by Freddy Silva
The parallel to the gilded path of Gualdino Paes is here inescapable. While one chronicler claims this knight was a Templar Master right from the beginning—although unlikely—if the claim is taken figuratively the implication is that Paes was destined, like Galahad, to undertake the quest from a very young age, which in Gualdino’s case might have begun as an infant, for when he returned from Jerusalem with Arnaldo da Rocha and three other Templar Procurators in the winter of 1125, he was barely eight years old.
In light of the donation of Sintra to Gualdino, and the esoteric discoveries made there, I could not help but wonder to what degree the aspects of both the Graal and the Ark of the Covenant were played out in Portugal, especially given Afonso Henriques’s cryptic seal on the charter of Ceras, the property that Master Gualdino and the Templars put to good use by creating an Elysian oasis in Tomar, the focal point being its enigmatic rotunda.
The Ark and the Graal share similar characteristics, especially in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s later and more complete story. They are both receptacles, they serve as oracles, they offer information, to the pure of heart they are light in weight but to others become unbearably heavy, they are stones that fell from heaven, they emit a dazzling radiance, they produce fertility or a cornucopia of abundance, they are associated with a salver or tray, they are made of gold, and they are symbolized by the emblem of the dove. It can be argued, then, that to search for the Ark—or what was deposited inside it—is to pursue the Graal.
Tradition describes how the Ark was secreted away from the Temple of Solomon by Menelik, son of the Ethiopian queen of Sheba and King Solomon,*47 shortly before a Babylonian army razed the building to the ground.3 Menelik is said to have transported it to Ethiopia by way of the river Nile, and he afterward became that kingdom’s first Jewish emperor. Research into the physical whereabouts of the Ark was carried out in the 1990s, leading to a thoroughly convincing argument for its present resting place to be the unassuming church of Our Lady Mary of Sion in the town of Aksum.†74 Simple logic dictates, therefore, that if the precious object is in Ethiopia, then it cannot be in Portugal as well.
Nor had I expected it to be. But an aspect of the Ark, now that is another story. If, like the Graal, the concept of the Ark depends very much on how it is interpreted, there is no reason why information once deposited in this container—scrolls, sacred geometry, rituals, and so forth—should not have been applied in Tomar by Gualdino Paes, especially if a million man Arab army came all the way from southern Spain to remove it from him.
This much was running through my mind as I found shade beneath the focal point in Tomar’s central plaza, a bronze statue of Gualdino Paes, his right hand firmly clutching a scroll as though its sculptor wished to convey a message.
Every four years, the plaza itself becomes the focus of an old tradition, the Feast of Tabuleiros. In a long procession, men and women parade side by side through the town, each woman balancing on her head a decorated tabuleiro to which is attached an unfeasibly tall vertical shaft bearing thirty loaves of bread. The structures are crowned either with a dove or an armillary sphere. The feast is unique to Tomar and has been enacted since at least the reign of Dom Dinis, a thirteenth-century Portuguese king and Templar protector,5 and up until 1895, it was celebrated on or close to the feast day of John the Baptist.
Such folk festivals reveal a lot about the history of a place, for they often commemorate a truth or an event of sufficient importance as to be maintained in the local consciousness long after the event itself. What struck me about this one was its blatant Templar roots and symbolism: thirty loaves of bread, synonymous with the thirty pieces of silver for which Jesus’s—and by implication John the Baptist’s—lineage was betrayed, later to become the symbolic entry fee into the Templar Order itself; the armillary sphere, an emblem unique to the maritime discoveries of the Order of the Temple in Portugal; and the dove, representing the holy spirit, an important symbol in the Graal story of Parzival, in which a secretive and spiritual group within the Templars, symbolized by this bird, protect the Graal and a castle on a hill, much like the one on top of the hill behind me protects the rotunda.
Incidentally, the seal of the Ordre de Sion also depicts a dove.
Perhaps I was starting to read too much into what may be nothing more than an innocent feast honoring the summer solstice, but then why perform it every fourth year when the solstice is a yearly event? I also could not help but take note of the disproportionately tall tabuleiros balanced precariously on the women’s heads and how the combination bears an uncanny resemblance to the unusually extended crown of twin tablets worn by Amun, the Egyptian god who once handed the knowledge of heaven to the god of wisdom, Djehuti.
