNEL, EIGHTY FEET BENEATH . . .

  Even for a knight it was hard work picking away at the limestone and debris of a thousand years of accumulated civilizations beneath es Sakhra, the sacred rock over which so much blood had been spilled, all in the name of a formless deity. Twice did Hugues de Payns journey to Jerusalem to assess the probability of locating an object relating to this cause, but now the Knights Templar were more than convinced they were on the right course of action.

  Even common sense dictates that the story of nine knights patrolling 33 miles of road between Jaffa and Jerusalem to protect thousands of pilgrims from brigands, thieves, Saracens, and mountain lions is a preposterous idea. One giant medieval smoke screen. Even Fulk de Chartres, t
he king of Jerusalem’s chronicler, never portrayed the Knights Templar acting as policemen for pilgrims, probably because security was already performed by the Knights Hospitaller.1

  The Hospitaller’s initial duty was to defend and care for visiting pilgrims. Upon being granted official status in 1113 by papal bull, their name also expanded to the Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem—named not for John the Baptist, as one would assume, but in memory of Jean l’Aumônier,*17 a Cypriot noble who, after his wife’s death, gave away all his worldly goods to the poor, rose to the rank of bishop of Alexandria, and became a model of exemplary charity.2 Thus, the Knights Hospitaller adopted as their patron saint a man who devoted his life to helping others.3

  The landscape around es Sakhra on Temple Mount.

  Their association with John the Baptist stems from their hostelry having been built on the ruins of his former church.

  A Rule of conduct was drawn up by their Grand Master, the knight Raymond De Puy, which did not include military aims, but by the mid-twelfth century, by order of the pope, the military spirit superseded their original charitable function, much to the chagrin of the members.†34

  Rather than ministering to the pilgrims of the Holy Land, the core members of the Knights Templar spent their first seven years sequestered away in Solomon’s stables armed with picks and shovels, stubbornly refusing admission to the site to anyone outside their inner brotherhood.5 But in 1121, something changed that led one of the founding Templars, Godefroi de Saint-Omer, to return to Flanders armed with scrolls.

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  1147. BRAGA. GUALDINO PAES ALSO MOVES INTO HIS NEW DOMICILE . . .

  Pelagius built a certain house, a dwelling-place for pilgrims, as a remedy for his soul and those of his parents, in Braga, to the sustenance of which house he brought with his generous hand, vines, landed property, many benefits and many incomes. After his death, however, those wanting many of the perishable riches of this world . . . destroyed it, reducing it altogether to nothing. Afterwards I, Afonso, King of Portugal, saw the above-mentioned house to be so destroyed and diminished, and wishing to reform it for the better, established a charter of testament and stability for it, together with João, Archbishop of Braga, with God and the Knights of the Temple of Solomon. . . . I give and concede it to them, with all its appurtenances which now it has and used to have on the day of the death of Archbishop Pelagius, that they might have and possess it, and do whatever they wish with it in the service to the Temple.1

  The letter by Afonso Henriques illustrates the enormous respect held by the king of Portugal for Pelagius, aka Payo Mendes. Afonso’s decision to refurbish the former dwelling place for pilgrims and its hospital for the poor was opportune timing, for it would soon become the domicile of the Templars’ next rising star, Gualdino Paes, following the knight’s efforts in the recapture of the city of Santarém.2

  Gualdino’s life reads like a list of coincidences and ironies; in fact, it takes on a near mythological aspect. He was born on the outskirts of Braga, in the town of Marecos, in 1118, the same year the Knights Templar were established as an entity. By the same token, his death on the thirteenth day of October mirrors the infamous day when the Templars would be arrested throughout France and practically obliterated. He was descended from the first and highest nobility of northern Portugal, and his father, Paio Ramires, sided with Afonso Henriques against the prince’s mother.

  Gualdino traveled widely, honing his skills as man of the sword and adept of devotion, and by the then-mature age of twenty-one he fought alongside Afonso at the decisive battle of Ourique, the moment that defined Afonso as a king, Portugal as a nation, and Paes as a Templar Master-in-waiting.*18

  Like an echo of the simultaneous birth of Portucale and the Cistercian Order, the rise of Gualdino Paes goes hand in hand with the fortunes of the Templars, the Cistercians, and the golden age of both in Portugal.

  In addition to his lifelong friendship with the future king (with whom he shared a singular vision of a kingdom accountable only to God), his family’s noble status would inevitably have established bonds with another of Braga’s most illustrious families, the la Roche, particularly Arnaldo da Rocha, and most likely it was the prior’s exploits on Mount Sion that inspired Gualdino’s parents to pack him off to Jerusalem. The young man obviously joined Arnaldo’s inner circle, since he is named as one of the five Procurators dispatched to Portugal by Hugues de Payns. Which is an extraordinary concept, given that, back in 1125, Gualdino would have been a mere eight years of age!