The seal of the Ordre de Sion.
The Portuguese word tabuleiro means “tray,” and the feast shares many similarities with the Ethiopian feast of Timbuk, a celebration practiced since the time when Menelik placed the Ark in the church of Our Lady Mary of Sion. During Timbuk the priests balance on their heads a tray called a tabotat, and that word shares the same etymological root as tabuleiro.
How did Ethiopia come to be in Portugal?
49
1153. GOSSIP IN THE ALLEYWAYS OF JERUSALEM . . .
Stories of the existence of an Ethiopian ruler named Presbyter John had been circulating around the city for eight years now. Gualdino Paes, recently arrived from Portugal to join the newly appointed Templar Grand Master, André de Montbard, would have been privy to these rumors, even though he would return to his native land by the time envoys representing this king finally arrived to request an altar in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher from the patriarch of Jerusalem.
Seeing as the Ethiopian king was “a direct descendant of the Magi, who are mentioned in the Gospel,”1 and one of the leaders of that sect had been grandfather to Mary Magdalene, the request was granted in 1177.2 Pilgrims describe the monks and priests in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher at the time as Copts, Egyptian Christians from the city of Alexandria.
A century passes and the story picks up in Bavaria when a writer by the name of Albrech von Scharfenberg adds the final component to the Graal legend originally begun by Chrétien de Troyes. In it, he mentions the final resting place of the Ark as the land of a priest-king nicknamed Prester John. Although that kingdom is eventually identified as Ethiopia, never did the Ethiopians refer to their king by that name. “Prester John” was an unfortunate artifact of translation, Prester being a contraction of the Latin pretiosus (exalted), while John was in actual fact pronounced gyam, which in Ethiopian means “powerful.”3
Ethiopia had a long tradition of black female monarchs who were often referred to as Virgin Queens. They ruled a vast empire stretching along the Nile, through Egypt and all the way to the Mediterranean, covering parts of Eritrea, Nubia, Yemen, and southern Arabia. It was a province considered as large as India, so much so that cartographers often confused the two.4 The focal center of the kingdom was Meroe, an ancient city on the eastern bank of the Nile centered on an area presided by no less than two hundred pyramids.
Meroe inevitably brings up connotations with Merovingian, the holy bloodline of Trojan kings and the line of Kings David and Solomon, which reemerged in central Europe around the fifth century AD with Merovech, king of the Franks, whose territory included the duchy of Burgundy. The focal point of these connections is Solomon and his lover, the queen of Sheba.
The queen of Sheba bore the title Maqueda, or as it appears in the Middle East, Magda, as in Magdalene. The attribute translates as “magnificent one.” In Arabian, Sheba is Saba, and may be linguistically linked to the Sabeans, the gnostic sect who once migrated from Ethiopia around 690 BC.5 In Ethiopian history, this consort of King Solomon was addressed as Negesta Sabia, with the word sabia surviving intact in the Portuguese language and meaning “a wise woman.”
The curiosity of the Knights Templar led them to trace the resting place of the Ark of the Covenant to the queen of Sheba’s former kingdom,6 becau
se around 1181 Emperor Lalibela of Ethiopia is said to have given them permission to build round churches in his land. This they did, and they progressed to create eleven others carved entirely out of the volcanic bedrock, one of them in the shape of a Templar cross. An eyewitness account describes how some of the churches “hide in the open mouths of huge quarried caves. Connecting them all is a complex and bewildering labyrinth of tunnels and narrow passageways with offset crypts, grottoes and galleries . . . a subterranean world, shaded and damp, silent but for the faint echoes of distant footfalls as priests and deacons go about their timeless business.”7
That Emperor Lalibela was somehow involved with a holy bloodline lies in the nature of his name, which literally translates as “the bees recognize his sovereignty,” the bee being the adopted symbol of Merovingians through the centuries.8 Like other Ethiopian monarchs, Lalibela also held the title Neguse Tsion (King of Sion); thus, he may have been involved with the Ordre of Sion in Jerusalem, given its original relationship with the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
Three and one-half centuries passes, and the story picks up again in the sixteenth century, when unusual processional staffs are witnessed in Ethiopia’s Coptic Christian community. One comprises a large central cross identical in design to the first dynasty Portuguese Templar cross, while the other bears the unmistakable emblem of the Templar cross surmounted with the fleur-de-lys, emblem of the Portuguese Order of Avis, the splinter Templar group created by Afonso Henriques, whose leader was the king’s brother, Dom Pedro.9
Left, first dynasty Portuguese Templar cross, and right, cross of the Order of Avis, atop Ethiopian processional staffs.
All this is most odd. How did the Portuguese Templars become involved in remote Ethiopia, especially since the entire Order had supposedly been extinguished two centuries earlier throughout Europe by order of the pope?
50
1312. SOUTHERN PORTUGAL. THE TEMPLARS ENJOY A SIX-YEAR VACATION . . .
With the Inquisition taking root in Spain, Pope Clement V issued the bull Regnas in coelis, ordering the Portuguese monarch to investigate the Knights Templar in neighboring Portugal. It had been five years since orders were issued on the night of October 13 to arrest all Templars and confiscate their property. The pope’s actions sought to extinguish the Templars’ power along with their secret teachings, for the obvious reason that both were undermining the authority of the church.
The second party to the issuing of arrests was the French king, Phillippe le Bel, who was merely keen to get his hands on their vast wealth, seeing as he had amassed a colossal debt in unpaid loans from the Templars. There was also that small grievance he harbored after requesting admittance into their inner brotherhood, but being as honest as a three-libre note, the Templars flatly refused him.
King Dinis of Portugal did not accept the pope’s accusations, in fact, his reaction to the pontiff ’s letter requesting the Templar’s imprisonment was derisory. Nevertheless, Dinis paid lip service and requested the archbishop of Lisbon look into the charges by way of procedure. Predictably, the archbishop found no wrongdoing, and the king exonerated the Templars.
Four quiet years passed, and the Portuguese Templars remained unmolested, so an understandably fuming Pope Clement pushed the issue with a follow-up bull, Vox in excelso, this time suppressing the Templar Order and ordering all Templar assets be handed over to the Hospitallers, who had since been reorganized into a military arm of the Catholic Church, with notable exceptions in Portugal and Scotland, where they still cooperated with the Templars and generally pursued their original charitable aim.*481
Dinis the Farmer King, and his queen, Isabel, were stout proponents of the Cistercian model and encouraged its ideals and practices throughout their reign. Under pressure, Dinis reasoned with Rome that the Templars had simply been granted perpetual use of lands that actually belonged to the Portuguese crown.2 When the ruse failed to convince, the king summoned the Templars to his court to explain another cunning plan.
What happened next ranks as one of history’s biggest practical jokes. Dinis proposed the Templars transfer their entire assets to the Portuguese crown, then take a sabbatical in the Algarve. In the meantime, a letter would be issued to the pope indicating the Order of the Temple in Portugal had ceased to exist.3
The Templars packed their belongings, left Tomar for Castro Marim, and laid low for a while, but to prove old habits die hard, they established the town’s municipal day on June 24, the feast day of John the Baptist.
Six years later, on the Feast of the Assumption (the same day Godefroi de Bouillon marched to Jerusalem), the ex-Templars returned from their extended vacation and met with the king, to discover he had rebranded the Knights Templar as the Order of Christ, all former Templars were now members of this Order, and all their former holdings and funds were transferred intact.4
In a manner of speaking, the Knights Templar died and were raised from the dead.
All knights remained unscathed in Portugal. And in Scotland, too, where many persecuted French Templars were given safe harbor by King Robert the Bruce, rebranding themselves as Scottish Rite Freemasons.
Back in Tomar, the “new” Order of Christ returned to its objectives and developed a strange alliance bordering on obsession with Ethiopia.
Ethiopia was a kingdom on the other side of the world and required a considerable effort to reach. It offered no obvious financial incentive to anyone willing to make the perilous journey; it was a land to which, up to that period, no known maritime route was known. But the Portuguese persevered, and with two exceptions, all known early visitors to Ethiopia were Portuguese.5 Why should the Templars/Order of Christ develop this irrational obsession?