  It gets stranger. The following year (June 1126) this child Templar Procurator is named in the charter of the village of Ferreira by Countess Tareja.3 An entry written alongside the document states, “This charter is an agreement and reaffirms that Master Gualdino and Arnaldo da Rocha take charge of our village of Ferreira.” And as if the story could not become any more remarkable, one Cistercian chronicler categorically states that for the entire length of his life Gualdino Paes was a Templar Master,4 “the principal knight in this kingdom, whom they were obedient to.”5

  What was so special about this child prodigy that required him to be groomed right from infanthood to be a Templar Master?

  At the more sensible age of thirty he followed in the footsteps of so many illustrious, pious knights before him when he undertook the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, his second. After preparing his belongings, he hitched a ride on one of many fleets passing by the shores of Portugal from England, filled with crusaders, mercenaries, glory hounds, blood-hungry zealots, and all manner of fortune seekers hoping for a share of spoils in the Second Crusade then taking place in the Holy Land. It is unlikely that he was actually part of the crusading army, for Portugal was never a recruitment area, the reason being that all hands were either busy protecting their nascent nation-state or busy driving the remaining Moors south and back to North Africa.6 One therefore has to ask, Why should Gualdino have been spared for this trip?

  Once in Jerusalem, Gualdino joined other Templars and honed his skills as a knight for five years, taking part in the siege of Asqalân alongside one of the original Templars, André de Montbard.

  A clue as to why he was sent to the Holy Land lies in his actions upon his return to the motherland. Along with his fellow Templars, he devotes precious little effort toward military goals or to upholding victories; instead, he dedicates himself to spiritual matters and, together with Arnaldo da Rocha, the pursuit and establishment of churches and their attached lands, even the erecting of new temples, and securing from Afonso Henriques guarantees of liberty from ecclesiastical interference and immunity from the state, which the king more than happily obliged.7 Such actions are at odds with a man who went to the Holy Land to, presumably, spend his entire time engaged in warfare. It would seem that Paes’s time was perhaps better spent doing exactly what Bernard de Clairvaux prescribed in his eulogy to the Templars: understanding the spiritual context of the land and visiting the sacred sites of the Near East.

  Upon his return, Paes discovered a present waiting for him. During his absence, King Afonso awarded his friend the village of Sintra and its surrounding lands and made him Templar Commander of the entire municipality,8 the implications of which reveal much about what the Templars learned in Jerusalem and what they were doing with it in Portugal. But we are getting ahead of ourselves . . .

  If a man is to be judged by the company he keeps, then Paes’s bond with a mystic named Dom Telo says much about his moral compass.

  Dom Telo was the prior of Viseu, who, after returning from his own pilgrimage to Jerusalem, was offered the bishopric but turned it down on ethical grounds. Dom Telo was also an ally of the teenage Afonso Henriques against his mother and even vowed at one point to excommunicate Countess Tareja for her wayward behavior. Not surprising, then, that following Payo Mendes’s death, it was Dom Telo who took up the mentorship of the now-grown king.

  Dom Telo also made a second pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and upon his return in 1132 he met in Coimbra with Afo
nso Henriques, who had just moved the seat of Portugal there and was busy founding the monastery of Santa Cruz so that his recently returned mentor and eleven of his monks could live in brand-new premises. In return for this gesture of kindness, Prior Telo raised Santa Cruz into one of the most important monastic houses during Portugal’s first dynasty; he in turn would be canonized as the first Portuguese saint (Saint Teotonio) in acknowledgment of his reformation of the corrupt habits of the Christian church in Portugal, and his example would spread worldwide via the Augustinian Order.

  Telo’s effort to reform a corrupt system is not unlike Bernard de Clairvaux’s, so it is not surprising to learn that the two clergymen exchanged correspondence, in which they expressed “good relations are established between the monastery of Santa Cruz and the abbey of Clairvaux,” a phrase strangely identical to the earlier accord signed between the Ordre de Sion and the Knights Templar.9

  Needless to say, associating with such an exemplary figure as Dom Telo would leave an indelible mark on anyone. And no doubt it did on Gualdino Paes, because not only was the young knight raised in his monastery, but what he was taught there shaped his conduct in the Holy Land and thereafter.

  Upon Paes’s return from Jerusalem in 1156, he is awarded the title of Templar Commander.10 He spends the next year in close contact with the newly appointed Templar Master Arnaldo da Rocha, who, on July 1157, confers that same title on Gualdino.11

  (Interestingly, one of Arnaldo’s later relatives, the Templar Master Aimery de la Roche, would himself initiate into the Order the most famous of all Templar Grand Masters, one Jacques de Molay.)12