A century later, in 1452, a group of Coptic emissaries arrived in Lisbon to meet with the new king, Afonso V. Shortly after, the king published an unusual book called Arte Magna, an alchemical treatise in which he mentions having been initiated into the magical arts by a man of knowledge who came from the lands of Egypt and taught him the secrets of what by then had become known as the Stone of Philosophy—formerly known as the Stones of Testimony, the very same ones associated with the Ark of the Covenant. Whether the two events are related or not, the truth is that two years after the meeting, the enlightened Afonso V granted spiritual jurisdiction over Ethiopia to the Order of Christ!6
These same emissaries then spent a considerable time in the company of the king’s uncle, Infante Dom Henrique (or Henry the Navigator, as he is most famously known), Grand Master of the rebranded Order of Christ and the mind behind Portugal’s unprecedented maritime achievements, which he oversaw from his office adjacent to the rotunda of Tomar.
Tomar became especially important in the fifteenth century as the nucleus of Portuguese overseas expansion, and Henry applied the knowledge and resources of the Templar Order with great success in his enterprises throughout Africa and the Atlantic. The distinctive red cross of the Order of Christ was painted on the sails of Portuguese caravelas, and missions in the new lands came under the authority of Tomar.
Enriched by his overseas endeavors, Henry became the first person since Gualdino Paes to ameliorate the original buildings of the Convent of Christ—as the area surrounding the rotunda had been rebranded—and he subsequently moved into the new quarters. Henry’s nickname, “the Navigator,” stemmed in part from his maritime exploits, although he himself spent little time aboard a ship. The term navigator or helmsman in French is nautonnier, a term familiar to the Ordre of Sion, which in 1188 changed its name to Priuré de Sion, and ever since then its Grand Masters have carried the official title Nautonnier.7 The Priuré also adopted the emblem of the rose cross, just like the ones engraved around the periphery of the rotunda of Tomar.8
Could Henry the Navigator have served two brotherhoods,*49 just as Hugues de Payns and Prior Arnaldo da Rocha had done before him?9
The language in the correspondence maintained throughout this period expresses a brotherly love and appreciation by the Ethiopi
ans for the Portuguese.10 For his part, Henry admitted to dedicating a disproportionate part of his career to finding a maritime route around Africa so as to reach the kingdom of Presbyter John, with every effort conducted under absolute secrecy.11 Facts, maps, even instructions to the ships’ captains and their reports were suppressed, and any man disobeying this commitment to secrecy was to be punished by death.12
Perhaps Henry’s privileged position as Grand Master of the Temple opened his eyes to the inner knowledge secreted by the brotherhood in Tomar, or maybe the rotunda was exercising its own magical effect. The learned man surrounded himself with the best savants of the period—astronomers, mathematicians, cosmologists—all of whom assumed the secretive behavior of a similar group of seekers in the Graal legends.13 It is possible that his meeting with the Copts from “the Egyptian lands” may have reawakened a dormant Templar plan. Maybe the Copts came with hope that whatever the Templars had once pursued in that remote corner of the world, but was rendered inert from three centuries of hostilities with the Muslims, was now worth pursuing once more.
Certainly, the opportunity was denied Henry, for he passed away in 1460, shortly after making his will on October 13.14
It would be two decades before the new king, João II of the Order of Avis, sent an envoy to Ethiopia by the name of Afonso de Paiva. A few years passed until Afonso was found to have died from a fever along the way in Cairo. A second envoy, Pero de Covilhã, followed in his footsteps, not knowing if his predecessor had succeeded in making contact with the court of Presbyter John.
Covilhã took a circuitous route, visiting the Ka’Ba in Mecca and Saint Catherine’s Chapel in Sinai. Three years later, the Portuguese man finally arrived at the king of Ethiopia’s court, where he was greeted most warmly. When a traveling Portuguese priest later met Covilhã, he wrote, “He is liked by the Presbyter and all his court.”15 This Presbyter John would have by now been more than three hundred years old, so clearly the name identified was not that of an individual but a shared title; indeed, Ethiopian monarchs did carry both a birth name as well as a throne name, in addition to the epithet Abd es Salib (Servant of the Cross).16
